I was thinking yesterday about immigration. I’d been shopping with my boyfriend and his sister who’d come up for the weekend to visit and take advantage of the sale in the Bullring. For various reasons I’d gone out wearing totally inappropriate footwear and ended up abandoning the two of them in Topshop and taking a Taxi home, a rare extravagance for me.
I’m at University in Birmingham, a town which has recently been the scene of some terrible race riots. Now I’ve always know I was in favour of multi-culturalism and I think the melting pot of different cultures that is modern Britain is a great thing, but getting into the Taxi made me think of an aspect of this debate I’d never considered before. I would much rather get into a taxi alone with a Muslim than a white man. When I was checking out the various Taxi drivers standing by their cabs waiting for customers, I was relieved to see the first man in the queue was an older middle aged, cheerful Middle Eastern man, whose car was bedecked in ornaments decorated with Arabic writing and sayings of the prophet. I was far more confident of my safety with anyone who followed the teachings of the Qur’an than with the skin-headed Daily Mail and Sun reading white guys you so often get driving cabs. And I was right to put my trust in this guy. He was cheerful, chatty, got me home quickly (and explained which route he was taking and why so I knew where we were going) and when it came to paying him, he rounded my fare down, rather than up.
It was something I’d never considered before, but now I come to analyse it I really do believe this is one aspect of the widespread migration from Muslim countries which is of enormous benefit to young women, ‘specially those who like to go out and get drunk and then come home alone and unprotected. But now I’m left with a dilemma – how do I ask a Taxi company about the religion of their drivers without sounding like a mental racist? It’s something I’m going to have to ponder. Along with where my driver was hiding the bale of hay – legally Hackney Carriages still have to carry one.
