Rod Liddle

We held a small party to celebrate the news that the UK had seen its largest rise in population in 50 years: a jump of 1 per cent in only 12 months to a respectable total of 68.3 million people. Just crisps and soft drinks, you understand. Nothing wildly extravagant. All patriots feel proud of the speed with which our numbers have been rising of late, because naturally we wish for the UK to be the biggest and best in the world – and we are on our way. The rights of the likes of Ardit outweigh the rights of the rest of us not to be burgled At the current rate of increase, the populations of Turkey, Iran and Thailand could be surpassed within a dozen or so years, although we have a way to go before we catch up with the real big boys, like Bangladesh.

Rosie Duffield’s magnificently rancorous resignation of the Labour whip has reduced the number of MPs on the government side who are able accurately to identify what a ‘woman’ is by about 30 per cent. This is, then, a grave loss to Sir Keir Starmer, who could have wheeled Rosie out every time he was asked the tricky question and told his interlocutors: ‘Ask her, she seems to know. I haven’t a clue. I have been shown diagrams, of course, many of them in full colour. But a proper definition still eludes me because, for me and the vast majority of my colleagues on the left, such things as diagrams and scientific facts are easily trumped by the post-truth wish--fulfilment pleading of shrill lunatics.

In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers. It is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt, greeted him with a fist-bump, which is apparently a common form of greeting among the African-Caribbean community from which Mr Deans hails.

I suppose there must be someone somewhere in this nation of ours who was surprised by the news that our fellow citizens have a much lower sense of pride in our country than has ever previously been the case. This apparent fact was reported by the National Centre for Social Research, whose representative did not seem terribly distressed by the findings. In short, only 64 per cent of us have any sense of pride in our nation’s history (down from 86 per cent in 2013) and a little over half of our number are proud of our democratic system. What do they put in its place, these guardians of Now?

Police are hunting a ‘hooded figure’ who sprayed ‘no whites’ on the wall of a primary school in Birmingham. The coppers presumably have racial hatred in mind, but there could be a much more innocent explanation for that which otherwise would be simply a case of vandalism – or even one of laudable graffiti art which may, one day, sell for millions of pounds to a rich idiot devoid of discernment. The school is located in the Alum Rock area of the city, a ward which consists almost entirely of ‘BAME’ people, according to a city council factsheet. So it may be that the hooded figure with the spray can was simply stating a fact, much as perhaps you are inclined to do when looking at television adverts or trailers for new BBC drama series.

Ihad entirely missed the online furore in which my colleague Douglas Murray was engulfed recently and only found out about it through a dubious article on the Guardian website by Kenan Malik. So I was slow off the mark, the reason being that I never read Twitter and have not the slightest interest in what anybody has to say on that absurd forum. (This includes whatever is said by the several people on there who are pretending to be me, incidentally.) Missing out on Douglas’s misery was a fairly crushing blow: there is nothing one enjoys more than revelling in the misfortunes of a colleague, especially if that colleague is also a good friend. I am way past the age when schadenfreude first eclipsed sexual intercourse as my principal enjoyment in life.

On a summer’s evening in 1978 I was standing on the platform at Redcar Central station, wondering if I had just missed my train. So I approached the only other person on the platform and asked him: ‘Excuse me, do you know what time the next train is due?’ He replied ‘What if it is?’ and punched me hard in the mouth. I hurried away. He was big, probably in his thirties, morbidly obese and pissed. With any luck he should be dead by now. I don’t quite buy the argument that these ‘far-right’ riots are an example of the dispossessed, effectively disenfranchised, urban working class articulating their many real concerns about our society. I think they’re largely the work of descendants of that fat bully who twatted me for no reason.

While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also how little. This supposedly marginal land is in danger of disappearing, and with it the wildlife that abounds These days there are just nine teachers in the country who vote Conservative and they keep their heads down in case a colleague dobs them in for the hate crime of existing. However, the principle of helping only those who voted for you seems to have been continued by Labour down the years.

I detected a degree of surprise among those people who were uncommonly cheered by Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory that England failed to beat Spain in the final of the European Championship. That wasn’t in the script. For those Labour supporters in the press and floating in the shallow trough of luvviedom, an England victory would have been the first thing to gild this brave new era of kindness, generosity of spirit and diversity.

I have never been a contributor to Twitter, partly because my comments would not be subjected to the intensive hygiene and cleanliness vetting which goes on here, for example. Instead it would all spew out untreated and lumpily noisome, like a Thames Water pipe on to your nearest beach, and I would be toast within about 60 minutes. There are other reasons – it seems to me a convocation of obsessive, perpetually furious morons, plus I loathe its modernity in reducing the discussion of complex issues into 75 words of bile, usually ending ‘just like Hitler’ – but self-preservation is the main one.