At the tail end of the last millennium, before blogs and definitely before social media, there was a book published called Web Pages That Suck, a guide to badly-designed web pages aimed at people who want to design good websites. The author, Vincent Flanders, turned the concept into a website which he continued updating until 2015; the site now has clearly been abandoned, with lots of missing image markers and ads in every in-between space. Bad web pages were often full of animations and other material which distracted from the actual content, or the product someone was trying to sell. One website that really did suck was MySpace, an early social media contender, principally aimed at musicians (it allowed people to upload music for download) but used by lots of others as a networking site. It allowed users to make their pages as over-the-top as they liked and pages often had animations that made the text illegible and which took several minutes to load. It was taken over by Microsoft, which didn’t improve those matters until it was too late, and made it unfashionable in the era of the infamous bug-ridden Windows XP and processor-hogging Vista. It was crying out to be replaced and when Facebook came along, it was swiftly abandoned.

Last year a book was published by Cory Doctorow, former co-editor of Boing Boing and long-time advocate for online freedom as part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Open Rights Group, titled Enshittification (edited extract here; you can order the book from their bookshop). This book was a thesis about how online services that were (or appeared) good to begin with go bad as their owners try to monetise them. In the early days, the owners portray themselves as freedom-loving in contrast to their competitors (like Microsoft and MySpace) and offer exceptionally good deals to consumers by undercutting existing companies using their venture capital, but then betray their users by selling their data to commercial customers, then betray the latter by making it more and more difficult to sell their products and publications, imposing onerous fees, limiting the reach of content and punishing them if they link to their own websites. The good deals end, the prices go up, the customer service and quality go down. Ultimately, you end up with a platform offering little other than garbage, surviving only because it is difficult for people to move as all their friends are on the site, or because they have bought a lot of music, video or literature which is locked to the apps, or because the competitors have been put out of business. He contends that “ultimately, they die”, but the principal enshittified web services have survived a lot longer than the sites, which included a fair few stinkers like MySpace, that they replaced. (Amazon does provide some value; its Prime membership offers include some films and music, and its returns system is better than a lot of the competition, but the deterioration of the goods on offer is undeniable.)

I’ve been online since 1995, when public access to the net was quite new, and I’ve been blogging since 2004, so I’ve seen how the Internet has developed. Search has changed from a number of competing engines like Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo and others to just Google and the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo, neither of which existed in 1995. Early Google, in the late 90s, was just so good that it rapidly put most of the early contenders out of business; Yahoo survived because it took over a number of other services, although some have since been sold, such as Flickr; in the drive to monetise the services, paid content comes first after a useless AI-based summary. Social networking and interaction were provided by email lists and the Usenet newsgroup system; in the early 2000s, and particularly following 9/11, blogs grew more prominent. Finally, in the late 2000s, social media and what was then called ‘microblogging’ exploded, including Twitter and Facebook. Other sites existed back then; the Twitter protocol was used by rivals StatusNet and Identi.ca, neither of which still exist, while Facebook had competitors like Bebo, which was sold to AOL in a much-derided $850 million deal that cost the latter’s CEO his job and is now defunct, although it has been relaunched and then closed down again since 2013. Google made several attempts to launch microblogging and social media apps, none of which still operate. I wrote about Google Plus when it first launched, but Google strangled it at birth by not including functionality which Facebook had, or which Facebook had removed and which users might like. It had no group functionality, apart from anything else.

The thing is, Facebook was always horrible. It both sucked as a service, and was evil. It grew because of the disadvantages of the existing social media options: it wasn’t MySpace with its slow animations and legibility-destroying backdrops, it made it easy to share personal content without having to set up a blog, and it has mostly been free of spam, which was the bane of anyone who ran a blog which allowed user comments before 2007. The downsides were that features changed all the time, with valued functionality removed (such as the discussion forums within the group system) or senselessly changed (such as merging mail with chat), as I mentioned in that article on G+. Worse, earlier versions of FB had a ‘ticker’ feature which told all your friends if you made a comment on any post or group which was not private. I used to call this feature Snitchbooking. This was a large part of what makes Facebook actually evil rather than just bad: old social media consisted of email groups and forums about specific subjects, and if you posted on one, it didn’t appear on any other. Here, all your friends were on the same platform and you couldn’t keep groups of friends separate anymore. On most of the old sites, you could use a handle or pseudonym; Facebook demands that you use your real name.

Back in 2008 when Facebook was in its infancy and blogs were still popular, I spoke at a Muslim community event called “Wired Warriors” in London and put my view forward that there was going to be a “blog crunch”: that the blogosphere was heavily dependent on corporate off-cuts and long-shot business models, such things as offering the principal service for free while charging for support that a lot of users would not need, and that this situation would not last very long as blog hosts would need to pay bills. In the event, some blogging sites have not succumbed to this; WordPress still offers a functional free version of their hosted blogging platform and Blogger is still going, though TypePad has closed, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company and Movable Type, a popular choice to run a blog in the 2000s with free and cheap personal plans, is now an expensive corporate product. However, a number of blogs disappeared in the move to social media and microblogging, as did a number of privately-hosted forums, and it’s those sites that have fallen victim to the crunch I predicted back in 2008: Twitter got markedly less useful as first Jack Dorsey and then Elon Musk sought to monetise it, restricting then blocking third-party clients and making ‘curated’ feeds the standard, while Facebook has undergone hyperenshittification — a shitty site getting even shittier — with friend and chosen-content feeds very difficult to find and the home feed being filled with promoted, often auto-generated slop, clickbait and churnalism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now branded X) has a default feed increasingly filled with racist and politically extremist content, driving a number of long-standing users to decamp to new, but underused, competitors such as BlueSky and Mastodon. On both sites, it has become difficult to promote blog articles, while many of the forums and email lists that previously allowed their promotion have closed.

