FraserWords

IN a small Dorset coastal town there’s a perfect symbol of the little England about which we’ve been talking.

It’s a tennis club festooned with ‘Private, Members Only’ signs. You can spot it easily: it’s the big site with, I think, five courts and a car park festooned with more ‘private: keep out’ signs and a padlock ready to lock up.

Of the five courts, just one was in use each time I walked past over a two-day weekend visit, joining the family on their holiday for a couple of days before returning home to work like a whipped cur from dawn to midnight while they frolic in the surf.

There they were inside their compound, each time, four geriatrics arthritically prodding a tennis ball limply over the net. You had to struggle for a vantage point to see, mind, because outside the tall wire that protects all tennis courts the charming members had erected a wooden fence so casual passers-by could not spy on their private pleasures. There were a few gaps.

Little England: “This tennis court is ours and even if none of us are using it you can’t have a look-in. Future Wimbledon champions? Sport awash with tens of millions of pounds? Don’t care. These courts are ours.”

How very perfectly English: a facility that could do good to residents and visitors with a simple online booking system involving little labour, a facility that could provide fun and fitness to all, cowering behind its locked fences and ‘keep out’ signs and padlocks and wire. How English.

I imagine the members will be all for the little-minded Cameron’s latest petty cruelty, to remove assistance from the families – that’s the children, the innocent children – of asylum seekers to try to dissuade people from coming here.

Perhaps we should make them work while we’re starving them? To ensure they don’t try to get out of it, we could keep them in barbed wire compounds, eh? Maybe we should give them something to wear so they’re conspicuous and can be easily spotted when necessary – suits with blue stripes, perhaps, or an easily visible brightly-coloured shape on their clothing?

Little England. Little minds. Jealously protecting their little country.

Doesn’t anybody have any sense? So Calais is a mess and a few thousand people are struggling to get into Britain. A few thousand out of an entire continent on the move shows you just how popular a destination we really are. And no wonder, for a country whose once-proud history of tolerance, inclusion and courage is besmirched daily by the little minds of David Cameron’s little England. No wonder, with our little towns decorated with ‘keep out’ ‘no turning’ signs. No wonder, with our pitiful sedatives of soccer crowds and Sky sports and Daily Mail and Britain’s Got Talent and EastEnders to stop any thought.

One port is a mess. One port. A continent is riven with want and need and hunger and desperation and little, little England focuses on one port. There are queues over a few thousand of the most wretched, miserable specimens of humanity you could imagine, and this little country hasn’t the wit to think about what’s going on. They’re coming over here to claim billions of pounds in benefits and use our health service and take our jobs and steal our grannies and rape our cars and that’s it. That’s all you need to know.

What a dumbed-down little place we are. Everybody’s happy to be told to be angry about pathetic migrants. Everybody’s happy to take to Twitter to condemn an idiot Minnesota prick for killing a lion, but will anybody take a stand over a disabled person refused help by Osborne’s welfare cuts, or a differently-coloured child refused food by Cameron’s casual racism? No, no, thinking about that sort of thing is far too difficult, isn’t it? Better by far to stand in pubs and exercise your easy right to casually condemn anybody not as strong or well-off as you. Better than thought.