Dogwash

So then, a bearded Brown nutter in a frock burns remembrance poppies in London and is 'granted' (gotta love that word!) a conviction for a section 5 public order offence and is fined £50. A slapheaded White nutter burns a Qur'an in Carlisle and is granted a Section 4 conviction with a potential sentence of 2 years' imprisonment, the actual sentence yet to be determined.

An unpleasant White scrote mouths off at some unfortunate Brown bystanders and is granted a 10-year CRASBO. And now... And now...

*drumroll*

A clutch of Brown Midlands toerags is whisked off to Blackpool for the day (via), just in case they are so offended by the visit of the EDL back in Dudley that they lose control and start hitting people. Unfortunately, when they get to Blackpool, they lose control and start hitting people.

This cannot go on.

For much of yesterday we were treated to rolling news coverage of Riot of the Day, as assorted anarchists, SWPers and other opportunistic riff-raff attempted to effect, er, impromptu rearrangements to selected business premises in Oxford Street and Piccadilly on behalf of the people. Jolly good television it was too; though I must say I was quite concerned for the safety of the BBC's Tom Willcox as he reported from the thick of it.

Every few weeks the EDL stages a demonstration somewhere in the country. Local "community" groups, politicians, bishops, imams, local authorities, senior policemen, chambers of commerce and the local chapters of Hamsters against Racism step forward to be interviewed by the local rag. We are warned that the EDL are violent racist knuckledragging hooligans who will terrorize the populace, eat small children, smash up "ethnic" business premises, burn down mosques and generally reduce the town to ruins. Catastrophic economic disruption is foretold as all the shops are preemptively boarded up and citizens are advised to cower indoors under the dining room table, thus conveniently creating the forecast massive trading losses anyway.

So what I wanna know is this. If advance notice has been given and it's going to be that tasty a bit of mayhem, where's all the TV cameras? Where are Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin and John Simpson in their flak jackets, perched atop a pile of rubble outside Luton Town Hall, to give us blow-by-blow reportage?

Could it be that the advertised armageddon is not there to be shown, or that such violence as does occur is largely caused by the "wrong" people?

I notice this recent coverage of the unfortunate Big John's incident. But what's this bit here?

Liz Dodds, prosecuting, told Leicester magistrates that Mooney was one of about 200 protesters who broke through a police cordon in Queens Street at about 4pm to challenge a group of Asian youths.

The trouble then spilled into Humberstone Road, where up to 20 members of the public had sought refuge in [Big John's Takeaway].

So, I guess these "Asian youths" were just standing there then, applauding politely, were they?

Scarcely the EDL's finest hour, to be sure, but possibly not quite the rampaging mobs of thugs mindlessly and entirely without provocation attacking innocent effnicks going about their legitimate business.


Just asking, that's all.

You'd think it would be obvious and not even require an announcement, wouldn't you? Allow space for alighting passengers not only to get off the train but to clear from the immediate vicinity of the doors and, lo and behold, there's this big empty space for you all to flood into like water whooshing down a freshly unblocked plughole.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Among stations I use regularly, the worst place for this sort of thing is the northbound platform at Cutty Sark on the Docklands Light Railway. Groups of young people are the usual culprits. There's something about the dynamics of large groups that seems to reduce their collective IQ; I reckon empirically to about 50% of the IQ of the thickest individual present. At Cutty Sark, large groups of school children, students and tourists are common, trying to board a Canary Wharf-bound train on the restricted-length platform. They crowd round the door in a dense scrum, waiting for it open, and seem immensely surprised when faced by people wanting to get off. Surely this train was a special journey, reserved especially for their group? Who are these inconvenient interlopers?

I find large groups of young French tourists are the worst offenders. My late mother had the theory that it was a side-effect of "let off the leash syndrome"; that French kids were subject to relatively strict standards of discipline at home and tended to overreact to the relative freedom of the UK. Myself, I just think they're arrogant monkeys who should all bugger off where they came from and concentrate their energies on their national pastimes of eating cheese and surrendering.

These days I tend to adopt the tactic of facing the buggers down. When the train door opens, I step forward far enough to hinder the potential closing of the door and then, if faced by a wall of passengers intent on boarding, I wait quietly and without gesture, speech or movement. This confuses them mightily, for it puts the ball in their court. I suspect many of these kids grew up on computer games, the sort of point-of-view driving or shoot-em-up game where "neutral" oncoming objects that don't either collide with you or attack you conveniently slide off the side of the screen and "pop" out of existence. I'm convinced that's what they're expecting me to do. This used to be a common experience when I worked in the City of London. The pavements of the maze of streets and lanes which thread the City come, as you might expect, in various widths. Whatever the width, walking out at lunchtime you would regularly encounter groups of office girls walking 2, 3 or 4 abreast, however many were required to fill the width of the footpath completely. As they approached an oncoming person they clearly expected them to magically disappear. If you stood your ground rather than squeezing flat against the wall or stepping into the carriageway, a brief period of confusion ensued, followed by much harumphing and complicated rearrangement of their "formation" to allow them to pass.

Occasionally, with the thicker passengers these days, it is necessary to bare the teeth and growl, but that is rather an inelegant last resort and does rather spoil the fun.


Since this blog is largely devoted to whingeing about the hordes of, what's the phrase again, uninvited wogs who have flooded into the country to do all those jobs that don't need doing*, I feel duty-bound to offer the following countervailing anecdote in the interests of fairness.

On one occasion, as the train pulled in to Cutty Sark, the doors opened to reveal what I can only assume was a madrassa group on a day out. The kids were about 8 or 9 years old and were strictly segregated into two groups by gender. The boys were in the charge of an adult male in the full whack of salwar kameez and skull cap. The little girls were supervised by a woman in jilbab and niqab. The kids were dressed identically in miniature versions of the adult clothing, although thankfully the girls wore hijab rather than being subjected at that early age to the full niqab. They looked for all the world like a couple of dozen cartoon characters who had escaped from an episode of South Park and were trying to find their way back.

The two groups, separated so that they should enter different sections of the train, stood neatly and quietly a clear 2 metres back from the platform edge, allowing passengers to alight in comfort before they attempted to board. It was a lesson in courtesy those French teenagers could benefit from.


___
* The jobs that don't need doing.

Well what do all these third-world immigrants actually do? Some are on the dole. Some are in the religion industry. Some work in the race industry, in all those equality and diversity quangos, local and national. Since HMG has run out of moolah, these last will also be on the dole soon enough.

