PCC discovers ominous milk tooth
It's a bit of a cliche to describe the PCC as toothless, or a "toothless bulldog", or ineffectual, or feeble, or a cargo cult construction, or pointless, or a verisimilitude of regulation that doesn't actually do the regulating it claims to, or meek, or a mild-mannered knee-knocking milquetoast knocking on the dragon's door and asking it to please not set fire to the village again, or a waste of time, or hopeless, or like trying to fight off a knife-wielding maniac with a cream bun, or depressingly predictable, or like asking footballers to decide whether they were offside or not rather than a referee, or useless, or not fit for purpose, or a man with a bucket and spade trying to clear away the Sahara, or dismal, or shit. All of this is a cliche. And wrong. Well some of it's wrong.
Anyway, today it appears to have found a milk tooth, with what might turn out to be a rather radical decision, upholding a complaint against Rod Liddle. Then again, it might also be a decision that augurs very ominously for some of the rest of us. But more of that later.
In what will hopefully never be called 'Goat currygate', Liddle typed in a late-night Friday evening rant on his Spectator blog saying that "the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community". He was wrong. Lots of people got annoyed by him saying this; others got annoyed that people got annoyed by it.
The Spectator did attempt a defence against the complaint under Clause 1 (accuracy), using as its sources the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. Scoff at that choice if you like, but the key thing is that these articles mentioned 'accusations' and 'proceedings' rather than convictions. An important distinction when you're trying to claim proof for an assertion like the one Liddle made. Have a look at Five Chinese Crackers's stellar post 'Rod Liddle - more racist than the BNP?' from 2009 for a good analysis.
Yes, it was a poisonous, vile little rant from an awful little man; but the important point to make is that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, he may be a polemicist, and yes, he may be trying to provoke rather than inform, and yes yes yes, all of that. But he said something was true when it wasn't, something which could bring about a misleading perception of one racial group in society. Toxic, destructive and dirty. But also wrong.
Interestingly, the PCC have previously ruled against complainants who have accused newspapers of inaccuracies vis-a-vis comment pieces, saying that because these are columns, they won't be taken seriously as sources of factual information by readers. The PCC said last June:
While the column had been phrased in stark terms - the journalist had made one claim which was prefaced by "the fact is", for example - the author's claims would nonetheless be recognised by readers as comment rather than unarguable fact.
So is this a sea change from the PCC, then? Or is it simply a case of there being two different adjudications in two slightly different articles? A blogger in that instance had complained about articles regarding gay adoption, so it's a similar complaint about potentially discriminatory inaccuracy. It's a similar argument: present something as a fact in a column, reader complains about accuracy.
There is another possibility: that if the Spectator had defended its article by dint of it being an opinion piece, rather than on factual grounds, it may well have succeeded. But it didn't: as well as the factual evidence they used to defend it, they said that Liddle's article was a blog, and that meant that the factual dissection could take place in the comments rather than in the article itself.
Now, blogs as such - like this one, or yours, or any - aren't covered by the PCC at present. But I wonder if this decision might be leading us up that path. Look back to November of last year when the PCC's Baroness Luscombe said:
Rather, a system of self-regulation (such as exists by the PCC for newspapers) would be more appropriate, if any bloggers wished to go down that route.
And now, here's the PCC dealing with a complaint about a 'blog', or at least what the Spectator called a blog rather than a paid column by a salaried journalist which happens to support comments and be regularly updated by the authors themselves.
I wonder if there might be some mission-creep going on, or whether we're in the foggy world of "What is blogging and what is journalism?" which, frankly, I'd rather not go down again if it's all the same to you, for the sake of my sanity. Perhaps I am a little paranoid and there's nothing in this. But perhaps the line between 'blogs' on sites like the Spectator's and elsewhere is a little more blurry. Who decides who should be covered by the PCC and who shouldn't? It's voluntary as far as I am aware, but voluntary so that regulation isn't enforced.
