James Delingpole

Croydon burns: Tea Party values to blame? (Photo: Getty)

Well you could argue, I suppose, that it’s payback for the nauseating apologia for terrorism written by the Guardian’s resident Wykhamist Trot Seumas Milne the day after 9/11 (”They can’t see why they are hated”).

But I surely can’t be the only Londoner for whom it sticks, ever so slightly, in the craw to be told by a Chicago-born professor of sociology and his Dutch sociologist wife in the New York Times is that the riots are kind of our fault because Britain has become such a hotbed of Tea Party values.
The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequence… Read More

Police officers chase young looters in Manchester yesterday

Read this and weep:
Now, just what will these consequences be you may ask? Well, for those over eighteen whatever custodial sentences they do receive, if any, they will no doubt serve just a fraction of their sentences as is common for most criminals in the UK. However, in what will clearly be a perversion of justice, those rioters under eighteen will be treated as if they too are the victims of the very crimes they have commited, as this is the ethos at the heart of the youth justice system. I know this from having worked alongside and in the Youth Offending Service. Within a few weeks many of these rioters that you are now… Read More

The Police are spectacularly inept.

In the Sunday Telegraph last weekend we learned that plans to improve London’s systematically useless police force the Metropolitan Police by appointing US supercop Bill Bratton to take it over and revamp it had been blocked by a woman called Theresa May.

By spooky coincidence, a woman also called Theresa May hit the headlines again more recently when she refused to give permission for young, unarmed, outnumbered policemen struggling – and mostly failing – to contain some of the worst riots in British history to use water cannon.

Is this Theresa May person really Home Secretary of one of the world’s leading economies? And if so, please can we have a new one, sharpish?

Sure, one can see why Theresa May was so keen to be seen ruling out the use of water… Read More

At the weekend I celebrated my 46th birthday but please don’t wish me any belated happy returns. Like many of you reading this I never imagined, looking into my future as a child, that the time of my life when I should have been settling in to some form of middle-aged security and contentment would instead coincide with a global economic crisis now threatening to eclipse even the Great Depression.

As Matthew Norman has noted we are currently still in the Phoney War stage of the Great Global Economic Meltdown. We know in our bones that things are going to get worse, much worse. At the same time, our collective cognitive dissonance – the same cognitive dissonance that brought us to this dreadful pass in the first place – is still contriving to reassure us that things will all be right… Read More

The Tea Party held Washington to account (Photo: Getty)

You know me. Never one to give a blog post a provocative headline unless I absolutely have to. And here I am doing no more than faithfully report on an important debate currently raging between two of my favourite Fox news stalwarts Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer.
In the aftermath of the debt ceiling deal struck between congressional Republicans, congressional Democrats and the White House, concessions made by Democrats have caused some on the left to lash out at the Tea Party. But where is this show of anger — with epithets like “hostage takers,” “terrorists” and “thugs” flying around — coming from?

On Tuesday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bill O’Reilly suggested it was a concerted… Read More

Don't feed the trolls (Photo: Reuters)

As we all know just because you’re away on holiday doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking about the nasty things in life. That’s why I’m dedicating this post to the menagerie – or, if you will, infestation – of trolls which lurk below this blog and who seem to have grown even more active in my absence.

There’s an argument which goes that we bloggers need our pet trolls almost as much as they need us. I’m not sure I value them that highly myself but I do find them a fascinating case study. What intrigues me is their psychopathology. I mean, it takes a certain sort of mentality actively to seek out columnists with whom you disagree and lurk below their blog being spiteful and angry and disruptive…. Read More

I’ve just written a depressing essay for Notting Hill Editions on why it is I’d like to leave Britain for America. It’s not that I have a particular desire to abandon my country, I explain. Rather, I feel the country I love has abandoned me. Its values are not my values; it seems to have lost all sense of what it is that once made it great – or at least worth living in.

In the piece I focus on wind farms as an emblem of almost everything that is wrong with modern Britain. (”The way, for example, we’ve surrendered our coolly rational, post-Enlightenment empiricism to a new post-Death-of-Diana emotionalism in which strength of feeling trumps all reason.”, etc). But there are plenty of other examples to choose from: truly, when it comes to bad policy decisions, Cameron is spoiling us almost as much as the Ferrero Rocher… Read More

Every holiday flight you take to Tuscany another one of these DIES!!!

This is too good a story not to repeat, not least for the headline it invites: (H/T Ed West; Julian Morris)
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.

Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”
Something about this story is very odd. Surely, under the… Read More

Have you seen the latest Greenpeace propaganda campaign? Here it is, above: have a glance and see whether you agree with me that the whole business stinks to high heaven.

The second most objectionable part of it is its noisome premise. Volkswagen makes cars not organic tofu ice cream. It is an entirely reasonable position for VW to campaign against CO2 emissions legislation, not least because – as most of us here know – the threat posed by CO2 exists solely in the realm of theory and carbon legislation will do nothing except damage to Europe’s already fragile markets. Yet here is Greenpeace, launching a campaign of vilification against a company which is doing nothing more harmful than looking after the interests of its business model and – as companies are legally obliged to do – its shareholders.

But the most seriously, nauseatingly objectionable part of it is the way – yet… Read More

Anders Breivik's 'manifesto' - not the fault of Right-wing bloggers

Apparently it was all the fault of Right-wing bloggers and Right-wingness generally. We know this because an important, symbolic, portentous cartoon by Martin Rowson tells us (Or not: see note below) so in the Guardian. And so does the New York Times.
More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.
Damn. What fools we were. There we were deluding ourselves after the USS Cole, and the Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam bombings, and the… Read More