Rod Liddle: the hater and his luvvies
Rod Liddle, former editor of the BBC’s Today programme and then columnist first for the Guardian, then the Spectator, the Sunday Times and men’s magazines GQ and Arena, died last Sunday aged 66. Rod Liddle as a columnist was a dreadful bigot who took a sneering tone towards a standard set of right-wing hate targets: Muslims of course, transgender people, ethnic minorities generally, the chronically ill. When I could still be bothered to read his poison, I responded to some of his writings targeted at both Muslims and people with ME, the neurological disease that leaves sufferers housebound and, at worst, bedridden and paralysed and in severe pain over years. When his death was announced, it prompted gushing tributes from the expected right-wing media figures (Boris Johnson, Fraser Nelson) but also from feminists whose disdain for transgender people he shared (Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Rosie Duffield). Katharine Birbalsingh, who styles herself Britain’s strictest headmistress, posted a tribute tweet featuring Liddle sticking two fingers up to someone or other, something children got punished for when I was one. Zoe Williams, a Guardian columnist who knew Liddle in the 1990s, noted that back then, his columns mostly poked fun at himself and others like him; by the end of his life he was “an attack dog for the race-baiting right”. Peter Oborne wrote about Liddle’s racist “true legacy” at Middle East Eye.
A lot of the people who turned out to celebrate his passing and ridicule those paying tribute rehashed the same one or two facts about him; the conviction for beating a girlfriend and a Guardian piece saying he could never be trusted to be a teacher because he could not stop himself getting sexually involved with teenaged pupils. Both these things are from 20 years ago. The unremitting racism and contempt hurled at other right-wing hate targets continued for long after. Amid a tribute by Kemi Badenoch, the current Tory leader, the Spectator reprints a poem from 2012 called “A Poem for the Met”, on “some of the people enriching our lives”, the poem being a litany of negative stereotypes of every known ethnic minority (except the Jews, of course) and none of the good stuff. This is the essence of what makes someone a racist: being quick to see people of other ‘races’ (in as much as there is such a thing as a race) through negative stereotypes or the few negative news stories you’ve heard about them, without considering that most are just decent ordinary people living decent ordinary lives; it doesn’t require blind hatred or the use of derogatory racial slurs. Robert Jenrick, former Tory cabinet minister and now Reform MP, claimed he “said the unsayable truth years before anyone else would come close”; in Boris Johnson’s tribute, he praises Liddle for his “genius, week after week, for finding the point that was obviously true but notionally unsayable, and then saying it with such zing as to cause maximum offence – and to all the right people”. In fact, he punched down, week after week, attacking powerless ordinary people rather than the wealthy and powerful, and did so in very much mainstream magazines and newspapers. Typical of the modern Right: always complaining of persecution, of being ‘cancelled’, while enjoying ample media exposure and no consequences.
Media personalities have a history of excusing or at least being silent on the misdeeds of others in their profession. When the matter of Roman Polanski’s flight from justice having been charged with rape in 1977 was in the news after he was arrested in Switzerland, Whoopi Goldberg famously opined that his actions were not “rape rape” (according to his victim’s testimony to the grand jury, it actually was). The R&B scene was noticeably quiet when two of its leading lights, Chris Brown and Robert Kelly, were charged with violent offences against women; many of them knew they would rely on the two men’s production skills or connections in future records. Many of those paying tribute said that, despite having been the focus of his contempt, found him to be kind to those he actually worked with; this fits the pattern of media types clubbing together despite disagreements over not only politics but behaviour as well, but they fail to understand that what someone writes is part of their behaviour, and part of their character. Whether they really believe it or think they are cocking a snook at someone or other or just doing it for the LOLs, as suggested of Liddle (and his racist writings under a false name on a Millwall FC fan forum suggest otherwise), it has an effect on other people’s lives if hatred is being peddled on the pages of political magazines or newspapers on a daily or weekly basis. When hate goes mainstream, it means people’s lives get difficult, people get beaten up, their houses and businesses vandalised or burned, or they are murdered. The Right understands this when people call racists racist and a politician is murdered; do they really not understand it when they portray every minority as gangsters, terrorists or drug smugglers week after week and mobs of men show up to burn people out of their houses?