At present, we don't subscribe to the PCC or an equivalent regulatory body. Should we? Who should and who shouldn't? Does it make you a better blog if you are? But who can afford the time to answer dozens of PCC complaints that might arrive in your inbox, possibly vexatiously from people who simply don't like you, without the time and resources of a professional publishing outfit to do it?
Some might say the bloggers who rejoice in Liddle's discomfort the most might want to look over their shoulders, because they could suffer the same kind of thing themselves soon. I don't think it's quite time to panic. Not just yet. But as the delineation between the big shots and the little shots gets ever more confused, might the pressure not grow for there to be a regulatory body for blogs? And might, then, those of us who cheerily demand teeth for the PCC be walking into a ruddy great bear trap?
So has the PCC found a tooth? And is it ominous for bloggers? I'm not so sure, on either case. Liddle has been correctly told off, but it's not so much a stinging slap on the wrist but a wagging finger. Hmm. For now, I can't help being delighted that Liddle's been made to look like the odious little man he is.
Will it make a difference to his output? I should cocoa. It might make him think twice. Will there be an apology, a correction, anything like that? We'll see. The PCC has no powers to enforce one. Remember, it's the 'shame' of being ruled against that is meant to be such a big deterrent from getting things wrong (not just wrong by mistake, but let's make it clear this Liddle's post was wrong, misleading and highly offensive). Let's see how much shame the Spectator suffers, if any. And then let's see how worried we should be.
Liddleballs
So, apparently Rod "goat curry" Liddle is not going to be the editor of the Independent.
And already people are queueing up to point fingers at the evil liberals whose screeching campaign against the world's most hilarious journalist stopped someone so brilliant from single-handedly rescuing the ailing Indy. One such person is Tim Luckhurst in today's Guardian.
Are we really supposed to believe that, despite the Jimmy Savile-a-like's apparent superior skills and the alleged fact he was the best man for the job, that everyone was just scared off from making the right decision by a bunch of shouty liberals? Come off it. No-one's ever been scared off by a bunch of shouty liberals, except other shouty liberals. Sunny claims victory over at Liberal Conspiracy, and it's certainly a decision to be pleased about in the context of there not being a total reactionary arse editing one of the two remaining supposedly liberal-left national newspapers. But I am not entirely sure that the campaign was the only thing that won the day.
More likely, I think, is another possibility: that the revelations about Liddle's fondness for posting stuff that was rather unpleasant on football message boards marked him out to be a bit of a loose cannon. Let's assume he didn't write any of the contentious posts, and his defence about having his computer hacked into by someone else is entirely true: even then, he still comes across as a bit of a loose cannon, and someone who, as Sarah Ditum pointed out, doesn't really understand technology tremendously well. Is that really the person you want running a national newspaper in the digital age, overseeing its web operations?
Secondly, I think it is worth considering the idea that the campaign didn't pluck Liddle's unpopularity among Indy readers out of the air - it actually existed, and exists. As a self-confessed bleeding heart, though a non-sandal-wearing non-yoghurt-weaving non-Islingtonite type of bleeding heart, I'm the kind of person who might buy the Independent - and indeed I have done many hundreds of times, largely for the news, world news and sport, as well as the Howard Jacobson column on a Saturday (I know, I know, you needn't point it out to me) or Robert Fisk, but I assume some of it's been down to the fact that I find it one of the least offensive options on the news-stand, and sometimes the thing that offends you the least is what you go with. (For example, the Guardian's politics might not offend me, but all that endless wall of sewage about buying really expensive stuff, the lifestyle flannel, makes me lose the will to live.)
Now, as a potential Independent reader, my emotional reaction to his possible editorship is that I don't really like it. I think he's a bit of a berk. Reading him tiptoeing over the racism tightrope in his Spectator articles is a thoroughly grim thing for me and I can only imagine a newspaper edited by him to make the same kind of inept judgements over stories as he does over his choice of words - possibly even being as unpleasantly provocative, as well. In which case, I don't really think I want to buy the thing any more. It's gone from being least offensive to possibly most offensive. Do I really want to waste my time with that?
