After the psychiatrist’s chair

Kill or cure remedy for Craig’s phobia about The Big Questions.

The prescription is a half hour dose of Channel Five.. you know, the weird channel that never feels quite right. In particular, the debate on immigration, because it made Nicky Campbell look like a colossus, which might cure your TBQ nightmares, and also, by the process of diverting you from one pain by giving you another. For example, distracting you from, say toothache, by pushing you into a bush of thorns.

“The Big British Immigration Row” 

Please catch it if you like a nice shambles. It was awful but I laiked it as Dick Emery would say.

Anne Diamond and Nick Ferrari were the “compères” but they were so incompetent at compèring that it was obvious that casting them was a ploy designed to bring about a dramatic melt-down, live on National Humiliationvision. The sadistic producer was surely overjoyed that so many  ‘now’ people had come along for a barney. Everyone was in the audience, or on the panel, and / or both.

A certain amount of pre-production preparation had been done. A few tricksy snippets of film had been cobbled together and transplanted into the debate at various inconvenient moments. Pleading the case for the rainbow nation, vox-pops of cuddly immigrants were inserted, with the subtlety of a clog, alongside disparaging innuendos about monocultural societies.  

A pub landlord from Margate was booed for saying that Margate has been ruined by immigration. Vanessa Feltz put on her “their views, not mine” voice to announce that many people had phoned in to her programme to say that they were troubled by immigration, and, with shining-eyes, rapturously recounted a multicultural experience of the NHS. However it had little to do with the deliberate social engineering that people are phoning you about, Vanessa, because your shared happy outcome, (baby-maternity ward) albeit a multicultural one, was the antithesis of the monocultural ghettos people are phoning you to complain about. You know, pockets of isolated, hostile, demanding immigrants who loathe the host society even more than they loathe slightly different sects of their own communities, or the other way round or both. 

Anne Diamond had an incongruous, impish smirk on her face, the grin of desperation, which vanished the instant someone looked like saying something racist, and came back again the instant the danger was over.  She failed to assert any authority over Mohammad Shafiq and Lee Jasper, whose shouting had risen to a deafening cacophony; no matter how hard she shrieked nor how high the pitch she merely added more decibels to the racket.   “Sorry Anne” said Nick, intervening with faux chivalry, before also being drowned out till nothing made any sense at all.  

Nicky Campbell is a masterful compère. He’s suave and incisive. Are you feeling better yet?

What Nancy De Lolly-Oh! was doing there was a mystery. She’s a lawyer? “Could you imagine Britain withou’me?”   

Yes.

Mohammad Shafiq and Lee Jasper were satisfactorily belligerent, but the star attraction was Katie Hopkins whose combustive potential had been heavily trailed in advance, and she was a great catalyst. Tenacious, persistent and glamourous, but it was a shame that, having uttered “people have had enough” for the umpteenth time, she ran out of ideas. People had had enough of her saying “people have had enough”. 

However she did manage to draw attention to some of the things people had had enough of, namely not being able to get their children into schools, not being able to get an appointment with the GP for three weeks and having an interminable wait to see a doctor at a hospital. 

It was exasperating to watch her ploughing the same old furrowed, conspicuously non-racist ground to justify all negative talk about mass immigration in view of the specter of Islam that was hanging over the proceedings all the while, like a black cloud/shroud.

Suddenly they introduced the phenomenon of the  “no-go area” and things got slightly more interesting. They showed a clip of  Anjem Choudary the pantomime Islamist, whereupon Mo Shafiq, and Mo Ansar who had been patiently squatting in the audience with his stripy scarf and diaphanous black dress, began frantically disowning Choudary and saying he wasn’t representative of the Muslims.

It ended inconclusively, having failed to do anything more than make the Big Questions look like a civilised debate. 

So there. Are you cured?

I didn’t recount all this just for Craig’s well being. It was in response to the headlines about the “withheld” statistics about the effect of mass immigration upon British Jobs for British people. 

You know what? I don’t care so much about foreign daffodil pickers undermining our indigenous ones. Sorry, but what I do care about has nothing to do with EU immigration or migration or whatever the polite euphemism is.

My concerns are loosely in synch with Pat Condell’s. They’re very specific. I’m concerned with the powers-that-be, (media/ politicians) pandering  to the whims and fancies of antisemitic immigrants from the Islamic third world. So there Katy Hopkins, never mind keeping your kids away from Chardonnay and Jayden, I’d advise you to ignore that and stay away from the ones with spiky names with lots of zs and qs that look, on the page, like barbed wire. You know, the ones in the captions on those child-grooming lists.

  

That’ll wipe the smile off Anne Diamond.