Nevertheless, if Carole Thatcher had said it on air, I don’t suppose there would have been much disagreement about her being taken off air as a result. Nor do I think there can be much disagreement with The One Show presenter Adrian Chiles, Jo Brand and others for picking up Medusa’s Daughter over her use of the word during an after-show conversation in which she blabbed out her ‘off-the-cuff remark made in jest’ to describe a tennis player in the Australian open.

(Why the widespread coyness, by the way, in naming the tennis player concerned? I couldn’t find one mainstream news outlet prepared to say that Thatcher was talking about French player Gael Monfils. Didn’t any of them think it might have been instructive to get his opinion on the subject?).

I don’t think it suggests any degree of sympathy for the use of racially-based epithets, however, to feel that the reaction to Thatcher’s foot-in-mouth has been just a little OTT. When the Beeb doesn’t have the bollocks to broadcast a DEC appeal for Gaza, it feels a mite disproportionate to start acting all macho over an ex-prime minister’s gobby offspring.

Actually, bicycle-riding Bojo didn’t have the ungreen guts to simply abolish the zone off his own bat. He disguised the decision as the product of a public consultation exercise. And he warned those who were ‘consulted’ that abolition would cost a lot of money, cause a lot of congestion, pollute the air in London even more than it is already and generally make life more difficult and unpleasant in the city. So he could palm off all responsibility for this environmental disaster in that bumbling Bojoish manner with a ‘Look, I did my jolly best to make the environmentalist case but the public just weren’t having it and who am I to ride my bicycle roughshod over their democratic verdict?’

The problem is that Bojo’s consultation exercise, in which he promised to ‘listen to the people of London’ and go along with whatever they said, has about as much to do with democracy as a phone-in talk show. Those who bother to express their views are those who feel strongest on the subject.

So, unsurprisingly, it’s those who were being made to pay more for the privilege of driving their petrol combustion engines through any semblance of a sensible transport and environmental policy who shouted loudest. Out of 28,000 responses (London’s electorate numbers 5,044,962, by the way), 67 per cent of individuals and 87 per cent of businesses said get rid of the zone, let us drive for free. You’d have had a similar response if you’d proposed abolishing car insurance.

Much less well-publicised has been the response to Transport for London’s mini-opinion survey on the subject. This was organised to see how representative the responses to Bojo’s consultation exercise were.

The answer is: hardly at all. In the TfL survey, only 41 per cent of individuals (out of 2,000 surveyed) favoured getting rid of the western extension and only half of businesses (out of 1,000). Thirty per cent of individuals favoured keeping it as it is and 15 per cent said they would keep it but make changes to the way it operates (such as easing restrictions in the middle of the day).

On a crude reckoning that makes a 45:41 per cent majority in favour of keeping a modified scheme – which is an odd sort of popular mandate for its abolition. If Bojo goes ahead with getting rid of it – and incurs all the costs of doing so, including the removal of signs and cameras and road marking and all the rest, as well as the estimated £70 million annual revenue loss – let it be clear that it is his decision. He should not be allowed to hide behind some floppy notion of the ‘people’ having spoken.

This year it was the city of Oxford that was first in the media firing line with the Oxford Mail’s ‘Council set to axe Christmas’ headline on 1 November setting the tone for a spot of ‘political correctness gone mad’-style bureaucrat bashing.

The Mail even managed to rope in Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, to lead a chorus of non-Christian, pro-Christmas complaint.

“‘This is going to be a disaster. I’m angry and very, very disappointed,” Mirza moaned. “Christmas is special and we shouldn’t ignore it. Christian people should be offended and 99 per cent of people will be against this.”

Against what, exactly? A prohibition on plum puddings and carol singing, a la Oliver Cromwell circa 1649? Hardly. Instead, it seems the charity Oxford Inspires took the outrageous decision to call this year’s city centre festive lights switch-on a ‘Winter Light Festival’, with the idea of incorporating Hannukah, Diwali and maybe a midwinter solstice bonfire or two.

There are still going to be Christmas carols and a Christmas tree and people getting outrageously drunk and shagging each other at office parties and all the other things that make up a traditional Christmas, so it’s hard to see where the axe is falling.

Anyway, as Oxford Inspires spokesman Tei Williams commented, “The ceremony takes place on 28 November. It’s hardly Christmas if it’s November.”

I think, on balance, it was right that the Olympics went to China. I think it was right, too, that there were widespread protests, most notably as the Olympic flame made its way around the world from Greece to Beijing. I think that both the presence of the Games in China and the protests against them can only help the cause of liberalisation and democracy there.

Am I trying to have my sporting and political cake and eat it too? I don’t believe so.

There are few sporting, cultural or other events of any description, even in our globalised world, in which a commitment to contact, communication and friendship between nations is raised so high – and none in which it reaches so many people. When it happens, it’s worth cherishing, for all the flaws.

And the opportunity to see human beings performing at the very peak of physical achievement is a thing of absolute beauty. We may not be gods, but as a celebration of life it’s right up there with invention, music, poetry, drama and the very best of human endeavour. Roll on London 2012.

