WILL THE MARTYRDOM OF JO COX STEM THE RACIST TIDE? I HOPE IT WILL. I FEAR IT WON'T.

A few years ago I visited the camp at Dachau. Or 'KZ Gedenstatte Dachau as it says on the signs that point the way. And of course it was horrible. I don't think there has ever been a time when my mind might have been open to the populist racism of Farage and his like. Time spent at KZ Gedenstatte Dachau merely rubber stamped every one of my instincts. The peddlers of hate can so easily look like such good old boys. They always have. And blaming all the bad stuff in your life on people who have different coloured skin and speak in different languages will always have a simplistic appeal. And I guess people at the end of their collective tether will always be tempted by the simplicity of racism.

Do they vote for places like KZ Gedenstatte Dachau? Of course they don't. The Germans didn't and we wouldn't. But once you give the purveyors of racism a popular mandate, KZ Gedenstatte Dachau is always what you get. Every brick and cobble of the place was horrible. But there was one corner of the 20th Century hell that stopped me dead in my tracks. Dachau wasn't one of the death camps. The Nazis baulked at the idea of having human slaughter houses on their own soil. They preferred to carry out their Final Solution out of sight and out of mind in Poland.

Instead Dachau was a particularly brutal prison. A labour camp. Before the war started, almost all of the prisoners were released at the end of their sentences. They were broken shells of men, mere shadows of their former selves, but they were released. Once the war got underway Dachau was filled way beyond capacity and people started dying in ever growing numbers – from beatings, from disease, from starvation, from the cold. Bodies needed to be disposed of, so a small crematorium was constructed. This wasn't a vast factory of a place like the buildings that housed the ovens of Treblinka and Birkenau. And unlike those notorious ovens, it wasn't blown up as the US Army approached in 1945.

It is still there today. Brick built to last. And on one of the walls there is a small plaque bearing the names of four young British women. I can't remember their exact ages. They were all in their late teens or early twenties. They were fluent French speakers who had volunteered to be parachuted into France to work with the Resistance. They were all betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. Remarkably, they all withstood Gestapo torture. The men in the black uniforms gave up the ghost and had them shipped off to KZ Gedenstatte Dachau to executed and cremated. They were killed with no fanfare. There were hooks on the ceiling of the Dachau crematorium. For hanging people. The hooks are still there. It was all about efficiency of course. Hang someone from the neck until they are dead. Cut the corpse down and the open door of the oven is a mere couple of feet away. It was how the four heroines who gave up nothing to the Gestapo torturers met their ends. One by one. Hang and burn. And now they are a tiny foot note in the vast history of those dark times. Four young British women who volunteered to play their part in slaying the foul, racist monster that was Nazism. Now they are nothing more than four names on a small plaque on the well built brick wall of the crematorium of KZ Gedenstatte Dachau.

I couldn't help thinking of these four young women last week as the facts behind the murder of Jo Cox's death stared to come in one by one. I didn't know Jo Cox. I never met Jo Cox. To be honest I had never heard of Jo Cox until she became the name on everyone's lips for the very worst of reasons. But it very soon became apparent to me that she was cut from similar cloth to the four young women named on the plaque. She had chosen her path. She had vowed to fight the hatred of racism with every fibre of her being. And it cost her her life.

A couple of weeks ago I chose words from Macbeth for the title of a blog about the growing spread of racist poison that the Brexit side of the referendum has released. 

'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes....'

Something wicked like a confused mind sent over the edge by all the words of hate in the air. 'Put Britain First'.

Throughout my thirteen years at First Base, I have got know several female MSPs well. Each and every one of them has been hugely supportive of the work we do. Aileen and Elaine and Emma and Joan. They have all gone out to bat for our clients when the State has been behaving disgracefully. Not one of them has in any way lived up to the popular view of politicians as being venal, selfish serial liars. Instead they are all thoroughly decent people working ridiculously long hours and getting virtually no recognition for their efforts.

Like Jo Cox, they enjoy no security whatsoever from the growing hatred of the times. And there is no escaping the fact that what happened to Jo could so easily have happened to Aileen or Elaine or Emma or Joan. Guilty of the crime of being decent. Guilty of the crime of trying to stand up to the rising tide of populist hate. Was it Jo's high profile that sealed her fate? Or was she merely in the wrong place at the wrong time? Who knows. I guess it will all come out in the wash. It was almost unbearably sad to hear what she had been saying in the days before her death. She told a reporter that she was losing the argument on the doorstep. She was daunted by the sheer strength of the poison that was infecting her beloved West Yorkshire. But she vowed to fight on all the way to the bitter end. And she did.

Now the millions of us who wouldn't use the Express or the Mail for toilet paper hang onto the hope that Jo's martyrdom might stem the racist tide. My gut feeling is that her death will deliver a vote for 'Remain' next Thursday. Sadly, the same gut feeling tells me a narrow 'Remain' vote will be the worst thing that can happen.

Those of us who lived through the heady days of the Scottish Referendum know only too well what happens next when millions of people feel they have been defeated by the lies of the British Establishment. Remember the birth of the 45? Remember how over 100,000 signed up for the SNP and the Greens? Remember the instinctive mood of defiance? Of course you do. And what happened next? 56 out of 59 MPs happened next. The death of Scottish Labour happened next. Huge seismic change happened next.

I fear a narrow 'Remain' vote will provoke a similar mood of defiance south of the border. But this time people will not be signing up for anyone as decent as the SNP or the Greens. Instead they will be pledging their allegiance to much darker forces. UKIP and worse. UKIP and much worse. No wonder a leaked memo from UKIP command confirms Brexit is the outcome they truly dread. Of course it is. Brexit will be the end of Nigel as we know him. Instead Brexit will be the Gove and Johnson show and nothing much will happen. It will be a true blue Tory Brexit. Will the corporate backers of the Tory Party accept the end of free movement of people? Of course they won't. The corporate backers of the Tory Party are addicted to the idea of cheap labour. And so a fudge will be quietly slotted into place. A Norway deal will be signed with as little fanfare as possible and the status quo will continue, only under different leadership. And Farage will scream and wail, but nobody will hear him any more. He will be yesterday's man. A Pound Shop Enoch Powell. Consigned to the dustbin of history's might have beens. It will take years for people to wake up to the status quo truth of a true blue Tory Brexit. The truth that absolutely nothing has changed much. The truth that immigration from the EU is just as high as ever. The truth that the corporations have got their way just like the corporations always get their way.

A narrow 'Remain' vote offers a completely different prospect. Farage and his merry men will be empowered: turbo charged. And like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, the seductive tune they will play will attract acolytes by the million. Their message of hate will find fertile soil. And the memory of Jo Cox and her martyrdom will be washed away.

I will not be voting next Thursday. I cannot stand the thought of lending my support to either side. The EU isn't a club I have any wish to be a part of. What has been done to Greece is despicable. One by one the countries of Eastern Europe are voting for Governments that are Fascist in all but name. Twenty years ago Carol and I could happily visit almost all of the 28 countries of the EU. As a white man and a black woman. As a mixed race couple. Now that number is more or less down to two. Britain and Germany. Britain and Germany are that last places where a mixed race couple can sit in a bar and not have to suffer cold staring eyes filled with loathing.