As for the rest, they seem to be employed in small shops and takeaways. Just how many convenience stores and chicken, pizza and kebab outlets do we need? I recall walking past a group of about 20 shops in Tufnell Park — it hardly qualified for the posh moniker of "shopping parade" — and every last one of 'em was an "effnick" takeaway of some stripe. Are they seriously suggesting that these places, which can surely only be sustained by a combination of tax evasion, barely paid illegal employees, dubiously sourced stock or ingredients, and in all probability some kind of minor criminality, are contributing usefully, never mind "essentially", to our society and our economy? Sweep 'em all away and repatriate all the illegals and the only noticeable impact would be a reduction in the load on the sewers.

Our own dear city of Leicester, as it goes.

In case you've not seen it before, here's an interesting Wikileak.

(Via.)

If you think you're right when accused of something, never apologize in the hope that you'll be treated leniently. It won't happen; they'll just enjoy publicly humiliating you, after which they will still cast you into the outer darkness anyway. And unless you are absolutely bang-to-rights, never accept a police caution; they're not offering you a caution to save you unncessary trouble, they're offering you a caution because they know damned well that the charge will not stand up in court.

Brian True-May has apologized for causing offence by preferring White characters in Midsomer Murders. He has in consequence been re-instated. Or has he? No, he has been re-instated for the remainder of the current series. He is effectively working out his notice. So, if he did indeed apologize as reported, what good has it done him?

Big Ron Atkinson made a perfectly defensible criticism of the footballer Marcel Desailly but couched it in robust terminology of a forbidden nature. He tried to save his career as a football pundit by extreme grovelling, including, as I put it on a previous occasion, verbally sucking Darcus Howe's cock. Where is Big Ron now? Producing podcasts for William Hill, apparently.

The dynamic duo of half-time commentary, Keys and Gray, made some flippant crack or other about a lino of the distaff persuasion. They grovelled. Not as fulsomely as Big Ron, it has to be said, but it made no odds. They were fired anyway.

The Top Gear team made some disparaging remarks about Mexicans. Scripted remarks, it would seem. Did they apologize? Well, no. The BBC uttered some token mumblings into its beard on their behalf and without their explicit sanction. They're still there. Well, let's be honest here. They're still there because Top Gear is a serious moneyspinner that is built around the manner and personality of its presenters. Had the boyish trio been expendable, they would have been expended. Anyway, yer Mexicans aren't proper Darkies, so it's not all that bad, eh?

Making a grovelling apology for breaching one of the many taboos of politically correct dogma in the forlorn hope of rehabilitation is uncomfortably reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution, in which the bewildered and often accidental perpetrator of some act of counterrevolutionary crimethink is ordered to perform an act of self-criticism and is then taken out and shot anyway.

Fuck 'em.

And another thing. Never, ever begin a sentence with "I'm not a racist but...". By doing so you have already conceded the argument in advance. It translates as "I know I'm a racist, but I'm not really a bad person, so please don't shout at me". Say what you want to say, and when they accuse you of racism, ask them to explain precisely what they mean by that. And if they can't or won't explain, they have lost the argument.

Fuck 'em.

If you are going to point out that the BNP, or these days the EDL, have got something right, never, ever begin with a formula like "The BNP are vile scum, but..." or "The EDL are brainless violent chavscum; on the other hand...".

The Righteous have controlled the language of polite discourse for the past forty years. That hegemony has begun to crumble. These people have been shown up for the paper tigers they are. When one growls at you, grab him and hold him to the fire; and then use the burning tiger to light your cigar.

Fuck' em.


Ah. That's better. I needed that. (© Ken Dodd)

The deliciously inconsequential Midsomergate controversicle rumbles on at CiF. Anon E Mouse, a thespian of colour, is angry that, in essence, White people are being cast in White roles in British drama.

We're used to the endless period dramas – for example, ITV's Downtown Abbey – where, as a result of not being given an opportunity to be auditioned, we are left in no doubt that we [ie Black actors] have no chance of donning a period costume.

If they do a life of Dr Johnson, Anon, you could always audition for the part of Francis Barber. If you have, or can do, a White British accent, there's plenty of work in radio drama, historical and contemporary.

The simple fact is that historically there were very few Black people in the UK and those few that were present had minor or subservient roles. It is not unreasonable to expect a role, whether representing an actual person or a dramatic stereotype or archetype, to be played by an actor who is a credible physical approximation to the target. In a dramatization of the Profumo affair, would it be OK for Christine Keeler to be portrayed by a geezer in drag? Or for Helen Mirren to play the part of John Profumo to rectify a perceived shortage of roles for female actors?

The broad exemption of acting from the various employment anti-discrimination laws reflects this obvious reality. Which is why, for example, the scrupulously gender-neutral use of the term "actor" to refer to both men and women players feels so unnatural and forced. It certainly grates on me, but then I'm an unreconstructed racist thug so my opinion doesn't really count.

Brian True-May should lose his job – he's the kind of producer who prevents me from being seen or even considered for a job. I only wish more of us actors had the courage to speak out. But if we did, would the phone ever ring with the offer of a casting? So even I feel I have to remain anonymous.

No, Sunshine. What's preventing you from being considered for a job in British period drama is that you don't look the part.

Your problem is that you have chosen to seek employment in a very restricted niche market. Credible roles for actors of colour in dramas representing life in a historically exclusively and still predominantly White society are few and far between. I symphathize with your plight, Mr Mouse, and reflect on how lucky I am that I did not embark upon the career of Mature Male Poledancer, or I might even now be penning sanctimonious whines for CiF about my lack of employment.

You want to rig the game, do you? Well, come back and talk to us when blue-eyed Viking types like me are being auditioned to play Nelson Mandela. Then we might think about it.

Joy for beat bobbies as minority police groups lose funding

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ cash doled out to fringe police groups representing homosexuals, women and Muslims is to be axed.

Home Office chiefs said they could no longer afford to fund the minority police groups.

Well, Whoop-de-doo!

But bosses at the staff associations slammed the decision, warning it could lead to their collapse.

Zaheer Ahmed, president of the National Association of ­Muslim Police, said cutting funds would deprive the police of “important religious and cultural voices” and could see policing thrown back to the 1970s.

Well, you'll just have to do your special pleading on your own time, Sunshine. And get ignored, like the rest of us.

... when we get wrapped up in the ramifications of diversity policy.

These days an intending employer's statement of inclusiveness tends to run to a couple of paragraphs at the end of the advertisement, in order to reassure one-legged Lesbian Amazonian Dwarves with learning difficulties that their application will be treated with the fairness it deserves. In simpler times, when diversity was still in short pants, it was the custom to emphasize simply that roles historically dominated by one or other gender were now open to both equally. In English this is conventionally done by adding the formula "(m/f)" to the job title, as in

Poledancers (m/f)
Bricklayers (m/f)
Midwives (m/f)

An ad in the current New Scientist recruiting staff for a German subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons is seeking

Publisher, Physics (f/m)
Commissioning Editor, Materials Science (f/m)
Trainee, Materials Science... (f/m)

Is this some obscure booktrade abbreviation (freemason? fully manicured? free magazines? folding motorcycle?) or is the writer indicating, as he/she seems to me to be, gender equality of opportunity?

