Rod Liddle

The free movement of labour and capital — don’t you just love it? Our unemployment rate is now 8.4 per cent, the worst in sixteen years. But, paradoxically, there isn’t an enormous problem with unemployment — or at least there shouldn’t be. Take the following two figures and you’ll see why: Last year’s total of British born workers in paid employment: down by 208,000. Last year’s total of foreign born workers in paid employment: up by 212,000. That’s fairly straightforward, isn’t it? Ok, it may not be quite as straightforward as it looks. But there is a certain agreeable symmetry to those figures, no?

For the magazine this week I’ve written about the plight of the young Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari, who faces a possible death penalty for having ‘tweeted’ something about that bloke Muhammad. His comments were wholly anodyne, but now a sort of maniacal combination of fundamentalist Islam and Twitter has done for him — and he will soon be charged with both blasphemy and apostasy, for which the penalty is death. When the furore kicked off he fled to Malaysia where the authorities put him on a plane back to Riyadh, out of cowardice and cravenness towards their Saudi investors.

The filth confiscated hundreds of cut-out-n-keep mock Ku Klux Klan masks which supporters of Manchester United had intended to wear to herald the visit of Liverpool. The implication behind the stunt being that Liverpool is a racist club, as evidenced by its support for the ‘orrible little scrote Luis Suarez. So, now it is not only a criminal offence to say something which someone somewhere might deem as racist, it is also a criminal offence to lampoon someone who might support someone else who might have said something racist. I suppose the police will insist that this was preventive measure designed to minimise the risk of trouble. Even so, it seems to me authoritarian and should be illegal. Thoughts?

It’s not snowing again. This is the fourth day running it’s not snowing again and I live in one of the most ‘badly affected’ areas south of the Wash. By badly affected I mean that all of the roads, even the single track lanes on top of a hill where I live, are entirely free from snow. It snowed for one evening only and left five inches or so on the fields; some of this has melted, some is still there. Just about enough to tell yourself that it had definitely snowed. So where’s this icy chaos? Every BBC news programme for a couple of days had reporters standing in mufflers looking concerned telling us about an icy chaos.

The England manager Fabio Capello is both right and wrong about John Terry. Right because it was stupid and, as Terry Venables says, ‘knee-jerk’ of the Football Association to remove the captaincy from the rat-faced little scrote. That’s up to the manager, a man disinclined to give a clamorous press what it wants. Wrong, because Terry should not be captain in the first place, nor indeed on the field of play. These days, Eric Pickles would be a more mobile and nuanced centre half for the national side than Mr Terry. Capello was also wrong to have reinstated Terry as captain after succumbing to FA and media pressure to remove the honour from him after that business where the defender was accused of shagging Wayne Bridge’s ex girlfriend.

Rowan Williams’s would-be successors have begun jostling for position. One stands out Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm university sinecure some time soon. The more cynical among you might not give a monkey’s and, indeed, suggest that jockeying for position to inherit Rowan’s mantle is akin to jockeying within the Romanov family to inherit Nicholas II’s mantle in about 1915. As with most artefacts of western civilisation — manufacturing, education, the armed forces, the press — the story is about managed decline.

Do we have a right to know why the football manager Gary Speed killed himself, if indeed he did kill himself? I’m not convinced. There’s a typically thoughtful and ruminatively controversial article by Stephen Glover in today’s Daily Mail. Stephen is critical of the inquest into Speed’s death, pointing out that the coroner was less than forensic in his cross-questioning of the various witnesses – particularly Speed’s wife and his close friend Alan Shearer. Mrs Speed had said that the evening before she discovered her husband hanging from a banister they had ‘exchanged words’, although she could not be sure what about.

It is a fairly horrible thing to find oneself on the same side of the fence as that gabbling imbecilic hag, Janet Street-Porter. The sort of occurrence which makes you question your entire belief system. But her article today about the ludicrous plan to build a vast airport on the Isle of Grain is absolutely correct, in pretty much every respect. I don’t quite see why the entire south-east of England should be tarmaced over and used as a sort of giant public convenience for London. The Isle of Grain is one of the few areas south of the Wash which is of genuine environmental importance (rather than being one of those mimsy Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which usually means over-farmed fields and honeystone cottages).

Late at night, when my wife is safely tucked up in bed, I sneak into my office and turn on the computer. I spend ages in front of the screen, mesmerised, panting with exertion. To my wife’s disgust — when she checks my browser history — I am almost always sporcling. ‘I married someone who wastes his life away doing THAT,’  she says with utter contempt. ‘I think I would rather it’s porn.’   It’s not porn. I’ve never really been porn-inclined, not even when I was 15 and magazines like Hustler were doing the rounds. Instead, I get my kicks out of nerdish geography quizzes on the US website, Sporcle. That’s why I can name all 196 countries in the world, right off, this minute, if you want.

Now here’s some good news to cheer you all up. Microsoft has applied for a patent for a Smartphone ‘app’ (I hate that word) called ‘Avoid the Ghetto’. Basically it just tells you the places to stay away from if you’re in an unfamiliar city. You can imagine the areas it tells you stay from. And so, by logical process, you can imagine the sorts of people who are demanding it never be made, be burned on a pyre and its inventors arrested etc. Yes, the NAACP was first out of the blocks, describing the device as ‘stereotyping’ and ‘discriminatory’. But the app, so far as I can gather, does not tell people to stay away from all black areas, only most of them.

Do you prefer the singer Beyonce when she is black or when she is white? Or could you not give a monkey’s either way? I think I prefer her, marginally, when she is white, although it’s a close call. If she were black and not singing, that would be pretty good. It would be better than white and singing. White and not singing would be best of all. She’s been made to look white for a new album cover. Very white, even whiter than when she got into trouble for looking white when she was photographed for an earlier album. Back then, she really annoyed the ludicrous journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown for looking white. This will piss off the dull and sententious old hag even more, I suspect.