On the other hand, I cannot abide the idea of giving my vote to the likes of Johnson, Gove and Farage. From a purely selfish point of view I hope next Thursday sees a vote for Brexit. It is the only thing that will stop Farage and his fellow travelling racists in their tracks. My two sons like to go to England to see family. Right now they free to walk the streets without looking over their shoulder. Without listening for the sound of heavy boots coming in fast. Without waiting for the sound of drunk, angry voices.

'I first felt a fist,

And then a kick,

I could now smell their breath.

They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs

And too many right wing meetings'

Only this time it will be so much worse than when Paul Weller penned these words back in the dark days of the 1980's when the skinhead stormtroopers of the National Front used to strut their stuff.

And then of the course there is the issue of Scotland finding a way to become Independent. Nicola Sturgeon has been singing from the same hymn sheet as Jo Cox. But what will she say if 'Remain' wins by a whisker? What will she say if Scotland's innate decency has been enough to drag England back from the gates of a Brexit? And will she claim that 51% for 'Remain' is enough to settle this issue for good? I bloody well hope she doesn't because if she does how can she possibly demand we have another say because only 55% voted for the lies of 'Better Together'.

Like I said, I am being entirely selfish. Brexit means my sons will probably be safe from the kind of far right pond life who made the lives of their mum and their aunts and uncles such a misery. Brexit means the end of Farage and all who sail with him. And Brexit means our dream of Scottish Independence can be stronger than ever.

But I ain't voting for it. To vote for it would feel like spitting on the memory of Jo Fox and the four forgotten heroines whose names are on that plaque on the wall of the crematorium at KZ Gedenstatte Dachau. 

THANK GOD FOR HEROES LIKE NIGEL FARAGE WHO SACRIFICE ALL TO KEEP US SAFE IN OUR BEDS.....

I don't know about you but I'm finding it's getting rather tiring trying to keep up with all the stuff I need to be scared about. Every passing day brings forth new levels of naked terror for me to try my best to deal with as Project Fear battles it out with... well.. Project Fear. I am fifty five now and yesterday I was presented with a bleak view of my future by my Prime Minister who was wearing the very gravest of grave faces. It was his 'we're about to be invaded' by China face. Basically the hard truth he was seeving up as his fear dish of the day could have not been much harder for a 55 year old contemplating the proximity of my golden years. Vote Leave and forget my state pension. Instead it will be a cardboard box in a shop door way. A closed up, boarded up shop by the way. And it will rain every day. And every time my exhausted eyes can stay open no more and start to close, a rabid rat will jump forward to gnaw at my face. And it will rain every day. And my desperate existence with revolve around queuing up at the soup kitchen for a thin gruel of rotten cabbage.

Scary, right?

On the up side, without any kind of NHS I doubt I will have to survive my pensionless old age for so very long. And will I survive the nightly carpet bombing from the newly re-established Luffewaffe once the next European War gets under way?

So I lay awake at night and I endure the cold sweats of gnawing fear. I don't want the rest of my life to look like this. Old, penniless and starving in the midst of the next war to end all wars.

I best vote to stay then. But there is no relief from fear to be found in doing that. Fair enough staying might mean I will still have a state pension and a degree of health care. But it will come at a terrible price. For voting to stay means destroying my country's ability to stop an invasion of wild eyed Jihadis and Turks. They are massing at the boarders right now. A vast brutal army readying themselves to swarm all over us to rape all our women and behead all our men. Voting to stay will mean voting for a life under Sharia Law with no football, no music, no pork and daily beheadings in the town square. Getting a state pension suddenly doesn't seem so great any more. Not at the price of living under an Islamic tyranny.

Which is worse? Destitution, starvation and endless war or being beheaded by a psychotic Turk who rakes in £500 a week in benefits and rapes a school girl every other day.

No wonder everyone is telling me that 23 June will see me cast the most important vote of my life.

As a writer of pulp fiction I feel a heavy burden of responsibility. Can I help people as they contemplate the life or death decision they are about to make? Well maybe I can. Maybe I should try to deploy my fiction writing skills to help to make the terror to come as real as possible. You see, the idea of being beheaded by a lunatic from Istanbul on the Tesco car park can feel like a bit of a distant prospect. A pulp fiction writer can maybe help to flesh out the terrible reality of this Sharia law nightmare that awaits us all if we vote to remain in the EU. A pulp fiction writer can describe the crows in the bare trees. The thin brutal wind. The potholes in the tarmac. The shabby old cars. The pinched, grey faces of the shoppers with their trolleys filled with nothing more than rotten cabbage and Bratwurst. The pulp fiction writer can describe the killing frenzy in the eyes of the Turk who is wielding the extra large machete. The beaten terror in the eyes of the kneeling figure about to lose their head in the most literal sense of the word. Guilty of the crime of listening to Frank Sinatra whilst eating a bacon roll...

Pulp fiction writers. It's what we do. It's how we roll. It is our duty. We have a civic responsibility to make the fear real. Project Fear means nothing unless you can picture it in 3D clarity.

OK. So here goes. Maybe this is the most important bit of typing my fingers will ever be involved in. Life and death typing. A chance to save millions of my fellow Brits from a life of living hell where we will be enslaved by a swarm of murderous, black hearted Turks.

I knew nothing of this until I watched Nigel Farage being interviewed last week. Thank God I tuned in. Because had I not tuned in, I may never have known..... Christ. Not surprsingly Nigel's face was grey with concern as he reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket and drew out his passport. He told me it had these words written on the front. 'European Union'. A British passport with 'European Union' written on the front! Tears of rage prickled my eyes. So Dunkirk was all for nothing. And Agincourt. And Waterloo And Nigel's features hardened as he laid it on the line. All the terror to come. How a Jihadi madman might take the terror trail to Germany and be gifted a passport bearing the words 'European Union'. How that very same Jihadi madman might arrive in Dover waving his passport with his cold killer's smile. How the border officials would be helpless to do anything other than wave him through. And then... Well we all know what comes next. A big house and the kind of benefits payout only Muslims are entitled to. And a carte blanche to rape school girls and blow up railway stations. And all because those German bastards gave him a passport bearing the words 'European Union'.

That is how it will be. That is our future. Thank God there are still men like Nigel with the guts to tell us the hard truth. To tell it like it is. And if Nigel is willing to put his future on the line to save us all, the least I can do is to show some support. Some solidarity. Some patriotism. And it it means being beheaded one day, then so be it. Ladies and gentlemen, here is what is coming if you vote to stay. It is Raqqa. It is Syria. It is two years time. It is a world where we have voted to remain. It is a journey to the very heart of the bottomless evil that is Isis. It is the way it will all pan out should we ignore Nigel's warnings and leave ourselves open and defenceless......

'THE SWORD OF THE PROPHET'

A STORY OF FEAR

BY MARK FRANKLAND

This story is dedicated to Nigel Farage and all the other brave men who give so much to keep us safe.

Omar had travelled a long road. Long and hard. He had come far. Ten years had seen him transformed from the skinny kid on the streets of Fallijah who had thrown stones at the American soldiers. They had watched him in his torn T shirt. They had seen the murder in his coal black eyes. They had sensed the raging hatred in his heart. A boy who had never learnt the meaning of fear. A skin and bone waif who would step out in front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and hurl a rock at the windscreen.

