theranttmistressblog: A few weeks ago, I wrote about a ridiculous piece in the Daily Mail, where David Goodhart, a writer with a book to peddle, portrayed Merton, the borough where I live, as some sort of hateful war zone where immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, were not integrating. I did not recognise the Merton Goodhart wrote about and I was appalled – although not especially surprised – that the Daily Mailreadily published something with rubbery use of stats and blatant lies.

As a result of this original blog post, I wrote a follow-up post and another post when David Goodhart responded over Twitter. And then I was invited to visit the mosque which formed the central theme of Goodhart’s disgust for the “polite apartheid” that he claimed was going on in Merton. The Baitul Futuh mosque was not, as Goodhart claimed, built to replace a dairy and steal local jobs. There was a seven-year gap between the dairy closing down and mosque construction starting. In the seven-year gap, the old dairy site became a magnet for drug-related crime. Now there is a mosque on the site, this is no longer the case.

On my visit to the mosque, I learnt about its construction – part of the old dairy was used to build the minaret , the building is clad in elegant, self-cleaning marble, light enters the part of the mosque where women pray via walls created from the same material used at Chelsea’s home ground – oh, and it didn’t cost British taxpayers a penny to build.

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