THERE are worrying signs that our nation is heading for serious civil unrest, with religious and cultural differences (the two often bound together) at its core.

Of course the flashpoint is closest in London where the mowing down of Muslim worshippers in the latest ‘van’ outrage is widely seen as revenge for the Islam-extremist-inspired attacks on innocent people on the London and Westminster bridges.

But elsewhere prejudiced sentiments are not hard to find. In my North Yorkshire community this week a man remarked to me, “Ah well, Enoch warned of this years ago,” – a reference to Tory politician Enoch Powell forecasting “Rivers of Blood” through racial conflict back in 1968.

It’s a shame that a complete and simple antidote to the fears expressed by Powell, and the simmering distrust, even hatred, that fuels them is not as well known as Powell’s infamous speech. It’s a poem, Human Beings, by the late Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008).

Excluding just a few lines here it is:

LOOK at your hands/ your beautiful hands/ you’re not an ape/ you’re not a parrot/ you’re not a slow loris/ or smart missile/ you’re human/ not british/ not american/ not israeli/ not palestinian/ you’re human/ not catholic/ not protestant/ not muslim/ not hindu/ you’re human/ we all start human/ we end up human/ human first/ human last/ we’re human/ or we’re nothing/ nothing but bombs/ and poison gas/ nothing but guns/ and torturers/…look at all that life/ you’re human/ they are human/ we are human/ let’s try to be human/ dance!

THIS is what needs to be taught, at a mother’s knee and in schools. It’s worth all the religious creeds of the world put together.

TO anyone caught up in the terrible events in London and Manchester over the last month it must be something akin to a vision of paradise to be trouble-free enough to campaign against… a line of telegraph poles.

Not pylons, mark you, just poles. Yet the residents of Over and Nether Silton, in the North York Moors near Thirsk, are fully justified in protesting at the dozen poles, and associated wires, that will disfigure the setting of their 12th century St Mary’s church, magically isolated in fields. Indeed their battle is essentially on behalf of all of us.

For here is a national park landscape – its ‘national’ designation signalling its ‘national’ importance as a place where people, locals and visitors alike, can find the precious, diminishing quality of unspoilt beauty.

In truth, telegraph poles blight many places in the North York Moors. Very damagingly they mar the view of Roseberry Topping from Capt Cook’s’ boyhood home of Aireyholme Farm. Another line impairs the delightful valley of Little Fryupdale.

The great architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner described St Mary’s as “a wonderfully relaxed sight.” With £15,000 offered by the national park authority, it would cost BT just £37,000 to keep it that way by undergrounding their cables. Factor in the £3,000 for the alternative poles and it’s really chicken feed to ensure that the trek to St Mary’s across the gentle, uncluttered farm fields, remains as special as it is now.