Perhaps the reaction to Liddle's possible appointment, the Facebook group, and all of that stuff, wasn't a bunch of nasty liberal bastards bullying the Indy bigwigs into rejecting the stellar candidate. Maybe it really was the case that Liddle would have been a liability, and a business decision was taken, rather than a hysterical "hiding behind the settee because of those ghastly lefties and their supreme power" decision that we're supposed to imagine has taken place, if you believe what some are saying.
It's important to bear this in mind because there's a danger in all this that liberals inevitably end up getting painted as fascists by the kind of people who view them with nothing but contempt. Look at the censorship-happy liberals, they will say. First they tried to ban Jan Moir because she just spoke her mind - we didn't, but thanks anyway - and now they've banned a brilliant genius from being the best Indy editor ever - we didn't, but thanks anyway. The left only gets made to look powerful when it's being wrongly blamed for clamping down on freedom. The narrative is a familiar one, though, one in which the hypocritical liberal-left fascist scum are the real anti-freedom people out there, and it's only brave souls like Liddle who are battling for freedom and truth, and de dah de dah de dah, you get the general idea. We encounter it so often it's wearying.
Maybe it wasn't us. Maybe it was just business, and a realisation that this person wasn't the right one for the job. Who knows - maybe there is another human being in Britain more capable of editing a national newspaper than Liddle? Can't we even entertain that possibility? No, blame the liberals; blame the mob. So much easier.
The Liddle Defence
He's doomed. He's finished. And it's his own fault.
Ever since Rod Liddle started getting so near the knuckle he'd gone down to the marrow, people have been defending him. You see racism everywhere where it isn't there, they say. He isn't racist, they say. It's not racist to be ignorant about crime, they say. It's against freedom of speech to want someone more skilful than this boorish twit from being a national newspaper editor, they say.
And now? Now he's left with his own feeble wafer-thin defence. Vile and racist things were posted to internet forums from his password-protected account, yet his story is they weren't put there by him, and he still carried on being a member of the forums and not asking for posts to be removed under his username, nor deleted them himself seeing as he had the fucking password and it was his account, nor switched username... well you can believe all that if you like, but god bless you if you do. There is a flimsy, teensy-weensy possibility, after all.
Go and have a laugh about the jokes about Jews being burnt at Auschwitz, you'll love it! Still not racist enough for you? Still a big leftie witch-hunt? How about calling Turks 'semi-house trained Muslim savages'? That one tickle you? No? Still thinking it's all a bit conspiracy against the big cuddly uncle? How about 'niggermeat'? Do you think that's a hilarious and clever word? Do you? Still not racist somehow? Do me a fucking favour. Whoever wrote that should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves as a human being. Even if he didn't write them - and there's a teensy-weensy possibility he didn't - he let them stay up on the site, under his username. He's gone. He's doomed.
Props to Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy for digging into the sewer and finding the really unpleasant examples, which the Mail on Sunday couldn't bring to its readers at the breakfast table.
It's a good investigation by the Mail, though with some caveats. Obviously, Liddle is referred to as a 'former Today editor' despite losing the job several years ago, just to get the BBC reference in first. Second, they complain about Liddle having a go at black-only organisations, which is a bit rich when you consider Richard Littlejohn was doing exactly the same in their own daily paper on Friday - and getting it entirely wrong. And finally, the story attracts some delightful comments like:
His language is appalling but his sentiments are spot on. They are not racialist but commonsense.
- Mike, Heraklion,Crete, 17/1/2010 12:02
How about the burning Jews joke, Mike? That one 'spot on' as well?
The Indy’s in a Liddle bit of trouble
You'll know I'm no fan of Rod Liddle. I'm not really much of a fan of the Independent nowadays either, though I still read it from time to time. So which is worse? There's only one to find out... make Liddle the editor!