'Cos, if the latter, I'm intrigued by the unidiomatic usage. Does the f come first because it's earlier in the alphabet, in which case the small-mindedness implied is terrifying.

Or does the f come first 'cos the writer is being chivalrarse to the ladies? That doesn't bear thinking about. Images of "Don't call me Love" feministas exploding with indignation right, left and centre. (Oh, I don't know though...)

What a complicated world we live in. Sod this, I'm off out to glare haughtily at some Nigerians. I'm hoping to be "granted" a CRASBO for my sixty-third birthday.

I tend to groan when confronted with yet another reference to, or yet worse full-blown pastiche of, Martin Niemöller's "First they came..." dictum. Not so much because its impact has become so threadbare with constant repetition but because the people who quote it in web fora and newspaper readers' comments threads always seem to behave as if they are the first person to have rediscovered it in the past 60 years. Why do these Niemöller quotes always radiate such an air of "Look! Aren't I so jolly clever and oh so well-read, then?"? Sorry, folks, but everybody else has got a copy of the Reader's Digest Bumper Book of Erudite Sayings to Impress Your Friends on their bookshelves too.

In the case of this spiked piece, though

First they came for the faux fascists

I am happy to make an exception. It concerns the "granting" (yes, that is the word used) of a CRASBO to one Shane Overton of Lincoln forbidding him from

• Travelling on any public railway or entering any railway station;
• Contacting the named victims in the current case;
• Knowingly participating in, organizing or controling any demonstration, meeting, gathering or website concerning the EDL;
• Entering or loitering outside any Mosque, Islamic prayer room, meeting room, school, cultural centre or festival site, or any site under development for these purposes.

for a period of 10 years.

From the report on the police website and this report in the Sheffield Star it seems clear that Mr Overton is a scrote of the first water. If he lived in Ruraltown he would undoubtedly be a resident of the Swamp and one of Mr Gadget's most valued customers. I note that

His 33 previous convictions included other racially aggravated offending linked to his association with the EDL.

"Included" precisely how many such convictions, I am tempted to ask. But fair enough. Now I hesitate to pontificate about the severity of the sentence. Like any other external commentator reading this stuff third-hand in the meeja, I don't know the detail of the mitigating or aggravating factors that may have influenced either verdict or sentence in this or any other case which I am not directly involved in. But frankly chaps, this seems a bit strong. Strip out the entirely artificial element of "racial aggravation" and this case is basically a bit of unpleasant verbal by someone with form for being a public arsehole. If the incident happened as reported, than I sympathize with the South Asian couple and their kids who were at the receiving end. If I were in their position I would probably have shrugged it off. If I pursued it, it would presumably have scored no more than a Section 5 public order offence, like that nice Mr Choudhury was "granted" for aggravated poppy burning. If I, as a White man, had been verbally abused by an agitated "Paki" telling me in no uncertain terms how his people were going to "take over the country and fuck you gora shitbags good and proper" or whatever, that would of course not be "racially aggravated", anyway.

The truly chilling quote comes from that Lincolnshire police report linked to above,

DC Andy Haworth from the National Domestic Extremism Unit, a national police unit who worked alongside BTP and Lincolnshire Police, said: “It is only the second time a Crasbo of this nature has been granted to individuals participating in Defence League demonstrations, and it is widely anticipated other police forces will follow suit and apply for Crasbos to stop violent individuals from subverting otherwise legitimate, lawful, protests.

“While the Defence Leagues are entitled to protest, violence has been a persistent feature of their demonstrations, and on this occasion on the offence was committed while travelling from a demonstration.

“We are working to support all police forces with Crasbo applications against any individual who persistently commits criminal acts at (or travelling to and from) Defence League demonstrations, regardless of whether they profess to support the Defence League or oppose it, in order to ensure future demonstrations are peaceful and lawful.”

The Old Bill have form for this.

Pardon my prejudice, but I get the impression that Shane Overton isn't bright enough to use a computer. Otherwise the "National Domestic Extremism Unit" would doubtless have confiscated his laptop and "found" some "level 1 kiddie porn" on it, just for good measure.

I don't like the way things are going.

Google is not always as clever as it's cracked up to be. Or, to put it another way, it's only as bright as the idiots who write the web pages it indexes. Google Ads is supposed to match suitable advertisements to web pages by analysing the contents of the page. This is not always as sophisticated as it might be. The automated process has repeatedly offered Muslim dating agency services to the readers of the Brussels Journal, for example. And, horror of horrors, has published ads for skin lightening creams on the august pages of Pickled Politics.

It now seems to be picking up the widespread and seemingly ineradicable confusion between the EDL, a popular movement campaigning against Islam, and EDF, a purveyor of electrical current to the masses, as witness this piece in the Stafford Post

Brewery moves to ban EDL meetings

featuring this well-matched display advertisment


The actual article copy describes the banning of the local EDL division from meeting in a Stafford pub, following agitation by the local rag.

This week, a spokesperson for Marston’s told the Post the group had once again been ‘shut down’ in the town: “Marston’s has no political affiliations, nor do we condone the actions of their parties. However, we have over 1,700 pubs in our tenanted estate and cannot regulate all meetings that take place within them. In this instance we can confirm that there will be no further meetings of this kind at the Princess Royal.”

A strange way to show political neutrality, chaps. Genuine political neutrality would demand that you either permit all politically-tinged gatherings equally, which clearly you have chosen not to do, or that you permit none of them. At all. Can I assume the latter to be the case?

Of course, as a private commercial organization it is your privilege to be as selective as you choose. And as a private consumer it is my privilege not to give you my custom as I choose. As it happens I'm not a fan of Marston's Pedigree — for some reason the Burton beers in general and my metabolism are not on particularly cordial terms. But if I were I might be having to think about reclassifying it and other Marston's products and outlets as haraam. This stuff works both ways.


Totally Gratuitous Update (18 March)

Further to my comment about Burton ales disagreeing with me, I've just remembered a graffito I saw in the, er, gentlemen's sanitary facility of a pub about 30 years ago. It read,

Has the bottom dropped out of your world?
Drink Bass and have the world fall out of your bottom!

Clearly someone else had the same problem.

I'm sure you really wanted to know that.

From the appropriately pointless Hannah Pool piece about "Midsomergate"


You wait till the Mods get back from lunch, my lad.

