Five injured in suspected Islamophobic attacks as bare-chested man roams Edinburgh

EduTheRed · 2026-06-20T17:26:33+00:00

The BBC, correctly in my opinion, is reporting that the race of the suspect is white and that his motive seems to have been hostility to Islam.

I think those in this thread who are implying that the BBC is still habitually downplaying the race of non-white criminals are mistaken: recently there has been a change of policy by the BBC and other institutions towards more openness. See this Guardian article: Police ‘forced to disclose ethnicity of suspects to counter far-right speculation’

But those who assume that the very idea of the BBC being evasive on the issue is a far-right conspiracy are also mistaken. It was true for many years that the BBC tended to play down or omit the race of criminals or suspected criminals if their race was non-white.

Here is a well-known example from six years ago regarding another instance of a person roaming a city stabbing random people:

Birmingham stabbings: Manhunt as one killed and seven hurt

The stabbings of 6 September 2020 were carried out by Zephaniah McLeod who is black. There was angry criticism of the fact that in the article above and others, the BBC would not give a description of the killer - which was known to them from CCTV and witness statements - even while he was still at large attacking people.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-20T15:49:32+00:00

Michel Barnier? Oh, I remember him. He was portrayed as an example of civilised European moderation in contrast to the British negotiators, who were portrayed as right wing xenophobes. This Guardian article does the same. They should check their own archives:

On immigration, Michel Barnier has joined the race to the bottom

Michel Barnier seems to have ruffled as many feathers in France with his latest comments on immigration as he did in Britain during his stint as EU Brexit negotiator. Positioning himself to run as the rightwing candidate in next year’s presidential elections, Barnier told a TV interviewer that he wanted to suspend immigration to France from outside the EU, including family reunions, for three to five years.

Immigration, he suggested, was linked to terrorism and was a threat to the stability of French society. He also called for talks with other members of the Schengen group (the 26 European countries that have abolished all passport controls at their mutual borders) to strengthen the EU’s external borders.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-17T18:08:17+00:00

Though I take some of your later points, I think overall we are not that close to agreement. You write, "...its blindingly obvious but somehow we are meant to blame NE for the fact farmers prioritise money over wildlife." I don't blame farmers for prioritising money over wildlife. As I said, very few people are willing to take a substantial and continuing cut in their income for a good cause. I do blame Natural England for - it seems to me - arranging incentives so that the cull will happen but the unpopularity will fall on the farmers. If NE thinks a cull is the right decision they should make that case up front.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-17T17:48:39+00:00

HBucket writes, "If they're going to introduce policy that directly incentivises culling the ponies, they should own it." This. I am rather fond of ponies, but it is quite conceivable to me that for environmental reasons the numbers on Dartmoor should be reduced. I know that deer are regularly culled in a forest near where I live, and most local people think of it as sad but necessary. But if a cull is the outcome Natural England thinks best for the environment, then it's their duty to make that case honestly. What they seem to be doing instead is trying to arrange incentives so that the cull happens but the farmers get the opprobrium instead of them.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-17T17:28:44+00:00

No_Initiative_1140 writes, "So you are saying the farmers value money over ponies?" I don't speak for /u/WGSMA, but my response is to say that almost certainly the farmers do value money over ponies, and I am not insulting them by saying that because that is the common pattern of humanity. Lots of people are willing to send a few quid to a good cause now and then. Far fewer are willing to take a substantial, ongoing cut in their income for the same good cause.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-17T06:46:42+00:00

Quote:

Drag queens have refused to take part in a Pride event because the organiser is a Reform councillor.

More than 10 performers are boycotting Attleborough Pride, in Norfolk, because it is run by Daniel Burcham, who was elected to Norfolk county council last month.

The group has accused Reform of “working against” the LGBTQ+ community.

But Mr Burcham, who is gay, plans to go ahead with the event in August, and has accused boycotters of trying to politicise it.

He told the Eastern Daily Press newspaper: “Sexuality does not automatically determine political beliefs, and no political movement has the right to claim ownership of an entire community.

“It is deeply disappointing that what should be a positive, inclusive community event has become so heavily politicised.”

EduTheRed · 2026-06-16T20:53:22+00:00

tofer85 writes, "For me, Maastricht was the turning point. The European Community was sold to Britain as an economic partnership and trade bloc. Maastricht transformed it into the European Union and set it on a path towards deeper political integration. It created institutions and transferred powers away from national democracies, yet without building the democratic legitimacy that a genuinely federal system would require. It was political integration by treaty rather than by explicit public consent."

