In which Littlejohn defends phone-hacking

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the ongoing revelations in the NOTW phone-hacking scandal has been watching underwhelming hacks attempting to justify it or attempt to diminish its relevance with increasingly extravagant and unconvincing shoulder-shrugs. True to depressing form, Richard Littlejohn has made own typically crap attempt.

Before that, in, today's grating word-dump, Littlejohn rails against the 'gruesome slappers' who sell kiss-and-tell stories, happy to put the blame primarily on the women involved and, in so doing, glossing over his profession's own grubby yet pivotal role in the whole business. His apparent contempt for people like "a bird called Linsey Dawn McKenzie" seems to contrast with his insistence that we all have a right to know about where celebrities' dicks are going. You'd think he hail them as heroes of citizen journalism!

Surprisingly, Littlejohn actually approaches a point when he complains about how legal injunctions taken out in the reporting of these matters unfairly favour the rich, but typically pisses on his own chips with self-parodic mentions of how it's all the fault of 'yuman rites'.

Having established that we all have a Right To Know about stuff, Littlejohn moves on to the pressing topic of belittling the importance of the NOTW affair. Under the sub-heading "Sorry, but this isn't Watergate", Littlejohn lays bare his "couldn't give a shit" attitude:

But nor do I understand what the difference is between the Screws listening to Sienna Miller’s tittle-tattle, and the self-righteous Guardian publishing leaked emails from national security agencies.

Now, I'm not particularly supportive of every decision Wikileaks has made, but I'm not so cretinously fucking stupid as to be unable to tell the ethical difference between releasing not-even-hidden diplomatic memos which relate to issues of serious international political importance, and bugging the private phone lines of actors and footballers so we can all have a good voyeuristic pry into who they're knobbing/being knobbed by.

Of course, when in doubt, always pull the "ah, but what about...?" distraction card;

Incredibly, there are now 50 officers investigating this matter full-time, having been pulled off rape, robbery and murder cases. Is this a proper use of scarce police resources at a time when London is in the grip of gun crime?

At this point I could probably go and try and check whether officers actually HAVE been moved off rape and murder cases, or I could go and check if London really is "in the grip of gun crime", but it seems kind of pointless, right? If the best thing you can come up with to defend phone-hacking is that it's less bad than rape, then it's not really worth the effort of trying to argue.

Next up, hilariously, rumoured £800,000-a-year celebrity newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn tells us what we the plebs think:

The paying public don’t share the collective Fleet Street/Westminster/Scotland Yard fascination with phone hacking. They must conclude that this particular three-ring circus has gone stark, staring mad.

Actually, some of us very much do share the fascination. No, we don't wish for the police to stop investigating all rapes and murders, but some of us actually would like to see journalism's grubby and illegal reliance on bugging celebrity phones for shit sex-based gossip come to an end. Some of us rather enjoyed Hugh Grant's revenge-bugging of Paul McMullan (Grant trended on Twitter as a result of the interest in this, and Roy Greenslade was moved to complain about how much interest the story was getting now Grant was involved). Some of us also enjoyed how Grant's piece undermined this bit of utter fucking celeb-obsessed nonsense.

But, more importantly, some of us just think that it's actually a bit wrong for the media to use their powers to bug private phones in pursuit of the story. Perhaps we the public would have more sympathy if you, the journalists, actually used it to target people in power, people of influence, catching them in acts of actual corruption, exposing real crimes, conflicts of interest or duplicity among those whom we vote for or who run the country. Instead, it's easier for Fleet Street to just find out who a footballer is cheating on his wife with and run article after article of pisspoor thigh-rubbing about how many times they did it and what his stamina was like. I mean, for Christ's sake, if you're going to commit acts of criminality in pursuit of content, you could at least target someone more important than professional charisma-vacuum Sienna "Sienna Miller" Miller, a human being so forgettable I'm surprised I even got to the end of typing her name before having to go on Wikipedia to remember who she was.