And from the unnecessarily combative tribute to the late Smiley Culture by Dotun "Is it because I is Black" Adebayo:


Quite. Let's also remember that this man died while being arrested in connection with the sale of class A drugs. He was no saint. The IPCC will no doubt investigate and irrespective of their findings the "Black community" will believe that he was murdered by the Babylon. Or the National Front. Or the perpetrators of the "New Cross bombing". Or whatever.

Some of the commenters are upset at the presence of negative comments from what one commenter describes as "the snide web racists on here". If the Guardian had wanted a cosy obituarial pæan to the unfortunate Mr Emmanuel, maybe they shouldn't have chosen a confrontational race-hustler to write it. Perhaps somebody like Rodigan might have produced a more neutral piece. Who knows? Not really my field of expertise.

Midsomer Murders creator suspended after race remarks

Read it and weep, or possibly boggle, or make yourself a hot bacon sarnie, as you prefer.

And right on cue, a localish rag wheels out the readily offended

One of Slough’s leading Muslims, businessman Nazar Lodhi, said the remarks amount to racial incitement and that he would contact the police.

Bollocks. Go on, Nazar, admit it mate; you've never even heard of the fucking programme, never mind watched it. If Phil Space of the Maidstone* Masturbator and Kebab Wrapper hadn't got in touch and wound you up about it, you'd have been none the wiser.

Incidentally, how do you get to be a "leading Muslim"? Is there an exam? Is there a career path? You know: leading Muslim, senior Muslim, chief Muslim.

From the Mediaspy piece:

A 2006 study commissioned by the British Film Institute found that British television had consistently failed to engage with ethnic minorities. One of the series singled out for its "strongly white, middle-England associations" was Midsomer Murders, which was described as "strikingly unpopular" among people from minority backgrounds.

To be honest, I'm not a regular listener to the BBC Asian Network, either. And you know what? I never watched a single episode of Nai Zindagi, Naya Jeevan in the 1970s. But I've never complained about their lack of ethnic balance. Should I have done, then?


I have a modest suggestion which might just restore the proper balance and resolve this major crisis in community relations. Why not dramatize Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers, under the original title and with actors of the ethnicity suggested by the title, and screen it alternate weeks with the next series of Midsomer Murders?

Happy now?

___
* Er, or possibly Maidenhead. Oh the shame, the shame. (Manfully resists temptation to crack lubricious joke about Madonna, or a racist joke about the heavenly reward of the shahidin.)

A favorite phrase of the less 'refaned' of my grandmothers, which she applied feely to what seemed to be a majority of the female population of 1950s Moston. I'm not sure what it says about me as a small child that I initially interpreted this phrase as an imputation of negotiable sexual incontinence rather than in its more usually accepted sense of "superficially impressive but with no underlying substance".

It is this latter sense that applies to the UK Border Agency's efforts to tackle the employment of illegal immigrants.

Local newspapers carry frequent reports of UKBA raids on business premises, which inform us that, for example, 16 Chinese nationals were found at the Fook Yew Tooh Chinese Restaurant, Acupuncture Clinic and Money Laundering Agency, of which 9 failed asylum seekers, 2 visa overstayers and 5 clandestine entrants. The proprietor has been served with a notice of potential liability for fines of up to £160,000. Of the illegals, three have been detained pending removal from the country, while the remaining 13 have been released on immigration bail. The report invariably concludes with a piece of boilerplate waffle from a local UKBA spokesmonkey about how seriously they take this sort of thing. You can often find links to a selection of these reports on the Migrationwatch UK newsfeed.

All good stuff, eh? More of it!

But wait, let's take a closer look. I've been watching some repeats of the fly-on-the-wall documentary series UK Border Force, recorded off Sky 3 (or the "samples of what you're missing because you haven't got a Sky subscription, you cheeseparing git" channel, as it has now been officially renamed). Several points emerge.

Firstly, illegals can only be taken into custody pending removal if they have identity documents which will be accepted by their country of origin on return. Those without such documentation must be released on immigration bail, usually with a weekly or fortnightly reporting requirement, until the necessary documentation can be obtained.

Secondly, getting such replacement documentation is a laborious process. The authorities in third-world source countries are frequently not only inefficient, but have little incentive to co-operate as their illegally-placed nationals are a valuable source of remittance revenue.

Thirdly, the great majority of the bailed illegals disappear promptly into the woodwork. What was particularly striking was the surprise in the voice of officers in follow-up interviews when a bailed illegal actually reported in.

Ah well, at least the employers are being effectively punished. Throttle the supply of illegal work; that's what will make a difference.

Or maybe not. The maximum fine of £10,000 per illegal is rarely levied. The going rate is typically £5,000. Which might still be a hefty disincentive except that, according to information winkled out of HMG by Frank Field and reported today, the actual take is no more than 20% of the fines levied. Fines are bargained down by "poverty-stricken" businessmen or otherwise not paid. (Incidentally, if you're puzzled by the unwonted lack of venom in that Guardian article, look again: it's a Press Association wire.)

We're not really trying, are we? Just going through the motions for the media.

Undocumented illegals should be detained until their papers come through. That will remove them from the UK economy and concentrate the minds of their home governments. Bugger the Human Rights whingers. Employers of illegals should be fined properly and if necessary driven out of business. Persistent deliberate offenders should be jailed.

And in the meantime, instead of whingeing about illegals and immigrants taking "our" jobs, potential customers might like to consider voting with their feet and eschewing their nightly Salmonella and Chilli Special, you know, the one served by the scruffy downtrodden-looking individual whose English vocabulary is limited to the number words.

Get a fucking grip.

Now here's something which doesn't seem to have made the popular prints to any noticeable extent. I read in Martin Brunt's blog at Sky News:

But Emdadur Choudhury was convicted of the least serious of public order crimes and could be fined only 50% of his weekly income, according to the means-testing sentencing rules.

The court had no option after Choudhury's lawyer said the defendent's part-time job paid him only £480 a month.

His monthly benefits of £792 apparently didn't count.

Two things. Firstly there is an interesting example of the "squeezed middle" effect here.

Suppose I have no dependents and receive no state benefits but, like Emdadur, have a total (acknowledged) income of a little over £15,000 a year, then all of that income would presumably be counted in determining a maximum fine of about £280. OK, Emdadur's income includes the subsidy you and I pay him to bring up a brace of sprogs — is that all, man: you are surely failing in your duties to the demographic Jihad here — a brace of sprogs whom he is no doubt assiduously teaching to despise us. But then I too might have inelastic and unavoidable financial commitments. For example, unlike Emdadur, who is living in subsidized social housing, I might have mortgage repayments to make.

I'm open to counterargument here, but it seems to me that the system is skewed in favour of those who are in the position of not giving a shit because the state will pay anyway. Oh I'm sure there are mechanisms in place for taking "my" mortgage commitments, etc, into account. So why do I have this sinking feeling that all of "my" income would end up being classified as disposable anyway?

