Poison

I have long suspected that the trope ‘a glass of red wine a night is good for you’ was a product of the vintners’ public relations operation, but it didn’t exactly come as a total surprise to learn that the gubmint's Chief Medical Officer now says there is no safe level of imbibition of a deadly, if socially acceptable, poison. Cue the outrage. What, you have to say, you lied to us all those years? And as you say it you must adopt a posture of indignant incredulity, as if you are entitled by some natural law – human right, if you will – never to be misled.

Millions of mostly muslim immigrants are dangerous, or they aren’t, depending on what agenda you wish to pursue. And the moon is made of cheese, the earth is flat and your chances of winning that roll-over lottery were less than your chances of dating a supermodel, apparently. Actually, all most men need to date a supermodel is to win the lottery, or at the very least their chances of doing so are increased immeasurably. The non-sequitur as argument is rife and probably always has been; a popular Owen Jones question used to be “So, the immigrants take your jobs, or they live on benefits... which is it?” He used to trot this conundrum out as regularly as clockwork, as if it killed the debate and won the day.

Of course the answer is both, either or neither, but any answer is an unhappy one if you are the homeless ex-squaddie watching refugees being housed while your potential wages are too low to afford rent and you can’t access benefits from the system you’ve paid into without an actual address. Is it the immigrants’ fault? Almost certainly not. Does the system appear to be skewed in their favour and against yours? Absolutely. Is this a fair appraisal? It depends. It depends whose over-zealous hands hold the facts and how they choose to air them.

The entire leftist cultural attack on the greater majority of the population relies heavily on impressing a sense of guilt on their otherwise uneventful and fairly blameless existence. You get up in the morning, go out to work, feed your family and bring up your kids to follow in your footsteps and then one day it turns out you are an over-privileged, xenophobic little Englander with hatred in your soul for anybody not like you. You are a far right, racist, sexist, islamophobe because seeing muslims behead non- muslims prompts you to question whether we should be more careful who we allow into the UK.

“All refugees are not terrorists” does not mean that some refugees are not terrorists. And even one terrorist can terrorise, can kill, a lot of innocent people. The nonsense argument that more Americans die at the hands of white, gun-toting Americans is utterly irrelevant to the discussion of the sagacity of importing sworn adversaries with a divine mission to slaughter the infidel. The world over, you are statistically more likely to suffer harm at the hands of people you know than otherwise and often for good – or at least comprehensible - reasons. Why would you deliberately compound your chances of coming to harm by adding a barbarous ideology to the risk cocktail?

Yes, there is hatred and fear and yes there is even an element of ‘hate speech’ but the cultural Marxists have time on their hands, a misguided missile of an agenda and a far larger PR machine to mobilise pop-up protest and suppress dissent by labelling normal as Nazi. Nobody with an ounce of normality could look on Europe’s self-inflicted migrant invasion and not feel trepidation and a sense of anger and helplessness, but calling that reaction xenophobic is to wantonly miss the point for unhelpful political purposes.

Poison... but whose is it?

But there is an answer. Next time you hear a lazy attack on your natural concerns, sticking an unfriendly label on your sensible objections, or shouting you down with spurious statistics, let them have their say. Let them rant and rave and foam and froth and hold their protest placards up aloft. Let them state their case whereby they turn the aggressors into saints and the victims into criminals. And when they’ve exhausted their repertoire of well-rehearsed but ultimately meaningless string of unconnected slogans, calmly look them in the eye and ask, “Or is that just bollocks?”