Incredibly, that's what a real human being has thought up as a viable idea to actually happen. Really.
Roy Greenslade has a good post up today about the shockwaves that the possibility of Liddle turning up and editing the Indy has created:
High-profile writers and editors are privately expressing grave concern about the decision by the editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, to appoint Liddle. They believe his views run counter to the paper's ethos and, in the words of one critic, it will prove to "a recipe for commercial disaster."
Not just commercial disaster, though, I'd wager - disaster for that newspaper in particular, and disastrous for the press in general. We've already got half a dozen or so "Climate change is bollocks, isn't it, of course you can't say anything nowadays for fear of upsetting minorities, and the PC liberal elite, who run everything, are ruining our country" newspapers; it's hard to imagine how Liddle would do anything than create another one.
There's an ever-growing Facebook group, now with 1,588 members at the time of writing, to try and stave off the threat of Liddle becoming editor and dragging the Indy into the toilet, which I think is an excellent idea. Paul over at Though Cowards Flinch is a bit more sceptical than me about that and hopes the NUJ will ride to the rescue - well I'd love to imagine they might, but I think the chances are remote. Still, a few days ago no-one would have thought that anyone in the world could have possibly considered Rod Liddle to be anything other than a miserably bad columnist who occasionally says things that are racist and whose blog entry about Marcus Brigstocke marked a new low water mark in his once-mediocre career.
There is another possibility, though, and it's one that I've considered for a while. Liddle might just be writing for his target market at the Spectator. He knows the kind of shit the readers there expect - ill-thought-out but provocative polemic about how liberals are all bastards and how it's actually the white people who are the good guys, and everyone in Bongobongoland is savage scum, written with enough conviction, if not evidence, to create a stir. You're faced with a choice if you're a writer like Liddle - you can write about what you want for buttons and a hearty "well done" every now and then; or you can abandon everything you believe in, all those principles you hold dear, and dive into the cesspit in order to keep the money coming in. I dare say he makes a decent enough living by dancing along the racism tightrope at the Spectator - who cares whether he believes in it or not? It's certainly effective, even if I find it blood-vomitingly offensive.
So there's a possibility that the liberal-left are worrying too much about Liddle. He may not be a borderline racist with keyboard-in-the-face stupid views about a great deal of things; he may simply be a canny journalist who knows exactly what his readership want from him - in the case of the Spectator, I think he's got them fairly well nailed down. It may be that ability to anticipate the demands of his readership that could lead to him being a great success at the Indy, you see.
All right, obviously not - of course not - but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway. I think the reason he's being picked is that someone, somewhere thinks he will be the kind of provocative, attention-grabbing editor who can turn up on the kind of TV programmes who need someone to make Quentin Letts not look so appalling and idiotic; he can generate publicity for the paper and attract people to it, people who might not otherwise be interested in the Independent and who might think that he'll bring a bit of fun to it. It's wrong, and it's doomed, if that's the strategy, but that's all I can think of.
Liddle gets the last laugh in all this, of course. He gets to chuckle about the people setting up Facebook groups, knowing that quite a lot of print dinosaurs are still lumberingly suspicious of anything electronic and wouldn't know social media if it came and bit them on the eyeball. He gets to arrive in his job with a pre-packaged controversy helping him get noticed. And, most of all, he gets the job. That said, I still think his presence as a national newspaper editor is another nail in the coffin of the dead-tree press. And I can't find myself thinking that's a good thing.
See also: Sarah Ditum at Liberal Conspiracy
I may have been a bit unfair to Rod Liddle
In the spirit of Janus, the god with two faces who looks both forward and back, who lent his name to this first month of the new year, I want to try and reassure you that I'm not just some kind of nasty person with a chip on his shoulder who's out to chuck kebabs at people.
