When Rod Liddle was a youthful anti-racist
Rod Liddle, a columnist for the Murdoch Times and the Spectator, has been in the news again. He made or attempted to make an after dinner ‘speech’ to a student Christmas event at Durham University. Many of the students took exception and walked out. The University authorities then took exception to the walk out.
Liddle’s remarks were it appears of the usual standard he currently promotes, sexist, laddish etc. His Islamophobia is well known.
One might be tempted to ask where it all went wrong for Liddle. After all he worked for the Labour Party as a speech writer between 1983 and 1987 and Edited the Today programme on Radio 4 until he departed after the BBC complained about the (left-wing) politics of one of his Guardian articles.
However Liddle is hardly being ‘cancelled’ and I’m sure is still doing very well for himself.
I knew Liddle as teenager when he lived in Nunthorpe a well to do area of Middlesbrough. He and some mates had formed a punk band, Dangerbird, and he appeared at the local SWP branch meetings occasionally to see if the band could get involved with Rock Against Racism. I was then student organiser of the IS/SWP on Teesside, and hence probably more in touch with what he wanted to do than some in the meetings.
After all at the start of punk a band playing on Teesside would have struggled to find, perhaps not an audience, but people prepared to try and sort out gigs. I think I heard Dangerbird play but have no memory of what they were like. I suspect that means they were at least not terrible or I would have remembered.
My memory of Liddle was that he seemed quite pleased with himself, but then he was young and confident, and perhaps to a degree entitled to be so, given he had taken the initiative to start a band.
Of course he’s far from the first person to have had a left-wing youth and turn in an unpleasant right-winger in later years. It’s a well-travelled path. It reflects the pressures society exerts on people who want to ‘get on’ but it also underlines how difficult the left find it in most generations to hold on to talented young people before they end up turning sour in older age.
I was a CLP member in the area covering the sixth firm college in Guisborough that Liddle then vaguely attended and I recall him contacting me and few others in the CLP about getting a gig set up
This was then passed on to comrades in Middlesbrough who then set up a spot for him for a midweek bash in the Labour Club that existed then on Linthorpe Road. I went, and you are right about Dangerbird; they were dire. They played to two audiences in the same room – a group of working class regulars who mostly upped and went to somewhere more peaceful, and a group of Prior Pursglove fellow student wo were mostly underage…..I also recall, the puzzled face of local Middlesbrough LP Agent, Councillor Charlie (or Charles, as he liked to be styled) Shopland looking out of his office door at what the future might hold. That was it as young Rod decamped to York Uni soon after, never to be seen again, we thought. But he was – first in his present unwholesome journalistic incarnation, and physically too, as he has now purchased a holiday cottage in Saltburn and periodically can be seen in the town to the regret of many locals.