They had chosen him. The big men. The leaders. And they had taken him to a camp out in the desert. And Omar had become accustomed to being the best. The best sniper. The best bomb maker. The best Koran student. He was the ultimate. He felt the hand of the Prophet on his shoulder. He was a sword of Allah. And one day he would deliver the greatest ever blow to the Crusaders.

He was running. Mile after mile after mile in the blazing heat of the midday sun. Mile after mile with a rucksack filled with rocks on his back. Mile after mile with no boots on his feet. Mile after mile. Like a machine. Like death.

There were three men waiting for Omar. Robes. Kalashnikovs. Belts of ammunition. Very still in the shimmering heat.

He reached them and he stopped. They saw how he was barely sweating. They saw how every inch of his lean body was knotted with hard muscle. They saw death in his eyes. They saw Omar. They saw the sword of the Prophet.

It was time. There were no words. Instead they led him to the waiting Toyota. No conversation. No words. Outside people looked away from the black vehicle with the tinted windows. Traffic cleared from their path as they wound through the streets of the bombed city.

A non descript building. Once it had been a garage. Now it was a nerve centre. Two dead eyed guards stood by a wide hole in the floor. Metal stairs. A tunnel lit by flickering bulbs powered by a distant generator. Down and down. Further and deeper. Out of reach of the American bombers who came every night. And now it was cool in the dampness of the subterranean command bunker. Omar followed in silence. Unruffled. The easy bouncing stride of a man at his peak.

A steel door. A body search. And then he was inside the inner sanctum.

Behind a steel deask was the old man who's face appeared on the walls of buildings across the Islamic State. The Caliph. The Mahdi. The Leader. The voice of the Prophet.

"Please sit Omar."

Omar sat. And Omar waited. After so many years he knew his time had finally arrived. Now the Kuffar would pay. Now he would do the great work of the Prophet.

"We have watched your progress for many years now Omar. And you have become the very best. You are the tip of our spear. You are the blade of our sword. You are our new Saladin. And now the time has come for you deliver a blow to the Crusaders they will never recover from. Are you ready Omar? Is the Prophet in your beating heart?"

"Caliph, I am ready."

The old man nodded. A gleam of rage boiled in his coal black eyes.

"Good. Very good. Your mission requires patience and determination. You will be the hawk who soars high over the hot sands of the desert. You will take a boat from Libya. You will pretend to be a refugee. You will find a away to get to Germany. And when you arrive, you will claim asylum. Your journey will be hard. Every border is now closed so you must deploy all the skills we have taught you. Maybe you will have to walk every step of the way. The Prophet with give you the strength. The Germans will give you a place to stay and they will give you money for food. They are fools. You must keep your purpose well hidden. You must hide yourself Omar. You will need to wait for eight years and you must avoid any trouble with their police. You must be perfect in their eyes. You must show the patience of the hawk in the desert skies."

Omar nodded. Eight years? He could wait for eight years. He was the sword of the Phrophet. The old man continued speaking in his cracked voice.

"When the eight years have passed you will fill in the paperwork and apply for a German Passport. Again you must be patient. Like the hawk. After two years they will give you one of these. A German passport.."

The old man held up a passport in his gnarled old fingers. Omar's eyes devoured it. He read the words 'European Union'.

 

"Once you have this there is nothing they can to to stop you finding your great destiny. For you are the sword of the Prophet, brother Omar. You are the very tip of the spear. You will catch a train to London and they will be helpless to stop you. And when you arrive among them, the Kuffar will pay for their crimes."

The old eyes gleamed in the half light of the deep bunker. The ceiling shook a little as an American airstrike hit home many metres above. Dust floated down from the clay ceiling. Omar moved slighly and spoke in a voice soaked in respect.

"Caliph, might I speak?"

"Of course brother Omar. You can speak."

"Caliph is it true that wee still sell oil every day. Much oil."

"It is true."

"And is it true that we sell our oil for many millions of dollars?"

"It is true."

"Great Caliph, I have heard men say a passport like the one you hold in your hands can be bought for as little as £500 dollars. Oh great Caliph, can you not buy me one of these passports and I will deliver a great blow to the Crusaders before the next new moon rises over the desert. Why must I wait for ten long years?"

The old man's weathered face broke open into a small smile of stumpy brown teeth. "Omar, you are strong but you are young. You lack the wisdom of age. I will teach you. For us to bring the greatest terror to the Kuffar, we must do what they fear the most. We have listened to the words of the one they call Farage. He is one of their most formidable Crusaders. Like the one they once called Richard the Lionhart. He has told his people to fear the man who comes to Germany and waits for ten long years to win himself a passport like the one I hold. Of course you could travel to London on a passport like the one you describe. A passport that can be purchased for a mere $500. And of course you could deliver a blow against the Kuffar before Friday Prayers. But that would not be victory. The Crusader they call Farage has shown us the way. If his people had listened to his wisdom, they would have left their European Union and then a man like you would have never been able to wait for ten years to earn a German passport and be allowed into his land. Well. You would be allowed in if you claimed you were merely a tourist, but let us not worry ourselves about that. And it is indeed true that even if his people had listened to his warnings, you could still have taken a plane to the place they call Dublin and entered his Kingdom at the place they call Dundalk and caught a ship from the place they call Larne and landed at the place they call Stranraer... But let us not consider any of these things for to consider these things would be to give the infidels what they want. Farage knows and Farage has warned. If you were to simply travel to London this week and slaughter hundreds of Kuffar, they would barely notice. It would be like the bite of a flea on the hide of a goat. But if you wait for ten long years and then deliver your blow, then you will have made the warnings of Farage into a glorious reality. Only then will they know true terror. Only then will they pay."

"I hear your wisdom oh great Caliph."

Omar closed his brain down. The Caliph was all wise. Omar could wait for ten years. He could wait for the whole of eternity.

And so it was that Omar, the very tip of the Phrophet's spear, made the great journey over land and sea to Germany. In the years that followed, he became a supporter of a football team they called Borrussia Munchengladbach. He met a girl called Helga and they became man and wife. He became a German citizen and forgot all about the old man with the gleaming eyes. He trained as an engineeer and found work in a factory making washing machines to clean the clothes of the unbelievers. He became a father of two daughters and one son. He became an eater of pork. He never did take a train to London to take the revenge of the Prophet to the British Kuffar....

But he might have done. Oh yes. He might well have done.....

THE END

So there. I hope you are scared. Really, really scared. Becuase we must never rely on the fact that lunatic Jihadis like Omar will meet girls like Helga and become eaters of pork. Instead they might wait out those ten long years and come into our midst bearing German passports. There is no excuse. Nigel has warned us loud and clear. Oh of course they can buy a false passport and come in through Dublin, but that would be cheating. Well, wouldn't it? Just like Hitler cheated when he sent his Panzer divisions around the Maginot Line and sneaked into France through the Ardennes Forest. We're not frightened of cheating foreigners. Never have been, never will be. But a foreigner who plays it by the book and waits ten long years to get a German passport..... Well that is a whole different level of crazy, right?

