British Right-Wing Pundits

I knew he was butthurt about losing the education post when he was presenting a R4 program about Character and repeatedly kept mentioning how he was hounded out of a job by the twitter mob. But didn't realise he'd managed to poison all the other wells he was drinking from, apart from the fucking Spectator of course!

I'll say a prayer for Toby (that he ends up homeless and dies on the streets).

God I hate Jimmy Bollix SO MUCH.

Stepping in to defend journalists at the Mail & Sun:

This is predictably getting piled-on (the irony of complaining about abuse and its dangers when you cause frequent abusive pile-ons aside) – but: plenty of journalists who do great, public interest work holding power to account started at newspapers OJ and co don't approve of. https://t.co/nERSyRcy5t

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 14, 2019

Personally I'm referring to people who directly write articles whipping up hatred against minorities and women.

— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) January 14, 2019

OJ offers the above as clarification AND THEN:

Other reasons people can find themselves at such outlets: people’s politics change, people grow up with Tory parents, people come from local news and get offered a secondment to a National their group owns that you’d be mad to then down, etc

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 14, 2019

People may then change their view (none of which wd excuse writing the hateful stuff, but as has been noted, many don’t). Or not change their view but do we really hold someone doing casual sports shifts equal to Rod Liddle? And if our bar is that high aren’t readers on the hook?

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 14, 2019

He’s such an awful cunt, how does he even have a job?!

who wouldn't jump at the chance to earn a living inciting hatred if it meant secondment to a thriving national newspaper?

Am I being oversimplistic or are all the people scolding other writers for being choosy about which outlets they write for, straight and white?

I don’t think JB is?

I’m on a fair few FB groups for journalists/freelancers and many of the members write for Sun/Mail etc and of those, most of them HATE Owen Jones (I think they would all sell their grannies for his profile TBH but I’m sick of them saying he wouldn’t last a week in a newsroom blah blah blah).

Yeah that doesn’t surprise me given how openly contemptuous a lot of the higher profile ones are on twitter. And definitely part jealousy but also the politics.

Journo groups: GO HADLEY GO, BODY HIM
Twitter: Fuck off, Hadley, you’re a TERF

Poor old @CampbellClaret, hero of the Iraq War, still can’t cope with the fact that he can no longer tell the BBC what they can and cannot broadcast. The rest of us (and the people of bombable nations) are relieved. Go for a run, Al, you’ve done enough harm. https://t.co/VmnSX4z70S

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) February 7, 2019

good retort imo.

Fuck them both.

yep, they'd both probably argue to the death they have nothing in common but Hitch is just a 1914 time-travel version of the same type of odious twat.

I made the mistake of checking his "satirical" account and it's even worse than I feared

...he says, while saying what he wants (and plugging his book) in a national newspaper pic.twitter.com/qfhdC8wI1B

— Emma Hughes (@emmahdhughes) March 7, 2019

it's quite shrill and witless and I would actually laugh if it was funny. Melts and conservatives need to develop some self-awareness before attempting satire.

(Right thread this time)
Isn’t he one of those Sp1k3d cunts?

it's too scattershot, like it's trying to simultaneously parody FBPE liberals and die-hard I-stand-with-Chris-Williamson Corbynistas and pop-intersectionalists when these are all fairly distinct groups?

they're all snowflakes tbf

"The genius of Titania McGrath | The Spectator"

talk about easily impressed, they must be the types that shit their pants with laughter at dominic holland.

I mean they pay Taki to praise the Wehrmacht and Rod Liddle to write about black people, so this is evidently the height of wit for that crowd.

where's that Prison Paul "conservatives are getting good at comedy and liberals are scared" meme when you need it

Just spent 10 mins reading the Titania McGrath Twitter feed. There is plenty to be parodied on woke Twitter, yet it never seems to hit the mark, obviously because this guy doesn't want to get it, and neither do his audience.

have there been any actually-funny British right wing pundits since Auberon Waugh died?

it's notable how the Spectator manages to have so many 'funny' columnists who are never actually funny (Tanya Gold is funny, but she doesn't seem particularly right wing?)

one big difference between Waugh and Rod Liddle/Toby Young/James Delingpole etc is that the latter rhetorically position themselves as being on the side of the masses against the sneering elites where Waugh proudly identified with the sneering elite, I don't think there's a space for someone like Waugh today, that old conservative elite contempt and revulsion for for fast food and pop music and TV etc maybe doesn't exist anymore?

JRM though?

his schtick is more of a cutesy affectation of being baffled by pop culture though, I don't think he expresses disgust for it in same way that the old-school types did

Always preferred Peter Simple (Michael Wharton) to Auberon Waugh myself, some of Wharton's stuff was staggeringly funny. Their writing careers more or less overlapped and indeed Waugh took over the Peter Simple column after Wharton retired. But yes, Wharton was another sneering conservative elite type.