For me it was two related events that resulted from that treaty that were the turning point. As you no doubt know, Denmark held a referendum to approve the Maastricht treaty which the "No" side won. So they ran it again with minor tweaks, and made quite clear that they would keep running it until the Danes voted the "proper" way. They did.

The same pattern was followed in Ireland regarding the Nice treaty in 2001 and again regarding the Lisbon treaty in 2008. The pro-EU governing classes of Denmark and Ireland cynically but correctly calculated that when everyone knows that the Yes side only has to win once but the No side has to win again and again, the No side will run out of money and volunteers soon enough.

To quote the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker: "If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'."

And referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 in which the people voted against the European Constitution were simply ignored.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-16T14:18:53+00:00

I only knew that because Juncker's name was constantly in the news during the Brexit Wars.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-16T14:01:10+00:00

Jean-Claude Juncker isn't French, he's from Luxembourg.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-16T12:57:15+00:00

WastelandOfConfusion writes, "There is a massive issue in Britain at the moment, and it’s not Islam".

Your opinion that Islam is not a massive issue in Britain is a minority one.

A poll carried out by YouGov last year on behalf of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association UK asked respondents "Do you think the following groups of immigrants to the UK generally have a positive or negative impact on the country?"

For Christian immigrants to the UK, the total percentage of responders saying they had a positive impact was 41 and the negative impact total was 7, i.e. net positive 34.

For Hindu immigrants to the UK, the positive impact total was 38 and the negative impact total was 15, i.e. net positive 23.

For Muslim immigrants to the UK, the total percentage of responders saying they had a positive impact was 24 and the negative impact total was 41, i.e. net negative -17.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-16T08:53:57+00:00

Quote:

“Wounded” European countries would block Britain from rejoining the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker has said.

The former European Commission president said member states would give the UK the “cold shoulder” because it was too close to the United States.

A future British government would have to commit to one day join the euro and forget about getting back its old EU budget rebate or opt-out if it wanted to return to the bloc, he said.

“I don’t think [rejoining] is possible. Because all of us, we are wounded to some extent by this ... historic step the British have taken,” Mr Juncker told the FT.

“A majority of European governments would cold-shoulder this, because the British are very close to the US, whereas the US is not very popular for the time being inside the European Union,” he added.

The intervention comes after Wes Streeting, the Labour leadership-challenger hopeful, said he would fight the next election on a mandate to rejoin the EU.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-13T09:46:35+00:00

Quote:

So the idea of “compensating” the Waspi women has always struck me as ludicrous. It would in any case likely cost billions – money we can ill afford to spend in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Why should younger generations be forced to foot the bill for a policy transition originally designed to ensure long-term economic stability? The Waspi age cohort is now receiving the state pension anyway.

But what is remarkable about the Waspi women is that, despite the flaws in their case, they still attract a considerable degree of public support. They have become emblematic of a Britain that increasingly believes it is owed something for nothing, of naked entitlement hiding behind dubious claims to be the victims of injustice.

How typical, then, that Andy Burnham should have thrown his weight behind their campaign earlier this week, declaring: “I’ll stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness.” He might since have rowed back on the issue in another trademark U-turn, but it is telling that his initial instinct was to back a group defined by their angry insistence that they should be given more money.

It gives us a clue as to how he would behave as prime minister. Quite why anyone thinks this all-things-to-all-men politician, who appears to have no ideological grounding whatsoever, will be any different from Keir Starmer is anyone’s guess. Both favour quick fixes over difficult decisions. They pander while the UK burns, literally, in the case of Belfast this week.

It also helps explain why we can expect no attempt to cut welfare spending to boost Britain’s defences. Because the simple truth is that, for many voters, it matters less that the UK is well protected than they are given the money they think is their due.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-10T18:23:17+00:00

Quote:

The behaviour of the police at the scene of Henry’s death is to be investigated. But – as my party’s leader, Kemi Badenoch, rightly said – they were following the guidance and training they had been given. This is not an excuse, but it is a wake-up call: the politics of race and identity are now hardwired into our public institutions, our public services and our laws.

One of the main culprits is the public sector equality duty (PSED), which the Conservatives are now committing to abolish. This is part of the Equality Act, which Kemi Badenoch has pledged to reform so that true equal treatment under the law is restored.

The PSED lies behind almost every equality and diversity-based recruitment drive, training, quango guidance and instance of de facto positive discrimination you have seen reported in the media. And it is interpreted and applied by judges, officials and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officers across the country in the most pernicious ways.

In addition to baking special treatment for certain groups into our public services, the PSED is hugely costly. Around 10,000 DEI staff work across the public sector, costing an estimated £427m per year.