So I thought to myself: perhaps I've been a bit harsh on Rod Liddle over the past year. Sure, what I may or may not write about him doesn't affect him in the slightest; he's more than happy churning out his "Ooh isn't inner city London terrible?" articles from his sleepy Wiltshire village in complete ignorance of my existence, among other things, and long may it continue. Who am I to try and rush in and save the day and say that he's a racist, or a dimwit, or that he gets things calamitously wrong, with a whiff of something distinctly smelly, in his polemical pieces? Is that really my job?
So I thought to myself: wouldn't it be a nice thing, for the new year, to try and find some people who agree with Rod Liddle, and to take their views on board, and wonder if I maybe am being a bit silly with my criticism of him? I think that's fair enough, isn't it, and it'll stop me hand-wringing for a while. So here's a nice post on a messageboard saying that Liddle's entirely right:
See, 'Quantum' agrees with Liddle's piece about black people and violence entirely. That's a good start. Now, where did he write that piece of congratulation...? Let me see... oh yes, it was the Stormfront website, for far-right extremists.
Well yes yes, but that's just a small example. Perhaps we can find an example of someone else entirely agreeing with Liddle. Ah yes, here we are. Here's someone who enjoyed a Rod Liddle article he repeated it in full, with his quotes in the brackets afterwards:
See, there's quite a fan base out there. And that was written by a Mr Lee Barnes. He's not an extremist, unless he's the same Lee Barnes who said the other day that burning down an immigration camp was not a crime, which I'm sure he isn't. Oh. Hang on, it is.
Right, let me try a bit harder now. I'll find someone else who agrees with Liddle, who isn't member of a far-right organisation, and then you'll understand the broad appeal, and not-at-all-racist nature, of what the Spectator's sparkling correspondent has to say. Ah yes, here's one:
There we are, that's not on a far-right website, that's the British Democracy Forum. They're not nutters and far-right racists, are they? I mean, they've got a whole forum dedicated to immigration that is specifically non-racist - that shows they value debate that doesn't descend into neo-Nazi racism. I mean have a look at this post from the Rod Liddle discussion page for an example of what I mean:
Oh. Ah. This isn't really doing my attempt to say sorry any good, is it. It would appear that a lot of people with some fairly smelly views do appear to be delighted that Liddle is voicing the opinions they believe in, which they encourage others to post onto as many news sites and message boards as possible. But that's not his fault, is it? I mean, it's not as if he's now started attracting people who think they can be genuinely racist to his stories, because they think it's acceptable under his byline, is it?
So another jiggaboo straps a bomb to his leg and trys to blow up an airplane but blows his leg off instead.
Oh.
Prolls
Professional trolls - or "prolls", as I'm inclined to call them now after hearing the term for the first time yesterday - are just bigger, more noticeable versions of those people you get on messageboards or in the comments section of news stories; and rather than doing it just to wind people up, they do it for a living.
Yesterday's article by Andrew Alexander in the Mail which I blogged about here is a classic example of a proll hard at work. Smugly revelling in his lack of research, preferring to light his pipe and 'ruminate' rather than actually check that what he's saying is true, there's not much more than a cigarette paper - or indeed an x-ray with an ominous shadow on it - between Alexander's "Smoking's not so bad, you know" and the kind of trolling absurdity you get underneath almost every story nowadays. Indeed, the pride in ignorance brings to mind those BBC Have Your Say types so splendidly taken down over at Speak You're Branes.
I've said this before in the wake of Jan Moir's miserable attack on Stephen Gately and no doubt I'll say it again, before I manage to fully form the argument: but I think the behaviour of certain columnists and professional writers is little better than that of trolls. But these prolls are seen as being intelligent, useful, articulate; their trolling nonsense is elevated from the level of 'some bloke on the internet trying to wind other people up' to Polemicist of the Year, in the case of Richard Littlejohn.
