These claims are nothing new — there was a documentary on the subject (on Channel 4) in this country a few months ago, and I have seen claims about such practices in tourist guidebooks (on Pakistan, I believe) — but what sticks out about this article is the ridiculous justification for the practice, which I don’t believe could possibly come from any Muslim:

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can’t even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

“How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face,” 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. “We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.”

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli’s team “how his wife could become pregnant,” her report said. When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?”

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It’s not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren’t in love with their boys.

Afghanistan is far from the only place where women cover their faces, and you get paedophilia everywhere but on nothing like this scale. Furthermore, people in Afghanistan marry young and they will have seen girls when growing up, so they will have some idea of how they will look as women. There is simply no possible Islamic justification for this: there are hadeeths about how devils follow “beardless youths”, i.e. boys of precisely the age of those involved in this custom, more than they follow women, and books by Deobandi scholars (and the Taliban were strongly influenced by the Deobandis in Pakistan) warning men against looking lustfully at boys.

The claim about a “biblical passage” obviously reflects the ignorance of the author. The Bible as it exists today has no relevance to Muslims, and its laws are not taken into account at all. What the Bible says about menstruation doesn’t apply to Muslims who get their law from the Qur’an and the Sunnah, which principally consists of the sayings of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and how they were acted on and interpreted by the early generations of Muslims. Muslims actually don’t regard menstruating women as unclean and, while they are barred from ritual activity, they are not prohibited from touching people or food, or from being touched, as they are in other religions such as Orthodox Judaism and some branches of Hinduism. It’s forbidden to have sex with a woman who currently has her period on, but it is not forbidden for her husband to touch or sleep with her during that time.

This could well be a custom that pre-dates Islam in that region — after all, similar customs existed in ancient Greece and are referred to in such texts as Plato’s Republic. I studied that at A-level and was puzzled by the lead character, named Socrates, talking about his companions being “bitten with a passion for boys in the bloom of youth” as if that was somehow normal. There is simply no way you can twist any Islamic text to show that it’s OK for a man to have sex with a young boy. It just isn’t.

The UK issues two types of domestic worker visa, and the most common one allows workers to change their employers while they are in the UK. The diplomatic domestic worker’s visa, however, doesn’t give the worker that right, with the result that they can be treated abominably and, because their employers have diplomatic immunity, they cannot be prosecuted for assaults or other crimes against their workers, and court judgements cannot be implemented against them. It was suggested that diplomatic immunity be amended so that it doesn’t apply to what goes on in the private lives of diplomatic staff, or what is unrelated to their diplomatic mission.

They could also make offences against the person exempt, but any such change is likely to be reciprocated against British diplomatic staff in other countries. Another solution might be to simply prohibit diplomatic staff from bringing their domestic staff with them, and require them to recruit in the UK, as British-based workers would be more likely to know the law and less likely to tolerate abuse. However, if a court judgement is made against an abusive employer and they refuse to pay, the money could be extracted from them by seizing their cars or buildings to be sold so that the amount concerned could be recovered. The inconvenience of losing such properties would probably motivate these people to pay what they owe pretty quickly.

There were three organisations mentioned in the programme which help or campaign for domestic workers in such situations: Anti-Slavery International, Kalayaan and Afruca (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse).

Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful poison gas, an Afghan official said Tuesday.

… The spokesman, Dr. Kargar Norughli, said his ministry and the World Health Organization had been testing the blood of victims in 10 mass sickenings and had confirmed the presence of toxic but not fatal levels of organophosphates. Those compounds are widely used in insecticides and herbicides, and are also the active ingredients of compounds developed as chemical weapons, including sarin and VX gas.

Dr. Norughli did not explain why the confirmations had not been announced earlier.

But he emphasized that how the gas was delivered — and even whether the poisonings were deliberate — remained a mystery. There have been no fatalities, and no one has claimed responsibility for the episodes.

Many local officials had dismissed the cases as episodes of mass hysteria provoked by acid and arson attacks on schoolgirls by Taliban fighters and others who objected to their education. But the cases have been reported only in girls’ schools, or in mixed schools during hours set aside only for girls.