So thank you Nigel. And thank God there are men like you who are willing to give everything thay have to keep us all safe in our beds.

THE 'VOTE LEAVE' CAMAPIGN IS GIVING CLOSET RACISTS PERMISSION TO COME OUT INTO THE LIGHT... IN THEIR DROVES

Yesterday wasn't a great day. I happened to visit a social media page which is linked up to First Base and I think it is fair to say my visit left a lot to be desired. Let's say the content wasn't the content I expected to find. I won't go into exactly what I expected to find for that would give too many clues about the page. Instead of reading the expected content I found myself trawling through a charming selection racist bile. Putting together these little images of hate for Facebook pages has become something of a cottage industry in these heady days. People all over the country are burning the midnight oil and honing their cutting, copying and pasting skills to show off just how clever their innate nastiness can be. Once upon a time this kind of open racism would have been considered to be rather socially unnacceptable. A few short months ago, only the worst kind of knuckle dragger would have been sufficiently comfortable in their tattooed skin to publicly associate themselves with this kind of imagery and language of the 1930's. Here's a nice little number I spotted this morning.

Well that was then. Only a few short months ago. Before a crow bar was taken to Pandora's Box. The growing swagger of 'Vote Leave' may not be enough to see us out of the EU in a couple of week's time but it has certainly given hundreds of thousands of closet racists the confidence to come out and strut their poisonous stuff.

One of the most popular themes of these laptop hate mongers is to take a sad image of our military past and scream in rage at how the brave boys who laid down their lives for a brave, free and white Britain are being betrayed. We see lines and lines of white stones in the cemeteries of France. Poppies and medals and Winston Churchill. And now the sacrifice of all these millions of heroes is being trampled under foot as a veritable tidal wave of Koran waiving brown people are being ushered through the gates.

It is hard to work out what gets me most pissed off about all this garbage. I guess the sheer bitter nastiness of it all has to come first. There are few uglier sights than nasty little people blaming every problem in their nasty little lives on the crimes of Johnny Foreigner. Then there is the blatant opportunism of the likes of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson who have all of a sudden chosen to pick up the UKIP playbook and run with it with the enthusiasm of men who have been born again.

Then there is the complete and utter stupidity of it all. I have yet to see a single one of these hate posts where the wicked swarm of immigrants have white faces. Oh no. Every face is a brown face. As in Middle East brown. As in a Moslem brown. As in a terrorist brown. Nobody seems to have the slightest interest in looking at the blatently obvious. We have 28 countries in the EU. Not one of them is home to an indiginous population of brown faced Moslems. Instead each and every one of the 28 is home to a majority of white Christians. I guess about 95% of EU immigrants who make their way here to work are also white Christian. But making up a natty little hate page filled with white Christian faces doesn't really cut it.

And let's face it, the logic of the situation is annoyingly inconvenient. It goes something like this. A brown faced muslim family in Alleppo finally decide they can't take the barrel bombs any more. So they cash in everything they can cash in and somehow make it to the Libyan coast where they buy themselves places on a boat headed for Italy. And they make it. They decide they want to choose Britain as their ultimate place of safety and duly manage to get themselves all the way to Calais to take up residence in a makeshift tent in 'The Jungle'. And every day they try to plot a way to get through the razor wire and the machine guns. That is how it is now. In the EU. But if we leave it is all supposed to be different.

Oh yeah, how?

If we are no longer in the EU, will Bashar Assad stop barrel bombing Alleppo?

No.

If we are no longer in the EU will the family decide to stay and wait to be blown to bits rather that getting out of Dodge?

No.

If we are no longer in the EU will they stay on the beach in Libya rather than getting a seat on a boat?

No.

If we are no longer in the EU will they decide not to make their way to Calais?

No.

In fact there is only one change. If we are no longer in the EU, will the French Government continue to put up with our razor wire and our immigration guys on THEIR soil? Will they buggery. Instead, the fences will be taken down and the immigration guys will be sent packing back to Dover. Because, believe it or not, the people of Calais ain't all that happy to have 'The Jungle' on the outskirts of their town. They would rather 'The Jungle' was somewhere else. Like Dover. So if we leave the EU there will be lots of Gallic shrugging and ironic smiles. You want to go to Britain? Be my guest. Have a nice trip.... look ... there's a wagon ... let me give you a leg up ...

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that all these freshly out of the closet racists are also pretty stupid. Or maybe they just can't bear to face up to painful truth that being in the EU is the only reason France co-operates in keeping so many of the brown faced Muslims they hate so much on their side of the Channel. Can you get angry with people for being stupid? Not really I suppose.

I start getting angry when I see the endless peddling of the military stuff. You know. Our boys died to protect our freedom and now we are letting in all these brown people! 1940 was indeed our very finest hour. Why? Because we discovered the collective guts to face down the worst racist monster planet earth has ever seen. Our soldiers laid down their lives to destroy racism, not to create a green and pleasant land where Hitler's poison could thrive and prosper. We fell out big time with our American allies in the run up to D Day because we dug our heels in and refused to adopt their segregation rules and thereby ban their black soldiers from having a pint in our pubs. And when we saw off Hitler and the Kaiser, our soldiers stood shoulder with literally millions of soldiers from every corner of our Empire. Muslim and Hindu and Sikh. Indians West Indians and Africans. I would love to see one of todays's out of the closet racists spouting off in a pub in 1943 about the Sikhs who were fighting the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma or the Poles who were flying the Spitfires. Their teeth wouldn't have remained in their mouths for more than a few seconds.

It wasn't like we behaved like choir boys when we had our Empire. But when it came down to a straight choice between us and Hitler, those with black or brown skin opted for us. They didn't much like the way Adolf called them sub human. So we all fought shoulder to shoulder. And we won.

Together.

And now a bunch of pathetic racist idiots claim the right to re-write history and pretend that only men with white faces defeated Hitler. It is the worst of rubbish of course but nobody seems to care much. Racists never care about facts. Instead they devour any bogus propaganda they can lay their hands on.

As the poison spreads a little further every day as we count down to June 23, it seems like a good idea to quote these words from a young British soldier who lost his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq. If anyone is in the mood to feel proud of one of our brave young soldiers then I suggest you need look no further than this lad.

"British soldier Chris Herbert from Portsmouth was just 19 years old when the vehicle he was travelling in through Basra in Iraq was hit by a roadside bomb. His friend was killed, another was injured and he lost his right leg. Because of this, some of his friends assumed he’d become angry and bitter over anybody who espoused interest in Islamic culture, that he’d hate Muslims, and who knows, think the BNP or Trump were wise guys. They were wrong.

The message below, posted up on his Facebook page, has gone viral – and for good reason.

“Getting frustrated by some people expecting racism from me, because I got blown up.

Yes. A Muslim man blew me up, and I lost my leg.

A Muslim man also lost his arm that day wearing a British Uniform. A Muslim medic was in the helicopter that took me from the field. A Muslim surgeon performed the surgery that saved my life. A Muslim Nurse was part of the team that helped me when I returned to the UK. A Muslim Healthcare Assistant was part of the team that sorted out my day to day needs in rehabilitation when I was learning to walk. A Muslim taxi driver gave me a free ride the first time I went for a beer with my Dad after I came home. A Muslim doctor offered my Dad comfort and advice in a pub, when he didnt know how to deal with my medicines and side effects.

