Let’s leave the coronabug alone for a while. Every time I switch on the television or radio or even dip into the newspapers, I am bombarded with gloomy ‘facts,’ figures and theories about it all. I am told that we are all doomed, that the dangers are being overstated and that the current lockdown will last another three weeks/six months/three years and so on.

I know I am not a man of huge intellect, but I am becoming ever more confused,

Thankfully I am back home on Dartmoor and can readily confirm that despite so many reports to the contrary in the mewling media, the lockdown is definitely working – at least on the roads. My journey back here last Sunday was almost a pleasure. The motorway was virtually empty and despite the many warnings I had received to the effect that I would undoubtedly be stopped and not allowed to come back into Devon, I didn’t see a copper or cop car throughout the journey.

Anyway, let’s see what else I can dredge up.

I read with a certain degree of horror that the United Nations has just handed China a key role on the human rights council.

This is surely madness! The Chinese government have an appalling and well-documented record of human rights abuses and there is widespread suspicion that they are lying through their teeth about the origins and extent of the current pandemic, which The Trumple described as Wuhan flu.

Still, what else have we come to expect of the UN, which delights in such perverse behaviour? Repressive states have been given seats on human rights bodies before. I seem to remember Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya chairing the committee at one stage.

As it stands, China will be sitting alongside that other bastion of democracy, compassion and fair play, Chad, which has repeatedly been accused of human rights abuses by Amnesty International and is the base of the Boko Haram terror group.

At this rate, it will only be a matter of time before China is put in charge of the World Health Organisation.

Then we can all tremble. I am sure most Chinese people are decent, neighbourly folk but for a long time they have been led by men without morals and suddenly they are putting themselves into a position whereby they could well end up ruling the world. They already control much of Africa and are responsible for so many problems in that continent. After all, who is responsible for the wiping out of the rhino, the near extermination of pangolins, the sale of lion bones and the escalation of the ivory trade, but China.

They are destroying national parks and wild areas in Tanzania and Ethiopia to make way for farms, highways and massive dams. They are exporting over one million tons of indigenous trees a year from Central and Southern Africa and taking payment in the form of mines and millions of acres of land for the building of roads and dams that can only benefit China, because they send their own people in to construct these projects.

And with the horrific logging in Africa’s great forests, wild animals are being decimated for the bush meat trade. Again, over one million tons of illegal meat leaves the forests each year, entirely due to China.

They have plundered and pillaged the oceans around Africa, killing fish, coral, sharks for their abominable soup and basically flattening every living things in our oceans.

And now because of the wet markets in their country where animals from different corners of the world live side by side in enclosures and cages, the coronabug developed and spread to the extent that entire countries are likely to go bankrupt and countless thousands will die from the disease or associated causes.

When is the rest of the world going to wake up to the danger and ban trade in Chinese products, even ban their people from other countries.

To me, the Chinese nation as a whole is very similar to the ‘bug’ that left their land and is now infecting almost every country in the world – silent, dangerous and destructively evil. Yet even the United Nations are kow-towing to them.

I know I said I wasn’t going to write about the coronabug and I have but I always marvel at the way Mankind sticks its collective head in the sand and ignores great danger if there is a hint of profit in it for themselves.

It seems that the boss of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary has sparked a race row after calling for Muslim passengers to be checked at airports in a bid to prevent terror attacks, as he claimed ‘that is where the threat is coming from.’

I don’t suppose he is a hundred percent correct, but he has a point. O Leary went on to say that terrorists ‘will generally be males of a Muslim persuasion’ – and that families with young children should be let through security as they are less likely to blow people up. He added that the only way to deal with the threat was to vet single male Muslims travelling on their own.

I am not sure whether he was being brutally honest or suicidal as he must have foreseen the uproar his comments would provoke in this ever more sensitive age.

The Muslim Council of Britain said the comments amounted to discrimination against Muslim passengers and branded the comments ‘racist’. Hate-crime monitoring group Tell Mama (surely an apt sort of name) suggested his ‘flippant’ words could end up having serious consequences for the budget airline.  

O’Leary told The Times, ‘Who are the bombers? They are going to be single males travelling on their own. If you are travelling with a family of kids, on you go; the chances you are going to blow them all up is zero.’

A spokeswoman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: ‘Michael O’Leary should be under no illusion: his comments are racist and discriminatory. He openly advocates discrimination against ‘males of a Muslim persuasion,’ which presumably is not based on specific intelligence but solely whether someone ‘looks or acts like a Muslim. This is the very definition of Islamophobia.’

The spokeswoman said Muslims already face challenges in airline travel and added: ‘It is a shame that such racism is being expressed so openly, and that the CEO of a large airline would so want to discriminate against his customers so brazenly.’

And Tell Mama said the comments could come back to bite Mr O’Leary’s business, likening them to jewellery firm boss, Gerald Ratner’s disastrous remark in 1991 when he called one of his own products ‘total crap’ and was later axed after profits tumbled.

Labour MP Khalid Mahmood said Mr O’Leary was ‘encouraging racism’ and asked why he wouldn’t suggest white people be given the same treatment ‘to see if they’re being fascists.’

‘If he can tell me what colour Muslims are then I’d be very happy to learn from him – you can’t judge a book by its cover,’ he told the Times.

‘He’s being very blinkered and is actually encouraging racism.’

O Leary’s comments were probably somewhat thoughtless but if they were followed up, we would not have the interminable nonsense of largely useless security checks in modern airports and air travel would probably be considerably safer.

Not all terrorist attacks over the past two decades have been carried out by Muslims, but the majority of them were and all the false righteousness of various lobby groups won’t alter that.