"I want to travel to england to claim political asylum"

No pictures or links this time, but if anyone finds (or can create !!) youtube footage of tonight's BBC News At Ten and cares to pass me the link in a comment, I'd be obliged.

by johnofgwent

A man stands in clothes that don't need to shout "down and out" because the smell tells you that from a hundred paces. He stands before a few metal poles roughly fashioned into a shape across which some ragged torn plastic sheeting dangles pathetically as if mocking the winter breeze in which it flutters.

The cameraman filming, and the journalist talking to, this man barely hide their distaste and the wrinkling of noses is evident. I, who have seen, and smelled, the down and out under railway arches in what was mockingly called Cardiff Bay (as if it were somewhere worth taking a beach holiday) and in The Hayes years before that, know exactly what they are wrinkling their noses against.

Or so I thought.

But then the camera pans back to show the acres of sodden mud, into which a disease-breeding mixture of refuse, rubbish, detritus and stinking untreated sewage has been generously mixed, and now I, a man who has witnessed first hand the stench of suppurating infected intestines going under the knife, I instinctively start breathing through my mouth so as not to gag.

And I am watching this on the telly.

It could have been any refuge camp anywhere. Gaza. Any of the countries bordering Rwanda at the height of the Tutse-Hutu killings. An ethiopian desert camp into which the victims of a "famine of biblical proportions" came to sit and wait for death. Or a refugee camp for the desperate fleeing the "ethnic cleansing" in what was Tito's Yugoslavia. It is a scene reminiscent of the low lying scuba-diving tourist paradise islands of the pacific AFTER the tsunami hit and wiped out half the population, carrying the dead out to sea to bloat and return on the tide.

Yes it could have been any of those places.

But it was not.

It was Calais pictured on the BBC Ten O Clock news tonight.

A muddy, stinking, sewage ridden, disease filled couple of hectares where dozens, no hundreds of men have gathered to wait their chance to ambush a lorry and try to get a free ride into Britain.

The cameraman drives round the roads where this goes on and is threatened by baseball bat wielding thugs who make a living from the fee (how the hell do their customers pay, I wonder) they charge to show these miserable wretches where to stand in order to break into a lorry and claim their ride to a new world.

And the cameraman and journalist "interview" one of these people, who smiles for the camera and says "I want to go to England To Claim Political Asylum"

He stands in a sea of stinking mud in a country that over fifty tears ago was one of the original six signatories to the treaty that set those six countries firmly on the road to "ever closer political union".

A country that did away with its aristocrats and royalty in favour of "Liberte, Egalite Et Fraternite"

A country that has willingly signed up to far more "workers rights" laws than we ever will. A country whose pension rights are more generous than ours. A country that wants "back in" to NATO.

And a country where the "gallic shrug" means yet another strike or civil disturbance is afoot and will stay afoot untilt the government cave in.

But more than anything else France is a signatory to the UN resolutions establishing the UNHCR and recognises and defends the right of the genuine refugee to seek asylum free from persecution for political, religious or cultural beliefs which they face in their home lands.

And do not forget that France is a country that has given protection to both the Shah of Iran's Prime Minister Baktiar AND the Ayatollah who replaced him when the shah fled and left his fiefdom to the oncoming storm of the islamic revolution.

So why the Four-X does this guy hold such strength in his voice and pleasure in his eyes when he reveals hios intent to continue to HIDE IN TRUCKS until he successfully remains in one long enough to COME TO ENGLAND TO CLAIM POLITICAL ASYLUM.

WHY DOES HE NOT CLAIM POLITICAL ASYLUM IN THE FREE COUNTRY OF THE WEST IN WHICH HE NOW STANDS.

After all, given that where he is from is a former french colony, he probably speaks their language better than he speaks ours.