Contrary to that, a white Brit spat in my girlfriends face for ‘fucking a cripple when you could have me [him]’. A White Brit pushed my wheelchair away from a lift so he could use it first. A White brit screamed at my Dad for parking in a disabled bay when I was in the services coming home.(Although, a lot of people helped in my recovery! I don’t hate white Brits either! Ha, ha, ha!)

Point is, fuck off. I know who I dislike, and I know who I don’t.

I know who I appreciate, and I know who I don’t. If you want to hate an entire race of men and women for the actions of a few dickheads feel free, but don’t push your views on me, thinking I am an easy target because one douchebag decided it was my day to die. Blaming all Muslims for the actions of groups like Daeshe and the Taliban, is like blaming all Christians for the actions of the KKK or Westboro Baptist Church.

Get a grip of your lives, hug your family and get back to work.”

Have you ever read the kind of British values we fought Hitler for so magnificently described? I don't think I have. I must admit that yesterday was the first day that the rising racist tide really started to get to me a bit. For someone who is a father to two mixed race sons, it is almost impossible to stop the brain starting to go into 'what if?' mode. What if we vote to leave? What if the economy falls off a cliff like it did in 1929? What if Boris Johnson turns out to be our very own version of Von Papen? What if all of the racists who are emerging from their closets are suddenly wearing brown shirts in a few years time and stomping around the streets singing a 21st century version of the Horst Wessell song? What chance then for a mixed race family? And what of these blogs of mine? Ooops. They make a hell of a back list. They are the kind of thing guaranteed to earn me a free train ticket to a modern day version of Dachau.....

The alternative three R's. Racism, rats and roaches. No matter how many times you think you've got rid of them, they just keep on coming back........

'BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES.'

So. Two posters from two eras. 1935 and 2016. Germany and Great Britain. Compare and contrast. It's not so very hard is it? I mean the core message. Got a few problems in your life? Maybe even more than a few? And whose fault is that then....?

Then it was the Jews. Now it is the Muslims. What unites these poisonous images is the fact that at the time of their publication they were both deemed to be perfectly OK. Mainstream. The image of the 'Eternal Jew' was produced and pasted onto a million German walls care of the Government of the day. These days we don't do much pasting on walls. Well. Not real walls. Instead we copy and paste onto the virtual walls of the online face we show the world. I tore this hateful little racist number off such a page.

Take a step back. Have a read. And absorb 'They suck the western welfare system dry, outbreed to become a majority, lobby for their own laws and takeover.' How easy it would be to cut, copy and paste these words and move them from the 2016 picture to the 1935 picture. If I had copied out these words as a quotation and attributed them to Riechsfuhrer Josef Goebbels, 1935, would you have questioned it? Of course you wouldn't have questioned it because it is just kind of poisonous bile 'Joey the Crip' used to come out with on a daily basis.

There will always be racist poison leaking up from the sewers. Always has been, always will be. The time to start worrying is when the sewers suddenly burst through the pavement and pour a torrent of effluent onto the street. Into our lives. Into the world.

'Like and share if you are sick of it'

Like! For Christ's sake. Oh here is a nice bit of racist ghastliness. Oooh ....I LIKE that. It's absolutely scrummy. In fact I like it so much I'm going to share it with all my friends. When all is said and done, this is hardly usual behaviour. I am quite certain that very few who share these little Fascist messages would in a million years consider themselves to be Fascists. Oh no. Not even nearly. Instead they are merely listening to the thoughts of funny old Boris or good old Nigel. They're not fascists. They're good old boys. A bit of a laugh. Larger than life. The kind of guys you could imagine having a pint with. Life and soul. All good knockabout stuff. A breath of fresh air. Like that Donald Trump.... like that Herman Goering....

We are three weeks out from the EU Referendum and the race card is being played with ever greater ferocity. Can't get a house? It's the immigrants. Can't get a job? Its the immigrants. Can't get an appointment with your GP? It's the immigrants. Swarms of 'em. Millions of 'em. Like human cockroaches. Like a plague of locusts. Not people like you and me. They are different. They are dark of both skin and heart. Evil basically. When a whole race hatches a plan to 'outbreed' us in order to 'takeover' and steal all of our stuff, well, they really have to be seriously wicked.

The next step is to come up with some kind of symbol to publicly brand these sub humans who are so hell bent on outbreeding us and stealing all of our stuff. Like a five sided star which can quickly be painted on a wall by superimposing one triangle on top of another triangle. It's all basic stuff from the old playbook. You find a corner shop. You check out the name over the door. 'Cohen'. You smash the window. You spray 'JUDE' on the wall. You spray a five sided star on the wall. Job done. And when one night everyone gets themselves onto the same page and smash a million windows, you call it Kristalnacht.

'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes....'

Oh yeah. Something wicked is headed our way. When good people seriously think it is OK to put this kind of racist filth on their Facebook pages, we can know for certain that wickedness is headed our way. You start with laugh a minute lads like Boris and Nigel and Herman and before you know it five million people go up the chimney.

I can't begin to say how sick I am of hearing people compare this EU hatefest with the Scottish Indyref. Such comparisons suggest that Vote Leave are akin to 'YES'. For Christ's sake. I saw Boris on the news last night doing his clown act for the good folk of Preston. I recognised the location. He had parked his bus up in front of the Harris Library. When the cameraman pulled back it became clear that a vast crowd of about 60 had turned out on a sunny Lancashire afternoon to listen to the poisonous words of the Etonian mop head. And that is supposed to be in any way, shape of form like Indyref when the streets were filled with thousands?

IndyRef was a genuine mass movement of all generations. It was all about hope not hate. It was euphoric. It was uplifting. It shocked the Establishment to the very core of their manipulative beings. It was people power in the raw. And it took lies told on an industrial scale by Project Fear to stop 'Yes' in its tracks.

And of course in the end the hate and the fear were enough to drown the hope like an unwanted kitten. And people seriously compare the magnificent optimism of 'Yes' with the malignant hate of 'Vote Leave.'

It makes me sick to my stomach.

We're in for three more weeks of this frantic hate. There will be less and less talk about sovereignty and the democratic deficit and more and more talk of the swarm of wickedness that threatens to wash our way of life away. Of how these sub-humans plan to 'outbreed' us.

And takeover.

Back in 1935 there were the maniacs and the opportunists. They all shared the same black uniforms. Few would argue that the likes of Hitler and Himmler and Heydrich were maniacs. But Goering and Goebbels? Instead they were lads who liked the good life. Champagne and Cociane and the very best of everything. Whilst Himmler perfected his industrial death machines in Poland, Goering gathered up an art collection to rival the Tate. Every Adolf needs a Herman. Or a Boris.

But of course it couldn't happen again. Never. We live in different times. Better times. Nobody could ever share pictures of foreigners and claim that there were evil plans afoot to 'outbreed and 'takeover'......

Really? I think not. The proof of the pudding is in all these homemade Fascist pearls of wisdom that are appearing on the Facebook pages of run of the mill decent people.