Cory Doctorow gives some ideas as to how to de-enshittify the online world; these include unionising tech workers and strengthening anti-trust (competition regulation) laws so that one company cannot force competitors out of the market with subsidised undercutting or monopolise the supply chain. Sadly, the political climate right now is very much against any such legislative changes in many countries. Another legislative trend that makes resisting enshittification more difficult is the wave of online safety laws, requiring web service operators to impose age verification or police their services to ensure children are not exposed to ‘adult’ content. The motive is quite understandable, but it is precisely the large, established, enshittified service operators which have the resources to access this kind of technology, not those seeking to re-establish private forums or indeed new, open social media platforms, and this has led to some sites run on a shoestring to close, or to block users identifiable as being in the UK, Australia or other countries where such laws exist. One important way of reclaiming the online space is for a fund to be built up to buy out Twitter, either by an offer to its current owner or in the event of a distress sale. This would secure Twitter as a community resource and restore it to what it was before so much of its functionality was stripped away.

Is there a way back to what we had before social media swept it all away? Do we want those days back? Blogging was a lot more fun when people responded and there were lively discussions in the comment sections, but I also remember dealing with floods of spam and with Islamophobic comments; I don’t think I’ve had a single blog comment in a few years and I haven’t seen a lot of my old regulars for years now. For a while the discussion moved onto Facebook and Twitter and then it stopped altogether. Maybe people don’t read blogs anymore, but there are things you can’t say in a Twitter thread and we don’t want our writings to be stored on a social media site that might just choose to exclude us from it. When bloggers started shutting their sites down and moving onto Facebook around 2007, I had a sense that it wouldn’t end well and my fears were largely confirmed.

Sara Sharif

Today an independent review into the murder of an eight-year-old girl of mixed Pakistani and Polish parentage, Sara Sharif, was published. The review (PDF) by the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership (SCP), identified five particular failings, mostly by the court system, but also mistakes on the part of the local council which contributed to the failure to prevent the murder. These include the courts giving undue weight to the opinions of court-appointed guardians rather than social workers, a report compiled by an inexperienced social worker which meant a judge subsequently had insufficient information, a rushed response to a report of a bruise on Sara’s cheek which led to no action being taken, and failure to update records such as the Sharifs’ address. However, one section of it mentions that neighbours reported being “afraid of being called racist” and that visiting social workers did not ask why Sara was wearing hijab at home at age 8 when no older females were doing so, when the hijab was being worn to hide bruises and injuries to her head. These last points are, predictably, what racists have seized on.

To clarify, in Islam, hijab becomes compulsory for a girl at puberty. Some women don’t wear it, though, and you are more likely to find a girl wearing it before that time if her mother, aunts or other older female relatives wear it (and not in the family home in the presence of a female visitor, like the occupational therapist mentioned below). In the case of Sara Sharif’s family, they did not, and the type of hijab Sara was shown wearing in a police handout is one you would see on a girl from a more religious family whose relatives wore hijab. Social workers are familiar with make-up, face paints or food being used to cover bruises or injuries, but hijab is probably less common (and all the more so in a small Muslim community in an outer-suburban town like Woking). The visitor, as the report notes on page 20, was a newly-qualified occupational therapist, not a social worker at all. A social work department from an inner London borough or other district with a substantial Asian and/or Muslim population might have had a social worker from that background they could have sent on the visit, but the visit was not about Sara Sharif at all; rather, it was to support her father and stepmother in caring for their other children. It was noted that the OT “has reflected that she may have been reticent to talk about it for fear of causing offence”, but she was inexperienced, unaware that there was any history of Children’s Services involvement with the family and was visiting for reasons unconnected to Sara.

However, the Times’ headline writer puts it all down to the race aspect: “chances to prevent murder ‘lost to racial sensitivities’”, it proclaims, glossing over the fact that the report identifies failings that were nothing to do with “racial sensitivities” but consist of failure to share or act on information. Reform agitator Matt Goodwin goes even further in a Twitter post linking to the Times’ report:

Sara Sharif was murdered after officials failed to ask why she was wearing a hijab because “they didn’t want to offend”.

Exactly what happened with the rape gangs. Our culture is more interested in protecting minorities from “harm” than saving lives 

Again, she was an occupational therapist there to help the family, not an ‘official’, was inexperienced and not there to check on Sara. But more to the point, social workers and other staff not knowing enough about Asian or Muslim culture contributed more to this tragedy than any ‘sensitivity’: they did not realise that her wearing it in these particular circumstances was abnormal, and in some cases did not know about her family’s past, so did not know why it was not just abnormal but suspicious and that the “innocent explanation”, that she had been on a trip to Pakistan and was wearing it out of ‘pride’ in her culture and food, was likely to be spurious. 

The report also mentions that the family’s neighbours were interviewed; they said they had heard worrying things from within the family home but were reticent to share these with the authorities because they “feared being branded as being racist, especially on social media”. In the same paragraph on page 41, it quotes a work by the American academic Robin DiAngelo titled White Fragility, as if this was the reason the neighbours failed to report what they were hearing:

The Child Safeguarding Practice review panel report notes that ‘DiAngelo (2018) suggests that it is ‘white fragility’ – or a defensiveness – that is triggered when white individuals, even those who consider themselves to be progressive, encounter racial stress. This can result in individuals turning away from honest dialogue about racism, focusing instead on their own feelings of victimisation rather than on the person or people of colour who have been interpersonally and/or systemically harmed.’

Is that relevant here? The neighbours might have been looking for an explanation for why they failed to act. They are not held to professional standards; all they had to do was pick up the phone and let the police do the rest. White fragility is more relevant when a white person is accused of racism, or is told that an attitude they express is racist, or hears negative things said about their nation’s past and takes it personally.

