Sunday 21 March 2010

In Every Back Garden A Heartache

We have been trying very hard to wean ourselves off commenting about the daily tidal-wave of racist vitriol washing over us courtesy of the likes of the Mail and the Express. However, the Mail's latest* outburst of Colonel Blimpishness outrage was just begging to be lampooned.

'Residents powerless to remove illegal immigrants from their gardens' - except the paper then goes on to say that they "are mostly from Eastern Europe" and the only actual country of origin it identifies is the Czech Republic, which held the presidency of the EU for the first six months of last year, so they can hardly be 'illegal' as they are EU citizens! The paper even claims that the 'trespassers' "have no passports", so the paper is even further from being able to affirm that the people in question have no legal right to be in the UK. But when has that ever stopped the Mail from spreading its racist vitriol in one of these type of stories?

Given that the paper spends so much of its turnover employing squads of lawyers to try and protect their libellous output, one would have thought they could have asked one of them to explain the difference between trespass and squatting (except one wouldn't want a libel lawyer trying to explain the ins and outs of property law, would one?). Doesn't fit in the the simulated outrage does it?

Even when an ex-cop helpfully fills the Mail's readers in on the difference between the two, he gets heavily slapped down by the rest of the BNP?UKIP voting idiots that buy the rag.
Of course, the Mail trots out a local Tory MP, Stewart Jackson, who claimed that Labour had failed to deal with immigration problems that have led to jobless migrants camping in British gardens. "The Labour government was warned that uncontrolled immigration would cause these sorts of problems." We bet you did. A quick search of Hansard has not revealed any Tories warning the government of the potential problem of foreigners squatting in people's gardens "leaving a trail of cider bottles, bags of human waste and drugs needles behind them."

Yes, the paper makes great play of the drugs and drug paraphernalia littering the area but also claim that the "police are powerless to step in." They even print a photo of the interior of a rather next outbuilding with a mattress, blanket, cardboard and milk bottle with the subtitle 'Disgrace: Drugs and rubbish litter the area, but the local council and police are powerless to step in'. Pure fantasy. There's even a photo of an incredibly rickety 'treehouse' with the caption 'Some of the immigrants are believed to have slept in this treehouse in someone's garden.' [Note the believed, a typical Mailism.]**

However, the real reason why we wanted to highlight this article was because of a quote by one of the Peterborough residents whose shed was being squatted. "I caught him [his squatter, no doubt squatting at the time] defecating on my lawn, where my dog plays. I had to build a fence to keep him out of that part of the garden so my dog doesn't get ill playing in his mess." As if his dog doesn't shit on the lawn too.


* Yes we know the Express also covered it but the Mail's was the most Blimpish.
** The Daily Star takes this and conflates it into 'Migrants found living in family tree house.'

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