Bloody Immigrants!

It's those bloody immigrants again!  Coming here, taking our jobs, taking our houses, probably taking our women and eating our dogs.  It's about time the government got tough on them!  We can all heave a sigh of relief now that 'Call me Dave' Cameron is cracking down and saying that they can't get on housing lists or claim benefits until they've been resident in an area for at least three years, agree to skin whitening treatment and learn to speak 175 selected deferential English phrases in received pronunciation.  That'll show 'em!  Yes indeed, we're back in that tabloid fantasy land that politicians retreat to when they're desperate to shore up their poll ratings and their policies are in tatters.  It is the place where all of our ills are the fault of some minority group they think they can safely scapegoat.  Never mind the facts, just find someone to blame.  Never mind the consequences, just find some group to demonise. 

Immigrants, especially non-white immigrants, are always a good target - they are sufficiently 'different' to us, both culturally and visually, that they can be easily identified.  Everybody knows who the government means when it says 'immigrants'.  That said, credit where credit is due, this shambolic government has tried a few other groups to scapegoat for its own ineptitude, most notably the disabled.  Remember when they were blaming them for the recession?  The bastards were all claiming too many disability benefits, which were costing good honest hard working taxpayers billions, apparently.  You could see the logic - the disabled are generally pretty easy to identify, (the wheelchairs, white sticks, guide dogs and such are a dead giveaway) - and they aren't an ethnic minority, so you can't be accused of racism by picking on them.  The trouble is that they are a pretty powerful lobby group and most people are naturally sympathetic to them - their disabilities aren't they're fault.  No matter how they dress it up, there's no way the government could ever convince the wider public that disability is a lifestyle choice. 

Unlike poverty, of course.  The poor were the government's next scapegoats, as witnessed by all that 'workers vs shirkers' nonsense.  Incredibly, this seems to have some traction with some of the public who, despite the fact that we are in the middle of a massive economic downturn, seem to believe that the unemployed are idle bastards, jobless by choice.  The fact that huge numbers of them have been made redundant and the lack of economic growth, (thanks, largely, to the government's economic policy), means that there are no new jobs, doesn't come into it, apparently.  Nevertheless, scapegoating the poor was never going to work in the long term - not only are they too much like 'us', but most of us are all too aware that, through no fault of our own, we could easily join them.  So they had no choice but to come back to those bloody immigrants as public enemy number one!  The bastards!