Baroness (Syeeda) Warsi recently said in an interview with the Guardian that Muslim extremists such as Anjem Choudhary, who led the group which was threatening to outrage the public with a counter-demonstration on Remembrance Sunday until it was banned late last week, forfeited the right to call themselves Muslims. Her reasoning is pretty extraordinary: in a video interview with John Harris, she says:

From the Islam that I have been taught, and grown up with … and most people have been bought up with, it has to be rationed, reasoned, contextualised. Now if you detach reason from religion, then you are no longer a follower of that faith. If you are a follower of a religion that is so clear in its support of humanity [and you behave the way they do] then you are no longer part of that faith.

Asked specifically about Choudhary, she alleged that “nothing about the way they conduct themselves is in accordance with the teachings” and that “the minute they detach reason from religion, they’re not part of that faith any more”.

It is actually pretty dangerous for a Muslim to be issuing statements that clearly imply that someone who identifies as a Muslim in fact is not (known as takfir). There are pretty strict criteria for exclusion from Islam, such as expressing a belief which is contrary to what is well-known about Islam (whether in relation to law or doctrine) or showing clear contempt for Islam (such as by defiling a copy of the Qur’an or insulting any Prophet). There are certain sects which are held not to be Muslim despite their identifying as such and having a superficially Islamic culture or using Islamic language, because their beliefs are incompatible. The American-based group which calls itself the Nation of Islam is the best-known of these in the West.

Crucially, sins do not nullify one’s Islam, unless you deny that something well-known to be a sin is a sin. This does not include things on which there is any dispute about them being forbidden, even if only a small minority regards it as permitted. Making unusual or invalid excuses for a sin also does not constitute disbelief: one common example is justifying killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that all Israelis are soldiers, or justifying killing anyone associated with the army of any contemporary Muslim country on the grounds that they support a non-Islamic government. The early Muslims had to deal with a sect called the Kharijites, some of whom proclaimed anyone who disagreed with them on very minute matters to be an unbeliever and slaughtered them in their thousands. Yet, they did not call the Kharijites unbelievers.

When murder does not put someone outside of Islam, one can easily deduce that hurting people’s feelings by making a noise on Remembrance Sunday does not either. It is not even a sin as such, it is simply bad manners and politically naive, assuming that they were not actually intending to attract negative attention to the community as they did with their demonstration against the Royal Anglian regiment parade in Luton in 2009, which did immense damage by prompting the founding of the English Defence League. Some Muslims certainly suspect that they do their publicity stunts for ulterior motives and may in fact intend harm, but it is also possible that they intend to provoke a conflict in which Muslims will be forced to take sides and which they presume will lead to their victory and domination, or that of a group very much like them. A dishonourable intention, as most Muslims do not want to live under their rule, but not something which, on the face of it, stops them being Muslims.

Takfir is something that is by turn condemned and encouraged: a few years ago it was being presented as the root of the entire extremism problem in the Muslim world, and Muslims everywhere were encouraged to sign the “Amman message”, which declared that members of several named sects were, at least, Muslims and could not be called otherwise (some scholars refused to sign it, among them Mufti Taqi Uthmani). However, when the takfir is against the extremists themselves (and against those who cause embarrassment to the Muslim community), some people are only too keen to call them unbelievers. The fact remains that the criteria are extremely strict, and usually it is up to scholars, not ordinary Muslims, however famous or politically influential they are.

Image source: Wikipedia.

David Cameron gave a speech today in which he claimed that, while reducing the budget deficit was his duty, his so-called Big Society was his “passion” and that one part of this would be a “Big Society bank” to fund charitable projects. However, charity representatives are saying that his government’s spending cuts are forcing the reduction of existing voluntary activities, with charities making some workers redundant. The new “bank” will use £100m from dormant bank accounts and £200m from the Project Merlin deal to “support working capital projects approved by the government”.

What isn’t being discussed here is the matter of infrastructure. Voluntary means two things: work being done for nothing, and work being funded by people’s donations rather than from taxes. Given that the government is raising taxes, particularly VAT and fuel, while cutting public spending, which is likely to mean people being made redundant, the amount of money charities will be able to raise from people (other than the already very wealthy) is going to be more limited, and this will be more true for small, local projects.