One aspect of this report recalls the case of Ellie Butler, who was murdered by her father who had fought the local social services to get her and another child back, having been earlier accused of inflicting a shaking injury; the family courts sidelined the social workers who had tried to protect her, appointing a ‘consultancy’ to carry out any social work activity that involved the family, and sweeping away all the objections to returning a little girl to a plainly unstable and violent household. All the parties involved in that case were white. Much of the rest of this case consists of the usual problems of different official bodies, health, education, social work and courts, failing to share vital information. But the racists’ conclusion, that a girl died because “officials were too busy minding what they say about Muslims”, turns reality on its head: ignorance about Sara’s and her family’s religion and culture is what shielded them from any concerns about why Sara Sharif had started wearing the hijab at an age and in situations where Muslim girls do not. If they are given too much credence, the next tragedy could be because social workers were unwilling to be the ones learning about the cultures of the families and children they help, unwilling to be the goody-goody or even a traitor by defending an unpopular minority.

A thug takes a brick to the groin in last year’s racist riots.

A few years ago I saw someone say on Twitter that people would happily call each other feminazis or grammar Nazis, but would not call a Nazi a Nazi. In the past year or so since the Southport murders and the subsequent riots and since Donald Trump returned to office in the US and launched his war against legal and illegal immigrants, citizens and anyone else who “looks foreign”, racists have got increasingly strident in pretending that they are the ones who are in danger: the likes of Matt Goodwin have issued ‘warnings’ about the ‘dangers’ of calling people racists or “far right”, as it might lead to another politician or commentator being assassinated, as was Charlie Kirk last month (though the actual motives for that are unclear). Meanwhile, Muslims and others who march against the genocide in Gaza are branded as “antisemitic marchers”. I have noticed a climate in which it is considered unwise or dangerous to call people racists, and this has to be opposed.

The other day a video came up on my YouTube feed which was about the ten most unpleasant people in rock music. The eight men and two women were not the actual criminals — no Ian Watkins or Jim Gordon, for example — but mostly people who treated other musicians badly or who walked off stage or had fans ejected, for example. I noticed that one of those listed was a racist and another was known for exploiting young women, but neither of these facts was mentioned in the video as if being a racist was not something worth mentioning in that context. Did he think it would alienate some of his viewers, or does he sympathise with the views in question? I did point out that he’d left those details out, but he didn’t acknowledge or reply to my comment. Another case in point comes from the New Statesman at the end of September: an article instructing Labour activists, in the run-up to the Ellesmere Port by-election, not to call Nigel Farage racist because the “median voter” did not consider him to be; by doing so, Labour activists were scolding the voter and telling them they were wrong. A poll, sourced from “Merlin Strategies”, whoever they are, claims that even among current Labour voters, only 46% of voters considered Farage to be racist and among northerners, it was only 33%, with 47% disagreeing. The word ‘racist’ is generally considered derogatory, and someone who actually is a racist will generally not call themselves that; people “not considering Farage to be racist” thus includes those who agree with him as well as those who somehow, after hearing all he has had to say throughout his political career, continue to believe that he is not.

We are also seeing the racists and far-right in politics in the media increasingly playing the victim. The assassination of Charlie Kirk has given them additional licence to cast themselves as being the ones in danger, when in fact racism is what puts people in danger. Goodwin, two weeks ago, accused “the Left” of “[setting] the stage for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the murder of Charlie Kirk”, both of whom had enemies on the neo-Nazi far right as well as the Left and elsewhere; Kirk’s alleged assassin may well have been a ‘groyper’ although his motives have yet to be fully investigated. However, the historical facts are that while anti-racism may produce the odd assassination (often in the midst of intense racist violence, as with the assassinations of Ernst von Rath and Reinhard Heydrich, which provided pretexts for early Nazi atrocities), racism itself results in far greater levels of destruction and death than anti-racism, or false accusations of racism, ever have; even the raft of false accusations of antisemitism during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party did not kill anyone. Goodwin tells us off for calling Nigel Farage an enemy; the same language was used in the Tory press during Theresa May’s premiership for judges and others they saw as trying to frustrate “the will of the people” on Brexit. (They, of course, still happily throw the Antisemitism slur around, as well as calling Black politicians racist for identifying white racism.)

A number of years ago, the Muslim Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi observed that Islamophobia “passed the dinner-table test”: that prejudice towards Muslims could be expressed in respectable circles with no fear of censure. In 2025, many more forms of prejudice not only pass that test — Islamophobia, anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, blind hostility to refugees and other real or perceived immigrants — but rather, opposition to them is what no longer passes that test. If we call people racists or fascists, we are accused of having contempt for what the ordinary person thinks or feels, and of putting politicians’ lives in danger even as actual racist thugs terrorise refugees and asylum seekers housed in hotels and two Asian women have been raped in the last month or so by white men who made their racist intentions clear to them. Even Keir Starmer could not call the goons rampaging around English towns after the Southport murders last year racists; he settled for calling them “far-right thugs” as they attacked people for their skin colour. As both Tory and Reform politicians and media demand the right to offend, the right to “criticise Islam” and to ridicule others’ beliefs (as per a bill currently going through Parliament, presented by Tory MP Nick Timothy), we must also be free to call out and condemn racism and to call racists what they are. They are the ones threatening everyone with violence, not us.

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans singing one of their favourite chants (source: 5Pillars).