The second point is this. If the potential punishment is so laughably mild, where was the CPS's famous creativity in inflating charges? A section 5 public order offence is basically at the level of giving somebody the finger. Given the fact that this clown and his oppos contrived to outrage a goodly tranche of the indigenous population to an extent which in more excitable countries would have had them and anybody who looked remotely like them torn limb from limb, surely we could have stretched to a section 4 incitement charge of some kind. Afraid of upsetting the muzzies, are we? Or are they just "our sort of people", as compared with those dreadful White chavs?

After all, if I understand the somewhat confusing reports appearing on the EDL message boards, "They" are still trying to pin something, anything, on Tommy Robinson for his involvement at the same incident.



Update 17 March

Oops! An income of £480+£792 per month equates to something over £292 per week. A maximum fine of 50% of weekly income would work out at £146, not £280 as written above. Well, give us a break. I was doing the sums in my head; it's 45 years since I did my maths 'A' level and the ageing brain is not what it was, innit?

The point still stands, though.

I'm sure you all eat this dish every week, but it's a new one on me. I called in for refreshments at a hostelry in the Seven Dials district of the West End of London, a district which seems to attract huge numbers of tourists, most of them keen to sample the English national dish. No, not chicken tikka masala, but fish and chips.

But what of those visitors who have chosen to follow the vegetarian path? How to cater for them?

And there before me was the answer:

Vegetarian fish and chips

announced the chalkboard behind the bar. I boggled gently. I was reminded of a former colleague, a batty Vincentian* woman who, among her other foibles, claimed to be a vegetarian — she never forwent an opportunity to sneer about people eating "dead, rotting animals" — but who also admitted that she ate fish, which in her twisted logic did not count as animals. We never did manage to get a lucid explanation of that one.

I consulted the menu and conferred with the bemused East European barstaff, and learned that the "fish fillet" in vegetarian fish and chips is a wodge of deep-fried battered halloumi cheese, presumably made from the milk of "goats, underwater goats with snorkels and flippers"

Well, Bombay Duck me, you live and learn, innit?

___
* I've always thought that "St Vincent and the Grenadines" would be a good name for a watered down Calypso or Soca ensemble, perhaps one targeted at the package-tourist market and the sort of Black band that always takes to the stage in identical slightly oversized shiny lounge suits and sings choreographed close harmony and smiles a lot. But then that's just the sort of bollocks that rattles round inside my head, innit?

I find myself in the proverbial one-and-a-half minds over this one,

Pendle cabbies face Asian clothing ban

On the one hand I'm not all that keen on overweening public authorities interfering unnecessarily in people's lives and work, just because they feel they can do, or in order to fit in with some jumped-up power-tripping councillor's idiosyncratic concept of propriety. There are certainly contexts where the prescribing of a business dress code is appropriate, but beyond a basic requirement for cleanliness, decency and a general absence of disconcerting whackiness, I'm not entirely convinced that this applies to the cab trade. It would be more useful for the relevant authorities, local and national, to ensure that vehicles are well maintained and correctly insured, that drivers are who they say they are (and not the licensee's cousin on an expired visitor's visa), that drivers are paying their taxes and that they are not distracted from their driving by the difficult decision as to whether to rape their current female passenger before or after signing on at the Job Centre.

On the other hand my hackles do begin to quiver gently when I read stuff like this,

And Mohammed Akram, chairman of Pendle Private Hire Association, said drivers were extremely unhappy with the plans.

Mr Akram said: “A lot of them are saying it would be discrimination because it would take away their rights.”

and this,

Glen Bulcock, chairman of Rossendale Taxi Association and owner of GB Taxis, said Rossendale Council had put forward a similar proposal recently, but it was rejected following a number of concerns.

He said: “It was refused because it infringes on human rights and, 90 per cent, if not more, of all taxi drivers in Rossendale are Asian.

"You can’t force Asian people to adhere to a code that doesn’t include their national dress.["]

Oh yes you can, Sunshine. Anyway, aren't we always being told that these people are "British"? As British as like wot I am, guvnor, innit? I hate to break this to you, but whatever garments might qualify as "British national dress", they do not include a Millets anorak worn over a salwar kameez.

Let me be brutally honest. I'm being opportunistic here, not indulging in some form of logical Libertarian analysis. On one level I'm not really bothered if Mr Ilyas wants to drive his cab while wearing his pyjamas. On the other hand, perhaps it's about time Mr Ilyas and his ilk made up their minds who they want to be. Are you going to participate fully in British society or are you going to remain Pakistani colonists, chaps?

Now that the Great and the Good have reluctantly acknowledged the failure of the multicultural project, the emphasis is all on community cohesion. Well let's define the basis of that cohesion, shall we? This is not a multicultural society. Nor is it a multiracial or a multi-faith society. It is an ethnic North European, secular-Christian society. That's the baseline. If you want to stay, you cohere with us, not the other way round. It's a one-way street.

Now if you want to wander our streets in your salwar kameez, or if your wife prefers to go forth in full jilbab and niqab, we are a tolerant people and will most likely indulge your eccentricity. We rather like eccentrics, do us Brits. But if accepted standards for business dress require that you dress à l'anglaise or if accepted security standards require that your wife reveal her face to facilitate identification when entering private premises like banks, shopping malls and even buses, then I'm sorry, don't come the bleedin' old soldier about your human rights and your sacred cultural and religious practices. Our gaff, our rules. If you can't hack it, you might be happier driving a cab in Mirpur.

Wasn't it CallMeDave who was banging on about muscular liberalism? Perhaps it's time for a bit of muscle. Come on, posh boy, show us your pecs. And, again, let me be honest. If some of our recent arrivals can't adapt to Britain, as opposed to Britain made over in the image of Pakistan, and if in consequnce they decide to leave, then I for one will not be shedding many tears.

(You know, I think I may have blown my chances of doing a guest post on Pickled Politics now, but heh, sod it, you can't win 'em all.)

In a comment to an earlier post, Ringmer remarked on the heavy moderation of CiF's "Banardo's are the spawn of the Devil" article. My habit these days is to snapshot CiF threads each time I open or refresh them, which means that with luck I can recover at least some of the comments that the Mod has taken exception to between snapshots. Bear in mind that this is very hit-and-miss.