As there will be more people out of work, there are likely to be more people available for voluntary activities. However, if the government cuts grants to local councils, and local councils can raise less money because there are fewer workers, the infrastructure the voluntary work relies on is not going to be there. Here in Kingston, for example, the council proposes to “cut £250,000 from its care budget by targeting services it has no legal duty to run”, which will mean closing four centres which provide services to the elderly and disabled, including two here in New Malden. If the council no longer provides these services, perhaps it will be left to volunteers or a charity — but where are they going to operate if the buildings have been sold off to property developers, as has been proposed for the centre here in New Malden? Once these buildings are sold and very likely demolished, they will not be coming back.

I’ve worked out of one of these centres, driving mentally disabled adults from their homes and care homes to that building and out to various leisure activities around south-west London. Now, work may be free, but vehicles aren’t (unless donated) and maintenance isn’t, and fuel certainly isn’t in the present climate, something the government is making worse by staging three duty increases in a few months at a time when the price of fuel has climbed to a record high, after a poor Christmas retail period when the country is just struggling to come out of a recession.

In short, voluntary work costs money, and if the government wants to take money out of our pockets and the general economy then there will be a whole lot less of it. It looks to me like nothing more than an empty slogan, intended to soften us up to the fact that we will have to pay the state more yet expect less of it, particularly if we very much need the services it provides.

Image source: ICTeachers.

Paul Burstow’s response included the following:

I want to stress that it is a neurological illness; it is not a mental health problem. I know that that suggestion causes great concern-and, campaigned vociferously against it. The strength of many people’s reaction to that label says a lot about the stigma that is still attached to mental illness, and about the attitudes of health professionals towards it. We seek to tackle those two problems in the mental health strategy that the Government have published today.

This seems to shift the blame for the stigma onto the ME sufferer who wants their disease to be seen as what it is, a physical neurological illness. If it is treated as a mental illness, their physical suffering will be overlooked and they may well suffer from the misguided mental health-oriented treatments that proved so damaging for so long. Their insights into their condition, as well as their judgement, may be called into question. It is not simply a case of ill people being offended at being perceived as crazy because they have a prejudice against the mentally ill, although people generally object to being classified as something they are not, whether that may have placed them in a more or less privileged position, which is why South African Black people who appeared white due to albinism sought to be classified as Black, so they would not be separated from their families and forced to live with strangers who were of totally different culture from themselves, notwithstanding the very distinct advantages of being classified as White under Apartheid.

Burstow then drew attention to the recent allocation of £1.5m by the Medical Research Council (MRC) into research on “CFS/ME”, but as noted in Osler’s Web, an allocation of money does not guarantee valuable research, or indeed any (similar sums were allocated in the USA for research into “CFS” but the money was mostly frittered away). It is noted (as by Invest in ME) that five of the six areas to be identified as “priority areas” (autonomic dysfunction, cognitive symptoms, fatigue, immune problems, pain management and sleep disorders) are related to symptoms, not possible causes, and bio-medical research into what causes (and therefore what could cure or even prevent) ME has not progressed much since the 1980s. Of course, symptom relief, and especially pain relief, would be more than welcome — the inadequacy of currently available long-term pain relief is well-known, and not just in the world of ME — but as a sufferer blogged yesterday, “people who have true neurological M.E … want the biomedical research, not plasters to cover over the cut”.