The saga over the Aston Villa versus Maccabi Tel Aviv football (soccer) fixture next month revealed a lot about how far our political establishment will go to defend Israel and to spare the feelings of its supporters. There has been a campaign to get the match called off, on the grounds that Israel is a genocidal state which should be treated as a pariah, as is Russia currently, for the past few weeks but last week the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG) recommended that MTA’s fans should not be allowed to travel to the game on the grounds that there was a strong likelihood of violence if the fans’ past record is anything to go by: picking fights with local Muslim minorities and singing offensive and racist songs (albeit in Hebrew, but they are not the only ones who understand Hebrew). They have, in short, a major hooligan problem and there was no guarantee that they would not get into, or start, a fight with Birmingham’s large Muslim community. The advice attracted scorn from the entire political class; it was accused of at best caving into antisemitism and at worst actual antisemitism; my former MP Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, opined that the way to oppose antisemitism was not by banning its victims. Meanwhile, the reaction from many of the Tories and parties further Right was to accuse the SAG of being afraid to offend Muslims, and accused local Muslims of being a threat to the visiting fans rather than the other way round.

Over the course of last weekend, events took several turns until the Israeli club announced that it would not sell tickets for the match to their own fans, which would mean there would be no MTA fans at the match. A man claiming to be the leader of Aston Villa’s own “Jewish supporters’ club” turned out not to be Jewish at all and the fan club turned out not to exist. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon then announced that he (and a bunch of his supporters) would turn out in support of the tourists; a derby match between MTA and another Tel Aviv side, Hapoel, had to be cancelled on advice from local police after riots inside and outside the stadium. The latter left a lot of politicians with egg on their faces; the former prompted the fake Jewish fan to change his position, calling for the match to be held behind closed doors with no fans, as had an earlier MTA fixture with a Turkish side (held behind closed doors in Hungary). Still, politicians continued to link the decision to bar the MTA fans to antisemitism, alleging that they never just banned away fans for this reason (not true), only when the away fans are Israeli, and brushed aside concerns about hooliganism, repeating claims that the violence in Amsterdam last year was a pogrom against them by local Muslims, ignoring reports from local police that the fans were violent and racist as well. Others were wringing their hands over our supposed admission that “Jews aren’t safe in Britain’s second city”, despite the fact that Jews live in Birmingham and travel there every day, and other teams with associations with the Jewish community (e.g. Tottenham Hotspur) have played there many times with no trouble, nor any reason perceived to ban them. The fact that they are Jewish, or that Israel is a Jewish state, has nothing to do with why locals do not want this group of fans in their city.

My solution would have been, instead of a game behind closed doors with no fans at all, to hold the match in a stadium away from Birmingham, fairly close to an airport if possible, where the fans could be bussed from the airport to the match, and then bussed back and flown out as soon as possible after it ends. This way, both sets of fans get to see their team play and antagonism to the local community is kept to a minimum. Two possibilities that spring to mind are the stadiums in Reading and Milton Keynes — both large, both within easy reach of Birmingham for Villa’s fans and within easy reach of Heathrow airport (and in MK’s case also Luton airport) for the Israeli fans, and crucially neither in residential areas where locals could be subjected to major inconvenience or antagonism.

However, I must stand in defence of the Muslim community who objected to holding the match in their area. Who can blame them for feeling uncomfortable with large numbers of Israeli football supporters with a record of violence coming into their area? The political space and media the last few months has been full of talk of the country being ‘invaded’ by asylum seekers described as “fighting-age males”, and any misdeed of one of them is held up as proof that they are all a menace; yet, we expect Birmingham’s Muslim community to tolerate this large group of actual fighters, people (men and women) who six months or a year or two ago were in an army whose main function was terrorising unarmed people, mostly Muslims, in their villages and orchards on the West Bank, protecting lawless,  racist settlers who destroy their homes, crops and livestock, enforcing an occupation that has persisted for more than 50 years, with its regime of arbitrary detention, oppressive checkpoints, and a pseudo-justice system consisting of military tribunals, and who the past two years have been waging a genocidal war against the civilians of Gaza? When people said they didn’t want “Israeli hooligans” around, they were accused of antisemitism for suggesting that Israeli hooligans were worse than other football hooligans, but the fact is that other football hooligans are not war criminals.

According to police intelligence as reported in the Guardian last Tuesday, the fears were precisely about extremists linked to the club and not about danger to the Israeli supporters from locals: that Dutch police had told British police that the MTA fans instigated violence in Amsterdam and that scores of extremist fans with a history of racism and violence were expected to travel. The fans would have had to travel through London as there are no direct flights from Israel to Birmingham, which would have raised the possibility of further violence while they travelled to and from the game, and that specialist riot police would have had to be drafted in from across the country (this could, again, have been solved with charter flights and direct buses to a nearby stadium). The assessments were not made with any consideration of whether they could be interpreted as antisemitic or as ‘pandering’ or a surrender to antisemitism; they did understand that if you had not seen the intelligence, you could conclude that it was because the fans were Jewish; in my opinion, only bigoted Zionists — the sort that would not accept that the deliberate slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians after referencing an actual incident of genocide in the Bible was genocide, or that travelling Israeli fans could not possibly have started previous violence, even if local police had said so — would have concluded this.

Our political and media class are so devoted to Israel right now that they are willing to ride roughshod over local people’s feelings to allow some of the worst of them to come to the UK and roam around for several days, something which would not be allowed for a team from anywhere in Europe with such a record (and was not allowed for our fans when British hooligans were a major problem in the late 1980s and their behaviour contributed to a fatal disaster). With all the talk about whether the MTA fans were safe, and whether the police could police the match and the journey to and from it effectively, nobody seemed to be asking whether it was justified to impose any level of inconvenience on local people just so that a group of fans with a history of racist violence, from a country still engaged in an orgy of war crimes, could go to a football match. This would have affected everyone, but it was Muslims and Arabs (or anyone perceived as such) who were at particular risk from their behaviour, and this did not matter to politicians and the media, but all the while we see hand-wringing about how “Jews are not safe” because Israeli thugs are told they are not welcome, and indeed any time a strident criticism of Israel is made in a public forum. Sod everyone else’s feelings, but watch you mind theirs.

