Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Captain of our fairy band,

Helena is here at hand,

And the youth, mistook by me,

Pleading for a lover's fee.

Shall we their fond pageant see?

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

A Midsummer Nights Dream Act 3, scene 2, 110–115

I don't think I have ever wanted to move away from Sulgrave quite as much as I do now.

So for a few years now it has been painfully obvious that there are a couple of racists living nearby. In the building next to mine someone hung a St George's Cross in their flat window that had "EDL" (English Defence League ) scrawled in the corners with marker pen (it also had The Sun Newspaper's logo on it suggesting that it was one of the mass produced in China ones the paper gave away free one world cup, which I suppose shows a fantastic sense of English pride).

There is a guy in our building that I see now and again wearing bike leathers with the National Front logo painted on the back, he held the gate open for me once and I suddenly realised I should be somewhere else and U-turned. I like to think of myself as fairly liberal, open-minded and accepting of other people's opinions, but I draw the line at accepting help from someone who's opinions deliberately hurt people. 

Last year our local Miners parade was followed down the road by three EDL guys on motorbikes, I'm pretty sure they were an unofficial tag along but it still made me feel quite uneasy.

So today I had to walk into town to buy vegetables, on my way I passed three flyers pasted to lampposts by the "North East Infidels" going on about the grooming of children, having seen the name I was already pretty convinced that this would be racists trying to tempt people in with smoke and mirrors. 

Of course any decent person is against the grooming of children, but this is how the right wing lure people in, talk about the things that everybody can agree on before hitting them with the poison.

Sure enough when I looked up North East Infidels... Yup racists, many of them former EDL by the look of it, the flag in the building next door is gone now, I guess this is why, he's moved on.

The real kicker about this?

Two of the flyers were posted next to the two primary school, they claim to be against grooming children, and yet here they are themselves grooming children to follow their hate filled causes.

If they are really against child abuse, how come they only talk about it when the perpetrators are not the same colour or religion as them?

The vast majority of paedophiles in this country are white, why do they never talk about them?