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There
are been a whole series of documentaries about Gypsies on TV recently, like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which are humourous
profiles of native British travelling communities. They’re quite funny, sometimes
educational and fairly harmless; I rather enjoyed them. At first I thought Gypsies on Benefits and Proud was one of
these; I should have guessed better from just the second part of the title. Has
my mind already blanked out my previous vitriolic bombardment of television
producers? See here for important
background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/on-benefits-and-proud.html.
This programme is not about native Gypsies. Gypsy
is actually a collective term in English for a whole series of different insular
and nomadic cultures that exist in much of the world. The Gypsies under
discussion here are ones from Eastern Europe where they are known as Roma and they constitute a
disproportionate percentage of recent immigration into the United Kingdom. The
programme follows the lives of several families and individuals who travel from
their native countries to a new life, courtesy of the British taxpayer. In the
opening scene the theme of the programme is set out in the statement from one
of the Roma: “It’s very easy to get benefits in Britain… Thank you very much,
England!” and another talking about her family of twenty-two people.
One
of the new immigrants is Ion Lazar, a man with a wife and many children currently living
in poverty in Romania, but he has a dream! He wants to spend a year or two in
the UK and make £40,000 on benefits to give himself a better life back home. Another
star of the show is Katerina Cisarova, a Slovakian Gypsy who is strangely similar in
character to the indigenous matriarchs of On
Benefits and Proud linked above. She has an unemployed husband called Peter
who has an accent like a James Bond villain. I suspect that he can speak better
English than he does in the show and has been coached to exaggerate his foreign
twang. They have eleven children and eleven grandchildren, all living in a row
of houses in Rotherham, “all paid for by the welfare state!” the narrator dutifully
points out; just the four who live with their parents receives £24,000 a year
in benefits. The others get a lot more. The camera pans round their lounge,
taking in young mothers sharing packets of cigarettes, guzzling bottles of soft
drinks and huge plates of food. Peter struts around talking about how “England
very goot. Give me everytheenk! Benefeets, school, doctorrrr. I not go home,
neverrrrrrr.” A third member of the cast is Viorel, a young man from Romania. However
this welfare king was knocked off his throne at the age of seven when he was
run over by a train and lost both his legs; since then he travels around by
sitting on a skateboard and propelling himself along with his hands. He left
his wife to come to the UK. He sometimes puts his disability to good use by
getting work as a part-time actor for particular roles in the movies, but he
can also earn £200 a day busking with his accordion… and claiming £750 a month
in benefits of course. He reckons that this is not enough and he needs more,
even though he has been given quite a large house in Nottingham, and his parents
and nephew have been brought over from Romania specially to act as his carers. The
amount of money they cost the nation is carefully included in the introduction
of all the characters in the programme. Katerina speaks no English, but she
doesn’t really need to because the council have employed a Roma language
interpreter especially for her and she loses her temper at one point when her
Job Seekers Allowance is sanctioned; her interpreter makes a few phone calls
and gets it restored plus £500 of back-pay. All this is done at a community
centre where the signs are in over a dozen different languages. She’s relieved
because all her grandchildren are asking for luxury items and she wants to buy
them. Ion travels all the way to Britain overland on a coach and claims child
benefit for his children, even though they’re back home in Romania and he quite
openly states that he intends to steal food and money as well as earn it. “If I
am working alone in a house I will take money if it’s left there.” He’s already
been deported once for working without a permit, but he just came straight
back. He’s today trading scrap metal which he picks up wherever he can find it,
whether legally or not. The council moves Peter and Katerina into a much bigger
and more expensive house, but there the lino is cracked and it needs a new
boiler so they agree to the improvements. A few hundred yards away an entire
house has been given to their daughter Petra and her two year old son, “the
next generation of immigrants living off the state!” Petra says: “I get tax credit,
housing benefit and all. I never go home to Slovakia; living in the UK is very
good.”
The purpose of Gypsies on Benefits and Proud is to make
the viewer’s blood boil. Its rhetoric is almost as palpable as that in On Benefits and Proud. As with the
former, its theme is simple, monolithic and aimed to appeal to any viewer, no
matter what their level of intelligence or education. On Benefits portrayed unemployed people as the public enemy on
which to blame our country’s economic woes; Gypsies
on does exactly the same with immigrants. This is something I’ve discussed
many times, how anti-immigration hysteria is being deliberately provoked in
order to justify all kinds of fundamental changes to society that would
otherwise be very unwelcome and which the people would never accept. The only
feature of the programme that surprised me was that none of the characters were
Muslims. A clue to all this is even given to us in the programme itself, when
Ion and his cronies go and register at their local GP surgery. The receptionist
demands identity checks on all of them; and this is something the UK Government
is currently trying to bring into the NHS, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/health-tourism-crackdown.html.