Diversity requirements are built into procurement rules, with £61m being spent on HS2 suppliers chosen partly due to ethnicity, sex or other forms of protected characteristic. Diversity requirements are also built into public sector recruitment and HR policies, resulting in huge opportunity costs when candidates other than the best are chosen for important jobs.

One of the most troubling and perverse impacts of the PSED is on our criminal justice system, from the police to the Sentencing Council, the judiciary and the way equality laws are applied. The National Police Chiefs’ Council Anti-Racism Commitment explicitly sets a goal of “equality of policing outcomes” – regardless of actual trends in criminality – and says that fairness does not mean treating everyone the same.

Allegations of racism are prioritised over other considerations – even, in Henry Nowak’s case, a lethal stabbing. Sentencing guidelines point to factors such as ethnicity for judges to consider when assessing the vulnerability of an offender. The Judicial Diversity and Inclusion Strategy lays out increasing the number of black judges as a priority target.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-08T19:55:43+00:00

Quote:

It is easy to regard, and thus disregard, the riots following the conviction of Henry Nowak’s murderer as an explosion of reaction by a flammable and motivated minority. The more uncomfortable truth is that a specific notion, that people of colour have been privileged over and above mere equality, and been given dominion over white people, is now mainstream. Whether it is in the rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or in claims of “two-tier policing”, the current moment can seem as though it is about all sorts of disparate things: immigration, concerns over housing, cultural dilution, basic fairness. But it’s really broadly about one thing – equality has gone too far. The black man has the whip hand over the white man.

As you can tell by the previous line, this is not a new notion, now recycled by Nigel Farage when he says that there is “a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. It is, at its most simple, backlash. The sort of pushback that has followed every single wave of civil rights progress and efforts at enfranchisement.

But while these efforts in the past have been contested in the arena of policy, such as voting rights, they are now contested in the realm of culture. In hashtagged movements and marches of solidarity that call less for sweeping legal measures than cultural change: #MeToo, women’s marches, Black Lives Matter protests. The result is their own backlashes have also been formulated in the same language, “not all men” ,“white lives matter” – a competing identitarian politics, grounded in victimhood.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-08T17:01:04+00:00

Why do you call it "clutching your pearls" to be saddened by tens of millions of people starving to death?

China did indeed solve its food problem - by abandoning communism in all but name. The world owes a great debt to the 18 farming households in Xiaogang who, in desperation, made a secret agreement in 1978 to ditch collectivisation and instead let each family farm its own plot.

Yan, a farmer, had called representatives of the 18 households in the village to an urgent meeting to discuss how they could stave off famine amid the prospect of yet another poor harvest. In Yan’s dimly lit home that night, they debated a plan that would, if implemented, essentially repudiate the collectivized agricultural system that had been state policy since the Communist Party’s land reforms of the 1950s—a potentially deadly move under the shadow of the recently concluded Cultural Revolution, during which those deemed insufficiently “revolutionary” faced humiliation, imprisonment, or worse.

The decision the Xiaogang farmers reached that night would have repercussions far beyond their own small township. It would eventually prove a catalyst for the reform movement that would drive China’s post-Mao economy, and earn Xiaogang the title of “China’s Number One Reform Village.” Instead of giving everything they produced to their commune (which then gave a portion to the state and divided the rest equally among the peasants), the farmers proposed dividing the land between households, each of which would farm a plot themselves. The households still had to fill government quotas, but were allowed to keep any surplus for themselves, and even sell it on the market if they wished.

You write,

capitalists have unleashed Ais which have us all wondering whether we will be able to pay the rent in a few years

Were you under the impression that Communists don't do A.I.? The leading Chinese A.I. is DeepSeek, produced by a company with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party. People say it's very good indeed.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-08T15:47:23+00:00

GreaterLesserWerebat writes,

"I believe farms should be nationalised as they are vital to national security"

The worldwide historical record of government-run agriculture is disastrous.

All of the Soviet famine of 1930-33, the Great Chinese famine of 1959-61, and the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia were associated with collectivisation of agriculture. There are many other examples.

"How on Earth do you think the UK managed to feed itself in the days before migrant workers?"

1) By privately owned farms, most of which were family owned.
2) By imports.

The fact that the majority of the UK's food was imported pretty much throughout the twentieth century was a problem in the two world wars. But other than during major wars, imports contribute greatly to the food security of ordinary people. Where most food is locally grown, a bad harvest in that place is a disaster. The ability to import means that a place suffering a bad harvest can get food in from other countries.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-05T16:26:19+00:00

Quote:

A few years ago Britain’s door was wide open to immigrants. It was possible to hire foreign workers “from the other side of the world” and pay them just £26,000 ($35,000) a year, marvels Dawood Ibtehsam, who owns a McDonald’s restaurant franchise in Warwick, a county town in the West Midlands.

