'Immigrants Ate my Granny!'

Cannibalism - is that going to be next racist trope peddled by extreme right and their enablers in the British press?  Obviously, they might have missed the boat on that, as cannibalism was always - wrongly - associated with 'darkest' Africa.  Well into the seventies: I well recall seeing as a child all those cartoons in newspapers and comedy sketches on TV involving hapless white missionaries being put into a large cooking pot by grass skirt clad African tribesmen.  Nowadays, though, the racists preferred targets are Muslims and illegal immigrants from North Africa, Albania and the like.  Black African immigrants still feature in their hate, but seem to have fallen down the pecking order somewhat.  But there's nothing the bigots like better than a racial or cultural stereotype with which to beat their targets.  Hence, all Muslims are crazy fundamentalist terrorists, all South Asian men are misogynists who like to sexually exploit women, especially white women and Eastern Europeans are all gypsies, werewolves and vampires who kill and eat swans when they aren't raping British women.  I suppose that the closest we've come to the Black African cannibalism trope were all those stories a few years back about African witches and witch doctors supposedly working in the UK, murdering children in their rituals.  Not to forget that in the States we had Trump claiming that Somali immigrants were eating people's pets in Cleveland, or wherever.  

Nonetheless, it is surely only a matter of time before that cannibalism meme gets another airing in the UK, particularly with the apparent rise of our own homegrown crypto-fascists like Nigel Fartage and 'Tommy Robinson'.   I have no doubt that they'd like to go back to the 'good old days' I still recall from my seventies childhood, of portraying black people as being savages, who were arriving in the UK straight from the jungle, still wearing their 'war paint', bones through their noses and waving spears.  I'm really not exaggerating, here - TV shows, in particular, seemed to be full of such caricatures.  So, I'm sure that, given half a chance, the right-wing press wouldn't be able to resist running headlines along the line of  'Cannibal immigrants ate my granny!', accompanied by mocked up pictures of OAPs being put into huge cooking pots suspended over fires, while groups of wild eyed black men in loincloths dance around them.  Or, they might try being subtler, with stories about unsuspecting diners at a Somali restaurant finding a human ear, or finger, in their meal and realising that they're being served up human meat.  Maybe, with Reform UK beginning to lose ground in the polls, we'll start seeing their MPs coming out with such stories - 'Only last week one of my constituents told me of how a black African immigrant tried to take a bite out of them on the bus - why isn't Keir Starmer personally tracking down this cannibal and bodily throwing him back into the Channel?'.  Before you know it, all those stories of Asian grooming gangs will be replaced by stories of black African immigrants kidnapping white children, keeping them in cages and fattening them up for their cannibal feasts.  Remember, you read it here first!