Roger Scruton is often old-fashioned-elitist conservative, but is never funny. For example

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34801885

jonathan meades is the name you're all kind of searching for, not that he's a pundit, or conservative in any manner that's in vogue

he's not a conservative, small or large C, in any sense

there's an argument that he is sort of an anti-authoritarian small-c conservative insofar as skeptical classic humanism is a conservative position

he had a really disappointingly run of the mill dad moan about thicko footballers and their tats in his last tv work. And the jibe about Cage provoked silence.

Nuke Twitter.

Never heard of this but, yes, there seems to be a Spiked connection.

I like this Meades article about Kenneth Clark's Civilisation

The root of the series’s appeal as a continuing model is obvious. To a certain cast of plodding mind, art remains a necessarily important thing, something intrinsically good, improving. And it is even better when rendered popularly “accessible” with stirring music, doting cinematography and big ideas that are easy to follow. Yet, for all its lavish grandiloquence, television of this sort is humble: it knows its place and pays due deference to acknowledged masterpieces in media to which it believes itself to be a subservient upstart. It is essentially reportorial and does not attempt to create its own reality.

https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/03/series-clark-television

Craig Brown, perhaps?

peter hitchens is v occasionally funny in a remote elite way, mostly accidentally

in the sort of manner when you are deep into hard drugs and your dad accuses you of being a glue sniffer.

sorry to post two articles to this thread in a single day but this is another doozy
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/would-any-publisher-dare-to-print-lolita-now/

A million-plus-selling literary novelist of my acquaintance — fêted for penetrating the labile recesses of the female heart — was warned that he should not attempt to write his next novel, set in the first half of the last century, in the voice of a woman.

Got to be Amis or Jacobson right?

To answer my own question I started — as you do — by typing ‘Lolita’ into Google. An alert flashed up, which said, ‘Warning: child pornography is illegal’.

*Narrator: No alert flashed up*

fêted for penetrating the labile recesses of the female heart

good grief

spectator.co.uk/2019/08/hitler-should-never-have-been-allowed-to-write-socialist-doctrines-in-prison

Posting my thoughts about Christchurch & the media mainstreaming hate here so as not to drag the thread off topic.

Just to single out some of the hypocrites on the UK side here:

Matthew “book eater” Goodwin primly criticising Andrew Adonis for a clumsy Julius Caesar reference. MG chaired a debate entitled “is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the west?” and for affronted when challenged on it. All his research seems to come to the conclusion that immigration is bad.

David Aaronovitch attended the above debate and wrote an article last year called “it’s not racist to criticise Islam”, and has a LOT of previous on this. He is tweeting his regret today.

I’m sure the Times will have opinion pieces shared on this soon enough. The Times has a complaint upheld by the press regulator over its story about a girl being adopted by a Muslim foster family - the story was almost entirely false. They publish Melanie Phillips, who was quoted in Anders Brevik’s manifesto.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2018/09/the-times-muslim-christian-child-foster-care-tower-hamlets-court-ruling-ipso

It would be good if any of these people thought about which views are being legitimised, or how many incidents like this will need to happen for them to reconsider.

Yeah, like that's going to happen. Aaronovitch, what a dick.

With some of these people, and their editors, it's part of the fetishisation of "debate" above all other issues, the idea that these ideas SHOULD be in the mainstream press so they can be interrogated and wilt under the glare of rational argument and forensic knowledge. Some of the others are just racists or click-hungry in search of a quick buck.

Now, obviously there's an existential question for the former group there, because if hatred and bigotry CAN'T be defeated through enlightened rational debate then what is the point of newspaper columnists existing?

Fanny Dinklesrtein also on the board of a blatantly Islamophopic foundation and gets VERY het up when challenged about it online.

They all get annoyed when they're challenged with any of their crap opinions. They think they can just say what they like and everyone will agree because they've thought so long and hard about their wise words, it's like they've never even been on ILX.

It's also like they've never been to a comprehensive school or anywhere else where their brand of shot rolls downhill to

*Shit.

One positive that might, with caution, be drawn from the anti-Zionism/antisemitism/Labour debacle and now the NZ shooting is like, better awareness about how one (not explicitly or intentionally racist and violent) discourse leads into or enables another (which is) unless some careful conditions are built in. I've been reading the Hirsh article Mordy linked to and it makes the case well. The cultivation of certain atmospheres. Or maybe the sort of RW pundits this thread is about won't learn but will come to seem behind the curve on this.