The ultimate goal is for there to be an electronic identity and entitlement
system which everybody will have to be included on in order to function in any
way within society, no matter whether you’re foreign or native. I can see a
time when there will be no passports, no cash, no forms to fill out, and no
licenses of any kind; instead we will all carry a single biometric tag
connected to a national or international database that does all those jobs.
Maybe it will be inserted directly into our body. This will give the
authorities complete control over our entire lives; this is their objective…
all they need is a reason to do it which the people will support. I wonder if Channel
5 are planning on making a programme called Bankers
on Benefits and Proud; after all the bailout of 2008 cost the exchequer the
equivalent of supporting every unemployed person and immigrant in Britain,
based on the current rates, for almost a century. Somehow I doubt it. The good
news is that many people are seeing through the flannel, based on some of the
comments underneath on the video page. I know not everybody who watched Gypsies on will be reading this review,
but if they are I’d like them to rein in their rage and look at the situation
more rationally. I agree that mass-immigration is causing problems in all Western
nations, but the reaction of “Send the bastards all back where they came from!”
is a controlled response. This is how the governments want us to react. As I’ve said before, there is no frying pan so
bad it warrants us jumping into a fire to escape from it. The genuine solution
to mass-immigration has to address the cause. To be fair, Gypsies on does that, inadvertently I’m sure, while all the news
coverage about this subject doesn’t. It is a very obvious question: Why do so
many people want to come to Britain in the first place? And the answer is very
simple: Life in this country is so much better than in many other parts of the
world. Immigrants are not "lazy scroungers!", they are ordinary
people just like you and me who are doing exactly what we would do if we were
in their shoes. Most immigrants are not coming from wealthy Western nations; they
are coming from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and other regions hit
by extreme poverty, famine and war. In my view, the answer therefore is to
improve the quality of life in those regions so that people won't want to leave
their homelands; after all, who's going to come to England for the weather? Let
nobody kid you into thinking that it’s not possible; it's actually very easy:
we can start by releasing Third World countries from their economic bondage
through the cancellation of debt and land occupation. End all the manipulated
wars over the resources in these regions. That alone would probably do the
trick, before we even begin delving into the more outlandish elements like UFO
Disclosure, the declassification of Free Energy and natural farming methods
like ORMUS and Terra Preta. See here for
more details: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/immigration-and-new-iron-curtain.html.
All in all I give Gypsies on Benefits and
Proud minus 5 stars. Utterly abysmal television. It’s almost as bad as On Benefits and Proud. I also suspect
that, like the former, it’s been carefully edited to make a false point, and
that the cast are exceptions rather than the norm. I recently read John Pilger’s
book Heroes, which has a chapter
about Pakistani immigrants in the early 1980’s and the decrepit penniless
squalor they had to live in. I also live with three Sudanese men and have
learnt a lot about the difficulties they face. Don’t believe the hype, guys. It’s
time to get wise.
5 comments:
I have read your blog and hear what you are saying. I am an intelligent woman who has worked in the sphere of social housing for over 20 years. I understand the power of TV and the press but I do not believe the money I pay in tax should be spent supporting people who admit on camera to stealing and have the attitude that they are coming to this country just for what they can get for free - and openly brag about it, intimating the folly of the country that allows them to do this.
You said in your blog, "they are ordinary people just like you and me who are doing exactly what we would do if we were in their shoes". Would you steal food and bicycles and openly admit to it with no shame whatsoever?
I really think the shame goes to channel 5 for orchestrating this story, which is obviously fake.. even if true , all they are doing is spending their benefit money back in england.... so its not living the country and indeed making Britain work...
But pretending this is the norm is so disappointing...Most immigrants want to have a good life and be part of society. ..not abuse it...I think it is shame on channel 5...
Anyway .... they not taking money from British people as they are last on the list much further down than British family. ..so again, shame on channel 5 making us believe that is the norm. ..its not....
So they should be and a lot further down on the list than a white English family. Our father's, Grandfather's and great Grandfather's fought wars in order to make this country what it is and give us our benefits system to help OUR children not give people who couldn't give a damn about our history money so they can breed and doss and send our money back home!!!
Before taking metal to the scrap yard for recycling, you must separate the metal by type. In order to collect the most value for your scrap metal, you should be familiar with the types of scrap metal and how much they're worth.
Saving Metals
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