'Like and share if you are sick of it'

And let's not ever forget that Hitler didn't need the help of any tanks to take his seat in the Reichstag in 1933. He was voted into power fair and square by tens of millions of normal working Germans who were taught to blame every problem in their hard lives on the evil scheming Jews.

'Like and share if you are sick of it'

And now it matters little which way the vote goes in three weeks time. The rabid cat is out of the bag and baring its yellow, rotting teeth. If we stay, there will be more and more pressure on Government to crack the immigration whip ever louder. And if we leave, then there will be many who will demand that our restored sovereignty should be used to initiate a 21^st Century pogrom. Get them out. Send them home. Ethnically cleanse our green and pleasant land. Ein Volk, Ein Reich. Because when people say talking about immigration and worrying about immigration isn't racist, they are absolutely right. It isn't racist. But when people start putting pictures up on their Facebook walls talking about 'outbreeding', it IS racist. It IS Fascist. It IS the thin end of a wedge that opens the door onto Auschwitz Birkenau. Which of course could never happen again. Shame nobody explained that to the lads on the Serbian death squads at Srebrinica.

'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.'

When I talk to community groups about the food parcels we hand out, the audience usually think I am a good bloke until someone inevitably suggests that things will only get worse and worse with all of these immigrants coming into the country. So I take a deep breath and do my best to to point out that it is the 1% who are bleeding the nation dry and not those who come here to make a better life. And all of a sudden I am not such a nice guy any more. Expressions harden. Body language goes all hostile. It would be easier to go with the flow. It always is. Just ask all those millions of Germans who really thought it would work out OK and went with the flow.

Going with the flow is not an option for me. I am a father of two mixed race sons. They have brown skin. They will always have brown skin. And who knows where the words of Boris and Nigel will take us. At first it will be words shouted across the street. 'Why don't you fuck off back to where you came from. You Wog'. And then they start to cross the street with faces all twisted and contorted with hate. Bad skin and brown shirts and heavy boots. Kicking and stamping and spitting. And then dog tags are hung around necks and numbers are issued and blood groups are tattooed onto the insides of upper arms. And ditches are dug. And people are lined up. And crows flap up from the trees when the stillness of the morning is disturbed by the sound of the guns.

And all of a sudden it is all far, far too late. Nigel and Boris are nothing but distant memories. Old before their time with faces collapsed by two bottles of gin a day. To ease the all consuming guilt. To blank out the murderous reality they helped to create. To hide away for the time when they used hate to further their loathsome ambitions.

In the world of Nigel and Boris, God help you if you have the wrong colour skin or worship the wrong kind of God.

'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.'

I guess I should point out where the quote comes from for those who don't recognise it. Macbeth. The witches looking into the depths of a dark and murderous future.

HANGING ON IN QUIET DESPERATION....

Our new 'Bridge project' is three months old now. It is a simple enough affair. Basically we try to do what we can to help the slowly growing number of foreign nationals who come through our doors for emergency food. Three months isn't so long. But it is long enough. Long enough to see a future filled with stories of quiet tragedy.

Quiet desperation

You see it in their eyes. A journey's end that isn't even close to living up to what the wording on the tin promised. Sam, the homeless and penniless Fijian soldier learning the hard way that giving his all in the brutality of Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't enough to warrant a British passport. No benefits. No right to work. Do not pass 'Go'...

The Tunisian father of four facing imminent eviction and the prospect of seeing his young kids out on the street.

So many people cut adrift and slowly drowning in a vast grey ocean of small print and regulation. It is impossible to paint an accurate pitcture of just how utterly dismal this world is. The world we have created at the behest of Farage and his fellow xenophobic hate mongers in the tabloid press. Nothing new in all this of course. Other times and other places have seen living breathing human beings reduced to despised numbers by the beaurcrats tasked with delivering endless nastiness.

People tell me that over the last couple of years the Home Office has added thousands on new clauses to the UK's immigration rulebook. The bar inches up higher and higher. And buried deep in the small print lies something that is becoming ever closer to true wickedness.

Deport and appeal.

Dusty old ghosts from the history books of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia or Honecker's East Germany would purr with appreciation at deport and appeal. It really does what it says on the tin. It goes something like this. Johnny foreigner pitches up in the UK and asks to stay. Maybe they are fleeing torture and war. Maybe they have already been here for long enough to settle into a family life complete with kids and career. Well, the answer is no of course. The answer is always no. Unless you are a Premier League footballer or a Russian oligarch. Once they say 'no', Johnny foreigner has the right to appeal. Because the UK is a decent caring place under the rule of law. Of course it is. And to help with their appeal they have the right to seek representation from a lawyer capable of getting their head around all those thousands of pages of vindictive Home Office legislation.

But I am using the wrong tense here. The present tense is no longer fit for purpose. The Home Office didn't like the appeals process. Too many pesky judges digging far to deeply into a well of human kindness they had no right to dig into. Saying 'yes' when it should have been abundantly clear that 'no' was the only acceptable outcome. Wig wearing pinko bastards.

Well the Home Office decided enough was enough. The goalposts needed moving and it was the beloved Michael Gove took an axe to the legal aid budget. Let's see how these jumped up foreign types get along trying to work their way through the rule book on their own. Ha!! Thought not. Go on. Off you bloody well pop. Goodbye and good bloody riddance. He even came up with the front to suggest that the legal profession should represent these uppity foreign types 'Pro Bono'. He conveniently forgot the fact that there was barely a living to be had for any lawyer plying their trade in immigration law even before he took away their life blood. He conveniently forgot that the lawyers from the milk and honey areas of the legal trade have no expertise whatsoever in immigration law and therefore couldn't help on a Pro Bono basis even if they wanted to.

But even that wasn't enough. The Home Office worried there might still be thousands of foreign types hanging around like a bad smell whingeing on about not wanting to sent back to the torture room. I mean. Come on. Some even bleat on about wanting to stay with their kids who were born in Britain as British citizens. Can you believe these people. The bloody cheek. They want to stay with their children! Bastards. And the children are little better. They actually want to stay in schools with their pals and continue to speak English as their first language. Bloody wimps. The cowardly swine can't even face the modest idea of upping sticks and relocating to a place thousands of miles away to learn a new language and live on a dollar a day.

So what did they come up with? It wasn't easy for them to be honest. You see, many moons ago that pinko bastard Winston Churchill signed us all up to the European Human Rights Convention. As in the nanny bloody state times about twenty. It doesn't half tie the hands when it comes to handling uppity foreign types. It insists they have the right to appeal. Bloody outrageous. Well the lads in the Home Office were having none of it. So the bloody European Human Rights Convention insists on a right of appeal? Fine then. They can have their right of appeal. But we don't remember it saying anywhere that they had to actually be in the country to appeal. Well, does it? Ha!! Thought not. So here's how we will play it. We'll deport the bastards and let them appeal from whichever hell hole they hail from. Bloody wogs. Best of luck with it. Let's see how they get on hiring a lawyer when all they've got is Skype and a dollar a day.

Is evil too strong a word? Not in my book. It's all about finding new small print ways to treat people like cockroaches.