The bottom line is, if there's a crime here, some of think it needs investigating, not simply shelving because there are more important things going on. The police work for all of us, and some of us are actually concerned about the pressure the media puts on the Met in particular to keep their nose out and turn a blind eye while the tabloids dig around in people's fucking bins. It's a grubby, hard-to-justify business, and you're going to need one helluva better excuse than the shit ones Littlejohn is tossing forward if you're going to convince us we shouldn't care.

Word games with Littlejohn

Sometimes I almost admire Richard Littlejohn. Not for his principled opinions, his witty prose, or his charm, none of which exist, but for his ability to move almost seamlessly from any given starting point into one of the subjects he has a stock rant prepared for. You can imagine this as a round on a mediocre Radio 4 quiz game, where contestants are challenged to get from topic A to topic Z in as few words as possible. I think Littlejohn would be good at this. Ask him who he thinks should be in the Ashes squad and he could be bending your ear about New Labour's nightmarish refuse collection system in no time. Ask him where he's going on his holidays this summer and before you know it you'll be slowly losing track of time as he makes what he imagines to be hilarious remarks about gyspies tarmacing driveways and how crazy it is that you can't call a spade a spade any more.

In today's Who wants to be a billionaire? Brits sadly lacking in the 40 super-rich giving away fortunes, Littlejohn manages to deftly turn the feelgood story about some of the world's richest billionaires pledging huge sums to charity into a launching pad for rants about socialism, the BBC and something about sex-change operations.

Littlejohn claims that "Both the BBC and the NHS have brought tremendous benefits", yet he doesn't seem to grasp the point of the BBC and why we have state-funded broadcasting. In his next paragraph he says:

Take the recent squabble over the future of BBC Radio 6, an obscure music channel beloved of a vociferous minority and financed from the licence fee.

Why should the common people be forced to pay for affluent pop stars like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker to sit in a studio playing their favourite records on the wireless?

The whole point of tax and non-commercial broadcasting is that it doesn't just fund the things you as an individual want. Sometimes your tax money goes to fund hospitals treating sick children, even though they're not your kids! Imagine! The BBC is put in between a rock and a hard place; broadcast things with low ratings and it's all "no-one watches that shit, what a waste of money!". Broadcast populist ratings-chasing nonsense and they're criticising for copying ITV and Channel 4. You can't say you think the BBC does good things one minute and then criticise something like 6 Music, which is exactly the sort of thing the BBC is for. It provides something lots people want, but that would struggle to exist in the same form on a commercial station.

Littlejohn then goes on a rant about US satellite radio and how diverse it is, but the US is a wildly different beast to the UK. 6 Music existed because commercial radio wasn't providing it, as anyone with the misfortune to sit through more than an hour of Xfm's All Kasabian, All The Time playlist will be able to tell you.

Similarly, why should taxpayers also have to fork out for tattoo removal, breast enlargement, fertility treatment and sex-change operations on the National Health Service?

Yes, Richard, because those things are all the same, right? The attitude of some people towards sex-change operations in particular baffles me. It's treated like it's some kind of whimsical choice, like there are hundreds of people waking up thinking "Yeah, I fancy switching gender today!", getting their NHS doctor on the speed dial and wasting a few grand of taxpayer's money for shits and giggles. Does Littlejohn really think it's not a serious medical condition? Does he think that people are making the choice to put themselves through the incredible social stigma attached to a sex change operation in the same way they decide what toppings to get on their pizza? Sadly, I suspect he does, because if you accept that there are serious health issues involved then I don't see how you can treat it in the same way as someone getting rid of an embarrassingly misspelled tattoo they got when they were pissed.

The philanthropists who founded hospitals before the advent of the NHS would never have donated their hard-earned if they thought it was going to be frittered away on such fripperies.

Would they? How can you possibly say that? And how can you not understand that, even if that were true, society's attitudes change over time as our understanding grows?

Littlejohn goes on to complain about taxes on high earners. Might anyone care to speculate as to why? Not that I'm suggesting for a moment that Littlejohn's dazzling columns don't earn every last penny of his upper-six-figure salary! He argues that if we just let the hard-working rich keep more of their money instead of bloody taxing them, they might probably give all their money to us! Even though much of the US philanthrophy he's talking about is going to developing countries rather than getting his bins emptied. I suspect that if British billionaires were beaming on the front of the papers about all the money they've given to AIDS orphans in Africa, he'd be moaning that they weren't doing enough here.

