Bruce Anderson?

[mrfrapp]

Who is Bruce Anderson? He's a pundit for The Independent, that I know but who is he? What's his background?

I've squirmed at his columns in the past but his article in today's Independent is apalling. I've never read so much racist, uninformed drivel in all my life.

If you're interested you can read it at the link given below but quite frankly, I wouldn't bother.

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/bruce_anderson/article310246.ece

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Teaser doesn't look good, but it a subscription article

[Briar]

2. He's a fully paid up fascist apologist

Often appears on things like News 24's Dateline London, where he can be relied upon to be even more RW than the Wall Street Journal correspondent, Anne Lesley (?is that her name?), Bernard Ingham and all the other far right pundits News 24 is devoted to.

[Mr Creosote]

3. Wasn't he editor of the Spectator

or at least a columnist on it?

[T_i_B]

14. He still does write for the Spectator

And he used to be a columnist on the Daily Mail. Basically he's another RW pundit along the lines of Paul Johnson or Simon Heffer.

[Oggy]

4. He is the token right wing pundit

The Independent started off by attempting to be just that, indpendent. These days it seems they have a couple of token right wingers so they can argue they are giving a voice accross the political spectrum.

Sorry should also say IMO!

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. From Wikipedia:

"Formerly political editor of The Spectator and contributor to The Daily Mail,"

and I think he's often written for the Telegraph too. Not that this pedigree automatically makes him a bigot (I can stand reading Max Hastings, for instance), but it's not promising. Private Eye has had many stories about him over the years (I think they call him 'Brute'), which seem to show he's a thug in his private life too.

[non sociopath skin]

6. Anderson pops up on BBC News 24's "Dateline London" now and then ...

... alternating with Anne Leslie and Bernard Ingham (on whom he appears to model himself)as Token Crusty Tory Bigot.

He's obnoxious.

My appetite is whetted now, frappy! Can I have a clue to what was in today's article?

The Skin

[mrfrapp]

8. Some snippets

I've identified the more outrageous passages below. (Hand typed so any typos are mine). I don't think I need to provide any comment except to say that I've never read a more inflammatory article in a mainstream newspaper. I'm looking forward to the Letters page over the next couple of days that's for sure.

America is founded on work, responsibility and law. This is no more important item in the Bill of Rights than the unwritten one: that each and every American has the right to work his butt off. That is the basis of another right: this year shall be better than the last year and next year will be better than this year.
Not in New Orleans: that city is founded on laziness, irresponsibility and lawlessness.

Large numbers of the descendents of the involuntary immigrants have spurned every opportunity to invest in the American dream. It's as if they regard the work ethic as tainted, because it was imposed on their forebears by slavery.

I suspect that at least 90 percent of the looters were from one-parent families.

The decisions which doomed New Orleans were taken years before Bush became President, including the one to build the city in the first place.

[non sociopath skin]

9. I am gobsmacked! Gobsmacked!

How the fcuk did the Indy allow this racist garbage past the sub-editing stage?

"I suspect that at least 90 percent of the looters were from one-parent families."

This isn't bloody JOURNALISM! It's bloody right-wing propaganda.

The NOLA tragedy is certainly bringing some very, very nasty racist cockroaches out from under the most surprising of rocks ....

The Skin

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. Good God, it's worse than Kilroy-Silk

and in the Independent too. It's plain racism. As NSS said, how did it ever get past an editor?

[Briar]

12. I see we both forgot Janet Daley

(or is it Dailey?), Skin.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

13. Ugh. Yes, that one has to be the worst

[evermind]

7. Seems to have a drink problem...

As reported in Private Eye (No. 1129, P.4) :

Bruce "Brute" Anderson recently penned a flattering if somewhat barmy book review in the Spectator. The book in question, The New English Kitchen by Spectator cook Rose Prince, got high praise from the Brute - but then the review went off at a peculiar tangent.

The Orcadian piss-pot spent paragraph after paragraph praising Lord Salisbury (aka Lord Cranborne) and his pig-breeding enterprise.

Why so? Because over the new year Anderson gatecrashed a Salisbury family holiday in Italy and infuriated them so much with his boorish drunken behaviour that he was barred from the house. Despite much banging on doors and several pleading phone calls, the resolute Salisburys refused to let the odious Brute back in.

Anderson is running short of grandees whose hospitality he can abuse: only a few months ago the Eye revealed a hideous incident which earned him a lifetime ban from Lord Hesketh's house in Northamptonshire. Will shameless brown-nosing in the Spectator get him back on the Salisbury guest list?

This is the same Bruce Anderson who waxed pompous and lyrical about the moral virtue of John Scarlett, as he succeeded Dearlove as head of MI6 in the face of much evidence that he had made major contributions to exaggerating and propagandising the nonexistant WMD of Iraq, saying that if there was the merest hint of a question over his probity, Scarlett, a man of the sternest ethical rigour, would refuse the appointment and resign on the spot because he was just that kind of man.

I wonder how many Independent readers were fooled? I stopped reading his column months ago, and it puzzles me why the Indy would publish it. But then I don't understand why the Guardian would pieces by Max "Hitler" Hastings, either.

[LeftishBrit]

10. What disgusting rubbish!

And how insensitive to publish it at this time!!!

Not that it isn't par for the course with Anderson. Here are some snippets from his comments on the G8 summit:


Africa will never work until Africans can work. A million new small businesses would be far more beneficial than a billion dollars in aid. At present, African self-help is almost an oxymoron. ...

The G8 will do nothing to correct this. It is more likely to encourage clientitis, a form of moral debility which affects vast swaths of the continent: the political equivalent of Aids. Its symptoms are the belief that if Africa has problems, it is someone else's duty to solve them.

Apropos of Aids, the Americans have been criticised for insisting that anti-Aids funding should be linked to efforts to combat prostitution. Many Western liberals have a Victorian spinster's reluctance to face the facts of life. You can have rampant prostitution. You can have a drive to reduce Aids. You cannot have both.

On Aids, the Americans are right, as usual. On Africa in general they may be less right, for once. There are worrying signs that the Bush administration is ready to accommodate naive liberals. Even Paul Wolfowitz may be guilty of this. He ought to remember that a neo-conservative president of the World Bank has one over-riding challenge, to tell Africa to get on its bike.


Let them eat cake (no, that wasn't actually in it...)