Setting The Record Straight

Today I caught sight of this front page story in the the Daily Express. The print version has a subhead which adds "No wonder 2 million people have emigrated", making an explicit link between the number of immigrants and the number of those leaving the country. A powerful anti-immigrant story for the front page but please, in the words of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq (among whom I include myself): "Not in my name!"

The reasons that led me to retire to southern Spain are many and I won´t bore you with a list of them. But they were reasons that had to do with wanting to come to a village we have grown to love over the past twenty five years. Of course, there are things that we are glad to have left behind in England including: town and city centres turned into no-go areas at evenings and weekends by staggering, puking, fighting, foulmouthed teens and twenties (both sexes and predominantly white)whose main aim in life seems to be to be unable to stand upright by the end of the evening; inadequate, infrequent, unreliable, dirty, uncomfortable public transport extortionately priced; a health service that staggers from one fiasco to another; the strident, thinly disguised casual racism (led and encouraged by the tabloid press), that dismisses those who don´t talk in a similar fashion as being bound by the fashion for political correctness, together with a jingoistic conviction that Brussels, and indeed everywhere that is not "this once great country of ours", is to be feared, suspected of being out to get us, and to be avoided.

I´m an immigrant here in Spain, which with North West Africa and southern Eurpoe so close has massive immigration itself. I´m especially glad that the Spanish attitude is totally different to the British.