And David Cameron looks so smug when his cherubic features fill our TV screens. Oh how he loves to gloat about his new triumphs over the tidal wave of human cockroaches who threaten to overwhelm us. The bastards in Brussels insist than any Lithuanian, German or Pole has the right to come to our fair shores with no questions asked. And the scrounging, scheming bastards actually seem to think they have the right to claim benefits. Well not on Dave's watch. Because Dave has sorted it. Dave has been out to bat for each and every one of us and Dave has hit the ball out of the park. Now these foreign cockroaches need to prove their worth by working for at least 16 hours a week before they are entitled to a lousy brass farthing. Pow!! Zap! Take that human cockroaches! There's a new Sheriff in town and the man in the white hat is called Dave. All hail Dave the bane of Johnny Foreigner.

Because they are all the same you see. These foreigners. Bloody cockroaches. They need a firm hand. They need to know exactly who's the boss here. Bastards. Aren't they Nigel? Course they are. All or 'em.

But here's the thing. They aren't all the same. Nobody is the same. Every single one of us on the planet is different. It's called genetics and it is inescapable. Every one of us has a different story. Sure, some of us are scheming, evil bastards. Others of us are not. Most in fact. We deserve to right to be treated on our merits. We deserve not to treated like human cockroaches as a punishment for not being born under a British postcode.

But this of course is the world of John Lennon. The reality is more Josef Goebbels. There is no case by case basis. And it is all completely hateful when you see it play out first hand. When you are confronted by the blindingly obvious fact that these are people not cockroaches.

Which brings me to Katarina which as usual is not her real name. Katerina hails from Eastern Europe and needs two First Base food parcels a week to keep her body and her soul together. You want to see her CV. Impressive doesn't even begin to cut it. For thirty years she was a very senior executive with a number of large companies in her home country. Then she met a Scottish ex pat, fell in love and got married. The Scottish ex pat fell ill and wanted to come home to the NHS. So they sold up and packed up and Katerina cut all her ties with home. The NHS treatment worked but the marriage fell apart. And all of a sudden Katerina found that without the paperwork linking her to a UK citizen she was all of a sudden one of those human cockroaches. She is over sixty and draws a pension from home which is enough to pay the rent on a flat in the tough part of town. If the exchange rate is good, she has £60 or £70 a month left over to pay for everything else. If the exchange rate is bad, then that figure can drop to £20.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Katarina to see if there was anything we could do to make things better. She came up the stairs looking smart as paint in her Sunday best. She sat quiet as a mouse and told her story in a quiet voice weighing every English word with great care. Time and again she apologised for her English which to my ear was pretty damn good. Let's face it, we see plenty of home grown clients whose English is all but indecipherable. Three litres of Frosty Jacks can turn the Queen's English into something akin to double Dutch.

I digress. Katarina. Her quiet words told of a life mostly lived without power. A lonely life of make do and mend. Wear an overcoat at all times. Only light the room you are in. And heating? No. No heating. She has a list of qualifications as long as her arm. Back home she was a high flying professional. Not here though. Here she fills in application form after application form to become a cleaner. Because cleaning offers her the best chance to find the sixteen hours a week of work Dave demands. But cleaning jobs are hard to come by when you are 61 years old and you live in a country far from home.

I filled in a form to a Trust that can help those in dire need. I got word yesterday that £100 had been ear marked for Katarina. To help with the power. To allow some electric light into her life. So I called her. And when I let her know that someone out there was going to help, the other end of the line was suddenly filled with quiet sobbing. And with every sob the sheer bottomless loneliness of her life ate into me. Once I was done, I called up Neil who is the minister at her local church. Neil is one of the good guys. Would you go see her? Sure he would. But only if she wanted him to. So I called her back up and once again there was sobbing. She said I was too kind. I said I wasn't. It made no difference.

Christ. You just feel so utterly and completely useless. Well I do. And every time I hear the likes of Farage spitting his poison I think of this lovely lady in her Sunday best. I see the loneliness in her eyes. I hear the quiet sobs on the other end of the line. And it really shouldn't be like this, but it is. And I can hear a million angry voices shouting why the bloody hell doesn't she go back home then? If it's all so bad here? Well.... why!! Because she has burnt her bridges and cut her ties. Because she put all her faith in a marriage that didn't work out. Because home is a place where the fascists are getting ever closer to enjoying a re-run of the good old days of the 1930's. Because of a whole host of reasons.

Her reasons. And I have no doubt that she will get a job at some stage. So long as she keeps body and soul together and doesn't allow the cold loneliness of her life to eat away at her soul so badly that it becomes incapable of repairing itself.

So.

Here's a request for any of you reading this are from in and around Dumfries. Anyone need a cleaner? An hour a week? Two hours a week? If you do this lovely lady really could do with a leg up if she is to abide by Dave's new rules. If anyone out there feels they might be able to help Katarina in any way please get in touch.

markglenmill@aol.com or 07770 443 483.      

HIDDEN CORNERS OF THE WAR ON THE POOR

The war being waged on the poor right now is no World War Two. It lacks the vast sprawling set piece battles like Midway or Stalingrad. Instead it is much more akin to the Cold War: a long, endlessly vicious conflict played out in hidden corners the eyes of the world seldom get to see.

The nearest thing we have seen to a Stalingrad has of course been the much hated Welfare Reforms. One by one these have been placed on the floor of the House of Commons and one by one they have been sent out across the country with a majority. Watching the likes of the Bedroom Tax being passed into law has been similar to watching a group of acne riddled Brownshirts kicking an old Jewish shop keeper on a pavement glittering with broken glass. Vicious, sure it has been vicious. But the mood music playing away in the background has always hammered home the fact that the beating is well and truly deserved. In any mid 1930's German town, the message was loud and clear – you life is shit and the reason is all down to those lousy scheming Jewish bastards. So it's OK to give them a kicking, right? Is the Bedroom Tax so very different? Struggling to make your mortgage payment this month? Well that is because all of these nasty skiving poor people are hoovering up all of tax you are paying. So it's fine and dandy to give them a proper kicking, right? It's what the shirking swine deserve.

The Welfare Reforms are the war on the poor right out there in the open for all the world to see. Brazen if you like. At risk of flogging the Cold War comparison to death, they are the equivalent of Reagan and Thatcher deploying their Cruise missiles and pointing them straight at the Kremlin. There was nothing secret about it. Instead it was all done right in the face of the Politbureau. When all was said and done, that was the whole point.

All the while, the real bread and butter brutality of the Cold War was being played out every single day in a hundred forgotten corners of the world where the TV cameras never came close to telling the story. CIA funded death squads quietly filled up mass graves in Nicaragua whilst Soviet Hind helicopters turned Afghan villages into rubble whilst South African punishment battalions deployed medieval levels of cruelty in Angola.

I guess that's probably enough of 'the war on the poor'/Cold War compare and contrast. Time to run through a couple of examples of how the war on the poor is being waged far from the public view. One is tiny, one is massive and both come from the same nasty stable.

The tiny one first.

I heard about this from one of our long term food parcel guys. No real names. I will call him Boris for obvious reasons. When Boris first came in a few years ago, the idea of him becoming a regular would have seemed laughable. He was about fifty and he had always worked. He had his shit together and getting a job was only a matter of time. So he filled out his job applications and he knocked doors. No big deal. He had plenty of experience of getting a job. However, he didn't fill in enough application forms to keep the Job Centre happy so they nailed him with a one month sanction. No big deal. He was perfectly confident that he would find a job which would render the sanction null and void.

