Whats amused you (in the news) today ?

I'm not in total disagreement with you (unusually ), but can you really imagine the earth shattering fall-out if a white MP used the term "hideously black"? It would be totally seismic and rightly so.

I've often thought you were more lucid when you're asleep  but are you really saying that the worthy pursuit of racial equality gives ANYONE the right to use disgusting, abusive, racial language? If so, you really need to take a long, hard look at yourself, or at the very least, go back to sleep.

So let me get this straight.

You don't believe that referring to any group as "hideous", purely on the basis of the colour of their skin is offensive!! You really have reached a new low.

Please, can we end this now, my head is about to implode. No more.

dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hideously

The UK must be a pretty tolerant place, as evidenced every day by the hundreds of ethnic families prepared to risk their lives crossing the Channel to live here. We must be doing something right.

So I asked myself, which countries are even more tolerant and less racist than the UK?  Which countries can we learn from?  Candidates might have included Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, the four Nordics and Switzerland.

And yet a quick search finds...

• "Racial profiling was a common practice of Dutch police during traffic control, border stops and identity checks, Committee Experts said. Minority communities felt over-policed and under-served."

• Racism in Sweden: "skin color, ethnic/religious background have significant impact on an individual's opportunities in the labor market, affecting mainly Romani people, Black people, Asian people, Muslims, Jews and Latinos". "Attitudes towards migrants from Finland was quite negative during the 1960s and 1970s. The Finns were called Finnjävlar (literally ‘Finn devils’, meaning ‘Finn bastards’)."

• "In 2015, 65 percent of the Finnish population strongly disagreed with the statement that the “white European race must be prevented from mixing into darker races because otherwise, the European autochthonous population will go extinct”, but in 2020 the number had decreased to 56."

• "The Happiest and the Most Racist: Institutional Racism in Nordic Countries"

• "Black residents are 20 times more likely than a White resident to be shot dead by police in Toronto". "83% of Black people in Canada say they are treated unfairly at least some of the time".

• Racism is endogenous to New Zealand: "I have feared for my life because of the colour of my skin". "The suffering of people of colour in Aotearoa has been silenced for too long. We are tired. We have lived this truth our entire lives".

• "Racial profiling exists in Switzerland: Black residents are targeted more often for searches and identity requests from police. Each of us has had a bad experience with the police,” Mutombo recently told Swiss public radio, RTS.

• Racism on the rise in Switzerland, says government report.

I form two conclusions from the common pattern:-

1. The UK is nowhere near as bad as often painted.

2. Cultural or other differences cause certain groups to be unsettled and apparently discriminated against in all the countries above.  No reasons are given for why that might be.  Are we all racists in every country, or is there some other explanation?  Who knows, but it's interesting that the UK experience seems to be replicated far and wide.