Burstow also said that the government would continue using the supposed WHO classification “CFS/ME”, when in fact a brief perusal of the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases reveals that CFS simply does not appear in it anywhere. ME is actually classified as Benign Myalgic Encephalomyelitis under the category of Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome in the current version, but as Elizabeth Dowsett noted in her interview with Jane Colby for the latter’s 1996 book, ME: The New Plague, the illness is now known not to be benign (i.e. it can kill). The ICD simply does not recognise a disease called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — that is a name made up in the USA and its various definitions are not specific to ME, concentrating too heavily on prolonged fatigue and not enough on neurological disturbance and cognitive dysfunction, which was demonstrated in countless tests of different types on those affected by the epidemic in the USA in the 1980s. According to an American neurologist, Marshall Handleman, quoted in Osler’s Web, who had performed scans on a number of “CFS” patients including airline and air-force pilots who had become too impaired to continue their work:

Patients have a wide variety of cognitive problems. They may have acquired dyslexia with left parietal lobe involvement. They have paraphasias, using the wrong word — like ‘table’ for ‘train’. They can have dyscalculia [math problems], dysgraphia [writing problems], and disorientation. They have decreased acquisition of new language from left temporal and left occipital lobe involvement, and visual-spatial perceptual problems from right parietal lobe involvement. They have attentional deficits — they can’t concentrate for a period of time that allows them to program information into their memory. They’re not doing well on their jobs because they have injury to their memory mechanism.

After explaining their mood disorders, including panic attacks, he concluded:

I want them to change the name — stop with this ‘chronic fatigue’ crap. It does a great disservice to these people. Doctors associate this term with malingering, and doctors work hard; they don’t like malingerers. What I’m saying is that this is just an old-fashioned subacute viral encephalitis. Let’s call it what it is, and let’s deal with it!

Other medical experts who have studied ME in detail will say that it is a quite distinct illness; Dr Byron Hyde, interviewed here (the captions are in Swedish, but the interview is in English), says it is an acute-onset illness which causes a diffuse brain injury which can easily be seen on SPECT and PET brain scans, and that almost all the patients had major thyroid disease, often with measurable thyroid shrinkage (he uses the term “Chronic Fatigue Syndromes” to mean those who fell ill gradually, often due to a tumour or an arterial obstruction). A further distinct symptom of ME is post-exertional paralytic muscle weakness, described by Dr Melvin Ramsay who defined ME in the 1950s as the “sheet-anchor” of ME diagnosis, saying that “without it a diagnosis should not be made”. This is not only significant from a healthcare perspective but also in assessing someone for eligibility for benefits, as someone may appear capable of doing some kind of work while fairly inactive at home but may suffer a relapse from travelling or from long spells of activity, even if sitting down. Many ME sufferers (and others with less than obvious disabilities) have complained that the present assessment for Disability Living Allowance seems designed to exclude as many people as possible; if the aim is to get people off benefits, the government should at least be trying to find suitable work for them, which in the case of ME sufferers may well be very limited indeed, if there is indeed any.

There is another side-swipe at the patient community further into Burstow’s speech (in column 328WH):

The expert group can only achieve so much on its own and, if I may be blunt, there has been a history of fractiousness and fragmentation between different groups with an interest in the area. Often, it is easy to agree on what we do not like, but harder to agree on the common ground and what the course of action should be to change things. I understand the heightened emotions that are often articulated by constituents who suffer from the condition, and I have spoken about that to people in my surgery. However, we will not achieve anything if organisations do not work together and engage with one another to find common ground and build alliances.

From my observation of the patient community, it is actually fairly united and people are generally friendly to each other, regardless of whether someone belongs to AYME or the Tymes Trust or the 25% Group or whatever (or more than one of those). Broadly speaking, there is distrust of the leadership of Action for ME (AfME) and the Association of Young People with ME (AYME) — both of which were once very well-valued organisations — as they have drifted towards accepting a pro-establishment, fatigue-oriented view of what is and is not ME, towards denying that there is really such as thing as ME (despite their names) and towards promoting harmful, or at least ineffective, ‘therapies’. Some of the groups specifically represent sections of the ME community, such as children and young people (such as the Tymes Trust) or the severely affected (the 25% ME Group) and others are focussed on raising money for biomedical research (Invest in ME, ME Research UK), but there is no fragmented patient community with mutually hostile factions; it is a question of the leaderships of two particular groups being out of touch with much of the patient and carer community.