When it’s Muslims doing it.

This past week there’s been a big brouhaha in the British media about a mosque in east London which put on a fun-run in a local park as a fundraiser, but made it men-only (girls under 12 excepted). A government minister (Steve Reed) put out a condemnation and was reported to have consulted the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to ascertain whether the event in Victoria Park, Hackney, which was the East London Mosque’s twelfth annual charity run, was legal. Matthew Goodwin, an academic whose Twitter feed and Substack are nowadays a conveyor belt of Faragist propaganda, proclaimed “this is Britain, not Afghanistan” and posted a “what is to be done” article on his paid Substack, calling for us to follow Italy’s lead and ban the ‘burqa’ and niqaab with large fines for any women caught wearing it. (He doesn’t propose criminalising Muslim men’s dress, of course; bigots always target women.) He then posted a quote of his original tweet, citing a Policy Exchange survey which found that “40% of Muslims in Britain support gender-segregated education, while 44% think schools should be able to insist on girls wearing the hijab or niqab”.

Except … single-sex sporting events are the norm, as are single-sex schools, especially secondary schools.

Almost all sports exist with men’s and women’s categories. It would not be fair to women to expect them to compete with men; indeed, there has been a vocal campaign by women to ensure trans women are excluded from the female category because they have some of the same advantages as men. (There are some exceptions; there is a mixed doubles tournament in tennis, and the wheelchair sport variously known as murderball, quad rugby and wheelchair rugby is mixed.) It is also not compulsory to even have men’s and women’s categories at major events; there are many national cycling tours for men, for example, such as the Tour de France and Giro D’Italia, which have only a shorter event for women, none of which meets the criteria for a Grand Tour at present and do not run every year. Many of the ‘classic’ cycle races also have no female event. It is common for women’s games to be paid much less than men’s, or for women’s games to be amateur or semi-professional, while male players receive anyone else’s idea of a year’s pay in a week. The only difference here is that the organisers excluded women because they believed their participation was inappropriate, not for the usual reasons that they just had never bothered to put a women’s event on or because the women’s game gets less sponsorship. But the end result was the same.

As for the preference for single-sex schools, almost every British local authority has at least one single-sex school and it is common for such schools (especially Catholic schools) to retain old-fashioned uniforms, requiring skirts of a particular design for girls for example. Many parents prefer them, arguing that during adolescence, it is a distraction to have both sexes in a school together; they particularly prefer them for girls, arguing that boys monopolise teachers’ time and attention at girls’ expense and that girls are relied on to moderate boys’ behaviour. The requirement for hijab for girls at a Muslim faith school is in keeping with the practice in other schools, which are allowed to have uniforms which are different for boys and girls. In some private schools, antiquated uniforms are retained; at state schools, there is a requirement that it not be financially burdensome, although many schools (particularly academies) do require expensive bespoke uniform items. The requirement of hijab for women and girls beyond puberty is well established in Islamic law and is thus the norm among practising Muslim women in the UK, so it is to be expected that a school run along Muslim principles, by a Muslim organisation for the betterment of the Muslim community should require Islamic dress. (None, from what I can tell, actually require niqaab; many do not even allow it.)

So, a sporting event that was men-only, and Muslims prefer single-sex secondary schools. These are all normal, or actually preferred by many people in this country, Muslims and others. It seems a “British value” ceases to be one when Muslims place emphasis on it.

Image: Muhamad Rifqi Fawzi, via Pexels.

Last Thursday it was reported that a man had stabbed two people to death outside a synagogue in Manchester. Today the man’s name was revealed to be Jihad al-Shamie, a name widely ridiculed by people who have never heard of Jihad being used as a first name (I have, many times), but it was also revealed that he in fact stabbed not two but one person before he was shot dead by police as he appeared to be wearing a bomb around his waist; the second fatality and a third injury were in fact caused by police gunfire. There is also a pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide demonstration also planned for tomorrow, as there has been most weekends since the genocide began in October 2023; a number of politicians have demanded it be called off. Starmer also made some ludicrous remarks in a speech on Thursday, claiming that “antisemitism is a hatred that is rising once again, and we must defeat it once again”, and that Britain not only provides refuge, but a home.

That last claim comes as the Labour government, in an attempt to outflank the Deform UK party, has proposed to double the length of time it takes to secure Indefinite Leave to Remain (Deform have talked about abolishing it altogether, which will mean no means for foreign nationals to live in the UK permanently other than by taking British citizenship) from five years to ten. The first claim will be news to anyone who has witnessed the rising tide of hatred towards both Muslims and asylum seekers in the UK over the past year; hotels housing asylum seekers, including children, have been subject to ‘protests’ by racist goons that often turn violent, while racist tropes increasingly dominate the public space, especially on social media and the Deformist new media, finding ways to blame Muslims in general for grooming gangs in particular. I’ll believe antisemitism is the hate that is rising when I hear a harsh word about Jews or Israel from Nigel Farage, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who is expected to visit Israel as a guest of the minister of diaspora affairs Amichai Chikli later this month, barring another run-in with the law) or Matthew Goodwin, or when a synagogue is actually besieged by a mob because of a crime someone presumed to be Jewish committed.