Anyway, I hereby offer this advice to Littlejohn; it's okay if you just want to go on a rant about the BBC, or lefty Islington liberals, or immigration, or how PC has gone mad except you can't say 'mad' any more because of PC gone mad. No-one is coming to you as a serious news source, you're a polemicist. So spare us the sight of you trying gamely to tie your stock rants half-arsedly to a prominent current news story. No-one really cares, and you could use the paragraphs you've saved to squeeze in another mention of what the gays are up to these days.

The more things change...

Having taken a fairly lengthy sabbatical from writing this blog, and indeed reading the papers, for a while, I thought I'd dive back in this week and have a look at what progress has been made in the world of journalism since the beginning of the year, while I've been sleeping and playing video games and trying not to read things that make me want to cave my own head in with a desk drawer. What I read all seems disturbingly, or maybe comfortingly, familiar.

Of course, it should be no surprise that Richard Littlejohn is still, for want of a better word, an arse. Today's column finds him predictably dancing a wee jig on Michael Foot's grave, calling him a coward and sneeringly referring to Foot's asthma as 'alleged asthma'. He follows this with a 'hilarious' imaginary conversation between two people from 'the real world', which concludes that real people in the real world don't give a toss about Lord Ashcroft's apparent £127m of avoided tax, and are instead more concerned about MANDELSON, BIG GAY PETER MANDELSON, LOOK OVER THERE AT WHAT LABOUR ARE DOING. Never being one to shy away from the important issues, Littlejohn then moves on to talking about how Ashley Cole's beard makes him look like a terrorist. No, really.

Elsewhere in the Mail we get reminded about the terrifying nature of our willies and front bottoms in yet another outraged article about the communist plot to ruden up our kids' fragile minds with dastardly sex education. The headline of this one describes the "Parents' anger" (plural), but it soon becomes apparent that the article hinges on literally one complaint by one mother about a sexy cartoon sex video the authorities sexily tried to sexify her 7-year-old daughter with. The parent, one Mrs Bullivant, sets herself up as an expert in psychology:

There is no educational or psychological benefit or need for children of this age to have full knowledge of what sexual intercourse actually entails

...which she may well be, for all I know. Still, the complaints of a single parent about a video which, according to the obligatory stapled-on official response at the end of the article, has been around for ten years, seem a somewhat flimsy basis for an entire story. Anyone would think the Mail was full of nannying conservative busybodies desperate to shield their kids from being educated about anything that might seem rude!

Still, at least the writer did attempt to disguise their agenda by tying it to a bit of factual information that, if you squint a bit, could almost be considered newsworthy. Not something that troubles writers at the somewhat lower-rent Daily Express, where I stumbled upon this curious piece about Anthea Turner by a writer named Elisa Roche. This piece is currently the fourth most important story on the Express' website, above the interest rate freeze, the Lord Ashcroft thing, and that boring story about the British child kidnapped in Pakistan. Anyway, this piece is one of the most bizarre I can remember reading. I urge you to read it in full (it's not very long), and when you've finished, tell me where the a) news, or b) comment is. It's essentially a potted biography of Anthea Turner's career which gives you the impression that she's no longer making as much money as she used to. This may not come as a surprise to you; it didn't to me, because I used to see her on the telly a lot, and now...not so much. It reads like a section from an Anthea Turner Wikipedia entry, written by someone with too much time on their hands and not deleted or tidied up yet because no-one bothered to read all the way through it.

What confuses me about this article isn't so much its absolutely staggering pointlessness (finding superfluous Daily Express articles is not a task that requires training and dedication, given that the paper loves to plug Desmond's OK! magazine by giving news space to fellating vapid celebrities), but the fact that it doesn't attempt to disguise its absolute absence of worth by orbiting loosely around a recent Turner-related news story. "But there are none!" I pretend to hear you cry! Well, quite. So why this? Did Roche wake up late, realise she had barely any time to file any copy, and then spin some kind of big celebrity wheel which told her to write some witless nonsense about Anthea fucking Turner? I mean, I know it's Friday (which is why I'm writing this rather than doing the work I get paid for), but seriously, have some standards! It's an unwritten law of journalism that you bloody well tack your hollow celebrity witterings onto some kind of nominally newsworthy happening that involves them, even if it's just a new picture of them on a red carpet or looking a bit fat. Elisa Roche, you have flouted these rules and left me dazed and confused. I don't know what to believe in any more.

