Rod Liddle v Tom Sutcliffe

My goodness, wasn't Start the Week fun today! 

Rod Liddle really got under the skin of presenter Tom Sutcliffe. 

In fairness, Tom Sutcliffe asked for it. He'd gone after Rod for "racism" almost from the word go for daring to say, in print and on air - and on the BBC no less - precisely the kind of things people like us tend to believe, alongside huge swatches of the British populus - things that aren't racist. 

Rod was completely unfazed by all this, and gave Tom Sutcliffe a cheerful roasting. 

Tom didn't sound to be enjoying it one bit though. His voice kept getting higher in pitch as he tried to assert himself and control his anger [not entirely successfully]. 

He also tried pretty hard to use his power as a BBC presenter to stamp on Rod Liddle's uncomfortable opinions, encouraging two of the other guests - a left-leaning community activist and a pro-multiculturalism threatre director who talked of the "7/7 boys and the Boston Marathon kids"- to say the right things [even asking them leading questions at times].

Rod Liddle was having none of it though.

Tom clearly isn't used to handling views like those expressed/reported by Rod. After all, those sort of views don't get much of an airing on Saturday Review. 

It would do BBC Radio 4 some good to have Rod Liddle and Tom Sutcliffe share the job of presenting Start the Week on a regular basis. It would be a step towards freeing the station from its well-earned reputation as a bastion of bien pensant thinking.

Update: Rod has written his own response to Tom Sutcliffe - one that will make a lot of sense if you listened to Start the Week today....

...[and which I've slightly tidied up, as Rod [good man!] clearly wrote it either in haste or in drink]...:

I had a horrible dream last night that I’ve never had before. In the dream, I knew I had to get up early and couldn’t get to sleep. Every time I checked the clock it got closer to 0600 and I got more and more panicked and frantic. But it was a dream. Most odd.

The reason I had to get up early was to talk about my book Selfish Whining Monkeys on the BBC Radio Four Start The Week. 

The presenter, Tom Sutcliffe, made a point which is often made: that me, and people like me:

"You complain that a whole bunch of serious issues within society are not allowed to be discussed and yet you talk about them every week, Rod.”

Well yes, but at the risk of being called a racist and a bigot.

So I can do it, but it’s very difficult for people in positions of political power, people who rely upon being tolerated by the liberal media elite, to do it – because that’s likely to be the end of their careers.

I couldn’t give a monkey’s if some irrelevant middle class blackclad drug-addled hag, male or female, from the Groucho Club thinks I’m beyond the pale for suggesting that the present rates of immigration have not been wholly beneficial to the poorest sections of society, even if they have been economically beneficial to the black-clad hags etc.

I think it would be for the best if you judged for yourselves if I am unspeakably ghastly, a sort of Anders Breivik of print, by buying the book. But I suppose that’s a very self-serving argument.