Thread: London Overground Argument About Feet Descends Into Bizarre Row Over Religion

Threats to call the police. Telling people they belong in prison. Firmly lecturing someone that "this is not a Muslim country".

Train rage seems to have taken on a new energy in the age of social media outrage and this video of a bizarre argument about whether someone should put their feet on an adjacent seat is an example par excellence.

The 84-second clip begins after the argument has begun, with a woman filming the man who is saying: "I cannot sit there and I cannot pray with my clothes, ok?"

After a bystander tries to intervene to say it's not worth arguing over, the elderly man tells the woman she belongs "in prison".

train rant
The man (right) who argued with the woman and the bystander who tried to intervene

Fast forward just over a minute, and the man is getting off the train while remonstrating with Ms Butler, who says: "I don't have the same religion as you sir. I pray with my shoes on. Every day, I pray with my shoes on. I am Christian."

When he says he is a Muslim and cannot pray with his shoes on, the woman filming decides the demographics about the UK are what's needed to settle whether she can place her feet on a train seat. She says: "Listen, this is not a Muslim country."

In between, the man gets into an argument with another man who tells him "this is England", to which the elderly man replies: "I was born here."

Ruby Butler, who claims to have shot and uploaded the footage, told the Evening Standard: "The gentleman came up to me, and I had been walking all day since 6am. There was no-one standing, everyone was was sitting, so I put my feet on the chair.

"I was playing on my phone and then the gentleman came up to me and said he worked on the train."

Commenters on the Evening Standard article seemed to think the issue of Islam was crucial to this argument over train etiquette.

"Feet on seats is obviously bad form," wrote one. "But this was a fairly normal example of muslim aggression."

Another took a more straight-forward view.

"Forget religion, forget if the train was full or not, the basic fact is the woman was wrong to put her feet on the seat," they said. "End of."

Huffington Post

London Overground Argument About Feet Descends Into Bizarre Row Over Religion

The woman shouldn't have had her feet on the train seating anyway. No one wants to get their clothes dirty because some selfish jerk tracked soil on the seating.