Tag Archives: Europe

A beach at Dieppe

I know I told you I had a yacht and a big cock, and it turns out it’s an inflatable canoe and three inches on a warm day, but picture the sunny uplands.

Think of the carbon emissions we’ll save circling around Teddington Lock not the Bay of Biscay. Given I also can’t get it up, there’s no threat of making babies that’ll blame solar panels for causing Covids 37 to 43 and feed Twirl wrappers to dolphins. The fact that you weren’t thinking of the climate crisis all along says more about your priorities than mine to be honest.

I can say absolutely anything I want, and when the truth doesn’t quite marry up don’t think for a moment I’ll act contrite. This is the Age of Fuckallaccountability.

Continue reading A beach at Dieppe

A shade of beetroot

I have a burning pet hate these days. I become so infuriated I’m sure I often resemble a ‘gammon’ myself as my face turns a shade of beetroot, my blood pressure skyrockets and I struggle to maintain my cool and dignity. I absolutely detest arrogance, especially when the so-called achievements are exaggerated or didn’t even happen.

So many Brits believe they are better than any other nationality, and living anywhere other than the UK is akin to living in North Korea or some third-world country in Africa. I really can’t comprehend where this arrogance comes from and I have no tolerance for people who think and behave like us Brits walk on water and look down on all other nationalities from our ivory tower. I’m beginning to think we’ve become a nation of complete twats, convinced we are far superior to the rest of the world and that our tiny little island exceeds any other place on the planet.

Continue reading A shade of beetroot

Idiota

My blood is boiling. Steam is blowing out my ears. I might just explode like Mark François was meant to on October 31st.

The reason? Hearing for the millionth time from some geriatric fuckwit who lives in Spain declaring he’s not an immigrant here, but an expat. Because clearly, as a British citizen living abroad, being referred to as an immigrant is an insult that puts us Brits on a par with immigrants in the UK. And everyone knows they only go over to get a free 6-bedroomed house, a mobile phone, a speedboat to smuggle the rest of their family over in and £2,000 a week in benefits.

Continue reading Idiota

The coffin of politics

I never thought this would happen. When it came down to it, I was convinced that the UK is a small ‘c’ conservative country and would vote to preserve the status quo. We’d vote to Remain, Nigel Farage would continue to bleat on about rigged votes and everything would carry on as normal.

But, oh, for fuck’s sake. It depresses me so much that a horrible, divisive campaign – so much like the one London comprehensively sent packing with the mayoral election – won over nearly 17.5m people. A campaign filled with outright lies, padded out with straight-up racism. A campaign that saw a woman get killed (a woman Farage seemed to forget about in his victory speech, saying his little independence movement succeeded without a single shot being fired. Oh, apart from those ones in Birstall, but never mind).

This wasn’t about Europe. This was about giving a bloody nose to them government poshos who never listen. There are Leave voters on the BBC today saying they didn’t mean it, they didn’t think Leave would win. On Facebook, there’s someone I used to hang out with – and no longer do because of bellendry like this – saying ‘oh crap, it was only a protest vote’. Yeah, well your little protest just wiped £1.5 trillion off the value of the world’s economy.

Project Fear my arse.

Continue reading The coffin of politics

Bloody immigrants

Bloody immigrants.

They come over here, can’t even be bothered to learn the language. You go in the banks and there they all are, queueing to speak to the one teller that speaks English. All the leaflets have had to be translated for them. It makes me sick.

They stick with their own. Always drinking in the English bars, run by the English and employing English staff. What’s wrong with giving some work to the natives? The Spanish would love the business opportunities but they’re undercut by the English and their network of friends and kids of friends, willing to work for cash in hand. What happens to the taxes, that’s what I’d like to know.

All the Spanish bars and restaurants, they’re going out of business. You feel like a stranger on your own high street, where you’ve lived all your life. Walk down the road, you can’t understand half the people you pass.

We’ve got some of them living next door. Can’t speak a word. It’s down to us, of course, we’re the ones who have to make the effort. I hear them talking about how well the neighbours speak English. Lazy bastards, how about you trying to speak some decent Spanish instead of shouting in your ridiculous dialect and waving your hands?

They’re all using dodgy TV connections. Eyesore satellite dishes stuck on the side of their houses by cowboys so they can watch Eastenders and the news that’s hardly local any more. Not a TV licence between them. They only read the English papers. They don’t vote. The ignorance is shocking.

They won’t integrate. Look at them, with the shops selling English food. What’s wrong with our shops and our food? Why do they need to shop at Iceland? Why do they still need to buy fish fingers? What’s wrong with eating the local produce and supporting local farmers?

And speaking of the food, have you seen some of the muck they eat? Especially for breakfast? Swimming in grease and my god, the smell. It sticks to them all day. I swear, I think most of them don’t even shower.

Then, when they have heart attacks or break a hip, they clog up the healthcare system. And of course they can’t speak the language so don’t get stuck behind one in the queue, you’ll be there forever. If you can even get seen, because of all the English pensioners on the waiting list.

And then they have the nerve to say they’re not immigrants, they’re ex-pats. They can fuck off back to where they came from, the lot of them.

