Liddle row shows nasty side of politics

So Rod Liddle earns himself the ignominious honour of becoming Britain's first blogger to get three lashes of the switch from the Press Complaints Commission for being wrong on the internet. Do try to contain your shock and surprise for a moment. This perspective-altering revelation that bloggers can get things wrong is often too much for some to cope with. Perhaps it's because he writes for the Spectator and, somehow, better is expected. The PCC aren't angry with our Liddle – they're just very, very disappointed. Let's recap for a moment to remind ourselves what caused all the trouble. If you'd care to join me on the "logic bus" for a moment, we start at "Black people are commiting a disproportionately high number of crimes". We stop to pick up an old lady at "London has the highest proportion of African-Caribbeans" and then we travel past the corner shop and arrive at our destination , which is "therefore the vast majority of violent crime in London is committed by young black males". I'm no professor of Logic or anything, but even I realised that at some point the logic bus had turned into the "quite possibly being a bit racist" bus. I took the bait, in my outrage, and began looking through government statistics on crime to see if I could find the truth. I found statistics that showed that it was extremely unlikely, based on arrest and conviction figures, that his claim was true. In hindsight, it was obvious I hadn't disproved it completely – government statistics will never count unreported crime so theoretically, technically, in the Richard Dawkins sense of proof, it's possible that Liddle may actually be right. But, in making such a claim, the burden of proof is on Liddle. He must prove to us that his assertion is true – and, simply put, he can't. The infuriating thing is he probably spent no more than five minutes writing that blog post, subsequently causing thousands of hours of people's lives to be wasted debating, discussing, disputing and disproving it. He shared his opinion as fact on a tiny blog post and we all went nuts. When it comes to blogs, bloggers share their opinions as if they were facts all the time. So why has Liddle been singled out? Why was the stupid thing he said on the internet so much more appalling than the stupid things other professional newspaper bloggers have said? Instead of writing about parties and politicians, where truth is the last thing anyone ever expects, he wrote about race. If his point was to prove that you can't write anything negative about black people in the press without getting into trouble, he'll consider this job done, point made. Bashing Liddle was fun when it was just pointing at him while shouting: "He's Rod! He's Liddle! He's thick as two short planks!" but it quickly descended into vitriolic, bitter, hate-fuelled exchanges between the pro-Liddle and the anti-Liddle gangs. In all the time I'd been writing my own blog, it was saying Liddle has "shit for brains" that attracted the most fierce, angry, hostile comments I'd ever had. I quickly realised just how intense and heated this war between the "thought police" and the "thought criminals" has become and how much guts it takes to stand up to either side. Turns out, almost ironically, that you can't say a thing about someone saying a thing about race without having the forces of internet hell unleashed upon you. Will these same forces accept the PCC's explanation – that Liddle published something wrong – or will they assume it's political correctness gone a few sandwiches short of a buffet again? This sort of thing worries me intensely, being a much darker and nastier side of politics that I sincerely wish I'd remained in blissful ignorance of. But as a society it's been decided that certain opinions and beliefs need to be stamped out. The obvious, inevitable reaction is that the people affected begin to fight back with a level of force proportionate to the pressure being applied to them. I do really wonder if the powers that be, or the PCC, have really thought this through.