The two most read articles on BBCi today give us a fascinating insight into where Britain’s collective head is at.

First of all we have the goth couple who have been banned from the bus because he insists on leading her on a lead. There are two issues here. First of all the bus company are surely only being responsible to ban them on health and safety grounds - the inherent dangers are quite obvious. Secondly, while what people do behind closed doors is fine by me, it is fascinating to compare this issue with the ongoing controversy over Muslim dress codes.

There is much public anxiety these days about Burqas (which I don’t see around anything like as much as I did a couple of years ago - anyone else notice this?) and other forms of Muslim dress. Would we have the same anxiety if like “Dani” and “Tasha” (guffaw!) they merely defined it as a form of sexual expression?

Is it really, as I fear some of my readers may accuse me, illiberal and prejudiced to suggest the two simply grow up, get a life and stop shoving their crass faux radicalism down our figurative throats? Where is the fine line between pointing out that people are making arses out of themselves and celebrating self-expression? Answers on a postcard (well, in the comments below) please.

Meanwhile, a retelling of the Three Little Pigs has been banned from a competition because it apparently is offensive to both Muslims and builders. In the case of the latter, I’m not sure if any retelling of the story can really avoid portraying them in a good light, unless the story is changed so that the houses made of straw and sticks end up meeting the latest tough EU building directives. I wonder if this sudden concern for the portrayal of the construction industry has anything to do with the current domination of Eastern Europeans of it in the UK? Should we all be talking it up with a view to establishing a new generation of eager young British labourers? Maybe studying Auf Weidersehen, Pet should be made compulsory on the national curriculum? Perhaps Bob the Builder should be monumented on the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square?

But I digress. As I’ve blogged before, in what way are piggies offensive to Muslims? Just because I don’t eat horses, it doesn’t mean I think Black Beauty should be banned. I don’t seem to ever hear Muslims objecting to it either; only people claiming to speak “for” them. I think I need this carefully explained to me, preferably with diagrams, but apparently doing so would be “culturally insensitive” so I fear it won’t happen.

UPDATE: Okay, mea culpa. I’ve read a couple of alternative accounts of the goth incident and while my views on the couple themselves haven’t changed, my defence of the bus driver in question certainly was misplaced. Everyone has a right to get on a bus without being abused, verbally or physically.

Sadly, Tasha herself though doesn’t exactly come out of this well: “I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life. I don’t cook or clean and I don’t go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It’s my culture and my choice. It isn’t hurting anyone.” Sounds like low self-esteem to me. Since Mat wants to bark Mill at me, I will refer him to this. You really think I’m the one enslaving people by conformity?

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They probably wouldn’t be very good at giving speeches, but they’re soooo cute; who could resist voting for them and their widdle nosey-woses?

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Honestly, who’d be a pig these days?

It was bad enough in the 70s and 80s when you were associated with the police force (George Orwell’s doing?). Now, your very existence is regularly said to offend both Jews and Muslims.

The latest example of this is an attempt (ultimately futile, but why let that get in the way of a good rant?) in Yorkshire to make a school play featuring the Three Little Pigs change the said porcine characters into canines, on the grounds that it would offend Muslims.

This is of course palpable nonsense. Not only are living pigs not offensive to Muslims (it is the smoke-cured variety that causes them difficulty), but living dogs very much are. Actually, let me be clearer, it isn’t forbidden to own a dog in Islam, but there are certain restrictions on what you do with it regarding purity laws. As with many religions though, cultural practice is often assumed, by practitioners and outsiders alike, as being religious decree. I’ve known Muslims who had a problem with dogs, either regarding them with utter contempt, or having an irrational fear of them. Indeed, the dislike of dogs has been cited as part of a rejection of Zoroastrianism, which highly valued dogs. The rise of Islam in Persia went hand in hand with a persecution of Zoroastrianism and cultural norms about not liking dogs may have started then.

Yet, because the most that the average brainless local government bureaucrat knows about Islam is that his Friday night kebab doesn’t have any pork in it, the rise of the pig as the ultimate in pariah animals has been inexorable. A friend of mine who used to work in educational publishing once told me that she had got a furious complaint, from a teacher who made it clear that she was not herself Muslim, because they had published an alphabet wall chart with “p” for “pig” on it. Last week I mentioned the ludicrousness of the Ham and High of all newspapers claiming that Labour was anti-semitic for portraying Michael Howard as a flying pig.

In turn, I have no doubt that this will become mutually reinforcing. Anxious Jews and Muslims, reaching out to find new examples of how they are being persecuted, are bound to lap all this up. Soon, people will be calling for Charlotte’s Web to be banned (Wilbur is an innocent being manipulated by the sinister, spidery Charlotte whose actions are driven by the Zionist Protocols); I can guarantee that the loony fringe of the Jewish lobby will start asserting that Animal Farm is anti-semitic (after all, Nelson=Marx, and Marx was a Jew). The lunacy can only continue. The only logical outcome of all this is to ban the pig, not merely the animal, but the concept itself. Only then can we guarantee that Jews and Muslims, and people claiming to be speaking for Jews and Muslims, will not be traumatised by their existence.

All of which suggests that Heather Mills is perhaps not thinking things through in her latest attempt to get the public on her side by convincing them she is Linda McCartney protesting at how pigs are treated on farms. She might just as well start doodling pictures of Mohammed.

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