Having been absent from the pages of the Daily Mail for a week – but no doubt still trousering yet more of that close to £1 million a year package at the same time – the talentless and unfunny Richard Littlejohn has today returned, with a subject and method he and his legendarily foul mouthed editor know well: picking on foreigners by telling packs of whoppers.
This time, the attempt to slip the tray of fresh porkies under the readers’ radar employs the tired and over-used diversionary tactic of reminiscing about Minder. The goings-on around Arthur Daley, Terence and the rest were moderately funny once, but Dick has flogged them half to death in the attempt to paper over the gaping chasms in his un-researched stream of bigotry.
Eastern European, guv? They're criminals, innit?!?
When the 94th recycling of Minder episodes past is stripped away, though, the underlying story and Dick’s false conclusion can be put simply: someone tried to strip metal from an electricity sub-station (most unwise) and was rewarded with 60% burns to his body. The individual did not have a criminal record. He was 21 years old and described as “Eastern European”.
Littlejohn, for reasons best known to himself, translates this as “thought to be Eastern European”. Perhaps it increases the nudge-nudge value of his copy. Then comes the smear: “[this] in a criminal context is, generally, code for ‘Romanian’ – although when it comes to drugs and extortion, it also encompasses ‘Albanian’”. It can’t mean “Polish”, Dick explains, as they’re “hard-working”.
“This was just one of the exciting benefits of EU expansion” sneers Dick, seemingly unaware that Albania is not part of the EU. “We have ... managed to import countless criminals from former Iron Curtain countries” he goes on, demonstrating how peoples who 22 years ago were suffering terrible oppression at the hands of the Ceausescu regime were in reality just a bunch of crims.
And anyone in any doubt that Dick is in full-on demonising bigot mode need look no further than his reference to “every Dale Farm lookalike”. The assertion that courts should hand down ten-year jail terms for receiving stolen metal, while fitting the Mail’s authoritarian agenda (just don’t mention the cost and likely ineffectiveness) is a mere sideshow to cover his tracks.
Dick, you’re a bigoted dick. If you’ve got any facts to stand up this campaign against people talking foreign, then bring them forward. But then, you haven’t: Littlejohn columns consist of zero research and 99% by-product from the northbound end of a southbound bull.
No change there, then.
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