And there's nothing wrong with being a good polemicist, of course; it's just that Littlejohn, Phillips, Alexander, Hitchens (P) and Liddle - and many others - seem to get things wrong quite often. By which I mean those pesky facts and evidence they need to back up their arguments. We've seen this week Melanie Phillips claim that Alan Titchmarsh is a 'distinguished climate-related scientist' to back up her 'climate change is all a big con' line. We've seen Littlejohn barking about immigrants staying the country because they've got a cat to back up his "Gorblimey, don't those immigrants get a good deal innit?" argument - except that wasn't the case; or laughing at the names of someone's children in a rolling-eyes at the state of Bonkers Britain rant - except they weren't children at all, they were pets. Which a simple bit of research would have discovered - yet the vastly salaried journalist Littlejohn (catchphrase "You couldn't make it up!") apparently decided he couldn't be bothered to do much more research than reading the Daily Mail.
Then there's Liddle. One of the arguments I read this week was from Kwasi Kwarteng, who said of Wiltshire-based Liddle's woefully inaccurate diatribe about London street crime:
You may not admire Mr Liddle's style of writing, nor agree with his views, but that does not mean that he should be sacked from the magazine for which he writes, as some have suggested. It is his job to provoke. And that is exactly what he has done.
I'm all for freedom of speech, of course, and I know it's Liddle's job to provoke - it's certainly not his job to research things properly, as we've seen. But provocation with incorrect and misleading facts behind it - which will be picked up like a baton by the BNP and other extremists as if it's gospel - is a fairly smelly thing, which Kwarteng signally failed to acknowledge throughout his entire article. You can try and give Liddle some wriggle-room by saying: Sure, he didn't research anything properly, he didn't get it right, he made assumptions based on his own prejudices rather than evidence, he said something which, because it was published by the Spectator will now be used as evidence by the far-right that even the mainstream press are saying the stuff they've been banging on about for ages, but hey, the 'goat curry' bit was funny, wasn't it?
But no, it wasn't funny. Not even funny. That last line of defence for prolls - that they're entertaining - doesn't stand up as being good enough if they're fuelling, through ignorance or on purpose - the flames of hatred. Once published by a leading newspaper or magazine, poisonous views and misleading stories are used by those who have real hatred and real venom to make their case. We saw that earlier this year with an English Defence League video which used Daily Mail and Daily Express stories and headlines to make its point. That's why it matters whether you get things right or wrong. A lot of readers will shrug their shoulders and take what you say with a pinch of salt; others will use your prestige - that fading prestige of publications like the Mail and Express and possibly even Spectator after this week's nocturnal emission by Liddle, but prestige nonetheless - and use it as proof that their hatred is right.
The irony is, of course, that we mere bloggers on the internet are the ones who are accused of being the trolls. I don't think that's quite the case. In fact, I'll take the internet trolls over the prolls any day of the week. At least trolls don't pretend to be anything other than trolls; they don't make lofty claims to be polemicists or to defend their role as being anything other than their right to a rant. Which everyone does have, of course. It's just that doing it underneath a banner of an official news source gives your rant a weight it wouldn't otherwise have; it implies a responsibility to get things right, because people will use what you say in their arguments, and sometimes, if you're not careful, you will give ammunition to some fairly despicable people.
Just say he’s wrong. Go on, say it
The Mail have drafted in Kwasi Kwarteng to write about Rod Liddle's load of racist claptrap. And instead of criticising him for getting everything entirely wrong, Kwasi decides that it's right for Liddle to say what he said:
You may not admire Mr Liddle's style of writing, nor agree with his views, but that does not mean that he should be sacked from the magazine for which he writes, as some have suggested. It is his job to provoke. And that is exactly what he has done.
Provoking,yes. But by saying stuff that isn't true. I don't mind people provoking by using facts and good knockabout arguments and humour, when required. But Liddle didn't use facts. He is either ignorant or a liar. I don't even care which, because it doesn't change what he said. What he said was bullshit. And yet Kwarteng ignores this entirely. He is either ignorant or has decided not to mention the factual errors in Liddle's account, preferring to state:
One controversial report conducted by Scotland Yard last year found that more than half of teen knife crime offences in the capital involve black suspects.
