Some people think UKIP is just a party of racists. Nope! It’s a party for bigots of every kind. Whether you hate the blacks, the gays, the muslims or the trans, UKIP is the party that’ll tell you the problem isn’t you, it’s them.

I’ve been reading the latest UKIP interim manifesto – yes, this is what my Saturday mornings are like; yes, I’m amazed I’m single too – and the whole thing is of course a horrific pile of shit. But there’s a new addition to it this year: the blatant anti-LGBT bigotry previously limited to stallholders at the UKIP conference is now official party policy.

The phrase “Cultural Marxism” is always a giveaway: it’s right-wing shorthand for “boo hoo we’re not allowed to be bigots all the time any more”. UKIP says cultural Marxism “seeks to close down discussion and alternative views, so that only one extreme left-wing ‘politically correct’ viewpoint is allowed.”

You can see their point of view. You can’t turn on Newsnight or pick up the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Sun or the Daily Telegraph without being subjected to nothing but one extreme left-wing politically correct viewpoint.

The proposed solutions are the usual pie of guff: repeal of all hate speech legislation and guidelines, the end of Public Space Protection orders, repeal of the Equality Act 2010, and a free golliwog and Roy Chubby Brown DVD for every pure-bred Englishman, woman and child.

In a sane world we’d just laugh at these clowns. Sadly it’s not a sane world.

There’s nothing I can say about this horrific, pathetic excuse for a man that isn’t expressed better by the faces of the every single woman in this photograph.

One of the more depressing things about the internet is the way that some publications have embraced hate clicks. Hate clicks are when you publish something terrible and then lots of people share it, not because they agree with it but because they’re shocked by how awful it is. The statistics show that lots of people read it, so the publication commissions more of it and the world gets a little bit worse.

The latest example of that comes once again from Glasgow’s Herald newspaper, which seems increasingly determined to sacrifice its reputation for the sake of a bit of online outrage. Its columnist Brian Beacom is a kind of Tesco Value Richard Littlejohn, writing really tired columns with exactly the kinds of views you’d expect from a straight, white, middle-aged pub bore. Beacom doesn’t have a high opinion of black music, or trans people, or women. And this week’s column is particularly bad.

This is the opening sentence.

TIME to give Zoe Ball a little kicking.

See what he did there? A ball is something you kick. So it’s okay to make a joke about violence against women.

I’m genuinely amazed that made it into print. How many people saw that and thought “yeah, suggesting a woman needs a kicking is absolutely fine”?

Beacom is outraged – he says it’s “anger following on from frustration” – because while “Ball isn’t a bad presenter” she has breasts, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to present the Radio 2 breakfast show. The only way for men to present prestigious radio programmes is for them to grow breasts too.

If you’re a man hoping for radio’s most prestigious slot, the only chance is to transgender and hope the oestrogen pills kick in before Chris Evans sets off to become a reborn Virgin.

It’s a sad day when a professional writer can’t even make his lazy slurs grammatically correct. Transgender is an adjective, not a verb.

Beacom’s argument is that the BBC is “pushing women beyond the level of their talent” and should stick with – surprise! – middle-aged straight white men like him. The Radio 2 breakfast show has always been presented by men, and should continue to be presented by men because it has always been presented by men. QED.

Whether he means it or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it got published, woman-kicking sentiment included, and a bunch of straight white guys in the comments saw it as validation. It even made it to TV, although many of the women journalists approached to appear with him refused on the grounds that “old man has bigoted views” is hardly newsworthy and they had proper journalism to be getting on with.

It’s so, so lazy. Anybody can do it, and most people could do a better job of it than Beacom. The irony here is that he’s claiming the BBC is not a meritocracy from the perspective of a white, middle-aged man who has a newspaper column despite not being any good at writing newspaper columns.

The Herald has clearly pushed him beyond the level of his talent.

I’ve written once or twice that the world is very different when you walk in women’s shoes: if you’re born and socialised as male you inhabit a completely different planet to women. It’s something many of my women friends find blackly funny when I’m outraged by an experience they have every day.

