Now even Fifa’s dinosaurs have learned to cry racism

Are all white women really prostitutes who should be avoided, as some children at those schools in Birmingham were apparently informed? This is obviously a delicate, if not rather fraught, area and one should tread carefully for fear of giving offence. I have given the matter a lot of thought and have tried to fashion a sort of middle way, amenable to both sides in the debate.

So, while everyone might agree that white women are to be avoided wherever possible, it seems to me to be overstating the case to characterise them all as prostitutes. I am not even certain that one could reasonably describe ‘most’ white women as being prostitutes. The Queen, for example, is not a prostitute, and nor, to my knowledge, is the Cambridge professor of classics, television’s Mary Beard. Several white women of my acquaintance are not prostitutes either, and one begins to wonder where such figures might have come from. (The school in question denies that any comments of this nature were made at all.)

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James Tidmarsh

The end of the pick ’n’ mix passport

Perhaps, then, in lieu of official statistics on the matter, ‘a substantial minority of white women are prostitutes, and all of them are to be avoided’ strikes the right sort of balance, upon which Muslim teachers and the feminists can agree. Indeed, that blanket derogation as applied to ‘all’ white women strikes me as, well, frankly borderline racist. But I am loth to use that term, as it has become so devalued of late. Indeed, as soon as I hear the word ‘racist’ bandied around I immediately suspect that whoever is doing the bandying has already lost the argument and is climbing into a bunker which he or she believes is impregnable, impossible to assail. It’s the real-life equivalent of the Get Out Of Jail Free card and has been effectively stripped of all meaning.