He didn't find a job. Instead he kept on getting sanction after sanction. And it started to take a toll on him. He was spending too much time on his own in an unheated flat with no power. Cold and dark, dark and cold. Every day became a story of killing time through empty hours. Finding a bit of warmth care of hot food providers. And of course he started to keep the kind of company he would never normally have kept. Slowly but slowly the grinding misery of his new life broke him down. Piece by piece. He stopped shaving and his clothes started to look like a tramp's clothes. He drifted over an invisible line and joined the ranks of the unemployable. And the sanctions kept on coming as surely as cold, dark night followed cold, dark day.

I remember chatting with Boris one day at the counter. By now the bones of his skull were in danger of bursting through his grey skin. If Speilberg were ever to come to Dumfries to cast for Schindler's List Two, my man would be hired on just like that. He shook his head in wonder at the sheer extent to which his life had become so utterly crap. He told me how he would kill all of those empty hours. He would walk and walk through the streets of the town centre collecting docked fags from the ashtrays on the top of the council's bins. Once he had a carrier bag filled up, he would take them home and gather in all the tobacco. And then he would smoke it. He said he would never in a million years have believed he would ever become a guy who would spend his days collecting dockers. But that is what he had become. A guy who spent his days collecting dockers. In a carrier bag.

He was in last week. He doesn't have the energy any more to get angry about things. He is too broken up to get angry. He is a poster boy for utter resignation. He told me that the council had buggered up his quest for dockers. He told me that council guys had been instructed to go around all the bins in the town centre to pour water on the docked fags.

This seemed to me to be a whole new level of gratuitous nastiness. Fair enough, it isn't exactly a good look for a town to have lads like Boris haunting the high street in the pursuit of dockers. But come on, it isn't like it will put off tourists or inward investment or recruiting doctors for the hospital. Instead it seemed as fine an example of kicking a man down as I had ever seen. So I called up the leader of the SNP group. I mean, bloody hell Andy. Surely this is out of order? Don't you think? There aren't necessarily all that many councilors you can call up with this kind of complaint, but Andy is one of them. He is one of the good guys. He got it. But he boxed clever and fired off an angry e mail to the relevant department asking if they really thought this was a good use of scarce human resources in this era of austerity? They replied pretty sharpish. Not us, Guv. Nobody here has issued any such instruction. Honest. They were no doubt telling the truth. Instead a lone wolf council employee had taken it upon themselves to use their authority to indulge themselves in the pleasure of kicking downed men.

How charming.

Once upon a time the front page headlines of 'Der Sturmer' made it seem to the Brownshirt bully boys that it was OK to kick old Jews on the pavement. No doubt the poor hating tabloids of today had the very same effect on the guy to decided it was perfectly OK to pour water on ashtrays full of dockers.

And now the big thing.

It might be wicked and calculating. Or maybe it is just a horrible accident. The result is the same either way. The result is the mass screwing over of the poor.

It goes something like this.

We demand our politicians defend our NHS. But our politicians daren't ask us to pay more tax to make such a thing realistically possible. Instead they try to convince us they are miracle men who can conjure up billions of pounds worth of magic money to keep the show on the road. They can't of course. They know it and if we ever choose to be honest with ourselves, we probably know it as well. They have learned the hard way that trying to close a hospital is the quickest way to render yourself unelectable, even if every medical professional agrees that closing the hospital is the best thing to do. So instead they look for ways to make the required cuts far from the public view.

Last week some highly reputable outfit shone a merciless light on some of this. And it is nasty. Really nasty. So your hip is killing you . You go to your GP and tell him your hip is killing you. He sends you for an X Ray which reveals your hip is all shot to hell. He tells you you need a new one. So he sends you along to the hospital to meet with the consultant who has the job of installing the new hip. All very straight forward and in an NHS free at the point of use, this is available to each and every one of us who is deemed to be a bone fide citizen.

Well it was. Not any more. Well. Not in England at least. For instead of meeting with a consultant you now get to meet with a beaurocrat who doesn't talk about how much your hip is hurting. Instead they get you one the scales and work out just how fat you are. And if you are deemed to be too fat, they tell you to bugger off and lose some weight before coming back. The report was all about how angry the consultants are about this. They seem to think they are the real experts who should be making the decisions about who gets a new hip and who doesn't. They are seriously pissed off that the beaurocrats have muscled in on their turf. It's hard to blame them for being angry.

Of course this kind of thing is pretty inevitable when you think about it. Politicians promise to maintain the NHS. Politicians promise not to cut the NHS. Politicians promise not to raise taxes. More people use the NHS. The NHS creaks at the seams. Politicians haven't the first clue what to do about it. Politicians hire Fancy Dan high fliers from the private sector and pay them six figure salaries to work a miracle. Politicians offer the Fancy Dan high fliers massive bonuses if they can find new ways of cutting NHS costs without the public noticing. The Fancy Dan high fliers come up with a cunning plan. We can stop fat people from getting expensive treatment. And the really good news here is that 63% of the population is deemed to be overweight or obese. So we can still bang on about how our NHS is free at the point of use for everyone. We just don't bang on about the fact that we have added an extra line to that 1947 statement. You know. The bit that says free at the point of use for everyone who isn't fat.

Pretty neat, right? The Fancy Dan high fliers cash their fat bonus cheques and the politicians get to keep on spouting their nonsense and nobody is any the wiser.

But wait one minute. Surely this is a war on fat people, not a war on the poor. Well once upon a time I guess it would have been. Back in the days of cotton mills and children being boosted up chimneys, poor people tended to be skinny people. Not any more. Now studies in obesity show the opposite. In the leafy suburbs where people own second homes and send their kids to private school, Waitrose is the shop of choice and people have the wherewithal to fill their trolleys with all the healthy stuff. In the schemes on the other side of the tracks, Farmfoods rules supreme. For a pound you can buy a whole box of things that have the look of sausages but in fact are little more than tubes filled with reclaimed fat, sugar and a bunch of weird and wonderful flavourings.

Check out any map of obesity and it looks a lot like the map of life expectancy. If you live in Kensigton you can expect to live many years longer than if you live in Easterhouse. Similarly if you live in Kensington and go to the gym and shop in Waitrose, statistically you are all but certain to be many pounds lighter that you will be if you live in Easterhouse and shop in Farmfoods. The wheel has come full circle since the days of Dickens when Mr Bumble was fat and Oliver was skin and bone. Now the rich tend to be trim whilst the poor tend to be obese. And this of course makes the cunning NHS plan all the more cunning. You save cash by finding a way to exclude fat poorer people from getting treatment and thereby ensuring slim rich people get seen quickly even though the budget has been cut. Especially older richer people.

And whose votes do politicians really covet? The older richer people who vote in their droves. And whose votes are the politicians really not all that bothered about? All those obese poorer people who don't tend to bother much with the polling booths.

Unlike the decision to pour water on dockers in Dumfries council bins, this is not the action of a poor hating lone wolf. This one has to come right from the top. But the effect is much the same.