The crusade against FGM is out of control

Imagine if a Ukip politician wrote about being on an aeroplane that was ‘heaving’ with black people. Imagine if he described becoming suspicious of them, and assuming, on the basis of no evidence, just a hunch, that they must be flying overseas to get up to no good. Imagine if he complained to British police about this ‘heaving’ group of dark-skinned air travellers, and the police agreed to interrogate them upon their return to Britain.

There would be outrage. We’d see this as racialised suspicion. In which case, why has there been no outrage, not so much as a raised eyebrow, over what the Lib Dem Baroness Jenny Tonge did at the end of last week?

Baroness Tonge wrote about a flight she recently took from Heathrow to Addis Ababa. In a Facebook post she said her flight had been ‘heaving… with British-Somalia families’. It looked like they were ‘returning to Somalia for “the holidays”‘, said Tonge.