So, Burstow’s whole speech was a round-about way of saying that it’s business as usual, that there is no change in policy or commitment to research into the biomedical causes of ME; merely a lecture to the patient community to “get behind” them and stop fighting (which they are not doing). Bland statements about accepting that ME is a neurological illness (the DWP site already confirms that they regard it as physical and not psychological) will not convince doctors that it is, let alone that it is a distinct condition that does not require the elimination of several other conditions before a diagnosis can even be considered, nor protect suffering children from being removed from their families because social workers or doctors groundlessly suspect factitious illness, nor ensure that ME sufferers who are not obviously bedridden are not denied the benefits they need. His speech is a long-winded way of not saying very much.

David Cameron clearly capitalised on the sob story of his own son Ivan, who also had cerebral palsy and epilepsy (specifically Ohtahara syndrome), and died aged six in 2009. Cameron claimed that caring for Ivan “sharpened [his] focus on the world of care assessments, eligibility criteria, disability living allowance, respite breaks, OTs, SENCOs, and other sets of initials” but insisted that he was not a carer; “the work that full-time carers or those with little extra help do is unbelievable”. However, one can assume that the Camerons had the money to pay for outside care for Ivan, which is not always the case for parents on average incomes who have severely disabled children, or adult children. Caring for a relative full-time by necessity requires someone not to work outside the home if the relative is disabled in the same manner as Ivan or Celyn (if they are someone like Stephen Hawking, a carer could also assist them in their professional activities), which means a family is likely to be plunged into poverty by losing one earner to become a carer (particularly in this day and age, when more families have two earners). I must say that it is quite odd that there are significant differences in what care different types of severely disabled people can access; Victoria Brignell (a quadriplegic, with a spinal cord injury) is able to live on her own, funding personal care and assistance through NHS direct payments, while Kay Gilderdale, whose daughter Lynn was totally bedridden with severe ME, got very little assistance.

The last few years, politicians’ class has appeared to lose relevance, and the fact that someone went to a posh “public” school (“public” schools are élite private schools, not state schools as in the USA) and Oxford or Cambridge, or comes from an aristocratic family or is very rich is no longer something we are supposed to hold against them, even though it may put considerable distance between them and the realities facing ordinary families. There are a lot of politicians in the Conservative party who come from fairly ordinary backgrounds and went to state schools, but the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne spent most of their post-university careers in politics or in media (and in Tory-friendly media at that). Struggling to survive is not something either of them have had to deal with, and neither of them has ever run a business.

How will situations like this be resolved? Of course, the easy way for a politician to do it is for a short-term intervention to help this particular family, or others in more or less this exact situation, but which will not last very long, and the next time they are in need, the media will have some other business to attend to. The problem is that it takes a lot more money to care adequately for disabled people, particularly those with particularly severe disabilities, in care homes because their entire care needs to be funded, along with heating, lighting, cleaning etc. which would normally be covered under household expenses, as well as administration staff, along with infection control which is increasingly a problem in institutional, medical settings. So, leaving mothers like Riven Vincent to fend for themselves without help is a false economy, even before we consider the fact that institutional care is often demeaning, it separates the disabled from their families and friends, it makes them vulnerable to cruelty, the fact that staff may run the treatment for their own convenience and forget their individual needs (e.g. tube-feeding residents who take too long to eat). We should also not forget that all the facilities which used to house the severely disabled long-term have been destroyed or sold off; if this kind of care is to become popular again, new buildings will have to be built. Properly funding home care looks like an increasingly attractive option.

The reason carers often find themselves in the situation of Riven Vincent is essentially that long-term care has nothing like the headline potential that acute care and matters like the provision of cancer drugs do; we commonly see media campaigns when the healthcare regulator blocks a drug which can extend a cancer patient’s life by a few months, but it is rare that this issue makes headlines. Those with disabilities are not always as able to mobilise as able-bodied young people (like students) are, particularly those with long-term debilitating illnesses like ME, and even so, recent experience shows that public demonstrations often have no political effect. This visibility gap was, of course, well in place before the present Lib-Con coalition took power, but it is already known that maintaining disabled people’s standards of living, regardless of their ability to work (or find an accessible workplace), is much less of a priority to this government than cutting the deficit — and making the ideologically-driven cuts for which the deficit provides a handy excuse.

