Rod Liddle and the hair some Welsh people dislike

Rod Liddle is a journalist. There, I’ve begun with a positive comment about him. Down hill all the way now, I’m afraid. No, not really. But I do feel like giving him the blogging equivalent of a good slap. It’s all because of some of the comments he made on his Spectator blog about the Welsh and our TV channel, S4C. According to Liddle we are a bunch of ‘miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering, pinch-faced, hill tribes’. The thing is, Rod, if you lived in a place where it rained non-stop for three weeks at a time you’d be miserable too.

Anyway, he now claims that he said it all in jest and that it was satire. The problem with being Welsh, of course, is that we’re not very good at recognising a joke when it’s on us. I think we do irony (unlike all Americans), and we do sarcasm very well, but satire can seem very unfunny at times. So we missed the point of the post and got upset.

You can read how upset some of us got by reading the comments on Liddle’s blog – dozens and dozens of them. Many have been penned by supporters of his – English in the main I guess, for they can see the funny side of the post. But most have been written by Welsh people largely being very angry at what he said. Some question his ‘journalistic integrity’ – he got a fact wrong and he miss-spelt the Welsh in the title of the piece; some make fun of his hair suggesting he looks like a sheep; some say he is an intolerant racist bigot; and one even calls him – and this is my favourite – a ‘damaged child in a modern world’.

And there’s a lot more. So when Liddle calls us ‘perpetually bitter’ about the English, how close does he get to the truth do you think?

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