There was a car full of angry white boys cruising the high street of Wootton Bassett this week, Luke and Sam and their two friends, on the lookout for camera crews from Sky, ITV and the BBC. They wanted to make it clear, for the early evening news programmes, that if the march of Muslims through the town went ahead, they would block the road with cars, bring down a whole bunch of trouble and perhaps smash some skulls. I caught up with them as they tried to get themselves onto Sky to elucidate this important point more vigorously. They’d driven over from Swindon precisely to achieve this objective and told me that thousand upon thousand more just like them, alerted by a Facebook campaign, would be supporting them. Three of the four lads said they had nothing against Muslims per se, but the fourth, an amiable young man — who nonetheless had the word ‘supremacy’ tattooed on his neck — said he thought they should all f*** off back to where they came from, the Pakis and the Indians. The Indians? What have the poor Indians done? ‘I don’t like them either,’ he grinned.
Luke, meanwhile, had served in the marines and had metal plates in his legs and thorax as a consequence; also a scar from where he was attacked with knives by ‘Muslims’ in Halifax when, he said, they tried to steal his pet dog, a mastiff. I didn’t get the name of his dog, for which apologies. The Sky people turned away from these men, shuddering, and wouldn’t put them on film; they’d got their selective quotes from the townsfolk, a nicely balanced montage of people saying the march should not go ahead and others saying oh, ok, maybe it should, in the interests of freedom of speech.

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