I have nothing against undercover journalists per se — of course, exposing wrongdoing is important, but this was not a matter of exposing wrongdoing but rather manufacturing a story. The bond between an MP and his constituents is supposed to be the cornerstone of our electoral system, and is supposedly the reason why it is superior to proportional voting systems involving multi-member constituencies. Whether the two women really were constituents as well as reporters is immaterial; they may deter any MP with a ministerial post or ministerial ambitions from holding surgeries for fear that anything he says may be used against him. Perhaps some may stop holding them, or demand proof that the attendees are actually constituents.

Because of this false scandal, yet another thing those who voted Lib Dem hoped they might achieve — restraining the power of the less-than-a-handful of media barons who regularly hold the government (regardless of which party is in power) to ransom — slips away. Of course, Murdoch is a competitor to the Telegraph, but it hardly matters; the right-wing corporate press is that much more powerful. One must ask what political designs motivate the Telegraph, a historically Tory paper, to post this; perhaps they intend to force the coalition apart, forcing an election which might cause the Lib Dem vote to collapse.

Image source: Wikipedia.

The group’s chief executive, one Donal Blaney, has said, “we have been described as a Conservative madrasa, so we bring the next generation out to the States and bring them back radicalised”. Whether this is said by the group’s enemies or its leaders, I find the comparison to Muslim madrasas offensive. Madrasa is simply Arabic for school, and as used outside the Arabic-speaking world, it means any place of Islamic religious education, regardless of the political or sectarian stripe of the people running it. It does not usually mean an extremist training camp of the sort found in some parts of Pakistan; it usually just means a Sunday school where children (or adults, for that matter) are taught to recite the Qur’an and how to pray.

They are using this term in a similar way to how gangsters use al-Qa’ida imagery to make themselves look hard, but they are appropriate a term which scares others but is neutral or positive to us. If they want to call themselves a Tory radicals’ training camp, much as one offshoot of the Countryside Alliance, formed to defend fox-hunting, called itself the “Real CA” (as in Real IRA), that’s their business, but let them use a term which means what they are trying to say.

Some people have a fascination with bastards. I remember the letters which appeared in the Croydon Advertiser attacking single mothers with bastard children who live on benefits. However, in this day and age, there are rather a lot of people who were born out of wedlock to parents who just lived together, and that MP probably offended a huge percentage of his audience. He lost handily to the woman he insulted.

I don’t know why he thought he could get away with those outrageous remarks. Perhaps he believed he would lose anyway (some cabinet ministers actually lost their seats in 1997, and one of them had said she expected to lose her seat), or really did think that his seat was safe and that he could say what he liked. However, in the past week we’ve seen two provincial Tory MPs make inflammatory remarks about Muslims. One element to this might surprise readers: only one of the controversies involves women.

Bilal Khan is a teenage boy who attacked and raped a woman in Stoke-on-Trent (report here; the Daily Mail is the best I could find, I’m afraid). He attacked the woman in a park in front of two boys, aged 10 and 11, who shouted to him to stop. He then stole the woman’s handbag, took a call on her mobile phone from her boyfriend and bragged to him about what he had done, and subsequently sold the phone and the woman’s iPod. He got three years because of his age (an adult would have got eight or nine) and because of the “remorse” he had shown.

Personally, I think that is a miserably short sentence for a violent rape. Readers might recall that the so-called M25 Rapist, Antoni Imiela, called the mother of one of his victims on her stolen mobile phone and bragged that he had just raped her daughter. If this guy is already that twisted at 13 (and remember, we are not talking about someone getting involved in a gang robbery because he couldn’t resist peer pressure, or about an assault committed in anger, or about a sexual encounter where there is a dispute over consent, but about an unambiguous, violent rape), then he really needs sorting out and I’m not sure a three-year sentence, of which he is unlikely to serve all or even most, is the way to do it.