Organophosphates are also a common ingredients in sheep dips, and contact with sheep dips has been linked to poisonings of farmers and farm workers in western countries, with long-term debilitating neurological effects including depression and pain. The practice of putting such incidents down to “hysteria” will be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of chronic neurological illness in the West: Gulf War Syndrome and M.E. have both been the subject of such claims and even when outbreaks of M.E. have occurred, there have been those who have tried to put them down to “mass hysteria” as with these poisonings. Even multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, before scientists worked out what was actually wrong with the patients, were put down to hysteria and some victims spent years in psychiatric hospitals because doctors were convinced that their symptoms were signs of mental illness — until the MRI scanners which were invented in the mid-1980s proved that wrong.

Way back, my Mum said that it was harder to get through a book if you don’t care what happens to the characters; as I recall, she was talking about the Jeanette Winterson book, Sexing the Cherry. Eastenders today is like that, and I remember that the last time I gave up on watching it, that was the reason as well. A large proportion of the characters, and certainly those who seemed to be dominating the stories last week, are either unpleasant or stupid, or both. This is particularly true of the younger characters. The story about how Phil Mitchell became a crackhead, after going to pieces when his daughter disappeared with her mother after he hit the bottle, has been widely denounced as preposterous and the Lucas/Denise story is right out of the Brookside book of ridiculous, sensational storylines.

What’s worse is the theme of pretty much every outsider turning out to be nasty or scheming — look at Adam Best, who seemed nice enough for most of the time he was in it, but then started offering Lucy Beale exam papers in return for sex (and thus cheating on his girlfriend Libby). Then there was Glenda and her son, whose scam on the Mitchells seemed to run for weeks and then peter out. Stacey’s friend Becca, from the psychiatric hospital, seemed vulnerable at first, but is now busy trying to turn Stacey Slater against her mother. (And the Slaters are the most miserable family ever invented.) The only really likeable character is Libby, but she’s a minor character and is getting written out of it later this year.

Well, next week they are running it five days a week (as opposed to four, most weeks) and the climax is set to be a big fire at the Vic, a climax of the current Phil-the-crackhead storyline. Meanwhile, Becca is set to “reveal her true colours in a shocking showdown with Stacey” and Ricky Butcher has to reveal that he may be the father of Sam’s baby. So, I’ll be watching bits of it up until that point (whether it’s on at 7:30pm or 8pm, that clashes with getting my food ready for the end of the fast) but I shouldn’t think I’ll bother with it after that.

Stephen Pollard and the Spectator apologise for the unintended and false suggestion in a blog published on 15 July 2008 that Islam Expo Limited is a fascist party dedicated to genocide which organised a conference with a racist and genocidal programme. We accept that Islam Expo’s purpose is to provide a neutral and broad-based platform for debate on issues relating to Muslims and Islam.

Stephen Pollard is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and the smears he wrote in an earlier edition were sourced from Harry’s Place.

To begin with, Islam Expo isn’t a party, it’s a business which puts on an annual event in a big conference venue in London where there are speeches, exhibitions and entertainment and stalls from Muslim charities and businesses (or just those which might interest Muslims). I’ve never been to it, but I have been to a similar event, Global Peace and Unity. There is nothing remotely fascist about any of it; there are speeches and the speakers come from almost the entire spectrum of Islamic thought, including various preachers, thinkers, writers, charity workers, politicians etc including from some outside the Muslim community.

There was a time when using the word nazi or fascist in response to anything you don’t like was held to be trivialising of what the real thing led to in the past. Fascism has certain characteristics, including personality cults promoted heavily by the state, an oppressive one-party form of politics and a heavy government hand in the economy. These things exist in parts of the Muslim world today, but just because Sayyid Qutb or early thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood were influenced by European fascists, it doesn’t make the Muslim Brotherhood fascist to this day. Certainly, it doesn’t make any event in which people from any organisation connected to the Muslim Brotherhood participate fascist.

Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the move to ban the niqaab in France:

The national assembly’s action came on July 13, as the country prepared to celebrate the birth of republican democracy in the revolution of 1789. Banning the burqa on the eve of the Fête Nationale provided a clear affirmation of true Frenchness.

