Rod Liddle

I’m not an enormous fan of “giving money to charity”; I prefer to spend my spare cash on holidays, consumer durables and alcohol. But somehow, for the last five years, I’ve been paying a monthly stipend to Amnesty International. I really don’t know how that can have happened. Obviously, it should now stop, seeing that they have suspended the head of the organisation’s gender section, Gita Saghal, for having the temerity to suggest Amnesty was being “damaged” by being nice about the Taliban all the time.

This has been an appalling couple of months for the climate change lobby and now there’s been another, sickening, blow – which some of you, undecided in the debate, may well feel is the clincher. Prince Charles has waded into the issue, eviscerating climate change sceptics. “Please be in no doubt that the evidence of long term and potentially irreversible changes  to our world is utterly overwhelming,” he said. Hell, you could almost see them, at the IPCC and UEA, cringing, banging their heads against their computers upon which they were, at that very moment, making things up. Just what you need, the support of Prince Charles. It came on the same day that he said he didn’t agree with The Enlightenment.

An interesting piece by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, in the magazine this week on the government apparently backtracking on the issue of the Muslim Council of Britain, and talking to it once again. The MCB was removed from the officially designated category of Good Islam a while back and placed in the ever expanding arena of Bad Islam, along with suicide bombers, Hizb ut Tahrir, women who wear copious veils etc etc.

This following is definitely in bad taste, isn’t it? I don’t always have a working moral compass when it comes to black humour, but I think this is just the wrong side of the line. Although I’m not sure. A disc jockey from Revolution Radio, in Manchester, played the song ‘Jump’, by Van Halen, as police attempted to coax a suicidal woman down from a nearby motorway bridge. The DJ, Steve Penk, had been inundated by complaints from motorists held up on the road while the police went about their delicate counselling work. Penk did not mention the woman when introducing the song. Somehow the case is not helped by the fact that the woman did indeed jump, although failed to hurt herself (I don’t know how. Maybe they had put mats out).

There are two big chunks of child-related outrage in our newspapers today (and tomorrow, I’d guess). The first is the story of a woman with learning difficulties who fled the country with her baby daughter because the local social services department argued that, effectively, she was too thick to bring the kid up. She has now been tracked down and the child taken away. There was outrage, on her behalf, when she fled and there is even more now she has been caught. How can they do this, the inhuman politically correct monkeys in the social services? It’s her human right to have a kid, etc etc. The other chunk of outrage has been occasioned by those two young boys sentenced by a Sheffield court to an indeterminate spell under lock and key for having tortured two younger boys.

There’s a few Early Day Motions in the House of Commons, one of which demands that I should not be made editor of the Independent newspaper, based upon a Guardian story that I was about to be. There are two signatories – the self-publicising, hypocritical pantomime dame Diane Abbott, with whom I have crossed swords before, and the Labour MP for Newport, Paul Flynn. Now, there aren’t very many MPs for whom I have enormous respect, but Flynn is one of them – free thinking, leftish, not afraid to say the unpopular thing, fundamentally decent. So I rang him to moan about the EDM and he said that he’d signed it without even reading it, accepted that he’d got one or two things wrong, removed an offensive piece from his blog and asked me out for a drink.

The conviction of seven Muslim protestors for shouting nasty things at returning British soldiers was a grave and dangerous assault upon freedom of speech. I don’t care how foul the men are, or how provocative their beards might be, nor how smug they appeared on the court steps after the verdict – it was still wrong. I don’t really care, either, if they are the only seven people in the country to believe that the soldiers were “rapists” and “murderers”, although I would bet that there are plenty more. By charging the men we surrendered moral superiority; we compromised our liberality and, dare I say it, decency in order to punish people we do not like. People who fit into our hastily constructed paradigm of “Bad Islam”.

This, from Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia: “Within a few years winter snowfall in Britain will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” March, 2000. Ah, the joy of knowing the difference between climate and weather.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Britain is now in the grip of a “whiteout”; schools closed, essential services hindered, lonely pensioners dying of starvation in their garrets. Exactly as I predicted last year, the white blanket covering Britain now is the consequence of thousand upon thousand of polar bear pelts which have floated southwards on the melted ice floes from the Arctic, where the bears once lived happy, democratic and inclusive lives. Soon we will be entirely engulfed  by this tidal wave of fur, and we only have ourselves to blame. Meanwhile the sun continues to beat down relentlessly and it is dangerous to go out, in case you catch skin cancer – another gift we have bestowed upon ourselves as a consequence of global warming.

Marcus says: “It’s going to be very mild, more like early April than January. There will be no snow. The average temperature will be 16 degrees centigrade, with a fifty per cent chance of monsoon style rain. Later the temperatures will drop to about 14 degrees, giving the earth some brief respite. Polar bears dead today………………………….18 Inuit settlements melted………………………...462 Appearances of myself on BBC programmes…..96 Funny things said………………………………..0” More weather with Marcus tomorrow.

Apologies for having been a bit remiss on the blogging front recently – I’ve been busy panic-buying groceries from the local supermarkets. I saw this cold snap coming. The Daily Mail this morning says that Britain is running out of food, energy, money, etc etc and that we are all going to die. One way or another, right or left, people are yearning for an apocalypse. But, to the point at hand: what are we to do about Carolyn Mellanby? Cazza is the district judge in the case of seven Muslim men charged with having incited racial or religious hatred. These were the chaps you may remember from their very public demo in Luton last year howling “scum!” and “murderer!” and “rapist!