Over the weekend a video surfaced of an Asian Muslim street preacher telling his fellow local Muslims (also mostly Asian) that as well-brought-up people who come from respectable families, they should not be talking as if they were Black or want to be Black. This obviously caused a stir with a number of Black Muslims from various parts of the world, not just the UK, saying it confirmed their belief that the Muslim community was rife with “anti-blackness” but it also seemed to reinforce prejudices among Muslims elsewhere (such as the US and Canada) that British Muslims were wild, extreme and out of ‘control’. The man later posted a video with a partial apology, although he also accused Black Muslims of having a “victim mentality”. The original video (“addressing the gangsters and drug dealers”) can be found here on YouTube and the ‘apology’ here on Facebook.
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Yesterday a bill was expected to go through Parliament to ban ‘upskirting’ — the taking of pictures under someone’s clothing, usually a woman’s skirt, without their consent — and the bill, a private member’s bill, had the support of MPs from all the main parties and the support of the government, but was 
Today the government gave its backing to plans to expand Heathrow airport in west London by building an extra runway to the north-west of the existing site, with all the necessary access roads and buildings and so on. This will absorb parts of Sipson, most of Harmondsworth and all of Longford as well as a number of industrial areas that currently sit around the airport perimeter and feed the airport with freight and food. The plans also include the re-routing of some local main roads, the closure of others, the tunnelling of a section of the M25 and the wholesale re-routing of the airport’s current taxiways, which currently form a hexagon around the central island where the old terminals are. A map of the new scheme can be found in 
Last week Quilliam, the self-styled counter-extremism think-tank set up by former member of Hizb-ut-Tahreer Maajid Nawaz, released a pamphlet on FGM written by one Muna Adil, complete with a foreword by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali emigree who teamed up with the extreme racist Theo Van Gogh to vilify Islam in the Netherlands ten years ago before a deception in her asylum application was discovered and she moved to the US and married Niall Ferguson. The pamphlet was given some advance publicity by the Sunday Times last weekend and was tweeted out by a bunch of the usual liberal suspects (often overseas, where the paper’s history of bias and bigotry towards Muslims is less well-known than it is here) but a quick look at it reveals a lack of any original research; rather it relies on well-known existing statistics which do not prove that FGM is taking place on any significant scale in the UK, spices it up with some familiar accusations about political correctness and offers some ‘solutions’. The publication is available 
A couple of weeks ago I had a very brief stab at being an all-week truck driver, or as they call them in this country, a tramper. The job would have involved picking up loaded containers at the various ports in the south-east, taking them to their destination and then either having them swapped or unloaded and then taking them back to a port (not necessarily the same one) and then starting again. I didn’t really want to do that job but I had not had either much work out of the agencies nor much success in finding permanent work since the start of the year; for whatever reason it’s been an unusually slow few months. About the same time, an article appeared on the website of a British truckers’ magazine that said drivers were being forced to sleep in places that were not easy to sleep in: service station truck parks and roadside lay-bys which often had no facilities, and that frequently they were not able to sleep properly and were driving tired. And then a familiar moan about a driver shortage.
Recently 
This morning I came across an appeal to raise money to help an 11-year-old British girl, Demi Knight, to receive ‘treatment’ for her cancer in Houston, Texas, from a guy called Stanyslaw Burzynski at a private clinic. Today the papers were reporting that enough money had been raised (around £25,000) to help Demi start the treatment (and that the family had “cut some corners” and borrowed money) but they were still soliciting money for further treatment as a ‘course’ can cost up to £150,000 including flights and accommodation. The story was repeated in the Lincolnshire local press (such as 
In the light of two recent inquests into the deaths of young men with learning disabilities, one in an NHS hospital (Oliver McGowan, right) and one in a Mencap-run care home (Danny Tozer), both of which resulted in very bitterly disputed findings of no neglect and no suggestion of error in Oliver’s case, Rosi Reed (mother of Nico Reed whose death in 2012 was the subject of an earlier campaign and inquest) retweeted a link to a blog entry she wrote in 2015 titled 
So, today a Labour and Momentum activist (and film-maker and co-founder of the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence) named 
Last year, the Times carried a story that a young girl of Christian background had not been allowed to eat pork under her Muslim foster carers’ roof, on their front page. They also claimed that the mother of the family wore a ‘burka’ and did not let her wear a cross on a chain, and that the girl cried when she had to return to the foster home and begged not to have to go there. Yesterday, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) upheld a complaint by Tower Hamlets borough council against the Times on the grounds that it broke clause 1 (accuracy) of its code, and a reference is made on the front page (see the red rectangle in the attached image). (See earlier entries: 
I sometimes regret the fact that I still live in a fairly affluent part of outer London which has been, for most of the past generation, a Lib Dem stronghold, particularly when I see people elsewhere get enthusiastic about the Corbyn project and realise that I won’t have a chance to vote for him, because there aren’t enough Labour voters round here to do more than split the anti-Tory vote. Generally speaking, Edward Davey was a good and responsive constituency MP for decades, only to throw away years of building up people’s trust to throw in his lot with David Cameron’s Tories in 2010. He lost his seat (to a Tory) in 2015, only to win it back in 2017. This past week, during the “plastic straws” debate, a former Lib Dem strategist (now director of Demos) named Polly Mackenzie boasted of how they had managed to get David Cameron to agree to their “5p tax on carrier bags” idea while in government: Cameron wanted their support to tighten up the rules for benefit claimants, and got it (though the rule change found to be illegal and never went ahead; whether the Lib Dems knew that would happen or not, I don’t know). The full thread on Twitter starts 
The other day the 80’s pop star Morrissey, best known for being the frontman for the Smiths, 
This is a sign which, allegedly, appeared on a college hall of residence in Toronto, Canada. It points left to a non-accessible bathroom for men, and right for an accessible one with a hoist and an adult changing table, for everyone else including all women and any men who want to use it. Feminists of a certain sect have been sharing this image with the suggestion that it requires women to share a toilet with men, and when I pointed out to one of them yesterday that it really (very seriously) inconveniences many disabled people, she accused me of glossing over the implications to women’s safety of having to share a bathroom with men. In fact, such toilets are always single cubicles, so this will not happen.
Some friends of mine have been sharing a Labour election video on Facebook. The 15-second video claims that the next Labour government will make bus travel free for under-25s in England before telling people, “Get on board and vote Labour on Thursday 3 May”. This is a misleading advert, for a number of reasons, because it makes promises that Labour cannot deliver in the forthcoming election and may not still be part of their policy by the time of the next general election.
The other day I watched a repeat of an episode of the BBC series DIY SOS: The Big Build. It’s where the BBC get some architects, designers and local builders and other workers and they all pitch in to drastically modify someone’s house for the benefit of a disabled person. 
Yesterday I came across a blog post by Nora Mulready, one of the most sanctimonious anti-Corbyn agitators among the centre-Left, welcoming the announcement of a “new party” in last Sunday’s Observer — which, as you might discover if you read the whole article rather than just the headline, hasn’t been founded yet. The same article was tweeted out by John Rentoul, a columnist for the Independent and biographer of Tony Blair, with a quote which really sums up the attitudes of many of the supporters of this “new party”: