A long time ago, like two years, we wrote a short and supposedly funny piece about the UK bringing out a "Not welcome sign" in the context of a campaign aimed at making the Isles less appealing to the great unwashed.
As in, gosh, it rains a lot, and no, money does not grow on trees here - although spaghetti does, as a BBC short film of 1 April some 50 odd years ago clearly proves.
In that old post we claimed that the UK was unable to overcome the intrinsic attractiveness of British humor and thus could not credibly appear nasty enough to deter the masses of the great unwashed.
Sadly, we must admit we got it all wrong.
A piece in the Guardian about "Marauding" migrants threatening the British standard of living proves just how wrong we were.
The British conservatives are showing us that they can be as nasty as continental xenophobes. That's not all bad, mind you, because it shows they are humans with the same concerns and shortcomings as everybody else, including the blogster.
The Tories seem to know that some 5000 migrants "ante Chunnel" in France are not a big enough number, so they look at the alleged number of candidate migrants in Africa to get to the scary level of "millions".
The number of "migrants" coming to Europe in 2015 has set the more welcoming countries on target for new record influx. In 2014, Germany surpassed its old high from 1995 by counting over 200 000 "migrants", and in the first six months of 2015, it has already seen 179 000. Other countries have smaller absolute numbers that are even higher if you put them in relation to the population size.
While "only" about half come from war torn regions, the K-Landnews won't resist the temptation to remind the Tories that much of the current violence has at least partial roots in ye olde Empire's fucked up drawing of borders.*
Some of the billions of Euros countries like Germany pay for "migrants" are a neatly externalized deferred cost of the Empire. Maybe you should say thank you, even if you say it in the same manner airlines traditionally say thank you for not smoking.
The Germans, for their part, are busy trying to tell their xenophobes to not torch current or planned migrant residences - without, of course, calling such firebombing terrorism - and spend time complaining about the "unfair" distribution of migrants across Europe.
Only fringe voices, like some scientists, "Gutmenschen" or loonies like the K-Landnews never tire to claim that national borders should be open for people to move back and forth at will. Read up the arguments in favor of such policy by searching the web.
The Tories love their money shot, so they go for the "threaten our living standards", coyly leaving out that "our" does not include the Tory leadership or the monied classes. This follows in the tradition of great leaders, like Mr. Churchill's proclamation "We'll fight them on the beaches..." etc., which really meant "you'll fight them while we enjoy the open spaces of Canada".
German leadership prefers to speak of "social stresses" because they don't dare mention that the new social order in the country is such that economic migrants enjoy pretty much the same government benefits as a young worker who is laid off after less than a year in his first job and, as a consequence, gets no unemployment benefits and lands in the means-tested bucket right out of the gate.
Before we go, chapeau to the Tories for the image of marauding migrants.
The K-Landnews, themselves being what you call expats, would love to see the new label used for "expats" too.
After all, we have "migrated", and we may on occasion - after a weekend pub crawl gone right - actually "maraud".
* How much exactly is a matter of interpretation because of the multitude of factors that make global interactions so complex. Germany, for example, uses lots of imported resources, and the consequences of their extraction and compensation will have some influence, too.
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