I’ll let you be in my ‘Johnny Foreigner’ dream, if I can be in yours…

In a very small way we have just tasted what it is like to face racism.

Don’t get me wrong, we haven’t had to cross from one land to another in a leaky plastic boat or feel our lives sweating out in the back of a rocking roasting truck.

No.

And we don’t have to live on minimum wage, ten-to-a-room, or in mildewed old caravans and spend the day picking vegetables and fruit in a muddy Middle England field.

Nor have we ever been piled one on top of the other in city ghettos.

But, that’s what we make our European neighbours do when they come looking for a new life in good old blustery Blighty!

No. We are actually the privileged … faux gypsies in a black Bentley look-alike. We have air-conditioning and cool bags, money, sat navs, jet-pack diesel and mobile phones.

We are the English lockedowners abroad, burping cheap lager, slugging purple and yellow shots and turned grey and wispy by cheap fags.

Out here Andrea and I seem to be a reminder of the old contemptibles who rode rough-shod over Europe a century ago…

We are the rich and rip-off-able, Johnny Foreigners in foreign lands, pasty white targets in so many European nations … Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and even that covid-ridden holiday haven of Croatia.

And as Brexit cuts like a limping old warship across the water where we fought our friends for all those little fishes, we are seen as the Don Quixote traitors tilting at the whirling cogs of the EU and its dictatorial legislation, tariffs and bullying.

Yes, strange things are happening in Europe …

The land of open borders and Schengen ambitions is the place where so many are pocketing the union coin for a better life while we build a wall between us and them, just like Trump.

But on the rolling roads from borderless country to borderless country we two were haunted by police in blacked-out BMWs and boy racers in souped up Skoda Octavias.

And when we got our speeding fine almost doubled, it was because we were in our black Bentley look-alike with English number plates. The four armed-to-the teeth police it took to detain us in a prison of red and white bollards in the fast lane licked their lips at the smell of our cash.

Local cars flashed by at twice the speed we were apparently doing.

But the speed of a corrupt copper’s mind knows no limit eh?

At the Slovenia border, we were made to get out of our car and empty its boot by a pinch-faced sneering spinster border guard with a gun, to show what contraband we were delivering into her country.

Her peevish arrogant gun-totting demands were orchestrated by the full-blown horn section of all the central Europeans who were being stopped from going around their daily business by this inquisitive stick insect in a bullet-proof vest.

But they didn’t have the horn for her, nooo – the cacophony was aimed directly at me, my wife and my big black limo.

But our world almost fell apart when she found two bars of cannabis chocolate and a bag of non-THC cannabis cookies … the gun itched the sun-parched spider of her hand as she pointed like a sniggering velociraptor at them.

She relented when we showed her the receipt from the official toll-road station souvenir shop in her own country.

So, we were on our way to the sneers and gestures of the locals SHE had held up in the blistering sun.

And why, when we crossed the border in to Croatia, a land desperate to drops its metaphorical skirts and allow the rest of Europe in to its glorious undulating hills and thighs and neatly-trimmed forests and bushes, were we followed by ‘secret police’ in an unmarked van as we went for a lovely day at the seaside?

And why did the taxi driver who took us to dinner confide on the way back home that there were two prices for a trip, a price for locals and a price for British tourists?

But are we being treated any better or worse than we Brits treat the Slovaks, the Poles, the Romanians or the Croats who still come across to the UK looking for a better life?

I think not!

And just maybe we created this atmosphere ourselves … and perhaps we deserve it.

There is a growing climate of anti-tourist sentiment brewing on the continent and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office recently released a list of countries where Britons have been the victims of serious crime.

Yet, there are roughly 2.2 million Eastern European nationals living in the UK, but nobody tells the Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian nationals where they could be in danger.

There were 43,516 knife crime offences in the UK early in 2019, and of course, these crimes were committed, mainly, by our own dispossessed youth, those trapped in tower-blocks that stand sentinel over no-go areas in ALL of our cities.

But in fact all we Johnny foreigners around Europe want to do is to share what we’ve got, our history, our beauty, our sun our rain our languages, our creativity. We want to become each other – they want the money we can supply for a job well done and we can buy the homes they have abandoned and restore them to their former glory.

“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours’.

There are approximately 285 thousand British citizens living in Spain, with a further 145 thousand in France and almost 93 thousand in Germany.

But we like modern myths… surveys show Britons think around a quarter of our population are immigrants, when it’s half that, at around 13 per cent.

But it’s not just how many, its who these foreigners are that people get wrong.

When asked people said that immigrants are refugees and asylum seekers yet these are in truth the smallest category of immigrants.

Large proportions think too that immigration increases crime levels, reduces the quality of the NHS and increases unemployment among skilled workers. This just isn’t true.

The truth is that all we want to do, even if we don’t see it yet, is share our lives, share our cultures, our boots and shoes, walk a mile in each others flip-flops, be in each others countries, be friends and distant neighbours …

#borders #racism #europe #police