Taxi Driver Online

Interesting to have a quick read through that piece above - it's 13 years old, and you could just about imagine a similar piece being written today, based on those handful of niche firms or individual drivers that pop up every now and again. And then eventually sink without trace. I think the London one mentioned above is still around, but not the others. And the London one looks quite high end, so probably not your average taxi/PH offering


No.


No. And as Bill said at the end of the thread back then, Pink Ladies had effectively collapsed by the time the article was written


No.


A quick Google suggests the firm was liquidated a couple of years later.

And a deadlink here: https://www.ladiesonlytravel.co.uk/


Can't find any trace of that one at all now

Fascinated to know why you went back to that historical thread.

Or was you just a tad bored?

_________________
IDFIMH

Interesting question, Sussex

Because it's a slightly interesting route, and a wee bit of a rabbit hole.

Anyway, it was a report on 'UK grooming gangs and Islam' by Dr Mark Durie, Senior Research Fellow Melbourne School of Theology. (No me neither.)

It was published online a couple of days ago, and I came across it on social media and via the kind of news stuff I watch on YouTube etc.

https://christianconcern.com/resource/r ... ark-durie/

The report itself is available via the above link.

I usually have a quick search on documents like that for the t-word (or maybe the p- and h-words, or the more traditional m-word) to see if there's anything particularly interesting.

Anyway, only the t-word came up in the report, and only once

And the links were to an old Met Police document specifically about 'Unlicensed mini cabs operating in Wandsworth, London', which the new report portrays in terms of that there "were on average 1,125 sexual assaults a year in London involving unlicensed taxi drivers."

(Note how the m-word used by the Met turns into the t-word used by the grooming gang report by someone in Australia...)

I actually had a quick look through that Met document a few years ago, and it's more like the kind of stuff we'd all be reading 25 years ago before London minicabs were even licensed as private hire.

https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/g/files ... /11-18.pdf

Anyway, this week's report also states: "Many of these have been Muslim offenders."

And that's linked to an article on an obscure website called 'Islamist Watch', and with a domain that I think means Middle East Forum

https://www.meforum.org/islamist-watch/uk-taxi-rapes

The article is from 2013, and is called 'UK Taxi Rapes - “No Woman is Safe in a Cab”'.

And a quick skim through reads like what you'd write if you were summarising that genre of pieces posted on TDO over a whole year or so. And, indeed, it summarises quite a long list of cases, and I'm quite sure a lot of them will be in the archives on here (some ring a vague bell, although I didn't actually search for any of them on here).

There's a ton of links in that article though (some of them dead now, I suspect), but this bit near the end caught my eye, and contains several links, including to the Telegraph article at the top of this thread:


...which linked to, and obviously summarised some of the stuff in the Telegraph article. So I searched to see if the Telegraph article was on here, because it looked like an interesting piece to read in retrospect in view of what we're still banging on about with regard to those ladies-only start-ups.

And, of course, it was easy enough to find out that the Telegraph article had indeed been posted on here by CC back in 2012, hence it seemed an interesting piece to bump, and comment on 13 years later

So it all looks like it took me quite a long time, but in fact just a few minutes of visiting the links, using the search function on here, and quickly skimming through it all.

In fact, I think I've spent more time composing this post than skimming all the pieces and quickly visiting the various links etc.

Well you did ask

And, for what it's worth, this is the original Telegraph piece:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/ro ... firms.html

Or if the above is paywalled, a replicated copy on the Archive.is site, which someone had obviously saved nine years ago:

https://archive.is/pQCcI

So my intention was to post that old article on here as an interesting retrospective, but no need as CC had posted it at the time