Nor of course, does my old favourite Andrew Brown over in The Guardian, who in his guise as Chief Wet Blanket Of Spirituality has penned another inconclusive article about religion which is sort of sceptical but also sort of credulous. Brown's articles seem forever pitched at the sort of people that consider themselves agnostics or nice atheists, but who would really like some kind of interesting proof of god's existence to come out, if only so they could slightly impress their friends at a dinner party with a quasi-spiritual tale that begins "Well, actually, I'm an agnostic atheist but I did read an interesting piece in The Guardian the other day...". In this piece, Brown tells the tale of some religious folks who like to make cups of tea for god, only for him to mysteriously not drink it. The ever-sensitive Brown resists the urge to be mean about them, and instead concludes his piece by quoting someone quite mealy-mouthed saying something a bit enigmatic, from atop a particularly broad fence.

So, yeah, I'm back, and fuck-all has changed. The Daily Star, lost for headlines without a current reality TV series to run angry "It's a fix!" front pages about, settles for some bollocks about Madeleine McCann. The Sun, meanwhile, is a sucker for stories about how prisons are basically holiday camps, and therefore is particularly incensed that Jon Venables ate a burger (with chips, mind you) when he should be eating humble pie on a bed of soil.

Fearful Venables is being given 24-hour protection inside jail as he gorges on burgers and chips in his cell.

We can only hope and pray that it was a Tesco Value burger and not one of those more expensive lamb and mint burgers. A source with no apparent sense of self-awareness said;

"The level of protection he has is incredible. It's like he is some kind of celebrity."

Ah, sometimes the satire just writes itself.

Mail now accusing others of racism? FIGHT!

I'm not a big fan of Nick Griffin, to be honest, but if there is one good thing to come out of his upcoming Question Time appearance, it's that there's a certain joy to be had in watching right-wing commentators squirm as they try to distance themselves from Griffin and his party, who they understand aren't very well-liked. This can be a little tricky when your own writing and that of your newspaper is to a large extent based on stoking up the kind of fears Griffin's BNP are feeding off, as Enemies Of Reason recently noted.

Last week, the Mail rain an article entitled Is political correctness to blame for lack of coverage over horrific black-on-white killings in America's Deep South?, which helpfully reproduced, in full, a white supremacist group's propaganda pamphlet. The police in the story suggest that there was no racial motive for the horrific crime in question, but the Mail doesn't really believe that cop-out, and attributes to 'campaigners' a flyer produced by 'govnn.com'. If you go there (and I'd advise you not to, especially at work), you'll get taken to the Vanguard News Network, an absolutely notorious white supremacist site, run by this charming fellow. The most recent stories on VNN concern 'Deciphering Jewish Intellectual Movements', revising the Auschwitz death totals, and celebrating the recent and shocking decision of a Lousiaina judge to refuse a marriage licence to an interracial couple. VNN helpfully divide their news articles with tags like 'nigger crime', 'nigger mentality', 'niggers', 'jewish lies', and, rather more simply, 'jews'. I'm not saying the Mail endorses these cunts, but it does get kind of troublesome for them when their areas of interest overlap with those of the more balls-out racists.

Today, Richard Littlejohn explains why he didn't want to go on Question Time alongside Griffin...

Best case, you monster him and come across as a bully. Worst case, he challenges you to disagree with some of his views, perhaps on something as straightforward as demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and you're immediately tarred as guilty by association.

Once you've said he's a racist, where else is there to go?

And there you have it. A Mail writer simply accusing someone of racism instead of engaging them in the debate? Isn't that the sort of thing Mail writers constantly accuse everyone else of doing with them? Imagine if Griffin challenged you to disagree with his views! Here's Littlejohn from back in January praising Trevor Phillips;

Those of us who argued at the time that it was ludicrous to accuse the entire police force of racism [he's referring to the Macpherson report], over what was a bungled murder inquiry, were ourselves slandered as 'racists'.