What led to him becoming a rapist is not clear. However, David Davies, Tory MP for Monmouth, suggested that attitudes to women in his Asian background might have had something to do with it:

The MP said the sentence was inadequate, adding: “I think there is a wider question here - what is it about this young man’s upbringing, what about his community or his parental upbringing that led him to think that women are second-class people whose rights can be trampled over like this?”

The Monmouth MP added: “There are some sensitive issues here, but there do seem to be some people in some communities who don’t respect women’s rights at all, and who, if I may say, without necessarily saying that this is the case on this occasion, who have imported into this country barbaric and medieval views about women, and that is something that needs to be addressed.”

More here at the South Wales Argus.

Clearly, Davies has not done much homework with regard to Muslim attitudes to rape, specifically. It’s true that there are some negative attitudes to women in Asian communities (not just among Muslims), but they affect women in their family relations. It does not mean that Muslims, or Asians, think it is acceptable to attack a woman in a park and rape her. It is more likely that he is getting these kinds of ideas from certain elements in hip-hop and “gangsta” culture which has permeated the Asian community in some places. Any Asian family would be deeply ashamed of a son who had done that sort of thing.

The Argus editorial stated:

He may well not like the attitudes towards women within certain communities and he is free to say so. Many may echo those views.

But to air those views in connection with the crime of rape is the kind of distortion we would expect from the BNP, not a responsible mainstream politician.

He needs to apologise for his verbal clumsiness.

It’s more than just “verbal clumsiness”; it’s profound ignorance and bigotry. Michael Howard had an MP de-selected before the 2005 general election for suggesting that a Tory government could slash public spending by a considerable margin; surely David Cameron should do the same here, unless he wants the party to be characterised by bigoted loose cannons.

Then we get back to the more normal media Islamophobia: attacks on women and their mode of dress. Tory MP for Kettering, Richard Hollobone, made his own broadside against immigration before focussing on the specific matter of the so-called burqa. Again, nobody to my knowledge wears the burqa, but that doesn’t stop it being used as if it meant any face-covering veil. From Hansard, the record of the British Parliament (via Engage):

Mr. Hollobone: The problem is the scale of the immigration-the number of people heading our way-and it is going to overwhelm our indigenous culture in ways that are frankly unacceptable.

At the crude end of the debate, the problem is reflected in talk about the burqa. I must say that I have huge sympathy with those who want action taken against people who want to cover themselves up in public. How ridiculous would the House of Commons be if we were all to wear burqas? How would Mr. Speaker be able to identify which Member to call next?

Mr. Frank Field: The voters might prefer it. [Laughter.]

Mr. Hollobone: The voters might well prefer it, but it is the religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head with two holes for the eyes. In my view, it is offensive to want to cut yourself off from face-to-face contact with, or recognition by, other members of the human race. We should certainly look at ways to tackle that issue.

The fact is that, when Asian Muslims started coming to this country, most women from those backgrounds did not wear niqaab, burqa or any other form of the face veil. Most of those who wear it are younger women who started as a result of listening to some Islamic lecture or other, or reading about its religious merits in a book or on a website, or were influenced by female friends who wore it. It is still only a minority of the Muslim community who wear it anyway — there are a fair number of Muslim women who flatly refuse to wear it — and women have been wearing niqaab for years in this country without any major incident related to it. Most of the hostility which exists is manufactured by the press, and I accept that many people don’t like it, but we have to put up with an awful lot we just don’t like.

Having done a bit of Googling on the Muslim community in Kettering, it seems that the main (or only) mosque is run by Deobandis and that the New Muslims group has a “salafi” leaning, so you may find a few niqabs around, but even most Deobandi women don’t actually wear niqab. But anyway, so what? Hollobone talks as if there is this great swarm of women in niqaab taking over the country, when what we really have is mostly peaceful people trying to get on with their lives the way they see fit, not harming anyone, and being vilified for it in the popular press.

I’m sure Hollobone can talk about a group of his constituents like this because he knows they will not vote for him. After all, why vote Tory when you get small-minded individuals like David Davies and Richard Hollowhead?

