ANGRY MOB

Richard Littlejohn exposes the madness of modern Britain in this thrill-packed roller coaster of a novel, bursting with all the humour and irreverence that have made him Britain's No 1 newspaper columnist.

 

Mickey French is just an ordinary bloke, an ex-cop struggling to look after his family as self-righteous do-gooders and bungling bureaucrats bring the country to its knees. But Mickey's life is turned upside sown when he is attacked in his own home and forced to defend himself. His arrest for murder is front-page news, and soon the whole nation is watching as he battles for justice, lost in a maze of dodgy lawyers, politically correct police officers, bogus asylum seekers, self-publicising politicians, shameless journalists and rabble-rousing shock-jocks.

It's often said of Richard Littlejohn that he speaks for the silent majority in Britain. Unfortunately, rather like the Conservative Party whose ideas are so close to his own, he actually only speaks for a loud, paranoid minority. This offensive (and offensively poorly written) tome is full of the knee-jerk rightwing politics we continually hear from the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Conservative Pary. It seems that Richard Littlejohn lives in an island very much like Britain, but without the tolerance, respect for others and liberalism that make the British people (which includes people with brown skin, gay people and even - gasp!- people who don't think the Sun is the source of all wisdom) so great. Those of us who live in the real Britain know that this rambling, incoherent cynical attempt at a novel is just that - fiction.

I'm not a serious political person, I'm not really a front line marcher but reading this book made me unhappy about some of the narrow-minded opinions that Richard Littlejohn seems to possess. Richard makes references to groups such as ethnic minorities and homosexuals sometimes regarding them as 'those people'. He also finds the ideas of a gay police as a useless idea.
He is a pinnacle in a section of society that seperates the human race into segments and certainly does not believe in any type of equality. He is a driving force of prejudice and discrimination.

The attacks on immigration, crime and political correctness are made over and over without giving any real insight into these issues, or offering anything new. The characters are cartoon stereotypes, and the dialogue is generally poor. Littlejohn cannot write a simile to save his life either... This book does not satirise or savage Blair's Britain, but does give a snapshot of a peculiarly British trait of right-wing paranoia.

Being a great admirer of Richard Littlejohn's writings (or so I thought), I bought this book in the great expectation of reading a searing, satirical condemnation of Britain's politically correct establishment. What I actually got was page after page of totally unjustified vulgarity [..]and profanity. Perhaps these "virtues" will make this book a bestseller in today's dumbed-down society, but personally, after forcing myself through the first 70 pages or so, I finally succumbed to nausea and threw the book in the dustbin. I wouldn't even recommend it to a "Sun" reader!

Our setting is Middle England, with odd forays into London's Soho, which Littlejohn clearly hasn't visited since the 1950s. Perhaps he saw a homosexual there, and took fright. The period is utterly opaque. Much of the exchange among the honest working classes smacks of the interwar years. On the other hand, Ilie, our anti-hero bogus asylum-seeker, is receiving "free board and lodging, clothing coupons and £117.50 a week in cash". Given that current benefits amount to £36.50 in coupons each week, of which £10 can be exchanged for cash, and with inflation at roughly 5 per cent, this puts us at somewhere around 2076...

 

The thesis of this book is as follows - Russian Jews are fine, genuine refugees from Cyprus are fine, and those involved in road-building programmes, meaning all Irish people, are fine. Black people are fine as long as they have jobs in petrol stations. "Gangs of fucking criminals from eastern Europe and Kurdistan" are not fine. Those who look eastern European, or set up camp in a local cricket pavilion, or beg, or fail to look grateful, are not fine.