Monday 21 February 2011

Mail laments "desperately sad" lack of benefits for immigrants

Earlier this month the Mail's irony meter exploded into a thousand tiny pieces when the paper expressed its shock at a French newspaper daring to criticise British ski instructors taking French jobs. You see, the usual invective about foreigners stealing "our" jobs doesn't apply if the foreigners in question are white and British.

Today the Mail is at it again, attempting to drum up sympathy for Brits who ploughed their life savings into homes in Spain only to see the bottom fall out of the market leaving many in negative equity.

It's sad stuff - nobody wants to see someone suffering like this - but once again the Mail displays extraordinary double-standards. Would we get two pages of sympathetic copy if an Asian Muslim family based in Britain found itself in similar straits?

One paragraph that leaps off the page contains a quote from 62-year-old widow Marian Henderson:
"I’ve looked for work but there just isn’t any. If you go for an interview and there are five Spanish people and one British person, they’ll have the five Spanish first. You can’t blame them, but that is just the way it is. As for help from the government there is nothing. If I was in England I would get help with the council tax and pension credits, but because I am in Spain there is nothing. They don’t hand out anything for free here - it’s terribly depressing."
The Mail describes her plight as "desperately sad" - but isn't this EXACTLY what the Mail wants to see happen in this country? Remember all those front pages demanding British jobs for British workers? The years and years and years of complaints about immigrants receiving benefits paid for by hard-working natives? Doesn't anyone at the Mail realise that the Brave New World the paper is constantly calling for will result in exactly the same "desperately sad" circumstances affecting Brits on the Costa? Would the Mail be at all sympathetic towards a 62-year-old Polish widow living in a house worth half-a-million pounds who couldn't get any benefits and was therefore struggling to get by?

I think we all know the answer...

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