Immigrants Ate My Granny!

Reform UK’s failure to condemn a candidate who claimed that cannibalism was rife amongst immigrants and asylum seekers has caused consternation in Britain, with widespread calls for the party to drop the individual concerned. “I’ve heard many stories on the doorstep about the severe problems caused by immigrants and asylum seekers while canvassing,” Diedre Fricklong, a candidate in the forthcoming local elections, told her local newspaper, the East Grinstead Sheep Worriers’ Weekly, in a recent interview. “But even I was shocked when one woman told me of what happened when her new neighbours – a family of asylum seekers from Somalia – invited her round ‘for a bite’ as they put it. Apparently, they quite brazenly had cages full of local white children they’d kidnapped lining the walls of the dining room, where they were being ‘fattened up’! Terrified by what she was seeing, the poor woman tried to escape, running through the kitchen, where, instead of an oven, there was a huge put bubbling away over a fire – she also glimpsed what she thought were skinned human bodies hung up in the larder!” With the back door locked, the woman allegedly found herself caught by her hosts. “Naturally, she though that she was going to go into that pot,” continued Fricklong. “But they couldn’t resist having a literal bite there and then, with one of them sinking his teeth into her thigh – she showed me the tooth marks! At this, she screamed so loudly that, startled, they let go of her and she was able to escape by jumping through the front window and fled! Naturally, she called the police, but by the time they got there, all evidence of cannibalism had vanished – there was even a normal gas oven in the kitchen!”

Despite her comments having been widely condemned, not to say discredited – police have said that the woman’s bite was most likely inflicted by a dog, while the woman herself has a history of racially aggravated assaults and other incidents – Fricklong has doubled down on them. “When I hear powerful stories like this, it just reinforces my belief that only Reform can offer the sort of anti-immigration policies that can keep this country safe,” she told the local paper in a subsequent interview. “Really, the government needs to start cracking down on these immigrants: if it isn’t Asian men grooming our girls, it’s Africans eating our women and children!” So far, the party itself has continued to back Fricklong, claiming that the incident she referred to wasn’t an isolated one, pointing to recent newspaper stories. Indeed, the Daily Excess, which has been increasingly favouring Reform UK as its neo-Nazi party of choice, only this week ran the headline ‘Immigrants Ate My Granny!’. In the story, twenty nine year old Birmingham resident Tommy Chuffer claimed that his eight two year old grandmother had been abducted from her home by what he described as a ‘tribe’ of cannibalistic West African pygmies currently living in a local hotel being used to house asylum seekers. “The place is notorious locally – its grounds are littered with human bones – the only remains of the many victims of its occupants,” he told the tabloid. “I know those bastards murdered and ate my granny – if the police won’t do anything, then I’m prepared to lead a mob with flaming torches to burn the place down!” Police who have been investigating the disappearance of Mr Chuffer’s granny yesterday announced that they had found thr body of an elderly woman in a freezer in her house, which Mr Chuffer now occupies.

For opponents of Reform UK, these sorts of stories are merely the next logical move for the anti-immigration lobby. “It was only a matter of time before cannibalism became the next racist trope peddled by extreme right and their enablers in the British press,” muses Professor Bob Mincer, Senior Lecturer in Extremist Studies at the Balham Institute of Hairdressing. “There’s nothing the bigots like better than a racial or cultural stereotype with which to beat their targets.  Hence, all Muslims are crazy fundamentalist terrorists, all South Asian men are misogynists who like to sexually exploit women, especially white women and Eastern Europeans are all gypsies, werewolves and vampires who kill and eat swans when they aren’t raping British women.  I suppose that the closest we’ve come to the Black African cannibalism trope were all those stories a few years back about African witches and witch doctors supposedly working in the UK, murdering children in their rituals.” Mincer suspects that it is the overuse of Asians, Muslims and Eastern Europeans as bogeymen that is forcing the right to fall back on cannibalism as its next scaremongering tactic. “They’ve pretty much exhausted those tropes, to the extent that they aren’t working with the public as effectively as they used to,” he says. “So, while black African immigrants have, in recent times, fallen down the race hate pecking order somewhat, they;ve now become the right’s fall back position.”

Mincer points out that, well into the seventies and beyond, black Britons were a prime target of the racists, frequently being associated with cannibalism and primitive savagery. “I well remember seeing as a child all those cartoons in newspapers and comedy sketches on TV involving hapless white missionaries being put into a large cooking pot by grass skirt clad African tribesmen,” he recalls. “Black people were routinely portrayed as being savages, who were arriving in the UK straight from the jungle, still wearing their ‘war paint’, bones through their noses and waving spears.  I’m really not exaggerating, here – TV shows, in particular, seemed to be full of such caricatures.  But thankfully, that sort of thing gradually faded away – until now, it seems.” Mincer has no doubt that Britain’s extreme right would like nothing better than to go back to such ‘good old days’ of demonising black people as wild savages threatening decent, ‘civilised’, whites. “It isn’t as if they haven’t already tested the waters to see what they can get away with in terms of anti-black bigotry,” he says. “Let’s not forget that Reform MP who loudly complained about the number of non-white people in TV commercials – apparently, it made her sick – or their mayoral candidate who called for the Justice Secretary to ‘go back home’ to Guyana, despite his having been born in the UK.”

Mincer believes that we are about to see the extreme right advancing the cannibalism narrative at every opportunity, aided and abetted by the right-wing press. “Given half a chance, the right-wing press wouldn’t be able to resist running more headlines along the lines of that ‘Cannibal immigrants ate my granny!’ one, accompanied by mocked up pictures of OAPs being put into huge cooking pots suspended over fires, while groups of wild eyed black men in loincloths dance around them,” he opines. “Or, they might try being subtler, with stories about unsuspecting diners at a Somali restaurant finding a human ear, or finger, in their meal and realising that they’re being served up human meat.” The academic also suspects that, with Reform UK beginning to lose ground in the polls, we’ll start seeing their MPs coming out with stories similar to the one peddled by Fricklong. “ You know the sort of thing: ‘Only last week one of my constituents told me of how a black African immigrant tried to take a bite out of them on the bus – why isn’t Keir Starmer personally tracking down this cannibal and bodily throwing him back into the Channel?’,” he says.  “Before you know it, all those stories of Asian grooming gangs will be replaced by stories of black African immigrants kidnapping white women, keeping them in cages and fattening them up for their cannibal feasts1”