A warm welcome from National Express?

Here we reprint an posting on Facebook by a group of young Musilm women from Leeds. Yusra Ahmed and friends claim they were denied entry onto a National Express Coach for reasons that sound like pure bigotry. Islamaphobia is on the rise across the UK as OBV and many others, have said repeatedly, this example provides a small insight into the prejudice some Muslim women face. Here is their account, published on June 17th which we reprint below in full.

"Absolutely disgusted with the treatment of myself and my friends by National Express staff on Sunday evening. I want to share our experience since National Express are not taking our complaints very seriously and it is not acceptable.

On 14/06/2015, we (four visibly Muslim girls) were waiting in the coach station in Manchester for the 10:30pm coach to Leeds. When the coach arrived we queued up as normal to have our tickets checked by the driver (Caroline), she was immediately quite rude her hostility towards us was felt on the onset as she analysed each of our tickets and coach cards very closely which is something we noticed she didn't do to any of the other passengers. .After checking our tickets she scanned us up and down and aggressively asked if we had any *hot* food in our bags (we were carrying shopping bags, one Chinese take-away bag and one Asda) to which we replied just cold lasagne and rice which was all tightly packed away and no smell.

She then shouted quite loudly that we were not allowed to eat on the coach and that “we had better not be taking ‘curry’ on to her coach”. I told her that we weren’t intending on eating on the coach but she continued shouting to us about stinking up her coach with curry. We offered to give the takeaway food to the homeless outside and put the remainder of it in the luggage section but she kept banging on about our “smelly curry food”. By this time we had lost our patience with her, we weren’t carrying any curry or “smelly food” at all. She was obviously targeting us of her preconceived ideas about brown people, we were visibly Muslim so this made it easier for her. She wanted to know exactly what was inside our bags asking for “proof” and had we been compliant she would have searched them.

I told her to stop with her charade of racist and presumptuous stereotypes about us at which point she flipped out. She actually shouted “I’M NOT RACIST AND FOR CALLING ME THAT I’M NOT LETTING YOU ON MY COACH YOU CAN FIND YOUR OWN WAY HOME” and “I’VE HAD THIS BEFORE AND I’M SICK AND TIRED OF PEOPLE ACCUSING ME OF RACISM” I tried explaining that a) she had no right to deny us the seats that’s we paid for and b) If she’s consistently being called out for racial abuse then she obviously has a problem?????????

A security man came at this point, just backing her up when she went on a rant about how our bags were “suspicious” he defended her saying that it was just company policy. Umm company policy to single out and harass customers for no good reason and then deny us the right to board? Eventually the white man behind us was trying to defend us but when he saw that they weren't listening he got on the coach. The security guard then had the cheek to ask us to apologise the driver for calling her racist so that she would let us on and that he would be reporting us for calling her racist which makes no sense. The driver continued with her rubbish about curry and smelly food and how it was unfair to everyone else, despite us not having either.

Eventually she got on the coach to drive away but other passengers on the coach were calling her out and arguing with her for about 10 minutes.The next coach wasn't until 12am arriving in Leeds at 2am which meant that we would be arriving home 4 hours later than we were supposed to.

We rang National Express to make a complaint and request that they provide us with alternative transport since we know that they have done this before on occasion, but they were very unhelpful and the most that they said they could do was provide us with a taxi from the coach station to our flat and the taxi was really late. They requested to speak to the security guy who had been defending the driver and he lied and contradicted everything we said, there was no mention of the offensive things she said.

No apology was made by National Express, we were told that an investigation would be launched and that we would hear from them the next day but 3 days later and we’ve heard nothing.

Honestly that was such a baffling and humiliating experience. Shout out to all the bystanders who said nothing and acted like we were causing a scene. This wasn't about our food this was about the principle and her racist and Islamophobic agenda. I've heard quite a few stories about National Express and their poor treatment of minorities and women, something needs to change."

You can read more here:
https://www.facebook.com/yusra.ahmed.142892/posts/1615768758639949