It followed a year in which President Sarkozy included a minister of immigration and national identity in his cabinet. The title of the new post conveyed the message that if national identity were in trouble immigrants were the source. The president and his minister called for a countrywide conversation on the meanings of national identity. There were to be contests and town-hall meetings to articulate what it meant to be truly French. When that effort fizzled, they came up with more draconian measures. Sarkozy proposed, this month, to take away the citizenship of foreign-born French citizens if they were convicted of crimes such as threatening the life of a police officer. Children born in France to foreign parents (once presumed to automatically qualify for citizenship) would be denied citizenship if there were any evidence of juvenile delinquency.

This month, too, began the expulsion of the Roma, said to be illegally camped throughout the country and responsible for all manner of crimes. Despite an outcry from those who denounced the expulsions as echoes of Vichy (the government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s), these activities have made “security” a prime focus for politicians and public opinion pollsters. Whether it will deliver another term to Sarkozy in 2012 remains to be seen.

The immediate effect is to conjure a fantasy spectre in which foreigners endanger France and are made to take the blame for all its economic, social and political problems.

The people advocating bans on veils on supposed women’s rights grounds are, she says, never normally supportive of efforts to improve the lot of women; some of them have opposed laws on domestic violence and sexual harassment. It’s all about forcing people of foreign descent to adopt white cultural norms, along with white feminists thinking that they have the right to dictate what liberty means for all women.

There is also the myth (which Joan Wallach Scott mentions but does not refute) that 1789 was somehow the “birth of republican democracy”. It wasn’t. After that came the Reign of Terror, Napoleon and a period of restored monarchy; republicanism did not become stable in France until the Third Republic.

Some of the points he makes in the first group are quite valid. He held up a map of Oxford in which there were three faith schools clustered in a small area, but the non-faith schools were miles away, and that if you live in the area where the faith schools were, you had less chance of getting into a local school. This seems valid on the surface of it, but in fact not all religious schools do discriminate against people from outside their church. The Church of England has a number of schools in which a majority of the pupils are not even Christian, let alone Anglican (this is particularly true in east London). The objection to this kind of discrimination has some validity; in the past, some of the white religious groups such as Catholics and Jews might have had a good reason to have separate schools because hostility towards them was rife. This is not the case anymore, particularly for Catholics, but it may well be true for Muslims in some places.

I should add here that religious or secular status is not in itself an indicator of whether a school is good or bad. I went to three Catholic schools as a child and two secular ones. As a rough guide, two of the three Catholic schools were reasonably good as was one of the secular ones. The other two were dreadful; the Catholic junior school seemed to be under the control of the reactionary faction of the Catholic school and had bizarre rules, allowing the boys and girls barely any contact with each other outside the classrooms with no explanation as to why. Several of the teachers were miserable individuals and they all taught in the lower section of the school, and the school had a system of prefects (usually girls) who could sometimes be heard screaming at a classful of children, while the teacher was out of the room, “stop talking!”. The bad secular school was a terribly cruel and brutal place.

Still, despite all this, the school had a fairly good ethnic mix as many of the Catholics in Croydon are from places like Goa and various parts of Africa. There was very little racial tension. The same was true of the Catholic secondary school I attended for my first year. However, some religions, and some branches of other religions, are ethnically based and any school which discriminates in their favour is discriminating against others. If a Jewish school sets its admission criteria based on strict adherence to a particular form of Judaism, that is not racial discrimination, but if they require them to just be Jewish but not necessarily practising to their standards, that is certainly racial discrimination. This may happen with some Muslim schools also: a school which demands adherence not only to Islam but to, say, a “Tablighi ethos”, is likely to end up with a predominantly Indo-Pak pupil base (there are some white and black converts who conform to this, but rarely any other ethnic Muslims).

