Stop the boats. Just stop them. Can’t you see what they’re doing, those bloody effing floaty boats? They’re ruining this country. Inside out; not to mention left, right and centre. To be honest I think it’s fair to say that we’d all be a lot better off without any boats whatsoever. I mean, what have boats ever done for us? Exactly, nothing. But it’s more complicated than that, for while a boat is a boat is a boat, it seems that all boats are equal but some boats are more equally crammed with illegal immigrants than others. We don’t mind the big ones that bring us food and cars and huge televisions and booze and endlessly evolving but eternally disposable tech devices and everything else that fuels our rampant consumerism, or even the ones that take away all our guns to support some teenage West African dictator and vast piles of cash to buy vast quantities of drugs. They’re the good boats. We can keep those ones. But it’s the small ones that are doing the most damage. Because when you look at the way we’ve bounced back so healthily well from Covid and at the way we’re just about reaching our peak again what we absolutely DO NOT NEED is to have all our hard work undone by a load of ruddy bloody, effing jeffing, sodding bastard small boats. God, those small boats really do my head in, coming over here when conditions are favourable and filling some of our finest seaside towns and, er, Dover with confused migrants. Bloody small boats. If they’re that much of a problem they should just stop making them.
Logically that would be the best way to solve the whole problem. If small boats are causing us so much grief then we just need to go back to the source and enforce an international ban on any vessel smaller than a mid-range stockbroker’s weekend yacht. No small boats means no more channel crossings, means no more pesky immigration, means the complete preservation of everything that keeps Great Britain great and pure and golden. A traditional Britain. A beautiful Britain with its rampant gang culture and knife crime. A special Britain with its appalling school attendance record and shambolic health service. A taste the difference, proud, white, Anglo Saxon Britain with its institutionally corrupt, racist and misogynist police force and a prison service that can’t even guarantee a touch up in the showers anymore because everyone inside is steamed to the gills on synthetic Chinese drugs; drugs which are probably manufactured in the same lab where they invented Covid, and then flown over by AI controlled drones, created by Elon Musk. Our very best Britain, shining a light so that others may follow. A beacon of purity and righteousness in a rotten world, but all falling apart thanks to those silly little small boats.
Of course, you could always try another tack and make the deterrents a bit more ‘in your face’. A bit more draconian. A bit shittier. It seems that having to spend 24 hours in Dover simply isn’t enough to put off your average, garden variety illegal immigrant anymore, which is testament to just how desperate these people are. So a much better way to deflect a migrant from, say, Rwanda, coming all this way to suckle on our rough, unappetising teat is to pay the Rwandan government £250 million just to give them a return flight home and a complimentary bacon sandwich. In fact, says us, let’s send them all to Rwanda: a land of undiluted democracy and upwardly mobile types fronted by a President pure in thought and motive and, miraculously, £250 million better off through some undisclosed investment triumph he forgot to tell anyone about until now. It’s a plan so flawless only a complete cretin would demure from backing it to the hilt. It’s almost artwork. It’s almost so good you’d think it had been made up by by a computer. We’ve even sent over our shiny new Home Secretary to smile and shake hands and sign off on pure stupidity. Cleverly by name, cleverly by natu………oh no, that doesn’t work.
Various people that populate (or lurk in, if you prefer) the very darkest right-wing corners of the right wing side of the Tory party are really having to grit their teeth at the moment. They know what they want to say out loud, in public, but they fear that if they do they will be exposed for the blinkered, untutored racists that they are. Their idea of draconian measures would make Vlad The Impaler look like Floella Benjamin. In their giddiest fantasies any migrant entering the UK, at all, would be forced to eat their own faeces before being summarily executed without trial. Failing that the least that could happen is that families would be ripped apart and forced into slavery somewhere in what is left of the British Empire or just herded up and sent to a ‘migrant processing facility’ in deepest Snowdonia and never be seen alive again. In a bid to become a more sustainable, greener Britain their remains might eventually be secretly used to fill pies to be handed out to the homeless at Christmas. All the boats they came on could then be stacked up and burnt en masse as a crowd of confused, deluded, angry arseholes like Katy Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman dance around, covered in pigs blood and doing their best to avoid eye contact because, inexplicably, they very likely hate each other as much as they hate illegal immigrants.
But there are always two sides to everything and so on the other hand we have the woolly liberals who are scratching themselves raw with concern over the human rights of the tens of thousands of people fleeing torment and turmoil, thousands of miles and the next gunshot away. All they want is for migrants to be treated fairly and kindly and not be subjected to inhumane conditions or be told by a slack faced cretin that living in tents on the streets is sort of a lifestyle choice. They believe that migrants should be allowed the legal protection to stay in Britain for as long as they want, sleeping soundly under the financial umbrella of the UK tax payer, because human life is sacred and underneath our skin we are all as one. And that’s very well and good, except the one thing the average woolly liberal won’t do is take on a family of illegal migrants themselves. Sure, they probably took on a couple of relatively well-heeled Ukrainians last year to replace their usual cleaner and told the Cheltenham Gazette all about it, but faced with the suggestion of housing a bunch of fishy Libyans? Well, that’s a totally different kettle of fish altogether: the kettle being their back yard and fish being explicitly unwelcome in said kettle on the grounds that they might be ‘incompatible with the values of our community’. Interestingly enough, these are the same woolly liberals who most likely voted for that fucking ridiculous Boaty McBoatface name. Silly woolly liberals: it’s one boat for them and another boat for everyone else.
So pity poor, tiny Rishi Sunak (if you can ever forgive yourself). He’s got the job of trying to keep a sticky finger in both sides of the camp as they try to wriggle away from each other, indignation flying in all directions. He’s also got the icky job of trying to defend an immigration policy that’s so mind-bogglingly unstable and feckless that it could almost have been nicked from a plotline of Love Thy Neighbour. It’s not as if he even came up with the idea and yet he says he believes all the way through to his miniscule soul that it’s the right thing for Britain to do. Naturally we all know that it will end in tears and if, on the slimmest of chances, we do end up with a migrant deportation plan with Rwanda that actually works it will still end up shelved for the rest of time when the Tories get tickled out at the next election by that big softie on the other side of the chamber. All that said, and on the basis of seconds of intelligent reflection on my part, there is a small bit of me that would like the plan to pan out well, if only because then I wouldn’t be thinking the same thing as Gary Lineker. For what greater crime can a migration agreement with a very dodgy African country commit than to elicit another unsolicited, crippled orphan of an opinion from Gary ‘The Opinion’ Lineker, a man who must spend most of his time meticulously counting out and polishing his own self-awarded self-importance medals before carefully stuffing them back up his own bleached balloon knot. Surely at least one of those empty small boats that leave our shores every day after dropping off another load of migrants must have space to take Gary and his opinions to a land far, far away and never bring him back again? Hey, there’s an idea: we take on the migrants in exchange for every idiot that we could really do without. I’d be happy to start a list; I think it might take quite a while so I suppose we could start with anyone mentioned in this post. Just say. Whatever floats your boat.
G B Burton. 16.12.2023
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 