The phrase was seized upon by those Trevor identifies as ' guilt-tripping white folks' as a potent stick to batter every public institution in the country.

They have used the catch-all cliche; of 'racism' to advance their own agenda, silence dissent and bully the paying public into submission.

The distinction, it soon becomes clear, is that Nick Griffin is an ACTUAL racist, even though, like Littlejohn, he constantly claims he's just sticking up for British identity, whereas Littlejohn is just someone who agrees with the BNP about a lot of things but wouldn't vote for them because they're racist thugs, unlike him.

Melanie Phillips wrote a similar 'Fuck the BNP!' piece this week:

But that is not the reason for [Griffin's] appeal. Those who support him do not in the main do so because they are racially prejudiced. It is because he also opposes mass immigration, Islamisation and the loss of sovereignty to the EU.

The message, then, is that if only the two main parties started opposing immigration and 'Islamisation' and started getting out of the EU, the BNP would go away. If we just adopt the BNP's policies, they won't be needed after all! Huzzah! Phillips continues;

The BNP really is racist.

Do you see?

But because legitimate feelings about national identity are also deemed to be racist, Griffin has been able to present the entire political mainstream as a conspiracy against the interests of ordinary people.

By cleverly sanitising the BNP message over recent years, he has thus been able to pose as a victim of political correctness.

I can't help feeling that I'm witnessing the truly absurd here. Mail commentators essentially saying 'Guys, come on, don't listen to him, he's racist!'. There's just something inherently amusing about Melanie freakin' Phillips decrying others for 'pos[ing] as a victim of political correctness'. It's the basis for your entire fucking career! You would have thought the Mail would take care not to toss around accusations of racism when their whole shtick is complaining that others are unfairly accusing them of it, but hey, here we are. The irony of Melanie Phillips talking about 'legitimate feelings' is brilliant. Could you imagine if a left-wing columnist had been chastising her by implying her feelings were illegitimate? She'd fly into a fury.

Let me make myself clear; the BNP are much worse than Phillips and Littlejohn, and I'm not trying to suggest their views are identical. But when Mail columnists like them constantly bang on about political correctness stifling debate, and depict accusations of racism as underhand tricks to create 'thought crimes', when you repeatedly say, as Phillips does, that "The hallmark of a liberal society is the toleration of offensive views", can they then realistically simply dismiss the BNP as racists? As Five Chinese Crackers wrote, these extremist groups seem to be at least partly fuelled by the relentlessly negative stories about Muslims and immigration and overbearing political correctness that the Mail churns out. I can't help but feel that when Mail writers lash out at the BNP, maybe somewhere in there should be a little twinge of guilt. There won't be, of course, they simply blame it on the left.

Quite possibly the laziest Richard Littlejohn column ever

I've been a bit quiet recently, since I haven't really been in the mood to depress myself with a trawl through the papers, and the stories I have followed, like the abortive attempt by several papers to whip up an HPV vaccine scare only to be cruelly thwarted by the actual evidence, (although many of them did gamely try to cling on to the 'well, we should still be concerned' angle even after their initial reactions proved unfounded), have been pretty well covered elsewhere.

So I figured I'd ease myself back in with another lazy run through Dicky Littlejohn's latest knockabout romp. Today's, though, is quite bizarre. In it, Littlejohn complains that his council are too damn reasonable about recycling and helpful with the bins. He ponders aloud how he's supposed to run off one of his ironically recycled rants about the Bin Nazis, displayed a hitherto undiscovered sense of self-awareness. You can see that he's suddenly struggling with his conscience; there's just a glimmer of a hint of a thought there that maybe, just maybe, the world isn't entirely run by morons without a shred of 'common sense', that maybe all these little pathetic one-off anecdotes he repeats about some unreasonable council official aren't actually a fair representation of the world. That in some cases these stories aren't even true, or that they're exaggerated, or that even when they're true they're only newsworthy because they're isolated incidents which you can't extrapolate from. As I read it, I almost started rooting for him. "He's about to get it! He's finally fucking getting it! Go on Richard my son!".

