My home town is Bedford, a throbbing metropolis which is so good they named a county after it. Today I travelled down to meet with a donor and others. Normally I’d have let the train take the strain, but the donor requested that I drive our battle van down and take a picture of him stood next to it. I was happy to oblige.

Long stretches of the M1 had 50mph speed limits, due to roadworks. On a number of occasions I saw a large poster of a woman in a hard hat, with a message something like:

My Mum works on this site.

Please drive carefully and don’t put her life in danger.

I can’t recall in my 35 years of driving ever seeing a woman engaged in roadworks, though I guess a few may exist. There must have been around 100 workers visible in the many miles after I’d first seen the poster. Needless to say, not one of them was a woman. Maybe women do such jobs in the summer, so long as the temperature doesn’t rise above 20C.

I digress. The van is performing very well, and I’m getting plenty of pedestrians and fellow drivers (men and women) giving me the thumbs-up sign. Not a single rude gesture so far. Three photos of the van taken this morning – here and here and here. The ‘father and son’ image in the final picture – the rear panels of the van – is the same as the A3 window poster image we have on one side of the leaflet we’re handing out to the public in the street, and posting door-to-door – here.

Will the van be vandalised? I don’t know, but you’d have thought feminists would have worked out by now that I – and others associated with J4MB – will not be intimidated by violence, threats of violence, vandalisation of property etc.

The sole reason we’re going to be campaigning outside the University of Nottingham on Saturday 14 March (11:30 – 14:00, outside the West Entrance, see earlier post) is in response to heavily soiled cat litter being hurled over the windscreen and bonnet of our battle van last Friday, when we were at that location. We originally had other plans for the day. If we’re faced with any intimidating tactics on 14 March, we’ll campaign at exactly the same spot again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

I refer you to the scene in the film Gandhi where row after row of Indian men defied the British Government’s Salt Tax by stepping forward to be struck down by British soldiers. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi:

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

Surely, by now, feminists have recognised that aggressive tactics will only lead to more opposition to their ideology? We’ll see, over the next nine weeks.