Scots see red over racial profiling

Police will incorporate redhead stop-and-search statistics into racial profiling quotas, Home Office minister Hazel Bleary has confirmed.

The new scheme is intended to balance out the large number of dodgy-looking Asians being questioned following the bombings in London. Under the programme police will have to question one ginger for every Asian.

Ms Bleary asked for calm as concerns grew among Celtic communities that they may be persecuted for the sake of statistics. Scots have stated that the searches could harm regional relations.

"People should not be stopped and searched just because they have freckles," said one comedy Scotsman with an enormous red beard and a nose to match. "Picking people up just on the basis that they're ginger is never going to address the real issue of a disenfranchised minority increasingly alientated from UK society."

The comments came as Ms Bleary was beginning talks with Scottish and Irish community leaders across the country, in an attempt to improve community relations and root out extremists. In Inverness, she met councillors, police and MPs, as well as clan leaders, and assured them she wanted to ensure the "genuine anger" of some young gingers was heard. "It's a very difficult thing to do but it is absolutely vital to make sure that we give people a sense they have a say here," Bleary intoned.

The former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Lord Herman Ouseley, said that many gingers would feel targeted by the policy and that ministers should recognise this. He accepted that "while it is okay for individuals to be beaten, like a ginger stepchild, they should not be shot."

In London, meanwhile, Tony Blair said he had ordered the establishment of a taskforce to prevent young gingers being sucked into the kind of extremist ideology which drove the London bombers. Home Secretary Charles Clarke will take time from fast-tracking ID cards to discuss the plans with International Man of Peace™ Gerry Adams next month — although a planned power lunch with Tory national security expert Anne Widdicombe has been postponed after she was chased down a London Tube escalator and shot eight times by armed Met officers because "she simply would not keep her fuc*king fat mouth shut", as one officer explained.

Previously

• Grinning Hazel Blears hails traffic police triumph
• More suicide bombers may go bang, UK warned
• World salutes resolute Londoners