The real enemy

In these days of heightened sensitivity about Muslim extremism, I sometimes suspect that we are forgetting who the real enemy is.

Very few people, for instance, took much notice about my comments about giving a talk in a school where easily 50 percent of the students were Muslims, yet I had cause to observe that these were just kids, delightful, clever English kids.

The great genius of the English nation is its ability to take on board the disparate peoples of the world, to absorb them and, in the space of a few generations, to turn them into English people. To that extent, we are a mongrel nation – a society of hybrids, from which we get our vigour.

Living in an area with one of the highest proportion of Muslims in England, I thus have no long-term fears about integration. There are the hotheads, the disaffected, the bigots and the fools, but the general trend (away from the self-serving race-relations industry) is towards greater integration, led by the growing band of liberated, intelligent young women, who will not take the crap dished out by the dinosaur Imams for much longer.

In strictly practical terms, therefore, the greater long-term threat to the well-being and liberty of the greater number of people in this country are not the Muslims but our own officials. They have been waging war against their own populations for as long as I can remember, and will continue to do so long after the Muslim threat has receded.

In the front line of the ranks of these jobsworths are the traffic wardens and the "speed kills" zealots who maintain an inventory of yellow-painted cash machines called speed cameras. These people who steal our money are more loathsome in some respects than terrorists as they do their malign work in the name of the public good yet will go to any lengths to ensure that their writ applies, up to and including depriving us of our liberty and wrecking lives.

One cannot help, therefore, but feel a certain uplifting of the spirit at the news that a "militant motorist" might be on the loose, sending letter-bombs – including the hated Crapita - to firms linked to speed cameras.

Yes, I know that such joy is totally irresponsible – that it is disproportionate, that the victims are innocent people and nothing at all justifies breaking the law.

But then, anyone who has experienced that "red-mist moment" as they open that little brown envelope - or had to deal with an implacable bureaucracy that is interested only in feeding its own lust for money – will know exactly how I feel. I cannot be the only one who has fantasised about breaking into the local camera partnership office and spraying the occupants with a Kalashnikov. And would I report someone who I saw in the act of burning down a camera? Most definitely not.

As to the current bombing "wave", with more than two million fixed-penalty tickets handed out last year, generating around £120 million in licensed theft fines, triggered in the main by the more than 6,000 speed cameras, there are plenty of suspects.

Says anti-camera campaigner "Captain Gatso", director of Motorists Against Detection: "We're not responsible for these attacks and do not condone causing injury. "However, there is a war against motorists and it seems this is an act of retaliation."

That irresponsible part of me that should never be let out, says, "bring it on". Today, it is under control. Tomorrow? That is another day.

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