There was a good example of that last night in my local, where as I often do I was sitting at the bar looking at things on my phone. From out of nowhere a pissed bloke had his arms around me and his head against mine, demanding I put down my phone so “we can have a chat”. I politely and then less politely told him to get his hands off me, which he did grudgingly. He didn’t actually do the fucking off I’d requested until one of my friends came over.

He wasn’t a no-neck football fan or a sleazy middle-aged lech in a shiny suit. Just your run of the mill sensitive indie guy who no doubt owns a “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt. He’s got a child, a girl. I know this because I overheard his friend later, apologising to the bar staff for his drunken behaviour. “I’ve been trying to get him into a taxi for five hours. It’s his daughter’s first birthday tomorrow.”

It’s not something I’ve experienced before, because for pretty obvious reasons I don’t tend to be the target of that kind of behaviour. But my women friends deal with it all the time. The same friend who came over last night told me of her own experience the night before: a complete stranger had grabbed her in a bear hug and kissed her on the cheek.

It’s just part of the background noise for women, the entitlement of men who don’t just refuse to take “no” for an answer but don’t ask in the first place. And the more likely a man is to get away with it, the worse the behaviour can be. My great love, live music, has a real problem of men groping women at shows. It’s led to campaigns such as Safe Gigs For Women. And sometimes it’s even worse than that. Sweden has just held a “cis man-free” festival for women, trans women and non-binary people after multiple sexual assaults at a previous music festival.

#NotAllMen, I know. But too many.

There’s an interesting piece in Bella Caledonia by Mike Small about how “overtourism” is doing to Edinburgh what it’s done to so many other places in the world.

It’s not just Edinburgh. The “North Coast 500” road route, an invention to draw in tourists, destroyed the road surface and caused chaos on rural roads thanks to sports car drivers. The isle of Skye is reaching saturation point in the summertime.

But Edinburgh is facing a perfect storm. Airbnb rentals focusing on the Festival are doing serious damage to the housing market (the numbers are up from 2,000 a decade ago to 10,000 now), damage that has seen its use severely restricted in other parts of the world. The use of public spaces for more and more boarded-off events is ruining the public sphere. Boneheaded planning decisions have turned the city into a perpetual building site. The basic infrastructure of the city is struggling to cope.

Some of the same trends are happening in my own beloved Glasgow, but we don’t have Harry Potter tourism, the Festival or much of an Old Town to worry about. Edinburgh’s a very different place from Glasgow and its problems are on a much greater scale.

Mike Small:

Unless there is widespread and urgent opposition the trajectory of the city is clear: a city designed for and shaped around the rich and designed to exclude and exploit residents. The people who profit from the city are a tight network and the lack of transparency about ownership and decision-making is a well practised art form.

I’ve nothing against tourism, or the Festival, or gigs in public parks. But a city isn’t just a tourist destination or a playground for the very rich. It’s a place where tens of thousands of people live, love and work. It’s their city too.

Fortress Britain doesn’t want foreign musicians.

The musician Peter Gabriel has expressed “alarm” over UK foreign policy after a number of international artists were unable to perform at Womad world music festival after visa issues.

Or authors.

A dozen authors who were planning to attend this year’s Edinburgh international book festival have had their visas refused, according to the director, Nick Barley, who warned that the “humiliating” application process would deter artists from visiting the UK.

Visa problems have been an issue for festivals for some years now (and have been an issue for UK musicians travelling to the US, whose visas are hilariously expensive and make some small tours uneconomic), but the Conservatives’ “hostile environment” is making things much worse. And it doesn’t just affect the artists who lose income and still incur huge costs when their visas are rejected at the last minute: it affects the future viability of the festivals that book them too.

Elsewhere, Private Eye reports that the custom of touring musicians, especially classical ones, performing in Dublin before travelling effortlessly into the UK has been stymied by Home Office pedants who fear terrorists hidden in tubas. And UK musicians are worried about the very real impact the end of EU free movement will have on their ability to tour, which is a crucial component of any modern musician’s career.

What a bleak, insular, joyless country we’re becoming.