Monday 2 April 2012

No Boris Bikes for Barnet

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the prospect of Boris Bikes for Barnet was an outpouring of my fevered imagination for April Fool's Day. In honour of the occasion, most of Barnet's bloggers - those that call themselves the Famous Five plus the mystery man behind the Brent Cross Coalition blog - published jokes of varying quality (I do place my own lowest on the scale: for someone with a highly developed sense of humour, I'm really quite bad at jokes).

I feel no remorse at having raised your expectations unduly only to dash them regarding the Boris Bikes. After all, to paraphrase* Barnet Council leader Richard Cornelius:
Barnet isn't really a place for people on Boris Bikes*.
* In the original comment the word here was "benefits", I kid you not.

2 comments:

Citizen Barnet said...

What's wrong with Muslims? On second thoughts, don't answer that.

I thought you were right-wing, I didn't realise you were anti-Muslim as well. Stupid.

You might be surprised to hear that I don't like George Galloway.

Citizen Barnet said...

All religions are pretty detestable on many grounds, most especially treatment of women and homosexuals; the separation of church and state is a good principle for any society.

A 'double-glazing salesman' - one step down from a car dealer?

Galloway made much in the election of never drinking alcohol and being a God-fearer. I think this appeal was particularly detestable. What about Muslims who drink - are they bad Muslims? What should their punishment be? And this from someone who is not of that faith.

I see Galloway got married recently - for the 3rd (or 4th?) time. The man wants to have his cake and eat it; but that's OK, because George Galloway thinks he is special. He declared once that he couldn't operate in UK politics without loads of money and that's why it was OK for him to earn loads, to be flash. What should the rest of us do? Oh, just vote for him.

His record of attendance in Parliament was poor; he talks about being anti-cuts but you can't imagine him doing any of the week-in, week-out campaigning. That's for other people.

And then there's his toadying to dictators, including Assad and Ahmedinejad. His 'anti-imperialism' amounts to just hating the USA. There's no recognition of other regimes' crimes and other powers' regional ambitions.

I could go on, but probably don't need to. You get the gist. I can't stand Galloway and don't think he should be any kind of hero for the left.

Part of what I don't like, Duff, about your dislike of Muslims is that often disliking someone's religion is used as a cover for disliking them, as people. Northern Ireland Catholics will have experienced this; attacking the Pope is fine on one level, but when what it's actually part of is a plain, sectarian, anti-Catholic agenda, it's not fine.

Muslims in the UK are, on the whole, despised, not for their religion, but mostly for their skin colour and for being 'foreign'. Sometimes being anti-Muslim is only thinly disguised racism. Anti-Islam can shade over into that as well.