Here are the deleted comments I managed to recover from the Barnardo's piece:


Most of the excluded comments are ad hominems against BeautifulBurnout. Fair enough in principle, no doubt; ad hominem abuse is surely not to be encouraged in serious high-flown debating circles like CiF. But this is all very mild stuff, part of the rough-and-tumble of vigorous on-line discussion. And it's positively tea and cucumber sandwiches with the vicar in comparison with the sanctimonious self-righteous abuse the woman herself dishes out at the drop of, if not a hat, then certainly a FAS's shredded passport. Or are BB's ad homs, rants and general abuse to be sympathetically overlooked as the understandable exasperation of a Righteous, decent and liberal woman driven to the limits of her patience and beyond by the repetitive baying of fascist morons? Or something.

But ilovemisty's comment at 3:49

UKBA and the courts don't always get it right when they reject people's asylum claims.

We have an asylum system with multiple stages of appeal as you know full well. Are you arguing claims should not be assessed as genuine or not? How long would the system survive without such a process? Lets be a bit more balanced, both UKBA and the courts have also approved a great many asylum applications which where bogus, or allowed false claimants to stay on human rights grounds.

is a perfectly sensible contribution. Were the Mods perhaps incensed at her misspelling of "were"? Or did the Righteous side just not have an answer to the question?

When I logged into my Linux server just now, it proffered, as usual, a fortune cookie,

Life may have no meaning — or, even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

Yep, that just about sums it up. Off into the heart of the Occupied Territories for a resupply sortie to Sainsbugger's, I think. I wonder what today's conversion rate for the Naira is.

Either that or off down Greenwich and get quietly kale-eyed on cheap Polish lager. Ah, decisions, decisions.

Oh, and the CiF response to the evil alliance between Barnardo's and the UKBA is as batty as expected, though I have to say the Unrighteous are putting up a pretty spirited attack.

Ho hum.


Update (Saturday)

In the event I did both. I went down to Greenwich and imbibed a couple of bottles of Polish lager while taking the piss out of the local professional beggars and then moved on to Woolwich to buy provisions. I can't update you on the conversion rate for remittances to Nigeria unfortunately; the A-boards had all been taken in by the time I got to Thomas Street. I expect it's still somewhere round the NGN240=GBP1 mark.

I've just got round to reading the Wikipedia article on the fortune cookie program referred to above. I didn't know you had to opt into the 'rude' cookies with fortune -a or fortune -o. Bloody typical. I shall give it a whirl. (And perhaps add a few "There was a bishop, an imam and a rabbi" jokes to the database while I'm at it.)

Interesting news this morning that Barnardo's are to be contracted to manage the welfare of children detained with their families awaiting deportation at the facility which is to replace the family unit at Yarl's Wood.

Cue the usual bleating about children being "imprisoned", with the impression being actively promoted that the poor terrified little mites are being cast mercilessly into dank dungeons where they are compelled to fight off the rats for possession of their meagre rations of bread and water. Actually, the proposed site looks quite pleasant.

But it's still detention, they say. You promised to end the detention of children whose families are slated for deportation (or immigration removal, or whatever, but let's not get bogged down in legal technicalities that are not pertinent to the issue).

So let's look at the practical possibilities. If a family with children has exhausted the legal paths available to them and has been told to leave, there seem to be five distinct ways of handling the process.

1. The family leaves voluntarily.


2. The family is detained together pending expulsion.


3. The adults are detained pending expulsion. The children are left with neighbours, relatives or the like, or are taken into local-authority care. The family is reunited immediately prior to expulsion.


4. The complete family is collected on the eve or on the day of expulsion.


5. No attempt is made to expel the family, who are allowed to remain indefinitely.

It is clear that only outcomes 1 and 5 are acceptable to the Righteous. Actually, no, scrub outcome 1: the Righteous will see this solely as evidence of the family having been "intimidated" into leaving.

Outcome 5 will satisfy both the Righteous and the affected family. But it is unacceptable to the state and to the British people at large. Why?

• It is unfair. It allows the rule of law to be circumvented. We have the right to control our borders and to decide who we allow to come and live here. It is a right asserted by nations throughout the world, often brutally. There is no justifiable reason why we in the UK should be expected to behave differently.


• It is unfair to those failed asylum seekers and other illegals who do not have a sprog or two in tow. A curious point but a valid one.


• It sends a signal to the many millions of potential illegal immigrants waiting at the gates that if you can acquire a dependent sprog then once you're in the country you can stay for ever. One more weapon to add to the armoury.


• It has potential for some interesting unintended consequences. If we adopt outcome 5 as standard — i.e. that no family with dependent children will ever be deported, however weak their claim — then I can imagine a market in trafficked "dependents" developing, matching trafficked children of the approximately correct origin to illegal adults in the UK. Children who are not only abused victims of trafficking in the first place, but will probably end up abandoned into the care of the British state once their initial purpose has been fulfilled.

OK, so a brief look at remaining outcomes 2, 3 and 4. Outcome 4 (the six o'clock snatch and the van ride to Heathrow) is perhaps the most unnecessarily traumatic of the lot. And error-prone too, with bags of possibilities for people to get separated. Surely you don't want that. Outcome 3 (bang up the parents and put the kids briefly into care) is almost as bad. Separating the kids from their parents at a difficult time and placing them in the care of strangers. Do you really want that? No, if the deportation is to go ahead and it is clear that the family will not co-operate or may attempt to actively frustrate the process, then outcome 2 (detain the family together) is the only realistic and humane approach.

Outcome 5 (let 'em stay) is a dereliction of the duty of the state to its people. It is similar to saying, "OK, Mrs Smith," (or Ms Smith as it might be these days), "your partner Kev has been convicted of armed robbery and GBH, but we're not going to imprison him because we wouldn't want the kids to be deprived of their father." Get a grip.

But we do expect a decent state to treat those in its charge humanely. Spare us the bollocks about the kids being locked up and deprived of their freedom. The freedom of movement of children is routinely circumscribed and constrained by parents or other guardians as part of everyday life. A 2.3m fence at the perimeter of the grounds of what amounts to a rather pleasant-looking country hotel is not traumatic.

The trauma, or to use old-fashioned language, the stress of the situation comes from the reaction of the parents, which is communicated to the children. Perfectly understandable. If I'd been convicted of an offence and was about to suffer the legal consequences, I'm sure I wouldn't be feeling particularly laid back about it either. It is also unavoidable. If we wanted to be nasty, we could say that it was the actions of the parents that brought about this situation and it's up to them to do the stiff upper-lip thing for the benefit of the kids. But being decent folk, we are bringing in a bit of extra support in an attempt to minimize it.

Far better to accept that you've been rejected and to leave quietly and under your own steam. For this country must enforce its laws. Ask yourselves this. You've come to the UK for a better life for yourselves and, in particular, for your kids. If, by accommodating your illegality and the illegal behaviour of the potentially many others in your position, we put into practice what amounts to an open borders policy and people then flow in from the third world until the country collapses into a copy of what you left behind to come here, what then have you gained?