Of course, he hasn't learned a fucking thing, or if he has, he's clearly about to repress it, as the final piece of his column today demonstrates. Still, before that, he has time for a couple of other segments, like a whole section which is designed to justify yet another pointless, smirking reference to Peter Mandelson's (gay!!!!) partner. It's actually quite a neat little bit of baiting; the section is headed "Thank God it was Sarah and not Reinaldo", and after a perfunctory complaint about Sarah Brown introducing Gordon Brown at the Labour conference (© all newspapers this week), he drifts into one of his merry little daydreams:

Still, at least we were spared Reinaldo's version of how Mandy makes a mess in the bathroom when he's dyeing his hair. Or Jack Dromey on how Harriet went mental when she discovered he had a Page 3 calendar up in his office.

The Dromey/Harman bit has the feel of something tacked on just in case someone makes a joke about his continuing obsession with Mandelson's gay relationship, so it wouldn't surprise me to see him making that defence of himself next week.

The next two sections aren't really worth talking about, just a strained dig at Gordon Brown and then a bit of fluff about how we're being turned into a federal superstate. Yawn.

Still, you know it wouldn't be a proper Littlejohn column without one of his trademark misleading anecdotes about politcal correctness gone mad, and today's comes in the form of this closing belch:

When the North Wales Traffic Taliban decided to muzzle all their police dogs and train them how to headbutt suspects instead of biting them, I thought I'd heard it all.

As usual, I should have known better. The increasingly absurd Devon and Cornwall force has started replacing their German shepherds with springer spaniels, which are said to be 'less frightening'.

Isn't frightening the whole point of police dogs?

Perhaps they should go still further and start recruiting labradors. Our old lab, Ossie, would have enjoyed being a police dog.

Trouble is, he wouldn't have been able to decide between licking suspects into submission or humping them to the ground.

Hmm, that seems odd. Attack dogs reduced in size to avoid hurting the nasty rapists and armed robbers? Must be human rights gone mad! So, donning my Sherlock Holmes hat, off I bravely go to Google to put in "springer spaniels" along with "Devon" and "Cornwall" to see if I can't get my massive detective brain around it and try to get to the bottom of it. It's amazing I go to this level of trouble unpaid, but what can I say, when duty calls I guess you gotta pick up that phone. And so, after upwards of 26 seconds of reading the BBC's less rabid account, I finally get a glimpse of the truth...

They're rescue dogs. No, genuinely, it's literally as straightforward and almost insultingly simple as that. They've trained them to be rescue dogs, for rescuing people. People who probably haven't done anything wrong and need rescuing. Devon and Cornwall police force have trained three (3!) springer spaniels and a Brittany to rescue people. So when Littlejohn asks "Isn't frightening the whole point of police dogs?", he means "Isn't frightening the whole point of police rescue dogs?". To which the answer, I would think most reasonable people would agree, is "no".

The force dog inspector said: "Our existing general purpose dogs are fantastic at what they do but vulnerable people are often scared when confronted by a German shepherd dog.

"These lost person search dogs have no other skills and are pure specialists in finding people who are lost."

So, these dogs will literally only be used to rescue people and find people who have gone missing, like for example lost children, with the old big dogs used for everything else. Meaning that they're not being 'replaced' either. This BBC story, which completely renders Littlejohn's argument massively wrong IN THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE, has been up since Tuesday. If you Google News search for "springer spaniels", you get it as the second result, with the Telegraph's Springer spaniels recruited as rescue dogs by police the main result. Indeed, do any kind of search for any news story about this, and it becomes painfully clearly that Richard Littlejohn is possibly the only person in the world who thinks these dogs are supposed to be hunting down criminals and giving them a playful lick on the face because political correctness gone mad says we can't frighten the bastards. I don't want to accuse him of being deliberately misleading, but I genuinely cannot conceive of a way he could have found out about this story without being told that these dogs are purely for rescuing people, unless he just half-heard it on the telly while he was doing something else and didn't bother his arse to do even the most basic Google-powered research of the kind a tiny child would be able to do.

