Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Monday 25 March 2013

The wrong track.

WELL. It's the immigrants, isn't it?

If it weren't for them we'd be rich. Or certainly not so poor.

It's not that we're racist. No, no, no, you misunderstand - we're a great and friendly nation. It's just money is tight and they come over here, providing cheap labour, taking the few jobs there are, and it puts the natives out of work. That's not fair, now is it?

As economic difficulties increase, so immigration is more of a burden. There is a lot of unemployment, growth has stagnated, the middle class worry they'll slip into poverty. Someone must be to blame. It's not hate, it's logic.

Then there's people who are not as fit and healthy as the rest of us. It's right we should look after them and all that, but does there seem to be more of them around? It's getting expensive. Can we afford to be so nice to the disabled?


Would it not be a kindness to make sure we didn't have so many? After all, disabled people who are only alive because of man's intervention would not, naturally, live to breed. We'd only be following the rules of Mother Nature by sterilising them all.

Then there's our money worries. A lot of countries have tied themselves to a rigid standard of currency which cannot be allowed to fail. So much so that some banks have failed, and to halt an immediate crunch some governments have been inventing money to give to the banks.

If one person pulls out of that currency system, then others will follow. The system will devalue, the money we invented for the banks will be worthless, and we'll all be up an oh-so-familiar creek without any method of propulsion.

That would be bad, so it would be best if we forced countries to stay in this rocky currency system, at gunpoint if necessary.


We know best, d'you see? There was a vote a few years ago where politicians failed to convince anyone to vote for them in sufficient numbers. But the growing public distrust in public officials is a problem in itself, because it doesn't provide freedom so much as disengagement from politics, allowing all sorts of fringe elements to gain control.

So it's for the best if we all muck in together and have a coalition government, headed up by someone who can describe these risks in a snappy soundbite, and lead us away from all the many terrors he would like us to know are lurking out there.

But if you're frightened now, there are people out there who want to frighten you more. There are terrorists with hooked noses, born of a culture alien to ours and with strange, crazy rules about bacon and beards. They're pernicious, they're rich, they have more money than us. They are, in fact, slowly buying our own country from underneath us.


They have even, I'm afraid to say, infiltrated one of the world's biggest media organisations with televisions and newspapers in millions of homes throughout the land. They spread their lies this way, these enemies of reason and science and our way of life.

So it's best to make sure their newspapers in particular are attacked, vilified, and shut down. We will bring in stricter controls so that media reproducing their idea of news - that the government is split, that its ministers can't be trusted - are stopped.

We need to make sure the public trust and believe us - and we're socialists, so we must be nice.

And if everyone just goes along with all of that, everything will be so much better. More jobs for our people, less cost for our taxpayers, less worry from the banks. We had a boom a decade or so ago, but it all turned out to be built on debt and now our chickens are coming home to roost.

All those things were said by Adolf Hitler as he rose to power. He criticised distrust for public officials in 1929, he argued the disabled placed too great a burden on the healthy, he led a coalition government from 1933, and he used one problem - a fire in the German parliament - as an excuse to blame his enemies, set up a one-party state and repeal laws of human rights, including habeas corpus, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and the right to protest.

Eighty years on, in the countries which resisted Hitler and his hate, we're doing the same.

Like Germany in the 1920s, we had a boom. Like them, it was built on debt. Half of Europe is broke as a result, there's protests and riots, everyone's getting poorer, the tax system's a mess, the currencies are as steady as a cork in a jacuzzi, and we're being encouraged to hate.

Germans were told to hate the Jews because they controlled all the money. In Britain today we're told to hate bankers and rich Arabs. We're told the disabled are putting it on, the poor are dragging us down to join them, and our only hope is to blame, and hate, and turn away from others.

Our leader even says we need to be more like the Germans, and that you can have too many human rights.

None of what's happened to us can be our fault, because we're fundamentally nice people and we had such a great Olympics.


There are many things attributed to Hitler he did not say. One of them is that if you tell a big lie often enough, people will believe it, and the other is that a man with no sense of history is like a man with no eyes and no ears.

Which is a shame, because of all the things he said they'd have been the truest.

So next time people talk about uncontrolled migration, benefit tourism, foreigners coming here to use the NHS, remember that only 2.6 per cent of people claiming the dole are from the EU, to claim benefits you have to be in work and pass a test which takes six months, and that the only free NHS treatment to foreign nationals is for emergencies and those with communicable diseases.

Of course, if you want migrants to stop coming here at all, you'll have to find a few millions to replace the money they repay the economy at far higher rate than they take out, invent thousands of jobs to replace the ones kicking out migrant-owned businesses would lose, and get rid of all the people like me who are descended from migrants several times over.

And then you would need to tell a great big lie, which is that these are just the tough measures needed to put us back on the right track.

How many times do we have to be told?