Portrait of the scrivener as a young man

Dear Lord Leveson, please interview Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle has written a column in The Sun today, saying three things:

1. Malingering arseholes pretending to be disabled are a curse upon the disabled.

2. Anyone claiming disabled benefit is viewed as beyond reproach: this view must change.

3. I know we hate bankers more, and I’d like to see the Coalition take a tougher line with them, too.

A stream of hate is now following him on Twitter: it can be viewed here.

I would say that about 95% of the comments would qualify as ‘hate-crime’ in the lexicon of political correctness. And amusingly, most of them accuse Liddle of committing hate-crime.

But what’s mainly apparent is that circa 100% of the tweeters haven’t read the piece – and are quoting bits of it entirely out of context. Let’s face it, how many Guardinistas pay to read the Sun?

The yelling mob are the same jerks who shouted everyone down about Chairman Mao when I was at Liverpool Uni in the 1960s. One of them – Robert Kilroy-Silk, my tutor – is more right wing today than Liddle could ever hope to be.

It’s all very familiar…but no less concerning for that. Here’s another pearler from Clegg on BBCNews today:

“It’s not that we can’t afford to help families on the breadline. We can’t not afford to help them”.

Fine words indeed from Nick. Does he have the remotest idea what a real breadline is? Is his answer, then, to afford things we can’t afford? Given his background as non-productive fatcat, I think that almost certainly is indeed his haut-bourgeois logic.

I watched seething earlier this week as Iain Duncan-Smith was pilloried for giving those on benefits the same as the minimum wage. I listened to Radio 4 as a very earnest lady insisted that the employed would be “still” better off due to tax allowances.

Isn’t that the bloody idea?

The Leveson Enquiry is supposed to be looking at press freedoms. I doubt if Rod Liddle is down as a witness. But I’d like to volunteer him in this role. Murdoch hack or not, I think it might rebalance the reality of the argument.

After all, Every Liddle Helps.