Reading Littlejohn so you don't have to

Summary for those of you who would rather slowly fry your genitals in an oversized wok than read Littlejohn's latest column:

- Police groups representing minorities, far from being valuable tools to ensure that the needs of minority groups are not trampled by the majority, are inherently funny. The Gay Police Association, The Black Police Association, indeed anything ending in '...Police Association' is of course worthy of derision, as I'm sure you'll agree despite my failure to put up a particulary good case. I exclude from this analysis the 126-year-old Christian Police Association, of course. That one is fine, so fine that I and similarly minded critics never mention it.

- Anecdotes I have received from my own fair-minded readers, clearly not subject to any sample bias, back up my previous assertions about gypsies, and prove I was right to suggest they were all thieves. Well, I did also receive mail telling me I was a cunt, but...hey, did I tell you about these anecdotes?

- Airport security was invented after 9/11 entirely to stop Muslims, and should as a consequence never target white or old people. Despite having claimed in my earlier pieces that people should be judged by their actions and that special treatment for minorities will inevitably 'foster a culture of division', these particular minorities should be subjected to special treatment. Equal treatment is great in areas where people like me are already well on top, but should really go out of the window in areas where it inconveniences me.

- Having said that, it was ludicrous of immigration authorities to refuse visas to some Pakistanis I heard about, because I deem these particular Pakistanis not to be terrorists like all the ones that are already here. They were in a band, for fuck's sake, and as any fule kno, human beings can be neatly divided into two categories: 1) terrorists who openly admit to wanting to blow us up and therefore are waved through by officials, and 2) innocent people who can play the pipes. Now that these men have been refused entry, I can safely never be proved wrong! Therefore I am free to once again use an anecdote to make a cheap shot about immigration policy which ignores the various complex issues involved. I can do this even despite the fact that, on the face of it, the story actually suggests that UK immigration laws are far tougher than I give the government credit for.

- Being a ludicrous purveyor of crass generalisations, I believed that all criminals in Britain were foreign-born. Imagine my surprise to find out that some jewel robbers weren't!

To hell in a correctly-registered, roadworthy handcart

For some reason, I always find the shorter pieces at the end of Richard Littlejohn columns the more interesting. Perhaps it's because in his main pieces, the torrent of bile unleashed is so strong that it's exhausting to read. This is certainly the case in today's Are you sitting comfortably? Let's go tarmacking with Teabag, Tess and Toby, the centrepiece of which is a toweringly obnoxious rant which does little except allow Littlejohn a platform to run down a list of classic gypsy stereotypes. I'd go through it, but I can't actually stand to read any of it again. Plus if I scroll back to the top of the page I'll have to see that picture of him with his self-satisfied smirk; a shit-eating grin that would infuse his subsequent writings with insufferable pomposity even if the words themselves didn't, and even if you hadn't heard him talk.

His shorter sections interest me more, because it's there where he'll toss out his twice-weekly exercises in eye-rolling, picking some apparently absurd decision by an authority figure and wondering aloud why no-one else in the world seems to share the straight-up, honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned common sense he and his like-minded readers have. 'Common sense' usually being synonymous with 'having a woefully underinformed grasp of a situation but spouting off about it anyway'. I always think of Littlejohn as being the type of person that's seen a few hack stand-up comics and came away genuinely baffled as to why Boeing don't make planes out of the same material black boxes are made out of.

Like those rubbish comedians though, I do sometimes wonder if Littlejohn's actually aware that the apparent absurdity he's pointing out actually has an explanation or not, whether he's deliberately sacrificing accuracy for the sake of his material or if he's actually that stupid. In his second section today, he complains tediously that Mandelson is somehow stand-in Prime Minister despite not having been elected in a weird 'What's THAT all about?!?!' kind of way, to which the obvious answer is that Prime Ministers, let alone caretaker ones, are not and have never been directly elected, and that Gordon Brown could pretty much have appointed a particularly foul-mouthed parrot to take his place if he'd so wished.

