Twit of the Year contest - I'm betting on a win for Alastair Campbell

I'd add "Conservative" MP Nicky Morgan to the list. In fact, it seems a shame...

The Great British Bake-Off's co-creator admits it's a vehicle for pro-EU, pro-multiculti propaganda - is that okay?

I'm perfectly aware that some of the things I've written over the years regarding the way the...

Roy Peck talks balls about immigration - and makes perfect sense

American journalist Roy Peck's famous 2010 gumball rally immigration video...

Why do young people vote Labour? They've been taught to. And it's going to get worse.

If you're a secondary school pupil, eight out of ten of your teachers vote for left-wing parties. Presumably...

Cultural Marxist mindbenders walk among us, sounding their PC piety klaxons...

I take a week off from the blog and return to find that the country's vast, sinister army of left-liberal social engineers has been hard at work rewiring the national psyche. It seems that, having failed to halt Brexit - and with the Tory lead in the opinion polls hovering between 16% and18% and President Literally Hitler in the White House - they've decided to redouble their thought-policing efforts in those areas (inclusivity, diversity, gender equality etc.) where they're not needed, because those battles have already been won. Still, when your main pleasure in life is signalling how morally superior you are to the vast majority of your countrymen (or countrypersons),  any cause is fair game - even if it's no longer a cause in any meaningful sense of the term.  First, the piety klaxon blared out from the campus of Hull University:

Britain's left-wing comedians quake as they realise "the men are coming up the drive"

Delightful news: the arrogant, lazy bigotry of left-wing metropolitan BBC comics like Marcus Brigstocke and Stewart Lee has led to some members of their audiences outside London booing and walking out of their otherwise rib-tickling stand-up "comedy" gigs, disgusted by the performers' anti-Brexit material. For some reason, the comedians' bewildered bleatings recalled the moment when, during a televised public speech, the vile Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu realised that the vast crowd listening to him in the square below were booing, not cheering, him. But that seemed a bit silly, given that the wretched tyrant in question spent decades murdering and torturing his people, rather than - as in the case of Brigstocke and Lee - using allegedly comic material on a platform provided by left-wing broadcasters to shame, browbeat, bully and embarrass anyone who doesn't share their achingly PC view of the world. So I searched for another analogy...

When "our" side next loses a major vote - let's behave really, really badly!

I'm finding politics rather dispiriting this year. At first I thought it was a natural reaction following the wholly  unexpected triumphs of 2016 - an inevitable period of dullness after the excitement generated by the Brexit vote and the defeat of Hillary Clinton: unconfined joy can only be sustained for so long. But I've recently begun to realise that it's also partly bemusement at having all one's suspicions confirmed. I've spent years raving about the sinister liberal-left establishment which runs this country (and Europe and America), and how, because "it" or "they" have such a firm grip on all of our major institutions, "they" will still be in control - whichever party is in power. Every day and in every way, this wild delusion is turning out to be true. I feel a bit like Mel Gibson's deranged cab-driver in the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory whose paranoid fantasies concerning vast global plots to undermine democracy turn out to be spot on - i.e. he's evidently nuts, but he happens to be right. The same could be said of me. It's disconcerting.

Yes, I know we who constantly complain about the "left-liberal elite" sound bonkers - but we're justified

"YOU'RE NEXT!"

I'm well aware of the danger of designating a disparate group of people as The Enemy, applying a handy, disparaging label to them, and then using it in a lazy, knee-jerk fashion every time something displeasing happens. The ability to instantly identify a standard scapegoat obviates the need for thought or analysis, and allows moaners like me to search out the next issue to blame the left-liberal elite for. Depending on which side of the political fence we're on, we choose different scapegoats, be it The Blacks, The Muslims, The Jews, The Rich, The Bankers, The EU, Little Englanders, Xenophobes, Racists, Social Workers, The Gutter Press, Tory Scum, The BBC, The Establishment, Climate Change Deniers, The Snowflake Generation, Social Justice Warriors, Guardian Readers, Academia, The Unions, The Green Lobby, The Military-Industrial Complex, Hollywood etc. In order to quell this instant pigeonholing tendency...

I'm pretty sure I heard today's edition of Radio 4's Any Questions 40 years ago

I was reading the Telegraph late this morning, and steadily becoming more depressed. Apparently, British veterans are to be charged with murdering an IRA leader in Northern Ireland 44 years ago. A Royal Marine charged with murdering a Taliban captive will be spending Christmas in jail because his bail hearing has been postponed until the new year. Pilots, aircrew and baggage handlers are staging a strike over Christmas. The worst prison riot for 25 years has taken place in Birmingham, possibly fuelled by drugs and a lack of access to television. Italy is proposing to drop fidelity vows from the marriage contract, because they represent "an outdated and obsolete view of marriage". Queen Mary University of London has removed a foundation stone laid by King Leopold II of Belgium because the Pan African Society said it represented "imperialism"...

The Lib-Dems triumph in Richmond. Here's the winner!

Er... Hmm. Oh well. Mind you, any man who thinks this is how you hold a glass of beer is a born loser (and I don't mean Boris)...

The So.Much.Guardian Twitter feed seems to have gone on holiday: this should help prevent withdrawal symptoms

Why not do us all a favour, George, and give up eating altogether?

