Time for another round of Macdara’s favourite game: ancient grudge. In this case it is not so ancient, but highlights an age-old phenomenon: English racism. Let us explore further.

Your correspondent’s representative in the theatrically undemocratic electoral system that obtains in the UK is Diane Abbott. He has no idea if Abbott is an effective representative. He admires a leftwing Black woman, of course, while also feeling that he might not much like to be in a room with Abbott specifically.

Two years ago, she wrote a letter to one of the rightwing papers, taking issue with an opinion piece on some research conducted into racism in Britain. In fact the researchers describe the country in their coverage and methodology section as Great Britain, which is not in fact a country. The research also does not cover all of Britain, although it does cover all of England, which is what people mean when they say Britain, so it is at least consistent with the ideology of Englishness, if not with actual Fact.

The opinion writer explores in pretty unexceptionable detail the fact that “Morally speaking, racism is a black and white issue. But when it comes to how it manifests itself, it is multidimensional”—your correspondent is unclear whether the switch from colours to dimensions was intentional or just some of the messy overwriting that is compulsory at the Guardian, the world’s least likeable publication: surely spectrum was the intended idea? (To prove the despicable nature of that paper: one of their environmental lifestyle ghouls not only refers to himself as a glyptodon—meaning, presumably, that he has thick skin—and not only adds a link so that moronic Guardian readers can learn what the word means and can drop it into a sentence to impress each other, but has done this—link and all—repeatedly.)

Now this newspaper article, following the research, uses actual hate speech, referring to Gypsies—admittedly a standard feature of this country’s backward discourse, though you might expect better of researchers into racism, and opinion writers opining on racism—but also confusingly has Gypsy and Traveller as a single item; Roma is a separate category, as it should be, but why are Travellers given their own name alongside a racist exonym, or have they been combined with another group of some kind unknown to Macdara?