It appears that the Tories overlooked a number of things while criticising state funding for two schools supposedly linked to Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Slough and north London:

The most obvious mistake was the allegation that they appeared not to have been registered or inspected.

In fact, one of the two schools – in Slough, Berkshire – had posted a glowing commendation from Ofsted on its website. The report was easily accessible by Googling the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation, and its veracity could be confirmed with Ofsted.

It praised the school for its “broad and balanced curriculum” and for its commitment to the “spiritual, moral, social and cultural development” of its 55 four- to 10-year-old pupils.

The second error, over the allegation that state finance from a fund designed to combat terrorism was being channelled into an extremist school dedicated to the overthrow of Western culture, was perhaps more serious.

The waters here were slightly muddier, although the Conservatives were mistaken again. Money from a government fund was paid to both schools – the second is in Haringey, north London – but the £113,000 concerned came from a fund designed to promote nursery education and distributed by local councils; the fund just happened to have the same name, Pathfinder, as the anti-terrorist fund.

As for the links with HT, the head teacher of the Slough school said she was not a member, while the proprietor, whose husband is a member, has resigned as a trustee. Of course, a “member” of HT is not just an ordinary activist; you don’t become a member until you have been known to them for a long time. However, the measure of such a school shouldn’t be whether the school’s board of governors has one or two members of HT on it, but who they employ and what they teach.

However, the reason the Tories put their foot in it on this issue isn’t really explained in that article. The reason seems to be that they saw an opportunity to attack HT, or a group of Muslims with views too radical for their liking, and took it without letting the facts get in the way.

While he was capable of turning pretty much anything into an excuse for a political speech, the issues that particularly got his goat were the lesbians (Beth Jordache and her succession of girlfriends) and the introduction of wheelie-bins to the Close. Fifteen years later, the Daily Mail have scored a first, getting a fictional character — from a long-dead soap at that — to guest-edit, bringing Bing’s wheelie-bin campaign to the front page:

The Daily Mail today launches the Not In My Front Yard campaign, to spearhead the fightback against wheelie bins.

It comes amid growing fury at the plastic monstrosities blighting our streets and gardens.

All across the country, people find their councils steamrolling through unwanted changes to rubbish collections.

Now the Mail is calling on town halls to let council tax payers choose between wheelie bins, ordinary dustbins or biodegradeable bags.

The Mail does, of course, blame ‘elf-n-safety for the spread of wheelie-bins, but somehow fails to grasp why that matters. I’m the first to admit that health & safety is sometimes enforced much more stringently than it needs to be in this country, but there are very good reasons for these bins. For one thing, they wheel rather than having to be carried; they can also be picked up mechanically by a rubbish truck and the contents emptied without the staff having to touch it. This makes it possible to do the job more quickly and efficiently, but most importantly, it relieves the staff of having to pick up dozens of heavy rubbish bins every day, which is bad for the back. This may come as a surprise to those who no longer have to pick up and push a pen across a page since the introduction of the computer, but surely it means a lot to the poor bin-men. Edward Heathcoat-Amory, Mail columnist and nephew of the Tory MP for Wells in Somerset, gives a few examples of ‘elf-n-safety stupidity even after the wheelie-bins have been introduced, but the fact remains that moving a wheelie-bin to a truck is easier on the back than carrying it and then up-ending it yourself, and you are less likely to get some of the rubbish blown back into your face.

They quote the head of the “Harlow Pensioners Action Association” as saying:

‘The town is simply not built for them - and yet we are all going to get three.

‘In a lot of places there are steps up to buildings and it’s going to be hard for elderly people to push them. Some of my members are only as tall as the wheelie bins - how are they going to move them when they are full?’

The claim about the heights of his members seems like a porky-pie to me. I’m 6ft tall and our wheelie-bins come to only waist height on me (and my legs aren’t that long). I don’t doubt that some elderly people would have difficulty moving them around, but surely they would have difficulty moving a full dustbin, which is round and has no wheels, around as well. Perhaps the residents can club together so that the stronger residents can take turns to put the bins out. However, none of these people has to handle the things more than once or twice a week. The bin-men would otherwise have to pick up several full bins a day.