On Saturday, in case you missed it (which you probably did, since both the pre-publicity and the turnout were tiny), there was a central London ‘march and carnival parade’ organised by Unite Against Fascism. It was predominantly youthful, colourful and vibrant, but if there were more than two or three thousand present Trafalgar Square has got a lot bigger since I was last there.

That’s a long way short of the 60,000-plus who turned out in the rain for the Love Music Hate Racism event on the weekend before Dismayday (see ‘Just like ’78′); and no more than turned up at short notice to say hello to George Bush on his visit to London a week ago.

Far more depressing than the turnout on Saturday, however, has been the sectarian squabbling and repetitive point-scoring that erupts over every discussion of anti-racist organising (or almost any other form of organising) these days in the left-wing blogosphere. The participants have long since lost any sense of how they appear to the 999,999 people in every million who have not the slightest interest in their internecine catfights and wish only that they would go away and rattle some other tin roofs rather than keeping the rest of us awake at night.

Their arguments can be summed up in a couple of sentences. (If you really want to read them in detail you can find a representative sample here, under Liam MacUaid’s in itself unobjectionable assessment; or here on the ever more inappropriately-named Socialist Unity blog.) On the one side there are those who see Saturday’s event as a Socialist Worker’s Party front, regard the SWP as the font of all sectarian evil and want to drive a stake through the heart of the people they blame for splitting Respect and dividing the left. On the other side there are those who see Saturday’s event as a model of broad front mobilising, regard those who didn’t support it as the font of all sectarian evil and want to drive a stake through the heart of the people they blame for splitting Respect and dividing the left.

Meanwhile, the BNP (642 wards contested in the Dismayday elections, winning an average 13.4 per cent of the vote; 130,174 votes in London and a seat on the London Assembly) must be laughing all the way to the polling stations.

One of the arguments over Saturday’s march concerns the fact that it clashed with door-to-door leafleting, organised by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, in one of two wards in east London where the BNP has hopes of winning council by-elections in two weeks time. It’s clear that this sort of local campaigning is an essential part of first halting, and then reversing, the advance of the far right. But it seems equally clear to me that big set-piece events on a national stage are an essential part of the campaigning mix too. That, after all, was the basis for the success of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism the last time the far right posed a significant electoral threat; and the sad thing is that if you strip away the sectarian tensions I don’t believe that anyone is seriously arguing otherwise.

What also seems clear to me, though, is that the old anti-Nazi formula is inadequate to the current challenge. I was born and (in large part) brought up in Stoke-on-Trent, and my ex-partner of 20-odd years was born and brought up in Barking, the two main centres of BNP electoral success and ambition at the moment. So I know both places well; and I know the kind of people who are now backing the BNP. Dammit, some of the people in our families are among them.

The simple anti-Nazi demonising doesn’t work in the way that it used to for a number of reasons. First, the BNP has sunk real roots into some of these communities – far more so than the left. Whatever its ideological origins, whatever the backgrounds of some of its leaders, the BNP is not the same fringe Nazi organisation as its predecessors; and in places like Barking and Stoke voters know this from their personal experience. Outsiders coming in and telling them otherwise simply doesn’t wash.

Second, the core anti-Nazi message is in any case weaker now than it was 30 years ago, when many people of working age still had direct personal experience of the war against fascism and couldn’t stomach a supposedly ‘nationalist’ message that was at odds with what they and their parents had fought for in 1939-45. Put crudely, the patriotic appeal of anti-fascism has lost its punch; it’s much harder to combat the far right on this terrain than in the past.

Expose them for what they are, yes, but the new-look, besuited-not-booted image is not just window dressing. As Magnus Marsdal (‘Underdog politics’) and Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas MP and Searchlight editor Nick Lowles (‘Nothing is more important’) outline in the June/July issue of Red Pepper, we are facing a Europe-wide phenomenon in the shape of the rise of a newly ‘respectable’ far right that cannot be combated on the simple basis of old-style anti-fascism.

This new far right is reaching parts of the white working class that the left is failing to touch. The reasons are many, but they boil down to two: the absence of an alternative political appeal in the form of a credible left-wing programme (exacerbated by the surrender of New Labour and other European social democratic parties to the forces of neoliberalism and global capitalism); and the absence of alternative political organisation rooted in the experiences and needs of people who have been to a large extent abandoned by the mainstream political parties and the left alike.

In the course of writing this, I dug out for reference a piece I wrote for New Society back in February 1985 (‘I’m not racialist but …’). Reading through it, I was struck by how I could have written virtually the exact same article yesterday. And if that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is.

Photo: Saturday’s march/parade in London, courtesy of Harpymarx, who has other good pics too

So my instinctive reaction to the news that a young Muslim woman had been awarded £4,000 for ‘injury to feelings’ after a London hairdresser refused to employ her because she wore a headscarf was:

a) That’s a bit steep (which also happens to be the exact phrase used by the hairdresser after the industrial tribunal made its ruling).

b) Why would someone who believes that women should cover up their hair in public want a job as a hairdresser anyway? and

c) I can think of a few hairdressers around my neck of the woods where business would improve immensely if the wearing of headscarfs was made compulsory for some of the staff.

