Why should we tolerate these Islamofascists who hate us all?

At the root of my friend Michael Collins's quite brilliant book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, and the recent TV show on the obliteration of the same, one truth hit home with agonising ease. And that was his righteous anger not with immigrants - as many seat-sniffing, mosque-bothering critics have accused him - but with the ruling and chattering classes who dared to criticise the working-class attitude towards them.

From the word go, the white working class have been portrayed as the fat white fly in the joyous rainbow ointment of cultural diversity, SPOILING EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY ELSE, set up against noble, chaste, hard-working immigrants as the undeserving or deserving poor.

Of course, it is all very well to spend your days lecturing others to "celebrate diversity" when you go home each night to Hampstead. But surely the faces of the people who were killed last week told their own story - if this is such an unwelcoming, racist place to live, why do all races continue to flock here, as they do to evil, imperialist America?

We are told to celebrate the diversity of life, but the diversity of death has a totally unforced, unbossed, unmanaged poignancy, a million miles away from English toddlers being forced to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid when they are still trying to get their heads around the Easter Bunny. The capital city gave much to immigrants - freedom - as they themselves gave much to it, and now they have given their lives for that city and that freedom.

Still, there was something a little creepy about the way in which certain people went on about the diversity of the dead. For one thing, it showed a willingness to believe the best of the bombers: that if only they had known that they had murdered delegates of all creeds and colours, they wouldn't have done it.

Bullshit. This sort of Islamofascist hates multiculturalism. Just you try building a church in Saudi Arabia! They won't even let our troops out there celebrate St Valentine's Day. And as for any idea of the races being equal . . . it is the Muslim world that keeps slavery alive, and Muslim governments, as in Sudan, that see nothing whatsoever wrong with ethnic cleansing. Recently a Muslim columnist wrote sorrowfully of how in her culture a Muslim girl marrying a black man was the greatest shame that could fall upon a family. So much for equality under Islam.

There was also the implication from some quarters that if all the dead had been white Christians, the tragedy and abomination would have been somehow less. This seemed particularly inappropriate at a time when we were celebrating this country's wartime suffering and resilience. We were white then - but did we bleed less because of it?

In an effort to fight racism, certain people like to pretend that there was no fun, no culture, no nobility here before multiculturalism - but there was. And to follow that weird logic, you'd also have to say that the Third World also had none of the above before the white man went there and interfered. And before you know it, you're making all sorts of mad claims.

What we have learnt recently is that diversity is not just to be celebrated mindlessly, but also navigated and negotiated. We, the host community, have accepted multiculturalism; the issue now is whether hardline - and I stress hardline - Muslims can do the same.

To my eyes at least, "live and let live" seems to be a concept they have a problem with; until they can grasp it, as the Sikhs and Hindus have (who have at least as strong and rich a culture, but feel no need to burn books, form parliaments, set up separatist schools and kill their fellow Britons to demonstrate this), the jury is still out on whether hardline Muslims can truly live happily in non-Muslim countries. And, after all, they have 56 - count 'em! - of their own to go to if they don't like it. They are spoilt for choice.

Or will they not be happy until every last country in the world is composed of veiled women, bearded men and dead infidels, of all creeds and colours?

Rag-hags follow new fashion

FASHION designers say the funniest things. Such as "Fashion is Art". And sometimes, when seeking to seem more than a gaggle of giggling gay pattern-cutters, "Fashion Cares". Few things, as I recall, were more comic in the attempt to position the "Nice Nineties" firmly opposite the "'Ateful Eighties" than the rag trade's bleatings that "Fashion cares about ecology".

They could send as many models wearing babies and carrying unbleached cotton (or was it the other way around?) as they liked down the catwalks, but before long the jig was up and clothes were filthy with fur and dripping with diamonds. A new label, Noir, promises "meaningful luxury fashion" and includes, alongside "African suits" and Third World sourcing, an "iconic" mink jacket. That's fashion - red in tooth, claw and bank account too.

Of course, it is as silly to accuse fashion of being frivolous and wasteful as it is to blame a dog for barking. But in return for our benevolent blind eye, could they please cease acting as if they care about anything more than their own profit margins? When thespians and crooners lecture about making poverty history and generally saving the planet it's bad enough, but to pretend that fashion, which inherently depends on chucking out perfectly good clothes to buy more that you don't need, can in any way do anything more constructive than promote profligate waste and pollution, is madness.

The attitude of the designers to the women at whom their clothes are aimed is similarly ill-sorted and paradoxical. For instance, not one of the clowns can resist the temptation to squeal "I LOVE WOMEN!" approximately ten times a day for the benefit of the media. To which the only sensible retort is surely, a) then why do you never have sex with them? and b) then why is the only choice women are offered by haute couture the difference between dressing like a £5,000 a night hooker, a £500 a night hooker or a £5 a night hooker?

Amazingly, the proportion of women buying cheap and cheerful clothes at supermarkets has gone from 60 to 73 per cent in the space of a year, according to a survey, which has put huge pressure not just on high-end fashion - in crisis for years, most of the houses clawing back a profit only through the sale of make-up and fragrances - but on fashion chain stores too. (Many of whom allow you the honour of dressing like a whore on a nurse's wages, bless 'em.)

Women - the ungrateful bitches. Buying clothes when they need them. Treating them as if they were food or books rather than the Holy Grail, which is going to change their lives forever. Outrageous. In fact, it's so "revolutionary", you should look out for the new dumb rag-hag slogan any day soon: "Fashion Hates Fashion".

# It's true - the white working-class is the only group that may now be abused and maligned with impunity. Regard Big Brother. White girl takes top off, has sex with boy: filthy slag. Black girl takes top off, has sex with boy: strong woman. Rude white kids: bullies. Rude ethnic kids: divine divas, darling. Let's hear it for inverted racism!