PAUL ROUTLEDGE Many questions need addressing T

OMORROW is polling day in the general election. It could well be my last. I’ve already voted by post in Keighley. Labour, since you ask, as I have since 1966, except 2005 when I spoiled my ballot paper with “Not Liar Blair.”

In retrospect, that was an understandable but silly act of anonymous reaction against the Iraq War.

And safe really, because another win for the party to which I belong was pretty well guaranteed.

This time it’s different. Not only is Labour up against an arrogant, overconfident Tory Party, it is fighting for its political life. So every vote counts.

Barry Sheerman is standing for re-election in Huddersfield.

He’s been a hard-working, committed constituency MP since 1979.

If I had a vote here I wouldn’t hestitate to put an “X” next to his name. A BUILDING firm has banned its employees having facial hair on health and safety grounds.

Nasties might get round ill-fitting face masks.

There are too many accidents on construction sites so I’m all in favour of H & S, but this is surely going too far.

Building workers already have to wear hard hats and hi-vis clothing.

How can they swear at the job from behind a mask?

I only once worked on a construction site, in Edinburgh. That’s when I learned that labouring is a skilled job, not one for amateurs.

Incidentally, how did anything get built before loud music portable radio was invented? HERE will not be a trial so we’ll never know precisely why they did it.

Police officers shot dead the terrorists who brought murder and mayhem to London Bridge.

But their motives are self-evident from cries of “this is for Allah!” heard by witnesses to the terrible crime.

I know cosmopolitan Borough Market of old. For years I lived only a mile away and regularly drank and shopped there.

It’s a warren of streets with pubs, restaurants and food stalls, with trains roaring overhead from Waterloo East and Southwark Cathedral at its heart.

It was a prime target and this latest atrocity must force an honest reappraisal of the complacent establishment view that Islam is solely a religion of peace.

Yes, for the vast majority of Muslims, it is. But not for the dangerous minority with extremist views whose numbers and the threat they pose are clearly growing.

The security services say they are investigating 50 possible terror plots involving 3,000 suspects and a total of 20,000 “persons of interest.” Even with my mistrust of round figures, this is a scary scenario.

Killer Khuram Butt, on an MI5 watch-list for the past two years, managed to slip through the net, along with his coconspirators. It’s no use pretending that Islamic fundamentalism is not a clear and present danger. Or that Muslim leaders are doing enough to root out this evil fanaticism.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan angrily condemned the “perverse and poisonous ideology that has no place in Islam.” The Ramadan Foundation says: “We must take them on.” But where are the women’s voices in this crisis? Spokesman Nazir Afzal calls the authorities “lazy” for talking only to “the usual suspects – middleaged, middleclass professional men” and urged a bigger role for women – the mainstay of the Muslim family. Hear, hear to that. Islam is a different way of life, an all-encompassing religion, as Christianity has not been in the UK for more than a century.

It’s no use pretending that Islamic fundamentalism is not a clear and present danger.

Hardliners like their women to be fully-veiled in a burka which I think is a breach of their human rights.

Some Muslim men think white women have lax morals so they target girls who know no better. Gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham, Keighley and other towns have sexually abused them and are now in jail.

Muslim insistence on being “other” – maintaining a separate existence in the UK long after the first generations arrived here – makes for mutual suspicion, hatred even.

Are they British Muslims or Muslim British? Which comes first? Loyalty to faith or country? Are they a “community” apart, or part of the community?

Until these questions can be answered, to the satisfaction of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, seeds of conflict will remain, ready to burst into the full flower of conflict.