Peston’s children

Between the stories of lunatic Islamists on the rampage all across the world and John Noakes going missing in Majorca – unrelated as far as I can tell – a significant news event has snuck quietly between the gaps with virtually no fanfare. A whole country, and a famous one at that, has been banned.

Greece is done, finished, no longer allowed to exist. If I were hilarious I’d make some reference to the Monty Python parrot sketch at this point, but I’m not hilarious. A country that has done a fair amount for the advancement of humanity has been told by a selection of economists that it must now shutter up its tavernas and quit that stupid bloody dancing, because they’re all now to be scattered to the four corners of Europe and their lands shared between Bulgaria, Turkey and, controversially, Chad.

Continue reading Peston’s children

The serious business of blame

The corpse of a west London schoolgirl has turned up in the River Brent. Plainly this is grim news for the people who knew her, and the sympathies of the country are with them at this difficult time.

It’s important to get that out of the way, like the condolences handed out to the families of dead soldiers at the start of Prime Minister’s Questions, just before MPs start baying hateful abuse at each other and making noises that sound like a goat’s vinegar strokes. Now we’ve said that we feel distinctly sorry for the family of the dead girl, we can move on to the serious business of blame.

It appears the police think some Latvian did it. There’s a good chance he’s pissed off back to Latvia since the crime was committed – the very country in which a few years ago he murdered his wife in a forest. The word ‘lure’ is used when that tale is told. He sounds a bit of a git does Arnis Zalkalns.

If he did indeed kill the British schoolgirl, that makes the blame game nice and easy. We blame Zalkalns. I’m no criminologist but the world will be a saner place for all of us if the man who did the murder is the man blamed for the murder. But we can’t confirm that he did it yet, not least because nobody knows where he is except perhaps for a load of Latvians, and that’s where the art of blaming takes a fun turn.

He killed his wife and served seven years in prison for it. Not long enough, with hindsight, but he served his time, was released and as far as the Latvian authorities were concerned he was free to hot-foot it to Britain to mess with schoolgirls because of the EU’s rules on freedom of movement. He comes here, he’s arrested on suspicion of assaulting a different schoolgirl in 2009 and released without charge, and even has the gall to take a British builder’s job while he’s here, the bastard.

Something has to be done. The Latvians have let him go, not monitored him at all, he’s free to go where he wants in Europe and now he’s over here touching up and murdering our schoolgirls. Something is rotten at the heart of the European project when a man can come here from somewhere they speak a funny language and kill one of US, and piss off back east to blend in with the very people who’ve allowed this to happen.

That ‘something rotten’ is the way this story will highlight how we view ‘other people’. The implication is that, had Arnis Zalkalns stayed in Latvia and killed a Latvian schoolgirl, it would matter far less. Is that really where we’ve ended up?

We all know the media will latch onto a good child murder, particularly if it’s of a girl, ideally a white one, and if there’s a dodgy homemade video of her appearing in some shocking school play, all the better. It’s possibly a stretch to say the News of the World may have considered topping one or two nativity play Marys themselves when the phone hacking lost its lustre, but you get the point.

But if this young, pretty, white girl is foreign in some way, or killed somewhere else, that’s really not our concern. There’ll be a devastated family somewhere, but not here, so never mind. We like TV news shots of dull British streets with yellow police tape and small white tents like on Silent Witness, not mysterious overseas cities of dark rains and police uniforms we don’t recognise. If Latvians want to kill Latvians that’s their business. How dare they come here and kill US?

People frequently define themselves by where they’re ‘from’. I could lay claim to the area of London where I live, or claim to be a Londoner, or an Englishman, or British. Anything wider than that makes you out as a freak in 2014. Nonetheless, I’m a citizen of the EU, an inhabitant of the continent of Europe, an Earth-dweller and a member of the human race and why the bloody hell would I choose one of the mid-range classifications, British say, to decide whether I care about someone being murdered?

I never met Alice Gross and I don’t doubt she’s a huge loss for her family, but if she’d been Latvian, Albanian, Peruvian or someone on the International Space Station I’d care as much or as little. Now her body’s been found we’re about to embark on weeks of moaning about why the suspect was allowed to come to Britain to commit this crime, utterly ignoring that he could have gone to any other country and we probably wouldn’t have heard about it. But he came to Britain because ‘they’ all come to Britain, and if we can use the death of a schoolgirl to reduce the number of immigrants ‘coming over here, taking our jobs’, we’d be fools to miss the opportunity.

There’s just as much chance that a British fiend will travel to another European country and kill one of their schoolgirls, unencumbered by any form of monitoring by British authorities. Next time this happens, let’s see if there’s an outcry here about it. He could have stayed in Britain and killed someone here, but thanks to the freedom of movement he could happily head off to Banská Bystrica and commit the type of atrocity that makes Hostel look like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

So as the shouting commences and lasts a full eight months to the election, consider taking a breath and defining yourself first and foremost as a human being who hates the nasty shit we do to each other, regardless of how close to home the victim might be. Alice Gross is a dead schoolgirl, and that’s awful. She’s not an excuse for xenophobia.