Apparently, wheelie-bins are a blot on the landscape too, especially in the lovely English countryside:

Art historian Sir Roy Strong said: ‘Hasn’t anybody talked to a designer about these things? They are awful and they’re multiplying like rabbits. It is total thoughtlessness.’

Broadcaster Stefan Buczacki, former presenter of BBC2’s Gardener’s World, has four wheelie bins in his Warwickshire garden.

‘We have a pretty big garden so we can hide them,’ he said. ‘But there are other cottages in our village with these things and they are a blot on our countryside.’

As if dustbins were ever pretty? They are squat plastic things, and people generally do not bother to dust them as they are there to hold rubbish, and they store them out of sight and mind, which means they get ugly and dirty on the outside even if they were made of clean, shiny plastic to start with. They were always meant to be utilitarian, not decorative. Metal dustbins (try getting your Nana to shift one of them) are also noisy, particularly if they have metal lids. Dustbins can also fall over when they are empty, whereupon they roll around and, if left in the road for a bin-man to collect (or as a makeshift traffic cone to stop anyone else taking your parking space), can get in the way of an oncoming car or cyclist. Wheelie-bins are not round, and if they fall over, they can’t roll.

The petty-mindedness of this stupid campaign is mind-boggling. Wheelie-bins are practical, they are easier to move around and don’t have to be lifted up; they look no more ugly than dustbins, and the only thing to dislike is that they are new. We all know that the Mail loves to protect everything British, but there really was never any such thing as the great British dustbin.

(More discussion at MailWatch.)

This is at least the second time that the antics of al-Muhajiroun have led to a campaign to ban whatever they are doing - the law banning people from “glorifying” terrorism was in direct response to their post-9/11 press conferences in which they crowed about the “magnificent” attacks on the World Trade Centre. Their strength then was barely more than it is now, and yet laws are framed which affect all of us just to stop a few dozen loud-mouths whose ravings are amplified by a press which, while feigning hostility to them, actually loves the money they bring in.

I do not believe that these protests are equivalent to inciting hatred for people based on religion or race, anyway. Racial and religious hatred is what communal riots and mass murder, rape and general destruction is based on; a few strong words aimed at soldiers on parade in a public place is not in the same league at all. In any case, if our soldiers had really been involved in an atrocity - if something like Abu Ghraib had been British soldiers’ responsibility rather than Americans’ - then public anger, particularly from any community connected in some way to the victims, would be quite understandable. If the soldiers had been returning from Sierra Leone or Bosnia, suffice to say that there would have been no protest, but how many regiments were taken on a parade through a town centre after coming back from either of those places, when a heroes’ welcome might have been more appropriate?

It is depressing that we see reactive legislation, or attempts at it, in response to vexatious antics by loud-mouths such as Anjem Choudhary and his gang, who should have been denied the oxygen of publicity years ago rather than being dignified with bills in parliament in response. I notice that there have been few prosecutions for inciting hatred based on religion, despite the flood of Muslim-bashing headlines from the Daily Express, which a lot of Muslims, including myself, find more worrying than the rantings of delinquent BNP activists. Why do people cry “ban it” every time an annoying public demonstration is reported on the news? Why does freedom of speech mean so little to us? This could never happen in the USA, where the First Amendment would make it not worth discussing unless real harm could happen as a direct result.

Mr Davies’s voting record is interesting - very strongly against ID cards, generally against Labour anti-terrorist laws, and in favour of an investigation into the causes of the Iraq war; his position, as expressed in the BBC news report, is that any protest should be directed at Parliament and not at the soldiers themselves. I wonder if he sees the irony in voting in favour of civil-libertarian causes but proposing a law telling us how we should talk about soldiers in their presence? This is exactly the kind of law used by dictatorships and pseudo-democracies like Turkey to ban criticism of the military. There would be some justification if abusive or violent demonstrations at such events were a known problem (and even then, police action to keep them away would be a better idea), but this is one incident involving a small number of people, and a law banning such demonstrations is a disproportionate response.