The English are the first among unequal minorities

Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels, wrote H A L Fisher in his great 1935 History of Europe. Such sentiments had clearly failed to penetrate the thick skull of the thug who disfigured 22-year-old Lucy Newman in Aberdeen at the weekend, apparently on the pretext that she is English. You may depend on it. This unsavoury incident is going to raise another stushie about anti-English racism.