Both politicians and media have been demanding that anti-genocide protests planned for this weekend be called off so as to “respect the grief of the Jewish community” (they legally can’t force them to be for that reason). “This is a moment of mourning. It is not a time to stoke tension and cause further pain. It is a time to stand together” tweeted Starmer; Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, called the protests “un-British and wrong” and told us to “take a step back and allow [the Jewish community] to grieve”. The protests are not aimed at the Jewish community; they are invariably routed away from synagogues and when people wanted to demonstrate near the BBC’s Broadcasting House one Saturday, it was banned because there is a synagogue a few streets away. They are aimed at the state of Israel and its backers in the British government, which include Starmer. It’s interesting how a demonstration in London against a genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians by the state of Israel is deemed to be hurtful to British Jews, or to interfere with their grief at a single Jew being killed by a low-life (who was not even Palestinian) in Manchester. We have a Palestinian community here too; many of them are grieving relatives lost in the genocide — to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have seen their brothers and sisters slaughtered in huge numbers, while not being chased from place to place while starving, for the sake of Israel’s final solution. Yet the establishment still demand that the precious feelings of British Jews govern what we can and cannot say about Israel and Palestine, and how Israel treats Palestinians.

The media have also repeated some of the slurs: that pro-Palestinian demonstrations are full of antisemitism, or that they make Jews feel threatened, or that they are fronts for Hamas or at least riddled with Hamas supporters, or supporters of other ‘terrorist’ groups such as Palestine Action. These days ‘terrorist’ means whatever the government says it means; as with PA, they do not have to do anything that resembles actual terrorism, which means targeting the general public with violence to force political change, but the limit of “support for Hamas” at some demonstrations consists of things like pictures of gliders on people’s clothing, or one or two incidents of “reckless speech”; there has been no large-scale demonstration of support for Hamas itself. As for antisemitism, the Palestine solidarity movement has always bent over backwards to avoid language that implicates Jews in general, or even mentions them; it mentions Israel and Zionism, and specific atrocities. The propaganda is long on accusations and short on evidence, and is aimed at people who have never been on one, and do not know anyone involved.

So, you’re grieving. Boo hoo, so are we. There’s a genocide going on. People are dying in huge numbers. There’s still an occupation going on in the West Bank, Palestinian natives being forced off their land because Israeli settlers covet it, or some other reason, and still being threatened by settlers and soldiers as they go about their daily lives. Mainstream Jewish organisations in the UK, including the Chabad Lubavitch organisation that runs the synagogue targeted last week, loudly support much of this (if not explicitly, then through genocide denial, victim blaming and repeating other Israeli propaganda) and use ‘antisemitism’ smears against those who expose and oppose it. Unlike when terrorist acts are committed by Muslim organisations or when violent acts are committed by individual Muslims, there is no pressure on the Jewish community to condemn or distance itself from the perpetrators; any attempt at such pressure is met with antisemitism smears. So, excuse us for not minding your feelings while we march against the genocide you support. You stop killing, we stop marching.

Recently there has been a movement, spearheaded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (the football hooligan and racist rabble-rouser known as Tommy Robinson) and his associates  to fly both British and English flags off buildings and lampposts, as well as the more traditional flagpoles, pretty much wherever they are. The campaign has been accompanied by the usual claims from Reform supporters and the like on GB News that anyone who objects is a snob, or a woke lefty who despises the ‘real’ white working class. Matt Goodwin posted a video taken from a car driving down a street in Rednall, on the south-western outskirts of Birmingham, in which flags had been attached to every lamppost (in this case Union flags; in other cases they have been St George’s Crosses or a combination of the two), and in the accompanying tweet called it “act of resistance against mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, the decision by politicians to house illegal migrants in the heart of their communities, and the loss of their national identity”.

The other day I saw a video, on a motorcycling channel on YouTube, titled “Does the Saint George’s flag offend you??”. The simple answer to this is no. (YouTube apparently blacks out any flags that are posted by emoji in the comments; this was assumed to apply only to that flag.) But the context and atmosphere in which these flags are being posted does. We have seen footage of louts painting flags on other people’s property, while racially abusing Asian people who just happened to drive onto the scene to do shopping. We have seen footage of council workers being assaulted, in one case by someone trying to remove the ladder he was standing on, while removing unauthorised flags or just while working on the pole or mast the flag was attached to. If flags are flown from public property such as lampposts and not attached properly, they can become a safety hazard, for example by falling into a cyclist’s or motorcyclist’s face, obscuring their vision; if they just fall off, they become litter. In many cases the flags were the wrong way up, representing a signal of distress, not a show of pride. It’s quite right that some councils want to remove unauthorised flags; it doesn’t mean they “hate the English” or “despise the working class”. It means they want to keep their districts clean and looking civilised, and keeping their character.

In a recent debate at the London Assembly, a Tory assembly member named Emma Best, having made some now common accusations that “the Left — people like you, people like the mayor — exaggerate and lie about members of the Right, and this … will lead to more violence” (having already mentioned the murder of Charlie Kirk), suggested that the best way to ‘reclaim’ the St George’s flag would be to fly it at City Hall and across the GLA and TfL (Greater London Authority and Transport For London) estate. The deputy mayor did not answer the question adequately, mumbling about how she had been born here and supported the English football team, and thought that Britain at its best was seen in the Second World War and in the welcoming of refugees from Ukraine, as “a place of inclusion and tolerance”. The TfL estate consists of things like railway stations and depots as well as bus and tram stations and maintenance depots; a brief glance at the Google Street View images of many TfL rail stations shows that they do not have flagpoles. Of those I looked at, only Embankment had one, and sometimes this was empty and sometimes it carried the Union flag. To fly flags at stations would require flagpoles to be installed, which would cost a lot of money that could be spent on improving the service; station staff also have enough to do without having to worry about raising or lowering flags when it’s deemed appropriate.

