By Dominic Cadden
There’s a certain type of Australian who’s a bit . . . how can we put this . . . bullish when it comes to dealing with his new neighbours from Britain. He boasts a competitiveness which is bordering on obsessive, resulting in a confrontational approach which can be, frankly, a tad tiresome. “I went to London once,” he’ll tell you. “It was crap, mate. Dirty, boring, rude, expensive.”
Brighton’s beach, he’ll add, is just a joke compared to Manly. And then the sports stuff kicks in. Perhaps an Australian tennis player has won something; perhaps the English cricket team has lost something. Whatever, it’s all extra ammunition for him to throw at us in his never-ending quest to point out just why Australia is a million billion times better than Britain.
What he misses, however, when he’s bandying around the ‘bastard Pom’- peppered vitriol, is that, honestly, we don’t care.
Yes, back home there are plenty of jingoistic nationalists who would happily spend hours trading jibes with him, but you’re not going to find many Brits of that nature down under. We have, after all, run away from the UK, which isn’t really the modus operandi of the flag-waving patriot. Our motivation when we went through the trials and tribulations of visa applications was not to rip ourselves away from the greatest place in the whole wide world and replant ourselves in a broken backwater where we’d live out our years in abject misery. Your convict ancestors, Mr Ranty Australia, may have had no choice but to head down under, but we certainly did. In fact, we took a look at your homeland and thought ‘I’d like a bit of that’.
So, when we’re being told for the umpteenth time that it’s just unbelievable that so many people would want to cram themselves onto a windswept, rainy island and that Britain simply isn’t Great anymore, we just nod patiently and wait for you to get the next round in.
Australia, you see, has long boasted a host of betters – better weather, better beaches, better wine, better wages, better job security, better tans – which is why the immigration floodgates don’t look like shutting anytime soon. Today, however, we’ll happily admit that, while we can still be smug about culture, television, literature, film and football, in the chest-beating world of who’s the greatest, us British ex-pats are more than happy to concede that Oz holds all the cards.
I mean, just look at the place. Thanks to the global economic meltdown palaver, Britain’s a mess, so the only place you can comfortably enjoy being British right now is sitting safely on the other side of the world with a gin and tonic in one hand and a three-day old copy of The Times in the other. From this vantage point, we can, while of course having the greatest sympathy for those we’ve left behind, muse on the fact that we simply can’t believe our luck that we got out when we did and would have to be dragged kicking and screaming back to our old three-bedroom semi in Solihull.
The greed and incompetence of the world’s bankers has, of course, hit Australia too, but compared to the injuries inflicting on the UK, the lucky country has a mere bloody nose compared to Britain’s two broken legs, a couple of smashed ribs and facial injuries that’ll scare children forever more.
Take the basic indicator as to whether things are going well – unemployment. Yes, there have been some lay-offs in Oz, but back home more and more people are finding themselves scouring the job ads in the local rag and on the internet. The official figure has just hit 2.26 million, that’s 7.2 per cent of the working population. To get to that figure, that mass of broken souls was swollen by 232,000 in the three months to April this year. And it’s 605,000 more than it was at the same time last year.
And it’s not just your factory workers that are reaping the whirlwind of other people’s mistakes. Service industries are shedding staff quicker than you can say ‘could I get another bottle of water over here, please’ and once safe industries such as journalism are also being decimated. Your evening paper back home is, more than likely, now being produced by a spotty Mac-operator, two fresh out of college NCTJ graduates and the work experience boy.
The unemployment figures then are reaching early-80s proportions. And, just as it was when the Iron Lady was closing down the mines and smashing the unions willy nilly, the result is more and more seriously pissed off people in the hills and valleys of the United Kingdom – which makes the place all the more scary.
Being of a certain age, I can remember growing up surrounded by one of the foulest bi-products of a serious recession – the rise of the extreme right wing. Back then, it was the National Front lashing out at the hardship, all shaven heads, bomber jackets and biroed-on swastikas. The representatives in my East Anglian dormitory town were led by a nasty piece of work called Neil, who had an alsatian called Hitler which was trained to bite anyone with even the slightest tan. Neil cared not that the total non-white population of his hometown barely touched double figures, as far as he was concerned it was the ‘darkies’ who were the cause of the country’s – and, more importantly, his own – ills.
Hopefully, Neil’s long been reduced to a quivering mess of drool and catheter bags by the tin-loads of Evostik he’d inhale behind the bus station and Hitler was eventually taken in by a nice family in Lavenham who rechristened him ‘Cuddles’ and trained him to be less partisan in his attack habits. But the sad truth is that this latest bit of financial hardship has ensured that a plethora of new Neils are now pounding the streets of Britain looking for someone to blame.
They are, of course, a new breed. The National Front is, thankfully, long dead. Most people under 20 would be hard pressed to understand the evil emanating from the joined up N and F that was the prominent feature of graffiti circa the late-seventies and early eighties – and the leadership of its successor, the British National Party, have not considered developing their own logo to be daubed on walls, let alone gone down the route of carving it onto their foreheads with a Stanley knife as was the party piece of their predecessors.
No, the BNP carry their standard of the neo-Nazi with an unhealthy slice of deception. Its leader, the portly Nick Griffin, for instance, will never be seen in swastika T-shirt and 12-hole DMs – it’s all expensive suits and ties for him. Needless to say, they hang badly on him, but his intention is to come across not as the gurning thug with a burning hatred of all things different but as the serious politician who knows that tough times demand tough action.
And his party has all the trappings of a sensible, well-considered political movement – a flash website, spin doctors, a nice HQ, policies on things other than immigration.
