Peter Rhodes: Inconvenient truths

MORE mis-heard musicians. A reader goes back many years with his tale of a pal being entranced by a brilliant American jazz pianist and rushing down to the music shop to buy his records. Nobody in the shop had heard of Fat Swallow.

ANOTHER Countryfile (BBC1), another taste-testing of country fayre, this time duck and greens. As always, the presenters declared the stuff to be delicious. Once, just once, wouldn't you love to see John Craven spit something out?

SPEED humps in the road save lives, right?Apparently not. Clean-air campaigners claim the slowing-down and speeding-up caused by "sleeping policemen" actually increase harmful emissions, contributing to the 25,000 - 50,000 deaths (the figures seems to change every week) blamed on diesel emissions. So it's out with humps and in with safer air. And how long before the inevitable casualties occur and this new theory is turned on its head when road humps are discovered to be safer, after all?

MEANWHILE, Paris, Athens, Madrid and Mexico City have announced a total ban on diesel lorries from 2025. This is intended to encourage electric, hydrogen and petrol vehicles and thus make the air safe to breathe. But as I noted last week, petrol is far more explosive than diesel. When a car's petrol tank explodes it is dramatic enough. What effect would a lorry's 200-gallon petrol tank have if it exploded in a crowded city? And who knows what sort of inferno a ruptured hydrogen tank might create in the Champs Elysee?

DAME Louise Casey's report on segregation in Britain has "long grass" written all over it. Such reports tend to flutter around for a day or two and then vanish without trace as we try to convince ourselves that all is well in our happy, matey, multicultural society. Deep down, we know it isn't. For thousands of people in Britain today, "multiculturalism" actually means "living in ghettos." Those are the segregated, inner-city enclaves where "community leaders" rule the roost and fiddle the ballots and where the languages, prejudices and practices of the Third World still thrive. Women and girls are the property of their men and, although forced marriage and genital mutilation are rife, everyone looks the other way because "it's their culture" and must therefore be accepted.

YOU cannot stamp out unacceptable behaviour without first explaining that it is wrong, and then doing something positive to make the point – up to and including prosecution. Getting it right may mean supporting women and children against their own fathers, mothers, extended families and "community leaders." It would take rather more moral courage than most politicians can muster.

AS for cultural rights, I am reminded of a dinner some years ago in Texas where the most striking thing about our American hosts was the gentility of their language. Not a single damn or bloody passed their lips. But at the end of the table was a jolly ex-pat working for a company in Houston. He was cheerfully, and loudly, effing and blinding – and worse - throughout the meal. "Has no-one spoken to him about his language?" I asked our host. "Oh, no," she replied, shocked. "It's his culture – he's Australian."