These pesky Muslims

I was nearly asleep on the settee and Melanie Phillips woke me up. She's a journalist and very clever. She's been around for a long time, and not just in the newspapers but on radio and TV.

Tonight Melanie was giving her opinion on the man who last night drove a van into a London crowd coming out of a mosque after prayers during Ramadan. She didn't seem to think this man was an extremist. She felt he was 'reacting' to - and I quote - the wish of 1.6 billion Muslims to overwhelm the rest of us. She wasn't even willing to link that man with the man who murdered Jo Cox. There was, she felt, 'no equivalence.' So, no white terrorists exist in the UK.

Given the situation we're in right now: 4 terror attacks in the UK in a month, and a huge number of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany in the past year (another reported late tonight in the gare centrale in Brussels) maybe Melanie might want to consider a few facts.

If 1.6 billion Muslim people in the world really wanted us all dead, we'd be dead.

It's a bad idea to lay all these extremist attacks in the name of Islam at the door of perfectly ordinary people who just happen to be Muslims and want for themselves and their families what the rest of us want: not to be killed or maimed as we go about our daily lives.

There's a large element of UK society that refuses to accept that there are people - white, uneducated and luckily not yet armed - who are prepared to attack anyone they think doesn't share their view of a perfect UK: the UK that apparently existed before foreigners came here. You know, the people with black and brown skins who don't speak the language, live off benefits and are taking houses and jobs from decent British people. Groups like Britain First and the EDL stoke the fires of hatred, not just against Muslims but anyone - like Jo Cox - who preaches tolerance.

We have had black and brown neighbours for at least 200 years. They speak perfect English. They are fully integrated British people. They work and pay taxes and only the most recent arrivals sometimes work in jobs that British people won't do but they are often in essential services like the NHS. They don't take houses from 'British' people: there just aren't enough houses and there haven't been for 50 years, since the Tories in Thatcher's government started selling them off and refusing local councils permission to build new houses, a strategy that keeps house prices up - and the middle classes like that.

Of course, we'll get through these terrible extremist attacks, but it will help if we accept that there are groups of people out there who glory in our troubles and they don't all have dark skins.