Back Towards The Locus

Bloggers like Anton and 5cc a very fine job sluicing the Gutters, but sometimes something smells so bad that it just has to be commented on. Today, it’s Littlejohn…

“I could point to the millions spent on producing leaflets in 13 different languages, or the fact that there’s special guidance for gipsies and travellers…”

Yes, there are leaflets for Gypsies and Travellers: here’s one. It includes advice on risks that wouldn’t apply to other citizens – such as how to use gas canisters safely and the size of the spaces that should be kept between caravans.

“If that involves advising members of the travelling community not to roast hedgehogs over an open flame in their caravan and be careful when burning tyres next to a wooden cricket pavilion, then who am I to argue?”

Er, no, Richard. Hedgehogs aren’t mentioned, and nor are tyres, that’s just your dull imagination illustrating your prejudice. And that’s bad enough before one remembers that in Italy “members of the travelling community” are subjected to ethnic profiling and institutional discrimination.

Richard Littlejohn – A Boil On An Already Pimpled Behind

After being beautifully bitch-slapped by Will Self, Littlejohn once claimed that “if you don’t agree with [the Left] they don’t engage you in argument, they throw slogans at you“. The problem, of course, is that the man doesn’t have arguments – he’s a terrible journalist.

In his time he’s lied about single mothers, lied about benefits paid to immigrants and lied about Labour’s immigration record. He’s ignorant of fellow journalists and ignorant about Islam, and when this is quietly pointed out to him his only reply is “but…but…you’re gay!“. FFS, how can you take a political writer seriously when he doesn’t even know how to vote?

The rest of his rambling, factless articles are marked by amusing contradictions. He’s been appalled by the claim that jihadists may be motivated, in part, by Western foreign policy, but empathises with terrorists that, er, had to pay the congestion charge.

Sometimes these ‘arguments’ are openly bigoted: advocating ethnic profiling at airports and sympathising with ‘retaliation’ attacks against British Muslims, for example. Possibly the worst example of this was when, at the height of the Rwandan genocide, he wondered…

“Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.“

This indifference to suffering – and certainly the suffering of foreigners – is common to Littlejohn. For him, the oppressed Palistinians of Gaza are the “Pikeys of the Middle East“.

On a smaller scale, he’s fantasised about the murder of a goth couple and violence against homosexuals, and has joked about the murder of five women in Ipswich. There’s no Sadowitz-like nihilism to this, incidentally, it’s just a rich fifty-year-old sneering at the world…or, of course, minorities.

Back in 2004, Marina Hyde did some sums:

“In the past year’s Sun columns, Richard has referred 42 times to gays, 16 times to lesbians, 15 to homosexuals, eight to bisexuals, twice to “homophobia” and six to being “homophobic” (note his scornful inverted commas), five times to cottaging, four to “gay sex in public toilets”, three to poofs, twice to lesbianism, and once each to buggery, dykery, and poovery. This amounts to 104 references in 90-odd columns – an impressive increase on his 2003 total of 82 mentions. There is, alas, no space for us to revisit the scientific study which found obsessive homophobes more responsive to gay porn. But Richard, we’re begging you: talk to someone.”

Littlejohn describes his job as “sitting at the back throwing bottles“, but when directed against the powerful these “bottles” are just sponges. Mandelson is a “cancer on British life” and Blair’s record “sucks“, but what’s this for? Iraq? ‘Counter-terrorism’? No, just the odd bit of sleaze and some stupid restrictions regarding condiments.

Instead of worrying those with power, then, Littlejohn derides the vulnerable: murder victims, Polish immigrants living in a toilet and Somalian immigrants forced to share a room. In addition, the lies that he spreads propagate a twisted view of these minorities – pretty reminiscent of the Daily Mail of the 1930s, then.

He would, of course, disagree. He enthusiastically supported Tony Martin – a “political prisoner” – who shot a burgler in the back. This wasn’t because Martin was oppressed, though, but because it suited Littlejohn’s agenda. Martin had apparently been “driven to his wits’ end by the criminal activities of local gypsies” – the entire population of which Littlejohn now derides as hedgehog eating, tyre burning, cricket pitch infesting thieves.

Appealing to aimless frustration and devoid of compassion, his work, like most of the Mail’s content, is a red-faced sneer.

Now, let’s never speak of him again.

(Oh, and if you’re purblind enough to think that the above merely demonstrates the man’s good natured “plitcal increctness” then remember that he’s tewwibwy wuwwied about the rise of ‘anti-Americanism’.)