I wasn’t – and I’m still not – convinced that you can really make a case that it’s religious discrimination when a ‘funky, urban’ hairdresser’s like this one, a couple of miles down the road from me at King’s Cross, says it wants its employees to look the part.

But I can see the point that it should be up to an employer to demonstrate why someone in a headscarf can’t do the job. After all, I presume that the people who do (for example) breast implant surgery aren’t all required to have had a boob job done themselves.

The hairdresser concerned has been doubly unlucky in this case, however. First, she’s been stung for four grand for discrimination when, as far as it’s possible to tell, she doesn’t have a discriminatory hair on her head. And second, and far worse, she’s become a cause celebre for every Islamophobic bigot in the country.

Choose almost any internet news forum at random and check out the public comments on the story. And bear in mind that even if, like me and, it seems, most of the country, you think that the compensation award is wrong, Bushra Noah, the 19-year-old Muslim woman concerned, had trained as a hair stylist and worked in the industry for at least two years before applying for this job. ‘I know my punk from my funk and my urban from my trendy,’ she’s been quoted as saying.

What you’ll find in the news forums is visceral anti-Muslim hysteria. ‘She just sued to get money for her terrorist friends.’ ‘The Muslim woman is not interested in hairdressing but merely promoting her cause.’ ‘That ragbag Muslim creature certainly had tried this on before and got away with it!’ ‘Had she been employed I wonder if she would have demanded five breaks a day to pray.’ ‘She should be shaved, tarred and feathered … Mozzie bitch!’

The first four comments are from just the first page of a moderated – and moderate – news forum. The last one has been on the Sun’s news forum since 9 April. I’ve been watching to see if they’ll ever remove it.

The sun was shining, the plane trees were fruiting, the bus lanes were still functioning, there was still the same myriad mix of people, united in our variety. This is the city I never dreamt I would stay in when I first arrived here from the provinces. And this is the city I have grown to love and call home.

For someone who likes nothing better than solitude and the wild open spaces, I have become curiously attached to this humming, heaving metropolis. It was only the other day that I was telling someone that when I go I want my ashes to be given to a turning tide on the riverside beach at a Waterloo sunset, when the golden sunlight reflects back from the river to the sky, from Westminster looking west to St Paul’s looking east.

It’s on this stretch of river that Ken Livingstone aimed the rockets from the old GLC’s final firework display towards the parliament of Maggie Thatcher. It seems like an eternity ago now that he so ired the Tory harridan that she abolished London-wide local government altogether. Tony Blair brought it back and when he tried to keep Ken out of it, it was Ken that gave New Labour its first bloody nose instead.

Livingstone wasn’t always the nicest man on London’s political map – no one who rises so high in politics ever can be. He only became leader of the GLC in 1981 by executing a putsch against the man who had led Labour to election victory within 24 hours of the polls closing. He could be rough, tough, sharp-tongued and abrasive. Accusing a Jewish reporter of behaving ‘like a concentration camp guard’ wasn’t the most politic of remarks; nor was his refusal to grit his teeth and apologise afterwards. He made lasting enemies, often unnecessarily, often in his own ranks. I was once on the receiving end of a hungover Ken’s caustic; I know what it feels like, I always voted Ken without illusions.

But London without him at its helm is a lessened city. His backing for minorities, his belief in diversity, hoisted a rainbow flag to which we could rally long before such opinions became mainstream; when to say something like “Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything”, as he did, was to invite political purgatory. To make the now obvious point that there would be no peace in Northern Ireland until you started talking to the ‘men of violence’ showed bravery at the time beyond the call of political duty.

When Thatcher and the hard-right Tories held sway over the government of Britain, when she spoke of the miners as the ‘enemy within’, or of people feeling ‘swamped’ by blacks and Asians, we could say of London, ‘Not here, not us’, and Livingstone would offer a different voice.

When Blair took us to war under false pretences, and when that war brought bombers onto our tubes and buses, Livingstone led us in a different vision of London, what it is and what it represents.

London, despite everything, is a far, far better place to live than when I first arrived here when Ken was starting his climb up the greasy pole of politics. And many of the improvements of the past eight years – from the congestion charge and public transport to community policing and affordable housing – are down to Livingstone in particular.

I thought Boris Johnson was commendably gracious in his acceptance speech Friday night (when you’re a winner you can afford to be). But the best we can hope for from him is that he doesn’t mess up on what Livingstone has begun. It’s hard to imagine Bojo being so brave or imaginative in his own right.

And the people who voted for him to give Gordon Brown a kicking, or because they want the right to drive and park where and when they like in London, or because they think Livingstone had become too arrogant, or because they think there are too many immigrants moving in, or because they’re sick to death of young yobboes, or because they’re worried about their mortgages, or because they think bendy buses are a disaster, or because they’re apoplectic about speed humps, or because they never see a police officer round where they live, or because they don’t like that new skyscraper, or because the neighbours play their music too loud – well, it will be interesting to see how Bojo deals with that ragbag of complainants now that he has to do something rather than simply join them.

As for the Evening Standard, how on earth are they going to fill their pages now that they’ve won their 30-year war on Ken?