But the other answer to Emma Best’s question is that the flying of flags is something we do on special occasions, to celebrate or to commemorate. Aside from government buildings, and at military bases and the like, we see them at war memorials as well as on village greens. Companies use it to indicate a British product, though this can often mean British design rather than British manufacture. We do, of course, see flags flying when a British sports team is in an international tournament and when it is the English football team, the flag will be the English one. However, there is nothing traditional in this country about flying flags everywhere and attaching them to every lamppost, least of all by people who do not know how to fly them properly, and the persistent display of flags outside of competitions has a menacing overtone, reminiscent of its use for sectarian purposes in places like Northern Ireland. And it’s nothing for us to be proud of to have thugs roaming the streets, waving flags in people’s faces who didn’t ask for it, painting them on other people’s property without permission and then attacking or threatening council workers who try to remove them, or anyone they meet who looks different from them. It’s not a spontaneous display of national pride; it’s an ugly wave of incivility and thuggery from the worst of British.

Charlie Kirk

I am not sure I knew of the existence of Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated in Utah last Wednesday. I saw a tweet from a Muslim account on Twitter which drew attention to his well-known (in the US maybe) stance on gun control, that a few gun-related deaths were worth it to keep Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He was killed by a sniper, believed to be a young man from a conservative Mormon family in southern Utah, as he held court under a marquee bearing his slogan “Prove Me Wrong!”. In the immediate aftermath, Trump and his supporters rushed to blame the “Radical Left”, trans activists and even the Democratic party for the murder, while mainstream Democrat politicians published videos condemning the killing. I saw plenty of content, however, which while not condoning the murder made no secret that they believed Kirk’s death was no tragedy, was nothing to mourn, or was a comeuppance for his pro-gun views. Meanwhile there are also people proclaiming themselves ‘grief-stricken’ by the killing and condemning anyone who does not share their grief, accusing them of condoning murder, or of “virtue signalling” while actually betraying a vicious streak.

Last Thursday, the day after Kirk’s murder, a British lawyer on YouTube calling himself the Black Belt Barrister uploaded a video in which he proclaimed, “regardless of your own personal views, I’m sure you all share a sense of shock, horror and for many of you, even if you didn’t know them, a profound sense of grief for the cowardly and unlawful killings of Charlie Kirk and, of course, Iryna Zarutska”. Iryna Zarutska was a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina; racists have posted content alleging that the killing was part of a “race war”, drawing attention to the commuters who failed to act until it was too late (having seen the video, it does not appear that she was in danger of dying until she actually collapsed — she did not appear to be bleeding heavily, for example — and the killer was still in the carriage, armed). The two killings were entirely unconnected, the latter with no political motive, just a random killing by a man with a history of severe mental illness, and thousands of miles apart. He then goes on to accuse people who rail against the far right, racists etc., and accuse them of fostering hatred which leads to incidents like the murder of Charlie Kirk. All this before anything was known about who shot him. As for the reaction to Iryna Zarutska’s murder, the only vile or hateful comments I could see were those that implied that she was killed because the killer was Black and she was white, and that the others in the carriage (again mostly Black) did not spring to her aid for the same reason. There were comments like “don’t take your eyes off these people” as if every Black person was a madman looking to stab the next white person they see. All nonsensical, demented, racist drivel.

But I’m not grief-stricken about Kirk’s death. Not only because I didn’t know him, but also because he actually was a hateful, racist misogynist who also stood in the way of protecting children from violence. His last words, in response to a question from the audience about mass shootings in the US, were “counting or not counting gang violence?”: he was trying to divert the conversation onto Black-on-Black crime, which is mostly irrelevant to the matter of US mass shootings. His supporters want us to be empathetic to his wife and children, but he shows none to families who have lost loved ones, including children, to mass shootings. I am never going to be especially sad about the loss of a person like that. Gun control actually would not have saved him because the gun control being advocated in the USA relates to automatic or assault weapons, which does not appear to be what was used here, and better background checks and safety devices to prevent accidental discharge. Even in the UK, while we have had no school massacres since Dunblane in 1996, we have had a mass shooting by a sniper (the west Cumbria shootings of 2010). However, this was still a man who thought others’ right to their lives — schoolchildren and teachers — were worth much less than his own right to an automatic firearm capable of killing multiple people in seconds. While we may agree that his murder was wrong and that the killer should be punished, it stands to reason that when a person with such contempt for others’ lives loses his own, many people will not be especially aggrieved.

There has also been a chorus of disapproval at the mere use of words like racist and bigot to describe people who espouse racist and bigoted views. We are being told it creates the climate of hatred that leads to such acts as Charlie Kirk’s murder. History in fact shows that racism leads to violence to an extent that accusations of racism simply do not. With the exception of Cambodia, every genocide in recent times has been motivated principally by racism, as have countless other systems of oppression: chattel slavery, segregation, Apartheid. This is not to say that no injustice ever results from false accusations; we only have to look at the history of the Labour Party since 2015 to see that. But in this country at least, nobody died as a result of those false accusations of antisemitism (arguably it contributed to the Gaza genocide by making speaking out against it costly, especially in the first year or so, but nobody was killed because they were called antisemitic, even if they were expelled from a political party or even lost their job). Racism kills, both through direct violence and through the ways prejudice works its way into our police, education and health systems (deaths in custody, higher maternal mortality rates, etc) among other things. Many of the people coming out with this rhetoric are the same people who have been moaning about “cancel culture” for the past decade while enjoying columns in major newspapers, ample time in the broadcast media, ample representation in national and regional legislatures and so on; Kirk himself ran a “professor watch” website, ‘exposing’ academics he disagreed with, while his allies are now trying to drum people out of jobs for failing to manifest the required grief over his death, or repeating his less savoury opinions. These include a female primary school teacher who repeated his views about guns, a stance which results in people like her dying or seeing their pupils killed by young embittered men with guns no civilian can get hold of anywhere else, whose own congress representative joined the campaign to get her fired.

