Dimitri writes to say he would like blog entries to be
shorter and have a conclusion. Jane writes to ask just how it is that poetry
decreases readership: surely people have already opened the blog before they
discover that it contains poetry? She suggests that their computers may have a ‘Poetry
warning light’. Another useful feature would be a ‘Bullshit detector’, but I
fear it would be flashing all the time.
Today I want to talk about Bulgarians and Romanians.
Journalists in such balanced and widely-respected British papers as the Daily Express
and Daily Mail have, it seems, made a deep study of the cultures and languages
of Bulgarians and Romanians, (let us call them ‘Bags’ for short) and have some
alarming things to tell us.
Bags are not like other people. For one thing, they move
around, all together and at high speed, in ‘hordes’ or ‘waves’ or ‘floods’. And
Bags are all liars: they say they want to move around Europe in search of
employment, but in fact they are all haring straight across Europe to get into
England, where they have no intention of working; they are going to claim
benefits. (Well at least then they won’t be ‘stealing our jobs’, as some people
have feared.)
There have been hordes, waves, floods, whatever of
immigrants to Britain before. Every time there have been warnings of dire
results. Every time, the result has been an ‘Improvement in the economy’. (I’m
never quite sure what that means, but apparently it’s a good thing.) Sure, some
of them become ‘Benefit Scroungers’, just like many native Britons. Most want
to work, and many, in spite of discrimination, succeed in finding work. Very
often they do the jobs native Britons don’t want to do.
What about the ‘Benefit Scroungers’? It seems the government
compiles statistics about people receiving Social Security benefits. The
percentage of claimants who have come into the UK from other countries has
never, not even just after another horde of foreigners has arrived, risen above
two percent.
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