Put your ear to the ground and listen to the rumble of discontent. The lucky country has a bad case of the shits.
The anal taps are dripping and there’s no light at the end of Eurotunnel.
Did you think, when you were small, that Goldilocks had a point? All she wanted was porridge that was just right and a few home comforts. Who cared about a few bears? It’s a complicated ethical dilemma.
She’s moved on from porridge. Today she wants faster broadband, lower power bills, slower traffic, quicker deliveries, slow food, fast service, a bigger TV, less waste, fair trade, cheap clothes…. Poor little dear. Life has become so hard.
She wants all the organic pigs, chickens, beef and lamb she can eat, but only after they’ve gamboled in the fields for at least a year, eaten only grass or ‘natural’ food and have been killed humanely, preferably when she wasn’t watching and butchered by a nice man who knows her by name.
And everything she wants, she gets. The big ears of commerce and politics are listening and their heads are nodding. As long as she pays for it.
But even if she doesn’t, if she has a big enough tantrum and screams loud enough and signs a few online petitions she might expect to get it anyway.
She wants:
- Shorter NHS waiting lists and more GP’s, but please, no ‘foreign’ medical staff; they’re taking all our jobs.
- 24 hour call centres, but not in India – or even Scotland if that isn’t too much to ask. She can’t understand a word they say. British jobs should be for British people.
- Strawberries from Kent, but please, not picked by EU migrant workers living in converted containers. They block the country lanes with their armfuls of supermarket plastic bags. And besides, they’re taking all our jobs.
- An English plumber.
Eurorail is humming and the hordes are coming. It’s 1940 all over again. Economic migrants wanting our generous welfare benefits. Health tourists dressed in rags heading for the promised land or arriving frozen out of the sky.
The Welcome Mat is out.
The hordes at the other end of Eurotunnel don’t know how lucky they are.
Border Lines 