Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Homosexuals are tired of being portrayed on television as sexually obsessed, hilariously narcissistic, outrageously dressed queens each carrying a boxed set of Abba CDs – ie, Clary, Norton, Carr and so on. They want a bit more realism, believing that this sort of stereotypical depiction is hardly better than the Black and White Minstrels, or
From our UK edition
All too late in the day, I have come to worry about the stuff I put out in my waste bins. It is not the recycling issue that bothers me, but what council officials, poring over my detritus with rubber gloves in some sanitised hell in Maidstone, might find out about me, and what they
From our UK edition
A powerful editorial in New Scientist about Muir Russell’s report into those emails leaked from East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. It does not quite call Russell’s publication a whitewash, but comes fairly close. Its main point of contention is that there have been three inquiries into the Climategate farrago and “incredibly, none looked at the
From our UK edition
A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece for the magazine about the debate over the Schonrocks, a family living in south London who allowed their two children – aged five and eight years – to cycle to school unaccompanied. The school had told them to desist from this practice because it was dangerous.
From our UK edition
Must admit I’m thoroughly enjoying the government’s fury that decent, white, Christian, blind people keep getting chucked off buses because Muslims object to them. Apparently there is something in the Koran warning that if you brush up against a blind person, or get his saliva on your hand, it is haram – which means no
From our UK edition
Some new public conveniences at a shopping centre in Rochdale will include two hole-in-the-ground squat toilets in order to make the area’s Asian population feel more at home. These innovations are apparently known as “Nile pans”, although I must say I have never heard them called this. I’ve heard them called “holes in the ground”,
From our UK edition
This link was sent to me by my friend Belette. I am not sure if it makes it more or even less appropriate that one of the dancers is a survivor of Auschwitz. More, I suppose. Though I’ll bet it wasn’t his idea. Anyway, apologies if it causes offence; my own view is that it
From our UK edition
What on earth is the government going to do about all these deranged northerners running amok shooting people? The more callous among you might well argue that it doesn’t really matter, as these madmen are only shooting other northerners, and so it is therefore none of our business. Perhaps. But there is no guarantee that
From our UK edition
Just a quick one: who do you think is the more truly fucking stupid, the legions of thick Geordies who have signed the Facebook campaign claiming that Raoul Moat was a “legend”, or the outgoing chair of Ofsted Zenna Atkins, who said that it was good for schools to have incompetent or useless teachers because
From our UK edition
I was largely behind Charles Moore’s rebellion against the BBC license fee. Partly for aesthetic reasons – I don’t like Jonathan Ross, and the truth is I wouldn’t like him much better if he were paid only £6 per year, rather than £6m. Partly too for a reason of which I expect Charles himself would
From our UK edition
I’d hate to come across as a snob, but is the seaside town of Blackpool really worthy of UNESCO world heritage status, as is currently being suggested? Does it, you know, punch its weight alongside the Great Wall of China and the Acropolis? I thought it was just somewhere for Glaswegians to vomit. I’ve been
From our UK edition
Louise Bagshaw, one of the new intake of Conservative MPs perhaps unkindly called Tory Totty because they are not, actually, terrifyingly ugly, has put her head above the parapet on the subject of rape. She is opposing plans to give men charged with rape anonymity in court. Women who accuse a man of rape are
From our UK edition
It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains.
From our UK edition
I read Dan Hannan’s blog about the recent Spectator debate in which we argued about whether or not Britain was so completely knackered that we all ought to leave the place right now. I thought we should, Dan thought we should hang around for a bit longer. Anyway, on his blog Dan made reference to
From our UK edition
I bumped into Alan Yentob at The Spectator party last week. A good man who has both produced and presented some of the BBC’s best programmes over the last few decades. If there wasn’t a BBC, we wouldn’t have those programmes, or anything like them; the BBC exists through a sort of moral cross-subsidisation –
From our UK edition
I asked my local greengrocer for a couple of blood oranges last weekend. They were to go with an orange cake I’d baked for some left-wing friends who were coming over — a nice left-wing cake, I thought. No flour or butter in it (both right-wing ingredients, historically), just ground almonds, eggs, sugar and oranges.
From our UK edition
An interesting piece in The Guardian which suggests that people in warmer, hotter, more southerly countries (they mean Africa but dare not say it) might have lower IQs than people in the north, on account of some mysterious process by which the body devotes too much energy and resources to fighting infectious diseases and not
From our UK edition
The Telegraph ran a piece which virtually repeated my blog about young black men and crime figures in London. Here it is. I’ll be writing more about this later in the week, when I’ve tied down a few more details about the original complaint, supposedly from a “private individual” to the PCC about my blog.
From our UK edition
The general public seems split in two over who to blame for England’s latest abject failure at the world cup and our consequent exit. People who support one of the big six or seven teams in the Premier League blame the England manager, Fabio Capello. The rest of us blame the players. The division reinforces
From our UK edition
Years ago I used to spend one evening a month in some dank and frowzy local authority hall attempting to prevent crazed and scary lesbians from becoming my local MP or councillor. This was during my time as a Labour party activist in south London — and attendance at the staggeringly dull ward meetings was
