As the Mail Online runs a truly racist headline article, Matthew Steeples suggests that civilised people everywhere should accept that our neighbours are actually our friends
Today the Mail Online ran a headline article that was frankly nothing but racist. It’s not surprising given the paper at one point supported Hitler but having been the victim of racist bigots myself in the last couple of days, I found what someone named Sue Reid wrote utterly offensive.
In ‘Go away, you shouldn’t be here. Don’t come back’: The corner of Yorkshire that has almost no white residents, Ms Reid shared the thoughts of a once ‘white’ community [in Savile Town, Yorkshire] that has been “edged out” by Muslims. Her colleague Steve Doughty referred to how “ghetto Britain” is “racially segregated” and there is a “growing isolation of the white majority from minorities in urban zones”. She, herself, arrogantly concluded: “The omens [for the future] are not good”.
My own experience, simply for supporting Gina Miller’s legal action against Article 50, has been the receipt of an equally intolerant barrage of bilge. I have been called a “gay queer” [one gay friend suggested this is because the accusers themselves are living in the closet] and told I should be “thrown off the roof of a high building”. Though supporting ‘remain’, in these peoples’ minds, results in me being branded “a hater of Britain” and “anti-democratic”, I consider myself anything but. Loving Britain and regarding our relationships with our neighbours as positive are not mutually exclusive and neither, in my humble opinion, needs to be severed.
Three especially unpleasant middle-aged bores – Rupert James, Richard Neagle and Shaun Redmayne – have spent hours on Facebook berating me and mocking me as a “PC douche” and a “Muslim apologist”. Donald Trump supporter Mr Redmayne – a cretin of a creature whom I’m reliably told walked up and down the Fulham Road in a shirt captioned “Nuke ‘em George, Nuke ‘em” during the Iraq War – went as far to suggest I should shoot myself whilst his cohort Neagle claimed I have “mental health issues”.
Britain, post Brexit, has become an intolerant place. Social media has only perpetuated this and the Mail Online should know better. They should apologise for the vile article they ran today and they should cease their relentless blaming of immigrants for all that is wrong in Britain. It is time for tolerance to rise again and it is time to accept that our neighbours are our friends and not our enemies.