In the case of the “fake observance”, it should be pointed out that fake observance at the outset can give way to true observance later, but even so, if churches are acting as a kind of hereditary or ethnic friendly society, a private club you have to join to get your kids into their school, that’s not a good way to run an education system, all the more so if they set entry barriers which keep out the less well-off, such as expensive bespoke uniforms. I should add that Catholic schools in many places in the world cater to pupils of their religion and others, and see it as a way of spreading the gospel through service to the community. If the Catholic church wants to do that here, I don’t have a problem with that; if they are merely providing services to their old ethnic bases in the absence of belief or practice, that surely isn’t a good thing. The state funds all schools, and should make sure that all schools are up to the standard that parents should not have to choose between faking religion, even if it’s the religion of their grandparents, or a bad education for their children. This is to say nothing of those of different religions who are shut out of multiple local schools, for whom faking another religion is likely not to be an option at all.

I don’t buy the “dividing the communities” argument. Northern Ireland’s problems, as I have said here many times in the past, did not begin when Catholics and Protestants started going to different schools. There may be a case for making sure schools there (and in other places of long-standing Protestant/Catholic division, such as Liverpool and Glasgow) integrate, although in some cases it could lead to gang problems within the schools given the way some of the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland had developed. I was never conscious of any division between Catholics and others at schools in Croydon, where I grew up, and we certainly weren’t taught to be suspicious of them or consider them as infidels or anything of that sort.

The secularist arguments were not well laid-out. Dawkins was asked one of the most common and weakest arguments against evolution, namely why there are still apes if humans are descended from apes. His response was that humans are in fact apes and, rather than being descended from chimpanzees, we simply have a common ancestor. Dawkins: one, Muslim schoolgirl: nil. There are much stronger arguments than this, such as why there are plants growing in England that wasps confuse for female wasps so they can pollinate them; if the plant existed without the wasp, the plant is unlikely to have lasted very long. A schoolgirl was shown arguing that there is a barrier between bodies of fresh and salt water, so that the fresh water stays pure for us to drink, something that left Dawkins flabbergasted, but it could well have been the interpretation that the girl quoted a bit of that was unscientific, not the fact of such separation. After all, we get our drinking water from fresh sources such as wells and streams and they are never, or in some cases almost never, polluted by salt water. The land itself separates the two types of water.

Finally, there is the issue of what right parents have to indoctrinate their children in their own religion as if they own them. Well, parents have always been responsible for bringing up their children the best they can, and to those with a religion, that includes letting them in on the religion they believe in. It’s not some kind of power play; the parents regard it as doing their best for them. No doubt Dawkins will teach his children what he believes as well. This teaching can hardly be said to be unbreakable given how many children were sent to religious schools in the UK and stopped practising as soon as they left. I stopped going to Mass when I was eight, well before I left my second Catholic school.

I should add that not all Muslim parents want Muslim-only schools for their children. I have spoken to one parent in London who pulled his son out of one because its standards just weren’t up to his. Similarly, when I interviewed sister Ardo from Ottawa about her niqaab story in 2006, I discovered that her family had passed over an Islamic school for her younger sisters partly for financial reasons but also because they simply found the state school to be preferable for various social and educational reasons. She had herself worn niqaab in that same state school in her final year (age 17 onwards). I have read various stories on blogs about private Muslim schools where there is a lack of professionalism, where teachers are not paid enough and contracts not honoured and so on (particularly in the USA).

As for my own personal preference, if I lived in a decent part of town I would prefer a school that did not interfere with pupils’ expression of their own religion (such as hijaab and so on) and did not cling to relics of the past (uniforms, prefects, pointless rules) as so many British state schools do, than one like them with the Christian bits replaced with Islamic equivalents. But it is also quite justified for parents to want to keep their children away from those who are openly hostile to them and their religion, and to prefer a religious school to a state school in an inner-city area where there are problems with gangs and where the general standard of behaviour is much less than what they want their children to see. I am sure Dawkins is a fairly wealthy man and lives in a place where that choice does not have to be made; many Muslim parents in the UK are not so lucky.