Small wonder, then, that two years ago the Commons home affairs committee warned of a 'serious crisis' among Britain's young community.
It's no use howling 'racism', this is a real problem confronting our society - and despite her politically correct posturing, Diane Abbott knows it.
Strange that Kwarteng couldn't be bothered to look at the actual detail of that report rather than the way the Mail - for it was they - reported it. Five Chinese Crackers, in a post which points out how Liddle's views are more extreme than those expressed by the BNP's Richard Barnbrook, points out:
Quite apart from the fact that Liddle included no data to support his assertion, I happen to know that in the three months to July 2008 black people under the age of 29 made up 239 of 741 people proceeded against for offences involving knives in London. Take that back to under 18, and you get 124. Not really most, huh? Looks like Liddle just repeated crap racist clichés about black people being responsible for most of the crime in London after all (until of course, he produces the evidence he based his assumptions on. I look forward to seeing how he worked out the ethnicity of those responsible for 'street crime').
Bizarrely, my source for the stats about black people not being the biggest group proceeded against knife crime in London comes from a Freedom of Information request. Carried out by the Daily Mail.
But this isn't about the facts. Kwarteng's piece does a couple of things that help the Mail: firstly, it backs up a journalist for using misleading polemic with no facts to back it up whatsoever, calling Liddle 'clumsy' rather than saying he may have been highly offensive and unpleasant; secondly, it points out the disproportionate level of black men involved with crime arrests (see comments) without ever bothering with the context of social or economic factors, which presumably don't exist. And then there's this:
When people from the West Indies first came to Britain in the late Forties, they were as law-abiding, and often as well-educated, as the indigenous population.
Ah, the 'indigenous population'. And the reply will come back: "Aha, but this is a black man saying this, therefore it can't be racist, can it?" - and it isn't. But the use of the term 'indigenous population' is one generally done by racists or those attempting to create a 'them and us' situation, particularly when discussing immigration. For Kwarteng to use it is, well let's use his own word, 'clumsy'. He goes on to blame the Left, of course, somehow, despite a lot of the criminals he complains about having grown up during Thatcher's time, but it's no surprise he should do that, because this
Kwasi Kwarteng is a former Conservative candidate
appears at the end of the story.
It's a neat piece for the Mail: it looks watertight and unassailable, because it's a member of the black community who's doing the finger-pointing. But I can't help wondering why Liddle's factual assertions, which were entirely wrong, weren't called out. Why not?
Still, I look forward to another article soon, in which a resident of an east London council estate tells Rod Liddle what life is like in his Wiltshire village, just guessing and making up stuff based on what they've heard from their mate down the pub, accusing the majority of people who live there of crimes based on their heritage. I'm sure that'll get published.
A Liddle bit of racism
Sometimes you think to yourself: maybe this arsehole is just looking for attention, maybe we shouldn't give it to him. Maybe the best response to his trolling bollocks would be to ignore it. Perhaps he's looking to whip up a Jan Moir-style shitstorm and reap the benefit of being at the centre of it, the attention-seeking little shite. Perhaps it might be better to step back and give no further oxygen to his venomous awfulness.
And then you think: no, fuck you Liddle, you're a know-nothing fuckwit. You shouldn't have said what you said and I don't care if telling you you're a fuckwit might give you a tiny bit more attention; hopefully even Spectator readers are thinking you're highly unpleasant after your latest bit of bile. You started off with the 'Mary Seacole Academy fpr Advanced Textspeak and Stabbing' but that didn't get you enough attention, so you've had to move it on a bit - so now we have this:
The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.
You've gone beyond trolling. You've gone beyond trying to be provocative. You're just a cunt.
Read more: Rod Liddle has shit for brains
The case for the immediate arrest of Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle's racism further exposed
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