The bit of today's column that intrigued me most, though, is another of his world-gone-mad musings based around an apparently ridiculous real-life event. I'll quote it in full so you can see how Littlejohn portrays the totality of the evidence:

There was much rejoicing in North Wales when the Mad Mullah retired. The celebrations seem to have been premature.

Carl Myers was riding his motorbike on the A496 near Bontddu when he was passed by a police car and ambulance, sirens blaring and blue lights flashing, heading in the opposite direction.

He later discovered they were on their way to an emergency 12 miles away in which a three-year-old girl and her father died after falling 50 feet down a ravine.

So Carl was surprised to be pulled over by the same police car a little while later. The driver had turned round after spotting that Carl's bike had a non-regulation number plate.

He was given a £60 fixed penalty ticket because his plate was 80mm too short.
Nice to know that nicking a motorcyclist is deemed a higher priority than attending a life-and-death emergency.

A spokesman for North Wales Plod defended the decision, saying: 'Officers are tasked with specifically talking to motorcyclists - advising them of their vulnerability and enforcing any offences disclosed.'

The Mad Mullah may have gone, but the Traffic Taliban is still very much in business.

The first thing that seemed odd about that was Littlejohn's use of the new-fangled metric system. "80mm? What on earth is that?", many of his readers probably cried. It sounds tiny, but it's actually 8cm, or "over 3 inches" in ye olde English (not sure what it is in cubits, sorry). Still doesn't sound much, but then according to the similarly outraged Motorcycle News, it's 80mm short of a 178mm minimum, making it not much over half the size it should be. That's pretty fucking small, and was no doubt noticeable because, as the MCN suggests, motorbike plates are meant to be on two lines, whereas this guy's numbers were crammed onto one. In any case, yer motorcyclist here is bang to rights and admits as much, so the officers were doing their job correctly. I know it sounds like a tedious offence compared to say, gunning down a classroom full of kids, but the regulations are there for a reason.

So what of the more interesting question, of the police piddling around power-tripping on some poor biker instead of saving lives? Littlejohn characterises the Police's defence by quoting a largely irrelevant part of their statement where they asserted that catching rule-breaking motorcyclists is something they should be doing. This makes them sound officious and cold, which they may indeed be, but a quick Google for the story brings up via a local paper the vastly more important part of the statement, which Littlejohn presumably just didn't have space to include;

A police spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that at the time the motorcyclist was stopped we were dealing with a very serious incident in the Llanbedr area. That incident involved significant numbers of emergency personnel – including 13 police officers, plus the North Wales Police helicopter as well as officers coordinating the search from the force control room.

“At this time, other officers continued with their duties and an officer did stop a motorcyclist near Bontddu which is over 12 miles from the scene of the emergency incident. There were sufficient officers at the incident in Llanbedr and the force incident manager was able to ensure that sufficient resources were sent to the scene.”

Hmmm. So he was one of 13 officers (or possibly a 14th officer) being sent to the scene, which was also being attended by a helicopter team and at least one ambulance. What we can glean from this is that some officers were already there, and perhaps more importantly the helicopter, which would have been involved in the actual rescuing/life-saving part. Indeed, the apprehended biker himself suggested that by the time he was pulled over by these cops, the rescue process was already well underway:

"When I asked what it was he said: ‘Two persons missing in a ravine. We have air support attending the scene, hoping to lift them out.’”

It looks to me like what happened is that, being an emergency incident, the police sent every officer in the area to assist. The sensible thing to do in emergencies is to send every available officer, more than are strictly required, and see who gets there first. By the time the officer in question had spotted our motorcyclist friend, other officers, ambulances and choppers were already there trying to help. Nothing about that seems particularly unusual, does it?

I don't really understand why people choose to believe these extreme stories of jobsworthiness. Why would anyone believe, even for a second, that it was a simple case of an officer choosing to let a three-year-old child and her father die because he considers vehicle regulations more important? Because you'd have to ignore a lot of context to believe that, you'd have to want to believe it. I don't really understand the mindset, presumably it's comforting on some level to think everyone else has gone mad and you're one of the few sane ones left, but it sounds absolutely fucking terrifying to me. Can you imagine actually believing that Britain is really the way it sounds like it is in the Mail? The Apocalypse would come as a blessed relief.