The thing is, thought, that the hatred’s still there. They may well no longer chant ‘paki, paki, paki, out, out, out’ at their rallies, but try this chunk of policy C&P’d from their website for size and decide for yourself what their driving motivation really is: “On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years. To ensure that this does not happen, and that the British people retain their homeland and identity, we call for an immediate halt to all further immigration, the immediate deportation of criminal and illegal immigrants, and the introduction of a system of voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin assisted by a generous financial incentives both for individuals and for the countries in question.”
That’s their extra ‘s’ on ‘incentives’ by the way, not ours.
Anyway, couple that with the fact that you can’t join the BNP if you’re anything other than a white-skinned ‘indigenous’ British citizen and, unless your knuckles drag along the floor while you’re walking, it’s not hard to see Neil’s leering grin hiding behind Nick’s sombre statesman facade.
OK, you argue, there’s always been fat racists in the UK – and, yes, we’ll give you that. Thing is though, when things are going nicely, the fat racists are confined to the corners of stinking pubs in Rotherham or are left to fester in their own misery in Kleenex-strewn bedsits, pouring over internet sites searching for Nazi-lore and bestial porn in turn. Come a little bit of hardship, however, and they’re up and running, the not-quite-so-stupid ones realising that they have a chance now to grab what they crave most – safety in numbers.
The credit crunch, you see, hasn’t just bought an abundance of belt-tightening to the homeland, it’s bought the biggest nosedive in the faith those we’ve left behind have in their leaders that this writer can ever remember. First up, the UK population wasn’t so stupid not to realise that the crash was the Government’s fault. It may have been the bankers who milked the country’s coffers dry, but, to many, they did it with a nod from our elected representatives who turned a massive blind eye to the activities of the city traders.
Then, of course, came the deathly silence when the country was waiting for someone to admit responsibility. But all they got was that it wasn’t really Gordon’s fault, though. Oh no. And then, the insult following this injury was the shoving of what little cash the UK had left back to the incompetent banks in bail-outs and golden farewells for the obese cats at the top. Cue all kinds of kicking off as the G20 came to town to talk it all over.
Things were bad enough at this point and you could already hear the ill-educated, desolate and bitter looking for someone to turn to – and more importantly someone to blame – but the Whitehall coves just had to add a little icing on the cake to make sure that Nasty Nick and his frothing chums had the door held wide open for them. The expenses scandal. Yep, as well as screwing up the country, your closet bigot was told, our MPs had had their noses in the trough at the same time. While the rest of the country reeled, the Honourable Gentlemen and Ladies were adding second homes, pay-per-view porn and duck pens to their lives as a perk of the job. Nick must’ve been laughing himself silly.
With a speed his natural form belied, he was up and running loudly blaming all the ills of the UK on the ‘immigrants’ – and blaming the powers that be for letting them in. It’s simple dogma for simple people. You’d have a good job if it wasn’t for all the Asians taking them. You’d get your council house upgrade if those Somalians hadn’t turned up and leapfrogged you on the list. You’d have a girlfriend if those swarthy Iranians weren’t competition in the nightclubs. The truth, of course, is that many, many people are simply destined to a life of failure because of their lack of wiles, but these sheep are all too happy to believe you if you tell them that their personal woes are someone else’s fault rather than their own. And they’ll then line up behind you quick smart.
So now then, instead of having a few twisted racists muttering to themselves as they waddle to the off licence and back, we have a few twisted racists in the corridors of power. Nick himself is now an MEP, as his mate Andrew Brons. They got in after the BNP secured 6.3 per cent of the national vote. And the party also boasts nearly 60 councillors at local level, despite an incredibly poor track record of most of them to even understand what’s being said in an environmental services committee let alone do anything of any use for their communities.
Of course, that’s not a big enough army to seriously worry that we’re going to see a Kristallnacht in Kings Lynn just yet, but, hey, it’s a start. And it’s also an indication – or perhaps a reminder or a confirmation – that the UK, for all its wonderful qualities, does have more than its fair share of vile, bitter little scrotes.
In the tradition of fairness that you all know Whingeing Pom holds so dear, we have to point out that the rise of hate-filled politics isn’t just confined to British shores. It is, if you look hard enough, pushing its withered stems through the red dirt of Australia too.
Let us introduce you, for example, to Matthew David Tweedy. This fine figure of a man is one of the mainstays of a move to set up the Australian Protectionist Party, which would comprise of a bunch of lads who want to halt all immigration to Australia. They also don’t particularly want those who’ve already got here to have too good a time of it either, so would call for a ban on building mosques and the outlawing of Muslim women wearing veils.
Matt’s already the subject of an investigation by the Federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission after he peppered cities with hundreds of anti-Muslim leaflets and is, surprise, surprise, currently in the process of forging strong links with the BNP. Like most chaps of his ilk, he seems to be terrified that the ‘Islamists’ are going to take over, telling his local paper that there’s a “push for sharia law” going on. The poor lad has obviously been scared of people with different coloured skins for a while now, adding that back when he was a teenager it was, “the Aboriginals you were wary of”, but now that they’ve all been driven out of the metropolitan area there’s a new breed we should be looking over our shoulders for.
But, the thing is that Matt’s not even close to getting a political party together yet, let alone threatening to pinch a seat in the state or federal parliaments. There’s been a lot of truck in the Australian media recently about whether or not the country is racist, but despite the fact that it undoubtedly is – sorry, but you just have to say the word ‘Aboriginal’ to answer that question – the saving grace is that, on the whole, it’s not quite as racist as the likes of Matt, Nick and Neil, so the Australian face in that trio is destined to finish up back muttering to himself in the pub once the banks get back in order and we can all go back to drinking too much beer around the barbie. The worry, however, is that Nick, meanwhile, will still be sipping Scotch in Brussels with one eye on Downing Street.
