Not so Big in Romania

A day of unparalleled media exposure. If you were watching Plato's Breaking Point on Romanian pay-per-view this week, you might have spotted me in a yellow shirt filling out a scene in a greasy spoon. Or you might not if the alternative footage was used, shot on a freezing cold night at the end of the 1990s. I don't know myself as I haven't seen the film, but it's good to see some use being made of it somewhere.

My more serious appearance was on the Sonia Deol show, debating whether press coverage of the London bombs was responsible or not. I argued that compared to past "terror" campaigns - many described as such to assail legitimate liberation movements - recent journalism is largely quite restrained. More troubling is the assumption that the white working class in this country is ready to go on a racist rampage when fed the slightest tabloid provocation. For some reason this new etiquette involves pretending to live in the early 1980s, when such arguments were perhaps a bit more plausible. Still, it was quite pleasant to be able to stick it to Sun political editor Trevor Kavanagh, who is firmly a supporter of free speech and tolerance for those who agree with him. Poor old Tariq Ramadan is clearly beyond the pale.