The best version of this story is this one from the New Zealand Herald. What it makes clear is that the leading hospital in Saudi Arabia, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, said it couldn’t be done and wasn’t ethical according to the Saudi newspaper Okaz. Whether any other hospital will do it remains to be seen. Cutting through people’s spinal cords isn’t exactly what doctors do every day but the surgery has its uses — people with spinal cord injuries often experience spasms, and if you cut below the level of an existing injury, it can relieve that problem. A lot of doctors will consider that deliberately paralysing a healthy man, even in these circumstances, is against the oath they took when they became doctors.

As brother Abu Eesa points out here (and here), the norm is for the judge to really beg the victim’s family to pardon the assailant or accept financial compensation. In addition, if it is not possible to replicate the exact injury, then retaliation is no longer an option and financial compensation is what is appropriate, and this is particularly true with internal injuries. It is virtually impossible to replicate the effects of one spinal cord injury upon another person, particularly if the injury is incomplete, because everyone’s nervous system is slightly different.

But depending on where the injury happens, even a complete injury can have very different effects from person to person. The C4 area (the fourth vertebra down in the neck), for example, is one where there is a great deal of variation: some may have some arm function, enough to steer their wheelchair (invariably a powered one), feed themselves or drive; others have no arm function at all. Some with a C6 injury will be able to look after themselves entirely, others will need someone to help wash and dress them, and so on. Spinal cord injuries also often lead to complications, and they will be different from person to person (some will become incontinent, others over-continent and needing to use a catheter, for example). These are, I imagine, impossible to replicate.

So, despite this story grossing out a lot of people and becoming another excuse for people to call Islamic law barbaric (much as happens every time an obscure scholar from the Saudi interior issues a bizarre fatwa), there is a strong chance that the punishment won’t in fact happen at all. What has been reported is that the victim has demanded it — two years after the event, and after his assailant has already done jail time — and that the judge has investigated the possibility, but that’s not the same thing as a man already having been paralysed.

However, I am always most keen to see my referrer lists, to see who’s linking to my site, and lately I’ve noticed that these statistics are being filled up with sites which obviously have nothing to do with mine and had no reason to link to it. The past few months I’ve noticed that most of the sites which appear in my referrer lists (i.e. the lists of where people had supposedly found the link to my site and clicked it) are the same kind of sites which commonly appear in email spam, i.e. a lot of sites advertising stuff, and particularly dodgy and sleazy stuff.

I hope the people behind Awstats (the stats program my web host uses) find a way of distinguishing fake referrals from real ones, because my lists are becoming next to useless. My lists are private, but a lot of people make their stats public and I guess that’s the problem: it’s a way for these sites to get free advertising, up their Google ratings and so on. Surely those who develop public stats display software should employ spam filtering or Nofollow, so that there is no motivation to post false referrals.

I don’t doubt that the average GP sees plenty of patients with niggling problems (including fatigue and pain) which may well be the result of having anxieties or an unsatisfying life, probably far more than they see of actual cases of ME. Recently a book was published, Confessions of a GP by Dr Benjamin Daniels, a pseudonymous GP working in the British NHS, in which there was a chapter called “Shit Life Syndrome”, about a single mother living in a smoke-filled council house with three children, diagnosed with fibromyalgia and who kept begging him for something to treat her pain. Daniels is convinced that fibromyalgia is a dustbin diagnosis and says he has never seen a case of it which wasn’t connected to having a crappy life. Ultimately, this woman got a prescription of morphine from another doctor at the practice. Daniels didn’t mention ME in his book (as far as I could tell), but it begs the question of whether he can distinguish “shit life syndrome” from M.E. Many patients who really have M.E. didn’t have shit lives before they had M.E., but medical staff used every means at their disposal to put their condition down to school phobia, bullying, sexual abuse and pretty much any other non-medical problem, and to force them to admit that they weren’t ill.