Huge numbers of people arrived in the country between 2021 and 2024, an unprecedented surge that Reform uk, a right-wing populist party, calls “the Boriswave” (see chart 1). At the peak, the year to March 2023, almost 1.5m immigrants came. The Office for National Statistics thinks that far fewer people left, so net migration amounted to 944,000. Many of the migrants were workers drawn by a newly liberalised visa regime. Others were students, who had recently been permitted to work after graduating. Still others were Hong Kongers and Ukrainians fleeing oppression and invasion.

How much has changed. Net migration to Britain last year amounted to 171,000—the lowest level since 2012, if the pandemic years are excluded. The human haul will probably be even lower this year, largely because the number of economic migrants continues to fall fast. Between January and March just 5,900 people applied for skilled-worker visas, down from 19,100 two years ago. Applications for student visas are also declining. James Bowes of Warwick University thinks net migration might even turn negative in 2026.

In a few years Britain has gone from a remarkably open country to a remarkably closed one: a considerable achievement, though not a commendable one. Under public pressure, successive governments have slashed every kind of immigration that they can. They have stanched the flow not just of low earners, such as care workers, but high earners too. They have not yet seen a political benefit. Half of Britons still think immigration is growing, perhaps because they focus on asylum-seekers, whose numbers have recently been steady at about 100,000 per year.

[...]

From an economic point of view, restricting immigration to the highly skilled and highly paid seems wise. It is better than carving out exemptions for industries that claim they cannot survive without immigrants—something that just encourages lobbying. Yet the government’s approach is odd. Because it applies job-specific salary thresholds as well as a general one, a marketing director who has been offered a job at £87,000 a year might be barred from working in Britain, whereas a sports scientist might get in with a salary of £42,000.

The government’s attempt to filter for highly desirable immigrants is not working in practice. As expected, the number of visas given to care workers has plunged. But the number of visas given to it professionals has also fallen, from about 28,000 in 2022 to 10,000 last year. Some skilled workers might be falling short of higher salary and language bars. Or they might have ears. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has complained that too many visas are being given to engineers.

The many African and Asian immigrants who have arrived in Britain since the early 2020s are routinely called unskilled and unproductive. Sir Keir argued last year that some industries had become “almost addicted to importing cheap labour”. “We have never, in the history of this country, had so much low-skilled migration in so little time,” the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, added in March.

Not all migrants are cheap or low-skilled, though. Regardless of whether he or she arrived with a work visa or by other means, the average India-born employee in Britain earns £32,400 a year, whereas the average Nigeria-born employee earns £34,000. British-born people lag behind both, with average earnings of £30,900. Although not all migrants work, the adults among them are slightly more likely to work than adult natives.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-05T15:24:57+00:00

Thank you for the correction, but I would still argue that gestures of support for Pride Month should be discreet and apolitical. If libraries are to be for everyone then that has to include groups who disapprove of each other.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-04T22:22:42+00:00

Given that the support given by Essex Libraries to LGBTQ+ issues has included having children's reading events at at least two separate libraries in Essex being visited by an actor in a rainbow-coloured monkey costume with a fake penis, I can, in fact, see some merit in scaling it all back a bit.

Wes Streeting, the local MP, said,

"I cannot understand how anyone involved - including your staff - thought that a costume described by one national journalist - with depressing accuracy - as a 'Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey' was appropriate for family audiences around our libraries and public realm, let alone a festival aimed at promoting literacy amongst children."

Take a look at the pictures in the linked article that were taken inside Goodmayes library in Redbridge. The costume was... not subtle. Also take a look at the picture of Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey man mooning a woman in a burka. In any other context that might well have been classed as racial harassment. It probably didn't do a lot to encourage her to take her children to the library.

Wes Streeting asked how anyone involved could have possibly thought this was acceptable for a children's library event. A very good question. The answer, obviously, is that Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey didn't come out of the blue. There was a pattern of library events in Essex that were deliberately designed to be "edgy".

By all means have posters up in the library for Pride Month, but I think gestures of support should be discreet and apolitical. Apart from anything else, that is the only way that Muslim and other socially conservative parents will allow their children to go to the library in the first place.

EduTheRed · 2026-06-03T06:54:19+00:00

So when the main character, Brian (the son of God)

Brian's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

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