Two particular tropes of the right-wing response to Liddle’s death were that “the be-kind mob” (or a name to that effect) was being the vilest and most unkind after someone had died (this was repeated in a number of tweets and articles by various people including a few big names [1], [2]), and that the Left as usual was incapable of seeing anyone other than in Manichean terms of pure good or evil; for example, see this barrage of silly straw man arguments by Andrew Doyle:
When a famous right-wing, straight white male dies, if your first instinct isn’t to gloat and trash his reputation then you clearly have no idea what it takes to be a progressive.
The death of Rod Liddle is currently being celebrated by all of us on the right side of history. And because we announce our pronouns and wear keffiyehs, we can refer to him as a scumbag who deserves to burn in Hell and everyone will know that we’re actually incredibly compassionate.
It’s a matter of simple mathematics. The population is divided into two factions: those who are good and those who are evil. Every time an evil person dies, the proportion of good people increases. Ergo, by dying, Liddle has made the world a gooder place.
To be fair, I’ve come across a certain type of activist that will not tolerate any disagreement with their particular ideology and will write you off as some kind of bad person, but for the most part people are capable of working with and getting on with those with differing opinions, for the most part. It’s a right-wing stereotype that “conservatives only think socialists are wrong, while socialists think conservatives are evil”; this does not play out in everyday life (and the observation about the Right simply does not apply to many calling themselves conservatives in this day and age, especially in the US). In my campaigning life over the past twenty or so years, I’ve made common cause with people who don’t share my opinions on a lot of other things: Muslims belonging to different schools of thought, some of them very hostile to each other, communists, pacifists and others in the anti-war movement, people who share none of these views in ME and anti-austerity campaigns, old Thatcherites in the anti-Brexit campaign and yes, conservatives and supporters of unsavoury Middle Eastern and Asian regimes in the pro-Palestine and anti-genocide campaigns of the past few years. People often show one side of their character to some people and a completely different side to others (ask anyone who worked with Dennis Nilsen or Antoni Imiela); the reason many of us thought Rod Liddle was a nasty piece of work was because of what he wrote. We did not need to deal with him personally to know that. Writing like his makes the world a generally nastier place; it makes people meaner, more suspicious of and less tolerant to each other.
Open racism used to be a career ender, even in the Tory party. Britain has become a more racist place over the past 15 years or so. British Twitter in particular has become an open sewer of racism — people calling for ‘remigration’, using ‘diversity’ or ‘enrichment’ as terms of contempt, constant examples of the misdeeds of non-whites but none of white people’s, constant complaints about pretty much any sign that non-white people exist or what they are ‘getting’ — and the mainstream media increasingly follows suit. Over the past two years, violent racist mobs have descended on towns on many occasions, causing riots in response to real or rumoured misdeeds by real or supposed immigrants (or their mere presence, as seen most recently in Thetford) while politicians tell us they have “legitimate concerns” even if they are going about it the wrong way. It has become safe and fashionable to be racist, and increasingly dangerous to be anti-racist — at best silly and naive, at worst dangerous and radical, and to call someone racist results in accusations of ‘hate’ and of inciting a “pile-on”.
Rod Liddle was not a genocidaire. He was a racist, however nice he was to his colleagues at the magazines he worked for. When any famous person dies, there will always be aspects of his or her behaviour exposed that they had tried to keep hidden or which could not be talked about when they could still sue for libel and had deep pockets: the crimes of Jimmy Savile, for example, while an open secret during his lifetime, were only openly talked about when he was dead. Sometimes the revelations are positive: after the death of George Michael, tales of his generosity surfaced, such as paying off a total stranger’s debts. It’s only to be expected that when someone who made the world a worse place, a more hostile and even violent place with his bigoted writings dies and is the focus of gushing tributes from people who should know better, there will be pushback and people will talk openly of his true legacy.
