Rod Liddle

Was the BBC’s coverage of the Jubilee celebrations really as awful as all the papers seem to say it was? I’ve always rather liked Sophie Raworth, yet she and her colleagues come in for a terrible pasting — especially from the Mail of course. But I’d be interested to hear your views. Also on the subject of Kate Middleton, who I thought looked rather fit in that scarlet tunic, although she’s got it in the neck too. Thing is, I’m out of the country — in Austria — and can therefore experience the joys of this jubilee holiday vicariously, i.e. through the papers and with your assistance for clarification and correction. This is a sort of reverse blog, then, where I look to you for news.

The economy’s not looking terribly good, is it? Manufacturing has sunk to a three year low, rather worse than anyone expected — and the Eurozone crisis is only partly to blame. I note that our manufacturing sector now constitutes just ten per cent of the economy. One reason for this is that it has been starved of investment and the quantitative easing, as these monkeys call it, which will now be sprayed lightly in its general direction will do little to affect the overall trend, which is ever downwards. It seemed unlikely to me that we would ever see a clearer and more self-evident example of a political class being wrong than with the utter collapse of the Eurozone.

For all their cosmetic bluster about bonuses, our national politicians have never really stood up to the banks: it takes a bloody minded local politician to do that — and win. So some sort of award is surely due to Nader Fekri, the mayor of Calderdale. He attempted to withdraw cash from a NatWest ATM in Hebden Bridge and the machine swallowed his card. When this happens to me I usually just start crying: I know it will take the bank weeks to send out a new one (or “five working days” as they put it) and then another few weeks for the PIN to arrive. Nader was made of sterner stuff. He did what people would do if this were a normal world — went into the bank, showed his ID, and asked them to give the card back to him.

A young British lady called Rebecca Black is facing charges in Dubai of having ‘naked sex’ in the back of a local taxi cab, with some Irish bloke. Rebecca, for her part, vehemently denies the charges. It’s a tough one to call: on the one hand, this is Dubai, so ‘naked sex’ may well mean smiling politely at the Irish man while being fully dressed. Or even catching sight of him out of the corner of one eye. The Emiratis are strangely swift to take moral offence, for a people whose country is funded by slave labour. On the other hand, Ms Black is a British woman, a species which has made itself intimately familiar to men in every corner of the globe.

Is the reality television programme The Only Way Is Essex turning British girls into an army of feckless, drunken, sluts who are perpetually up the duff and care about nothing more than alcohol, drugs and money? Or were they of that disposition anyway? The Girl Guides blame the repulsive TOWIE, having commissioned a survey that showed young girls were more admiring of the lifestyle of the venal air-headed bints on the show than they were of more improving pursuits. I’m not so sure. It is a nice thought that, without TOWIE, our young females would all be beavering away trying to get a job as head of the Human Rights Commission, or the Howard League for Penal Reform, but I doubt it very much.

My column in the magazine last week was about a PR outfit called Awards Intelligence which helps companies and individuals win various pointless vanity awards — everything from business awards up to OBEs and knighthoods. I asked them if they’d help me get a knighthood, because I’m worth it. Yep, they said, that’ll be £3,900 plus VAT please. Oddly, despite the piece being published last Thursday, they’re still importuning me to call them and fix up the knighthood, so I’m not sure to what the ‘Intelligence’ part of their name refers. I suppose if private companies and individuals feel a pressing need to win these sorts of fatuous awards, it’s up to them.

Another example of the new and commendable ‘tough love’ approach adopted by health workers.  In a sense, the case of nurse Sally Miller epitomises this new movement within the NHS: the old, discredited and soppy notions of care and compassion is jettisoned in favour of an abrupt, no-nonsense vigour. Responding to a patient who, tiresomely, had pressed the buzzer in the ward in the hope of receiving palliative care, Sally said to her: ‘If you f****** press this buzzer again I am going to nail your f****** hand to the floor.’ Excellent. This follows a similarly uplifting case in South Wales.

Remarkable story about our top civil servants: they are all using the ‘private company’ loopholes to avoid paying the correct rate of tax, and have been doing so for some time. At least two thousand of the monkeys and that’s before you count the same level of management bureaucrats in the NHS and of course local government. The cost to the exchequer for the two thousand alone has been put at £30m. You can look at it two ways, I suppose. Either you argue that people are entitled to use whatever legal scams they can to protect their own incomes — a recourse which is not morally acceptable for a Labour politician, I would suggest. Or you believe that people should pay the amount of tax, at source, that the country intends them to pay.