I recently brought up ME in a discussion on the Muslim forum DeenPort, in the context of a discussion on some formerly high-profile Muslim bloggers leaving Islam. I mentioned that, if a friend seems to have dropped off the face of the earth, they might actually be ill rather than just not want to come to the mosque anymore, and mentioned ME since it was my particular interest and because it can take someone out of circulation for years. I mentioned that a Muslim lady I used to know through online forums had told me she had ME herself (a mild case of it) and had not received much sympathy from the community, including from a Muslim female GP. A doctor named Mushtaqur Rahman responded:

It’s an ill-defined condition and it is important to know this as people want to have a physical diagnosis. We get people with chronic fatigue syndrome looking for an endocrine diagnosis and there is usually no endocrine problem. Often people don’t want to accept a psychological approach to their condition, but of course a physical cause needs to be ruled out. I don’t get involved once there is no endocrine disorder.

The name Myalgic Encephalomyelitis suggests that it’s principally a neurological disorder, not an endocrine one, although research suggests that it’s caused by an auto-immune reaction to a viral infection. CFS may be an ill-defined condition but ME certainly isn’t (it was defined in the UK and by the WHO long before the notion of “chronic fatigue syndrome” became known of in the 1980s), and it’s disturbing that doctors don’t know the difference as someone’s — possibly a child’s — long-term health can depend on it. If someone presents with an acute case of ME, it’s vital that their doctor knows what is up, because advice to “keep active” can result in a drastic deterioration that at worst can lead to a patient becoming bedridden, quadriplegic or both within a matter of months.

But even if it were psychological, it wouldn’t justify the brutality meted out to those suffering from it. One might consider the story of the Kuomintang General’s Daughter in a book called The Good Women of China by former radio presenter Xinran, published in 2003. The general’s daughter, who had been left on the mainland after her father fled to Taiwan during the civil war, was tormented and repeatedly raped after villagers worked out that the man sheltering her could not be her real father, and when she revealed who, and where, her real father was, the entire family was persecuted. When Xinran encountered her, she was catatonic and unresponsive. I have heard of a woman from Zimbabwe, who witnessed horrific things during the Rhodesian period, spending decades in a similar state. A psychological state resulting in total paralysis, or a condition like that exhibited by Lynn Gilderdale in mid-1992, could not be from anything trivial, so how does any psychological theory justify such brutality as Lynn, Ean Proctor, Sophia Mirza and others encountered? On the other hand, while ample testimony about Lynn Gilderdale, for example, shows that she very much enjoyed life (and school) before she was ill and that people with ME are not just malingerers who cannot deal with life, where does that leave those who do have difficulties at school, or are in a difficult marriage, or have suffered some trauma or other, and coincidentally get ME?

The proof that ME is not psychological has been ample all along. The illness was just not that common until the 1980s, but as Jane Colby wrote in ME: The New Plague in 1996:

How is it we could think that pain and severe disability is such a desirable state to be in that thousands of children all over the country would choose, quite independently of one another, to invent it? How could sane adults imagine that children want to sit in a wheelchair when they might be running around with their friends?

She also notes that the symptoms of ME are quite recognisable to those familiar with polio and particularly the post-polio symptoms which are now blighting the lives of recovered polio sufferers from the 1950s (Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are famous examples). The viruses detected in the bodies of those who fell victims to past outbreaks of ME were enteroviruses, related to polio, and this persists in a fairly large percentage of ME sufferers today. Dr Benjamin Daniels suggests that one day some virus might be found to be the real cause of fibromyalgia or “shit life syndrome”, but would doctors even believe it? Reading this made me think that he had finally admitted that the sky was blue, since that has been quite obvious for a long time as well. I never had any doubt about the subject since seeing Lynn Gilderdale on Frontline in 1993, and had I ever darkened the door of a medical school, would have asked anyone who tried to tell me otherwise about how such a condition could be psychological.

(I’m not sure how significant this is as regards the Daily Mail itself; how much has Dr Scurr written on ME before this admission? The Mail has vacillated on the subject, sometimes printing highly sympathetic articles about the Gilderdales and Sophia Mirza and at other times running phone polls asking “is ME real?” and headlines about “yuppie flu” (on an article about Lynn Gilderdale, no less). I do not actually think the Mail cares about whether it’s real or not. It remains a source of crass headlines and touching human interest stories about “their kind of people”: middle-class white people and particularly women. If the Gilderdales had been black and lived on a council flat in south London, it’s quite unlikely that the Mail would have run any stories about them at all.)