Readers of this blog will, over the years, have marvelled at the outpourings of one Polly Toynbee, the Guardian’s foremost social commentator and hand-wringer in chief, a woman voted “the most influential commentator in the UK” and whose views regularly grace the programming of the BBC, for which she was formerly a newsroom social affairs editor. “Polly Toynbee’s influence is perceived to be huge in British public life,” wrote Julia Hobsbawm of the media analysts Editorial Intelligence. “Her columns resonate in Whitehall and beyond.”

From high atop those resonating columns, Ms Toynbee delivers her various pronouncements, including a conviction that “left-wing people are more intelligent and just generally better people,” i.e., better than thee and me, and a demand that taxes must be raised “to pay the state to become the best possible nanny to all babies.” There’s also her belief that “disruptive 16-year-old boys” should be taken out of class to spend a term being taught the finer points of dance, thereby resulting in a “transformation in the whole year group.” When not curing inner-city classroom delinquency with the thrill of modern tap, Polly tells her readers that obesity isn’t chiefly a matter of inactivity and overeating but instead has a more pernicious cause, i.e., a lack of socialism: 

It is inequality and disrespect that makes people fat.

To bolster this radical insight Ms Toynbee made a number of further claims regarding economic inequality and expanded waistlines, each of which proved to be either misleading or untrue. And chunkier readers should note that waiting for a socialist revolution probably isn’t the best way to lose those extra pounds.

Our imperious champion of the poor has a famously intermittent relationship with facts, logic and mathematics, such that an entire website, Factchecking Pollyanna, was devoted to providing detailed corrections of each week’s errors and distortions. Sadly, this effort to bring factual accuracy to the finest Guardian journalism became dormant some years ago, its anonymous author possibly having collapsed under the weight of the endeavour.

Happily, however, Tim Worstall has now published the best of that legendary blog in book form, so that another generation may bathe in Ms Toynbee’s blunders and fumbling with numbers. Amid various examples of Polly inverting statistics and misreporting figures by several orders of magnitude, as when she inflated council tax benefit changes by a mere 5,100%, the volume includes such moments of high journalism as Ms Toynbee telling the world that 142% of people were dissatisfied with Tony Blair, and a 21-word sentence containing no fewer than five factual errors.

If you buy the book via this Amazon link, or via this one here for readers in the U.S., your host will receive a small fee at no extra cost to you.  

Time, I think, for another classic Guardian sentence. A headline, in fact: 

How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?

The author of this latest ostentatious fretting session, Martin Robbins, is concerned by the “white and male race to conquer Mars.” The rest is pretty much what you’d imagine: 

The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.

And, 

The only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers, but no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery or oppression. It’s just what we do.

And so on, and so forth.

The Guardian’s Deborah Orr tells the unenlightened that Hillary Clinton should be elected president of the United States because she has ovaries and fallopian tubes, and that’s what really matters:

She’ll be the first American president who has experienced childbirth, or even admitted to wearing a bra… She’ll be the first president to have prompted the need for an answer to the question: who is that guy then, if he isn’t the first lady?

An opening for a feminist gag is what voting is all about.

I’ve never been a big Hillary fan. I don’t expect her to be the best president ever. In my book, anything more than competence would be a bonus.

Yes, if elected Mrs Clinton may be barely competent, and possibly much worse, but she would nonetheless be,

the perfect US president.

Why? Because Hillary is a she-person:

The symbolic power of her appointment transcends all else. Anyone who doesn’t understand that, in this one respect, Clinton is an absolutely perfect presidential choice, is simply refusing to acknowledge reality.

You heard the lady. We must vote based on a person having the right kind of genitals. It “transcends all else.” Because the “perfect US president” is one whose merits, so defined, are an accident of birth.

Commenter RY steers us to another contender for our series of classic sentences from a certain newspaper:

Witchcraft – and the embrace of “magical” practices, like reading tarot cards – has recently experienced a resurgence of sorts among young, creative, politically engaged women.

Ah, you didn’t see that coming.

The bearer of this hitherto suppressed knowledge is Ms Sady Doyle, who further enlightens us,

Women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a “spiritual but not religious” way to express feminist ambitions.

You see,

A popular Tumblr blog, Charmcore, purports to be run by three witch sisters; it gives sarcastic “magical” advice and praise of the female celebrities it deems to be “obvious witches.” On the more serious side, teen sensation Rookie magazine has published tarot tutorials along with more standard-issue feminist and fashion advice, and Autostraddle, a popular left-leaning blog for young queer women, has an in-house tarot columnist.

Yes, all that. And furthermore,

Tarot cards are available in trendy Brooklyn knick-knack shops and Urban Outfitters, as well as New Age stores. And these days, no one thinks there’s anything weird about herbal medicine and other potions.

Apparently, there are also “witchcore” punk bands. And – and – if even more proof were needed, a book: 

Mixed in with the spells and rituals of The Spiral Dance, you will find meditations on sexual violence, ecology and anarchist group building, and thoughts on how men can overcome patriarchal conditioning in order to participate effectively in leftwing activism.

Clearly, it’s a vibrant and thrusting cultural force, a subversive political juggernaut, one that will topple The Patriarchal Hegemon™ any day now. It’s game over, man. No, there’s no time to collect your belongings, we must flee to the escape pods. 

Polly Toynbee, that is:

There is an instinctive bond between Guardian readers – we almost nod to one another as we read the paper on a train.

Yes, I bet you do, Polly. I bet you do.

Update:

In the comments we’re also discussing this, spotted by Robert. Apparently, artists and writers are being “ignored to death”:

The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty… the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy.

You see, it’s simply ghastly that craftsmen and labourers can have nicer cars than “the makers and chroniclers of our culture.”