Crybaby American football players refusing to stand for the US national anthem need a lesson in true class from Usain Bolt

Ungrateful wretch

The protests started with the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who apparently wants to complain about racial inequality, which has evidently forced him and an enormous number of other black athletes to become unfeasibly rich and famous. I'm sure we all feel their pain and sympathise with how they've suffered under the jackboot of American racism.

The BBC goes full Peter Simple with one utterly deranged tweet

My first reaction was "What are they smoking at Radio Ulster these days?" My second reaction was...

Every political journalist, right now...

via GIPHY

Meanwhile an intellectually distinguished Conservative Brexiteer spends nine minutes trying to speak truth to a spectacularly stupid, ill-mannered and ill-informed left-wing female CNN "journalist" - or, more accurately, to a biased, bigoted political activist masquerading as a television news journalist who has already decided that all Leave voters are (wait for it)... WAYCISTS!!!!!!!!:

Brexit and Labour Party Armageddon - because you haven't heard enough about either subject today

Only a political party run by the hard left could manage it. This morning's (evidently pre-Hilary Benn sacking) <i>Telegraph</i> headline screamed "TORIES AT WAR". A gift, you'd think, for the main opposition party. Only it hasn't quite turned out that way? Let's face it, only a politician as goofy and inept (and left-wing) as Jeremy Corbyn could have reduced Her Majesty's Opposition to such an abject shambles at the very moment it should have been powering ahead in the polls (not, of course, that we need ever pay any attention to them ever again). I am heartbroken that... no, I can't manage it: it's just all so deliciously <i>funny</i>. Not that many of my friends are exactly laughing their heads off..<br />
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I say friends, but I suppose I mean "friends", really. I've been on Facebook for years but, because it's an unsuitable platform for airing one's political views (I usually "unfriend" anyone who does so), I never bother posting anything on it. I quite enjoy catching up on what old work colleagues and relatives are getting up to (lots of my Norwegian cousins share their doings on it, which is nice). I only check my timeline (or whatever it's called) every to weeks or so - and then only after receiving an email nudge from Facebook. Yesterday, I took a gander, only to encounter a tsunami of hatred, grief, angst and depression. One friend was telling everyone that Leave won because of&nbsp;"ignorant Sun readers and ageing parochials". <i>Gee, thanks!</i> Several assured me that Out voters had destroyed their children's future. Others were absolutely positive that a way would be found to overturn the result (I suppose if you approve of your laws being devised by unelected bureaucrats, you're not really a fan of democracy in any case). Others urged me to sign a petition to overturn the result (a petition whose signatories include 33,000 residents of Vatican City, where 800 people live, many from North Korea, and quite a few from the Arctic). I'm not sure why signing a petition that says "I didn't like the result" might result in the will of over 17,000,000 British (and, for some reason, Irish) voters being thwarted, but if it makes Remainers feel better, well, okay, I suppose.<br />
I find the point about young people's future being destroyed by ignorant, selfish, old bastards particularly perplexing. Here are some statistics to ponder:<br />
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Turnout by age group: 18-24: 36% 25-34: 58% 35-44: 72% 45-54: 75% 55-64: 81% 65+: 83%<br />
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Presumably, if the 64% of young folk who couldn't be arsed to vote had actually done so, the result would have been different, and their future in the dynamic, prosperous, popular, outward-looking, freedom-loving EU would have been assured.<br />
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Yes, but... they'd been lied to by the Leave campaign! Yes, indeed. They'd also been lied to - far more brazenly - by the Remain camp.<br />
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But the Leavers didn't have a proper plan! No, they didn't. But as they weren't running for office, they didn't need to. Similarly, it was the government's job to come up with a plan for what to do if the country voted to leave the EU: the fact that it evidently hasn't is bizarre.<br />
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The fact that a larger portion of older people voted to leave couldn't be more irrelevant. Post-referendum polls (them again) suggest that the main concern of the majority of Out voters

The Conservative and the Socialist

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If only it were that easy!

Message to Chris Mullin and the Left in general: people who don't share your peculiar beliefs are not necessarily evil

The diarist and former left-wing Labour MP Chris Mullin is in the Spectator this week, casting his eye over the Republican race for the presidential nomination. While I probably disagree with Mullin on most issues, I don't see him as a bad man. He may believe some strange things, and I'm certain that the policies he espouses would be utterly disastrous for this country -  but I don't think that automatically makes him evil. He's just wrong. Mullin, on the other hand, seems convinced that people who don't share his beliefs are evil:

Good God! When it comes to the EU and unilateralism, Conservative and Labour MPs are even more cowardly than I'd suspected!

First, there are all those ladyboy Blairite/centrist Labour MPs fannying about threatening to do something really drastic if their Trotskyite leaders go full loonytunes and back a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament - a policy that (among many other shortcomings) made their party unelectable between 1979 and 1997. What comes out of the mouths of pro-nuclear defence MPs is:

I will do such things,--
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. 

...but what "such things" boil down to is an off-the-record whining session with a political journalist, and getting a bit shouty in meetings when the Dear Leader sends some hapless member of the Politburo to soak up a bit of verbal punishment over his latest piece of doolalliness.

Student Jacob Williams on being reported to the police by Oxford offendotrons

And Jacob evidently isn't alone:

Cameron's critics are right - the Calais migrants look less like a bunch, and more like a rabble or a gang