Rod Liddle Channels Britain First

After a boat carrying a group of Albanians attempted to cross the English Channel recently, the paranoid and Europhobic wing of the punditerati did what it does best: it went off the end of the pier in no style at all, telling anyone who would listen that Scary Migrants (tm) are all coming to Britain, and we can’t stop them because BRUSSELS! This is, of course, simplistic horseshit, but desperate pundits churn out equally desperate copy.

And there is no more desperate pundit than professional Miserable Git Rod Liddle, who, having taken the Murdoch shilling, has only one mission at the moment, and that is to demonise the EU, and anyone looking not totally white, with bonus points for putting the boot into Scary Muslims (tm). While Liddle does not tell his readers this, the majority religion in Albania is, you guessed it, Islam.

So it should surprise no-one to see the headline “Rod Liddle: Blame leftie luvvies for surge in migrant (not refugee) deaths … Sun columnist says sending out rescue boats encourages more to make the perilous trip” (yes, it’s all Emma Thompson’s fault), followed by talk of “Rubber dinghies pitching up in Kent full of people who are very definitely not refugees”. They’re Albanians, and they’re up to no good.

“The BBC may call them refugees, but they are not. There is no war in Albania. Albania is at peace and has been for decades … The reason the Albanians wish to come here is to get British money … Some by working hard and putting Brits out of work by undercutting wages … Some by not working terribly hard, if we’re honest, but by doing other shady stuff … There’s a fairly vibrant Albanian mafia at work in the UK” [BBC at fault: check!].

How does he know this? He doesn’t. They’re Albanians, right, and that means bad things. And then comes the switch: having got his readers to look at the Albanians who are trying to cross the Channel, he starts on “Meanwhile, the floods of similar migrants - NOT refugees - continue across coastal Europe … Migrants were drowning all over the place, off the coasts of Italy, Greece, Tunisia, Turkey”. See what he did there?

Liddle identifies a group that may not be refugees, but economic migrants. He then makes sure readers know they are up to no good, before pretending that a far larger number of people who really ARE refugees are just the same. Or, as it is often known, talking well, but lying badly. The claim that they are not really refugees allows Liddle to ridicule the idea of not leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean.

Then he pulls a second switch, telling “Net migration to this country is currently running at 333,000 per year”. See? Anyone migrating to the UK is just as bad as those setting out across the Mediterranean, and they are in turn just as bad as the Albanians, who are up to no good and only after Our British Money. What kind of journalism is that?

For once, Liddle is right on the money: “That is catastrophic”. It certainly is. It’s the most catastrophically bad column since, er, his last outpouring of bigotry. We should welcome anyone not speaking English with hatred and suspicion, because, well, they’re like the Albanians, who are probably all Muslims. Real Britain First stuff. Really unacceptable.