We’ve had nearly two years of watching a genocide on social media, with the most appalling acts of depravity and cruelty plain to see, obviously innocent people shot dead for no reason, doctors, nurses and ambulance staff murdered as they do their job (or the rest of their families killed while they work), stories from visiting medics of repeatedly seeing children shot in the head by snipers, journalists murdered and then slandered by their killers; some of those lecturing or trying to silence us have been “standing with Israel” all this time, openly excusing or justifying it, or even celebrating it and mocking the dead and those who fought heroically to save them — as Kirk himself is on video doing. These include the ‘moderate’ Democrats now publicly commiserating with the Trumpists and falling over themselves to distance themselves from political violence when it’s on American soil. These people have had the past two years to demonstrate the decorum they expect from us when a public figure is murdered; they did not care to do so then but they expect us to now. So, there will be no crocodile tears here. He was not killed by one of ours, but was an enemy of ours and had contempt for us. His death is no great loss and will not be mourned.

A man being arrested near the Brook Hotel in Norwich

Last Thursday in the Guardian, there was a letter from one Desmond Hewitt telling us we should watch what we say about the people ‘protesting’ outside hotels housing asylum seekers in the UK. Referring to an article by David Renton which suggested drawing a strong link with the convictions for domestic violence of a large number of the prominent ‘protesters’, he said that this would be “like a red rag to a bull to the many protesters not involved in crimes of domestic violence” which could be dismissed as a “lefty slur against all men protesting against immigration”. He also suggested that we call “Tommy Robinson” an Islamophobe, as he targets single Muslim men: “if we can’t get that blatant fact out there as our argument, then I’m afraid we are, as they say, screwed”. I wrote a letter in response, but have had no reply in my inbox, so here’s a response to it.

To take the question of “Tommy Robinson” first: he certainly is an Islamophobe, but that term doesn’t have the same ‘sting’ among the far right, or even much of the mainstream Tory right, these days that “antisemitism” has across the political spectrum, except when it’s used as a slur against anyone opposing the genocide of Palestinians, or the oppression they experienced for the several decades leading up to it. They claim “we’re not Islamophobes, we’re Islamo-realists” or some similar get-out based on a selective reading of Islamic history, entirely overlooking the history of the Muslims in their country. Robinson, however, has a long criminal record, much of it violent.

In footage of the ‘protests’ outside the asylum hotels, we have seen an awful lot of violence, not only aimed at the hotels and their residents but also against counter-demonstrators and other dissenters. Last week, for example, footage was shared on social media of a man talking to reporters outside the Brook Hotel, a Best Western hotel on the outskirts of Norwich, telling them among other things that the ‘demonstrators’ bothered him far more than the asylum seekers do by disturbing his sleep, which was interrupted by thugs who chased the man around before he took refuge with the police guarding the hotel itself; the goons’ supporters cheered it on, calling the young man an ‘infiltrator’. There have been scores of arrests at these events; these include attempting to enter the hotels and attacking police, as well as things like breaching bail conditions. Locals not involved — women included — often say, as did the young man at Norwich, that they find the ‘protesters’ far more threatening than they find the asylum seekers themselves.

You can tell a man by the company he keeps, and the people at these ‘protests’ do not seem to mind the company of thugs, nor to listen to the speeches of thugs. Whether they all have pre-existing convictions for domestic violence or not, they choose to attend gatherings outside people’s homes that are designed to threaten them, gatherings they know have ended in violence, and many of those without prior convictions will doubtless acquire some, as many have found out to their cost.

Still from a video of Cycling Mikey’s bike being struck by the black Fiat.

Last week some videos went around showing a road safety activist (some call him a vigilante) named Michael van Erp, AKA Cycling Mikey, trying to stop a Fiat 500 going the wrong way up a partly closed road in west London and getting his bike knocked over and his property strewn over the street. The footage attracted the attention of some right-wing newspapers, some social media lawyers and some social media driving instructors, some of whom have criticised Mikey’s behaviour in the past and been blocked. Much of the commentary has been gleeful, as if Mikey “finally got his comeuppance”, and includes suggestions that Mikey broke the law by pushing his bike out to obstruct the Fiat, or “threw his bike into the road”, and ignores the multiple offences committed by the driver of the Fiat, which should not depend on Mikey reporting it. A YouTuber called Big Jobber, who has worked in the insurance industry, gives a fairly balanced explanation of the whole incident here.

Specifically, the driver of the Fiat, who had a child in their car, drove through a road that was clearly closed in the direction they were travelling in (the exit side had been closed because of roadworks; the entry side remained open, and there were numerous “road ahead closed” warning signs along the road at every junction, including at least one that was a viable diversion), then drove at a pedestrian who was in the process of entering the road ahead, causing damage to his property, then drove off without stopping; the latter is called “failing to stop after an accident”. This was witnessed by a number of bystanders, some of whom indicated that they recognised Mikey and some of whom also recorded their own footage. There will be other camera footage (shot by the local authority and the police) showing that the Fiat was in the area; if the social media footage is not good enough, that surely will be. Some of the commentators have suggested that Mikey’s actions constitute contributory negligence that will count against him if he has to claim on his insurance, but the Fiat driver’s actions were indefensible and plain criminal.

I have not much time for Cycling Mikey in the main; he is best known for riding around looking for people doing things they shouldn’t, such as using their mobile phone at the wheel, and publishing it online and sending the footage to the police. I have sometimes questioned how he has so much time to do this. I wrote about this in a previous entry on ‘snitching’ a couple of years ago, though I didn’t mention him by name then; most of the people he catches are stationary, not in motion and he was the classic example of the self-righteous snitch. But there’s also a world of difference between an inconsequential breach of the law and using your vehicle to barge someone out of the way — as a weapon — because you don’t have the patience to do what you should have done in the first place and find another route. The only crimes in this video were committed by the Fiat driver, and there were many of them.