Catch-22, innit?

Well, OK, if you're going to be picky about avian collective nouns, it's a murder of crows (or, interestingly, a congress of crows) and a parliament of rooks. Wha'ever, innit?

Anyway I think this lot are crows; I've never managed to get close enough to up-end one and read the label. They're sitting in a tree across the street. And they're making the most godawful racket about something.

And I thought to myself, I thought, ah, midday on a Wednesday: PMQs.

Last Saturday the EDL held a fairly modest gig in Rochdale to highlight the issue of "Asians" grooming underage White girls for prostitution, a problem which seems particularly rife in that benighted part of the country. As it happened, Stacey Dolan and Mark Roberts were getting spliced at the town hall at the time. The Mail tries to make something of it,

A day to remember: Couple’s wedding clashes with race protest
(so police officers are in all their photos)

Yes, OK. What if there'd been roadworks going on or a burst water-main or something, with drilling audible during the ceremony and nasty rough men in hard hats and hi-viz jackets in the background of the photography? So either a) make a feature of it, something you can point out when showing people your wedding album in years to come (for example, you can pretend that the line of coppers is there to hold back all the paparazzi and the crowd of screaming, over-excited Mark and Stacey fans), or b) take the pictures from a different angle or, if necessary, at the sodding reception. Anyway, dear, if you're going to get married in your underwear, you're really in no position to complain.

I mean, Gordon Bennett, my parents got married in 1945. My dad had to rebuild the bombed-out church with his bare hands and there was such a shortage of priests my mam had to knit one herself before the ceremony could go ahead.


But as non-stories dreamt up in the name of the drip-drip-drip approach to political proper gander go, you can hardly beat this one,

C4 'Come Dine With Me' contestant stood against Jack Straw for BNP

Let's see if I can get my tiny brain round this one. A participant in a minor "reality TV" programme, in which people are invited to dinner in each other's homes, also happens to be a BNP activist. That's a story? It basically equates to "BNP/EDL/whatever man caught breathing in public. Decent people terribly shocked." It's not even up to the standard of the saga of Julian Leppert's number plate, which at least demonstrated a modicum of painfully contorted imagination. (I can barely contain my indifference waiting for 2021 when the "NA21" plates come out.)

Interesting word order, incidentally: "stood against Jack Straw for BNP" reads as if Nick Holt (for it was he) and Mr Straw were competing to be selected as BNP candidate. Hidden depths, that geezer Jack "show us your pretty face, you delightful little Muslima sweetie-pie" Straw.

Sir,

I notice an uncanny resemblance between UK-based political blogger and professional angry wog Sunny Hundal and LSE alumnus and smooth-talking Arab dictator-in-waiting (frustrated) Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. Could they by any chance be related? I think we should be told.

Ivor Biggun,
In-De-Nile,
London N1

On the UAF site, we read:

UAF conference postponed: new date coming soon

On the London Patriot site (a local BNP-supporting site), we read:

UAF Conference cancelled: Oh dear how sad…

in which the BNP wallah asserts

A little bird tells me this was down to the efforts of a London Patriotic group who alerted the authorities to possibilities of a riot at the venue and civil disorder on a massive scale by the UAF Party.

If, despite the somewhat hyperbolic and imprecise language, there's any truth in that then it is poetic justice indeed. The UAF spend much of their time contacting venue owners to warn them, in a totally friendly non-threatening way, that if they host a BNP event then there will be spontaneous manifestations of outrage among the local population, or to put it another way, a mob of unwashed UAF crusties will descend on the joint and trash it.

If someone's managed to return the favour, then good.

I have to say I did rather enjoy the sanctimonious outrage evinced by the UAF when the EDL turned up to their anti-BNP gig in Barnsley the other day.

First the evil bean-counter Thilo Sarrazin, now new Innenminister Hans-Peter Friedrich goes slightly off-message:

German interior minister reopens bitter row over Muslim integration

< purchases bumper bucket of non-halal popcorn >

This happens just too often:

Immigration worker Maryam Javaid jailed after forging paperwork

Just what proportion of the adjudication staff at Lunar House, which is almost certainly where she would have been working, are either third-world immigrants or British citizens of recent third-world heritage? People whose loyalty to the UK is at least open to legitimate question, particularly where that loyalty conflicts with loyalty and obligation to the people of their original homeland.

In recent years I have read of numerous cases of dishonest caseworkers at Lunar House, all Africans and South Asians who have offered to short-circuit the process for money or, in the case of at least one chap, a Zimbabwean I think, in return for sexual favours.

Some of these caseworkers have turned out, for God's sake, to be illegal immigrants themselves!

Oh I have no doubt that there are decent, honest first- and second-generation immigrants working in immigration. And I have no doubt, as the Righteous would rush to point out, that there are White crooks in the system with indigenous pedigrees that go all the way back to Alfred the Cakeburner himself. That doesn't alter the fact that this kind of criminality seems to arise predominantly among non-indigenous caseworkers.

So why are we exposing ourselves to this obvious danger when actual experience clearly suggests the bleedin' obvious: that divided loyalties and community pressures among immigrant staff are a genuine problem? Should we not be ensuring that the people employed in decision-making roles in the immigration process are all people with deep roots in this country? If that means overwhelmingly White British people then so be it.

Well, d'hier as it goes, but nevertheless.

Roadblocks set up to catch drivers smoking

So presumably they'll be waving on all the TWOCing scrotes and all those confused Kurdish and Pakistani gentlemen and like foreign Johnnies who can't get their heads round the concept that in this country you are supposed to have a) a driving licence for yourself and b) a road-fund licence and basic insurance for the vehicle you are driving. Instead they'll be concentrating on those truly evil people whose residual traces of tobacco smoke might cause homeopathic cancer in subsequent users of their company motor.

Good use of resources there, Sunshine.

There's a thread on the EDL forum about Muslim "anger" that the London 2012 Olympic Games will take place during Ramadan. All fairly standard stuff and nothing new, but I do think this comment from thebigcornishman sums things up very nicely,

What have the games got to do with Ramadan anyway; there aren't any daylight eating events are there?

I can't get unduly worked up either way about the EU decision to ban gender-based car insurance. Insurance is a method of sharing risk. There is no fixed answer to the question of who should be allowed to share that risk with you and thus potentially benefit from the pool. We are pulled in one direction by the desire to minimize cost; we are pulled in the other direction by notions of equity and fairness. If we allow women to benefit from their collectively smaller claims records, what happens if the stats reveal that Black men are significantly more expensive to insure than White men; do we allow policies available to White males only?

