Free Republic

The tragic events of 9/11 were immediately followed by a grotesque and shameful fusillade of anti-Americanism, which still resonates today. I had already written my column that day. I still recall, although almost everything else from that morning is wiped from my memory, that the subject of it – this column that no one would ever see – was Tony Blair's upcoming appearance at the TUC conference. Because I had been engrossed in producing my copy for the next day, September 12, 2001, I had not heard any news. In the early afternoon, I filed my piece and turned on...

UK Riots: The End Of The Liberals’ Great Moral Delusion The Left has gone into overdrive in its attempts to rewrite the history of the riots, but the public knows the truth. By Janet Daley 20 Aug 2011 There is no national debate about the epidemic of riots and looting that spread through our cities like a bush fire. Out there in the real world, where people go about the normal business of life, there is no sign of the heated argument that the media is so determined to air. In fact, I cannot remember a time when there has...

I am stunned with admiration at the mental agility of the anti-war lobby. Having spent months taunting George W Bush and Tony Blair for their failure to capture Saddam Hussein, and thus accomplish one of the most fundamental aims of the "illegal war" in Iraq, it was able to recover its composure almost instantaneously when the worst happened. Within minutes of Paul Bremer pronouncing the words "We got him" to ecstatic cheers from Iraqi journalists, there were solemn-faced experts crowding on to my television screen to proclaim that the capture was largely irrelevant, or positively counter-productive, to the present difficulties...

I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose crudeness constituted a provocation to (not to say an insult to...