The media and the Turkish riots, and other recent news

If all one has is  access to the British media's reporting, one might be forgiven for being a little puzzled about the causes of the recent riots in Turkey. Those on the streets have been largely young, educated, middle class, a balanced mix of the sexes, secularists and so on ... surely exactly the people to whom our broadcasters would normally have been bending over backwards to give a voice. What is it all about? The redevelopment of green spaces in Istanbul surely cannot account for the level and duration of the protests or the initial severity of the regime's response; perhaps, then,  it's more to do with affluent resentment towards a government which favours the rural poor at the expense of the urban elite.

And then someone let the cat out of the bag. The Turkish Government, supported in its EU membership bid by the whole British establishment (including Boris Johnson - for obvious reasons...) is facing massive internal opposition because of its policy of creeping Islamification, an agenda which relies upon attacks on intellectual and press freedom, a politicisation of the judicial system, the restriction of women's rights and opportunities and a wholesale undermining of the secular constitution introduced by Ataturk in the 1920s. 
It seems to have been King Abdullah of Jordan who let it drop that the elected Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told him in a conversation that democracy "is a tram you ride as far as you want to and then get off’." 
One can understand the myopic lack of understanding on the part of our political leaders who, historically, have never understood a vital British interest until it is fatally threatened, but why the obfuscation by the British media?  Obviously, it can be nothing to do with an obsessive and wrong headed form of multi-culturalism disguising a craven fear of Islamism and the response of an alienated and militant section of our  own sizeable Muslim minority; our guardians of truth are far more courageous than that ....

Peter Hitchens [here] compares Russian President Vladimir Putin's bad press in the West to the easy ride given to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan.

Also: 

The M.P. for Salisbury takes issue with his bishop [here]

More on the St Mary Undercroft row [here]
If the events of the seventeenth century tell us anything, it is that in England (Britain to be anachronistic) Parliament is supreme, even - especially - when it is wrong. Not for nothing is King Charles I an Anglican martyr.

When new 'freedoms' involve old-style repression: the strange, heavy handed cultural correctness of the contemporary U.S. military [here]

Archbishop Welby reveals his inner Tory - is that praise from Andrew Brown in The Guardian ?