Where do you stop? The (il)logical conclusion is a pool of one: insure yourself. Which is what, incidentally, I have chosen to do in regard to household contents insurance. (Not household structure, i.e. "buildings" insurance, which is an entirely different kettle of bananas.) I am lucky enough to have the savings to cover replacement of the contents should the worst happen, so I have chosen to carry that risk myself rather than argue the toss with an insurance company motivated by an intense desire not to pay out.

On balance, I think I'd take the position that since both women and wimmin have campaigned long and hard for equality of opportunity and equality of treatment with men, then they have to accept the package as a whole, including the disadvantageous bits.

I'd say Ed West summarizes it well ...

But that’s the point – it may be an utterly absurd decision that will needlessly punish women drivers, but the ruling is certainly not discriminatory. On the contrary, it bans companies from discriminating between a group of people less likely to crash, and a group more likely to, using short-term stereotyping until they have a better measurement of an individual’s behaviour (after all, if a man drives well, then his premiums will come down). It is completely consistent with the goals and aims of the entire egalitarian movement – that of taking decisions away from individuals and independent groups and having the state regulate them. If Arlene McCarthy believes it’s unfair not to discriminate, what’s she doing in the Labour Party?

I don't agree that the ruling is absurd; it's just logical. And it might be that the egalitarian approach arguably has the edge here: start everybody off on the same, relatively high tariff, and reward good behaviour in individuals.


Sorry, girls, you want to "have your cake and eat it". It looks like "you've made your bed, so you will have to lie in it".

Sunny-ji posts at PP,

"Mosque expels Imam for preaching evolution and moderation",

This is very worrying. Leyton Mosque in London has expelled its imam Dr Usama Hasan for holding a lecture titled ‘Islam & Evolution’ and saying the two were not incompatible.

To be honest, what I find worrying is the very existence of a mosque in Leyton, of all places, be it a hotbed of Wahhabi extremism or no. Particularly an establishment of this size, with plans for expansion.

But, heh, I'm just one of those non-existent English people; what does my opinion matter?

The response of the Righteous to Searchlight's embarrassing survey on attitudes to immigration has been more muted than I had expected. Perhaps they're hoping it will all go away. Fat chance.

But Lynsey Hanley is still up for a fight, with a rather shrill CiF piece proclaiming the benefits of immigration and accusing doubters of racism, etc, etc, etc. It, and the below-the-line shouting match, are pretty standard stuff. If you don't have time on your hands, just think of it as the 94th repeat of the same episode and move on.

But this only marginally on-topic comment caught my eye:

Paxandlove
28 February 2011 3:35PM

I saw today an incident where an Asian boy in a supermarket was verbally insulted in language not fit to repeat
security was called ..but the person who verbally insulted the boy had gone

Racism is worse than ever .. I've witnessed it first hand ...

So have I, dear fellow, so have I.

When I first came to London as a young single man in the 1970s, I spent some of my free time exploring the city. Partly out of general curiosity, partly in order to check out potential places to relocate to: my initial rented accommodation in north Hendon was by no means a permanent prospect in terms either of its ongoing availability or the shit-awful public transport. One Saturday in 1975 I visited Clapham Junction. Like most people, the only thing I knew about Clapham Junction was that it had an enormous commuter rail interchange; possibly the largest suburban interchange in the world. So I went there and marvelled appropriately. And then had a look round the surrounding streets.

Clapham Junction seemed a fairly typical, reasonably well kept inner suburb. Pleasant enough. Wandering about, I decided to call into a pub for refreshments. I checked out the interior. Now, even by this early stage I had begun to learn the ethnic etiquette of London. On this quiet Saturday afternoon, not too long before the 3pm cut-off, the cavernous bar accommodated half-a-dozen middle-aged Black men. A Black man served behind the bar. Was this a Blacks-only bar, I wondered? But no, there was an elderly White chap sitting at the bar with the rest. So I ventured in and ordered a half-pint of lager.

The Black bartender served me a glass of what appeared to be froth, water and possibly line-cleaning detergent from what was an evidently out-of-use tap. No, I am not exaggerating or joking. That is an accurate and literal description of the contents of the glass. This was proffered to me with a straight face. I was so non-plussed I paid the man and retired to a stand-up table near the door, where I examined this concoction for a minute or two before leaving.

So bizarre was this experience, particularly in its blatancy, that on a subsequent visit to Clapham Junction perhaps 18 months later, I sought out that same pub and had precisely the same experience.

Now I wonder what that was about. (Answers on a postcard to that nice Trevor Phillips, please.)

Over the intervening years I have experienced a wide range of petty racism from persons of colour. I have been overcharged. I have been deliberately served duff goods, and all the rest of it.

Fortunately, I have never suffered violence, though I have received verbal abuse from "Asian" yoof asserting their territorial ambitions in the marches between White and Bengali East London. (There may be a bit of an evolving "front line" in the Three Colt Street area of Wapping, I notice, where Bangladeshi council housing abuts rich White middle-class private housing along Narrow Street.)

The closest I have come to suffering racial violence was a surreal incident a couple of years ago. This took place in what estate agents like to call Mid Town, the neither here nor there part of central London between the West End and the City centred on High Holborn. I was walking along what I suppose you would call a lane. Well, if you know the area, it's the broad pedestrianized lane that runs from Kingsway towards Lincoln's Inn Fields, between the Wetherspoon (Shakespear's Head) and the Catholic church.

As I walked, a strange looking group of boys appeared at the other end. There were about a dozen of them, aged 10 to 15 or so, all dressed uniformly in green tops and black trousers in what appeared to be a sports team strip or the uniform of a troupe of professional acrobats or whatever. They were of East African, possibly Ethiopian, appearance.

As we neared each other, the group stood to one side to allow me to pass. They stared at me fixedly. I maintained a neutral expression, totally ignoring them and refusing to engage in eye contact as one of the boys called out "Waht Man!" in a tone of voice which the tabloid prints would probably describe as "hate-filled". I walked on. When I was about 20 feet past the group, they began to throw stuff at me. Fortunately, the only missiles to hand were bags of shredded office papers left out for collection, none of which made contact anyway.

Yes, Paxandlove, I agree. Racism has not gone away. And my impression also is that it's getting worse. But it's not all in the one direction.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Eunice and Owen Johns — the clearly decent and competent serial foster parents who have lost their right to foster due to fears that as Pentecostal Christians they might "poison" their charges against homosexuality — are West Indians, or African Caribbeans as we are now required to say. This when we are apparently crying out for Black couples to foster problematical Black kids in a "culturally compatible environment".

The balance between sexuality human-rights victimhood points and faith human-rights victimhood points was undoubtedly fairly straightforward for the Righteous. Adding race to the mix must have them tied up in knots. All good fun.

In the sidebar of the Mail article linked above, I notice this link. I don't think I can add much to that.