Controversial right-wing TV ‘news’ channel Bulldog News has aired what it claims is a ‘sensational expose’ of the ‘life of luxury’ enjoyed by illegal immigrants to the UK. The undercover report was made independently by thirty eight year old Ramsgate resident Gerry Diklo, self-styled ‘citizen journalist’ and a fully paid up member of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, using hidden cameras. “I spent six months, blacked up, pretending to be an illegal immigrant, in order to experience first hand how these so called ‘asylum seekers’ are treated with kid gloves by the authorities,” he claims. “It was a terrifying experience, as I was in constant danger of being exposed – which could have had deadly consequences!” Diklo drew his inspiration from the stunts pulled by tabloids in the seventies, when they’d have one of their reporters black up to ‘experience a day in the life of a black person in order to encounter, first hand, allegations of racism and discrimination. “Obviously, what they found, as I recall it, was that everybody was scrupulously nice and accommodating to non-whites, regardless of their inherent criminality and lack of civilised values, thanks to the propaganda propagated by leftists,” he says. “At least, that’s what I’ve been told happened. So, I decided that, as a citizen journalist, I should go to Calais, black up and pretend to be a Somali migrant trying to cross the Channel and enter the UK illegally!”

From the outset, Diklo’s project proved perilous. “The trouble was that I didn’t speak the darkies’ lingo – I had to improvise by talking gibberish which sounded about right,” he explained in the Bulldog News report. “But eventually I managed to get a place on one of those boats. Mainly by handing over huge wads of cash to some decidedly shady cut-throats who ran the racket.” The Channel crossing proved extremely difficult, with a dinghy packed with more than a hundred men, women and children, heavy seas and a near-miss with a car ferry. “Everybody was sick as a dog – I was worried that the sea water that kept sweeping over the boat might wash the boot polish off of my face and expose me,” he recalled. “But somehow it stayed on – a bit smeared, but I could still pass for one of them. Still, it was a bloody relief when we finally made landfall on a beach near Folkestone.” Diklo’s relief was short-lived as he and the other occupants of the dinghy found themselves under attack from a gang of right-wing anti-immigration protestors. “Don’t think the irony was wasted on me – it’s usually me throwing stones and abuse at bloody immigrants, trying to drive them back into the sea. Part of me wanted to cheer them on – but those stones they were throwing were bloody painful when they hit you – especially if they get you in the knackers,” he muses. “Luckily, though, this gang of people traffickers turned up, started giving the anti-immigration boys a good kicking and bundled all of us from the boat into the backs of a line of Transit vans waiting in the beach car park.”

Whilst the arrival of the people traffickers was fortuitous for Diklo, it also resulted in his plans being badly blown off course. “Obviously, I was banking on being arrested by Border Patrol or the cops and sent to one of those five star asylum centres to live at tax payers’ expense,” he says. “Instead, I found myself working as an undocumented illegal for a criminal gang.” Over the next few weeks Diklo found himself variously working in underground sweat shops producing knock off trainers, dodgy high street shops selling illegal vapes, cigarettes and pornography to underage kids, acting as a drugs courier and working in the unhygienic kitchen of a grimy back street takeaway. “We were moved from dingy damp ridden flat to louse-infested and unheated house to mould ridden bedsit,” he explains. “Twelve of us to a room, at least, not to mention twelve hour days, no hot running water and only basic cooking facilities. But on the plus side, we didn’t have to pay rent and – quite frankly – some of those places were nearly nowhere as bad as properties I’ve actually rented.” Despite the Hellish conditions he was forced to work and live in, Dklo still thinks that illegal immigrants have an enviable existence. “Is it any wonder that there are no jobs for British people any more? These bastards are doing them all and undercutting British workers by working for a pittance,” he declares. “But they don’t pay tax on any of it, so they’re still probably better off than most Brits! Believe me, I know lots of people who’d give their right arms to be able to work under the radar, with rent-free accommodation and tax free wages!”

Determined to keep to his original mission, Diklo finally managed to break free of the criminal gang controlling him and succeeded in being arrested and sent to an asylum centre. “I don’t what all those liberals are complaining about,” he told viewers of Bulldog News. “Sure, the place wasn’t as luxurious as I expected – there was no room service and I had to share a room with five other blokes – but it was a bloody palace compared to those flats and houses we’d lived in while working for that gang! I mean, I know we had to queue to use a single shower at the centre, but at least there was hot running water! It’s a bloody sight better than where I live normally!” The presence of hot running water also allowed Diklo to finally wash away his disguise and reveal himself to the guards at the facility as a white Englishman. “They still wouldn’t release me, though,” he laments. “They thought I might actually be an Albanian illegal – in the end I had to get a Reform councillor I know to come and vouch for me. The authorities are still threatening to prosecute me for fraud unless I pay them back for the ‘hospitality’ I enjoyed in the asylum centre.”

Not surprisingly, Diklo’s report has been met with incredulity in the legitimate media, with not only its authenticity, but also its assumptions being called into question. “It all seems to stem from a misrepresentation of those investigations of the seventies involving blacked up undercover reporters,” opines Peter Fruitost, senior lecturer in journalism at the Peckham School of Origami and a columnist for the Sunday Bystander. “At the time they actually thought that they were being incredibly progressive with these types of story: exposing racism, prejudice and inequality first hand.  Except that, arguably, they weren’t doing any of those things but rather exposing the reactions that a white man with boot polish on his face speaking in a fake West Indian accent might get from bemused citizens of all races. Which is the problem with Diklo’s report – did anyone ever really think that he was anything other than a right-wing bigot in black face?” For his part, Diklo’s biggest regret about his investigation was that he was never invited to join a ‘grooming gang’ and never got to rape a white woman. “I mean, I was pretty much promised that that was what all asylum seekers did upon arrival in the UK,” he complains. “But not once did I get a sniff of any kind of sexual assaults – just my luck to get caught up with a bunch of illegal immigrant homos, eh?”