In Actual Fact…

“It’s a bloody disgrace!” he says, scanning my groceries over the barcode-reader. “These buggers come to Britain, they’ve never paid any tax nor national insurance and the government gives ‘em everything whilst soft buggers like me who’ve worked all their lives don’t get owt…” he trails off, his dialect much more stereotypically “old Northern curmudgeon” than I’m prepared to replicate in text.
“Really?” I ask as unenthusiastically as possible, sighing as I see how much of my shopping is still waiting on the conveyor belt, mentally calculating how long I’m going to have to listen to him, wondering whether he’s going to continue in this vein and how on earth the conversation got here in the first place.
I look back at my groceries; “it’s not my Daily Mail,” I explain. He starts to extricate the offending article from beneath a bag of apples. “No, no. I want to buy it,” I explain before adding, perhaps a tad confusingly, “well, that’s not strictly true, I don’t want to buy it.”
As I’m speaking the scanner beeps as the newspaper passes over it and the man looks at me with a look of exasperation.
“Do you want it or not?”
“Yes. But it’s for my sister,” I explain very hastily, “personally, I don’t agree with its editorial stance.”
He shakes his head and picks up the apples, “What about these?” I nod silently.
Determined to salvage a little dignity I decide to question his views of immigrants rather than just wait silently; “So these people that come to Britain, just how do they get all this money?”
“DHSS” he states, “but it’s not called the DHSS anymore, it’s called summat else, but it’s still in the old Labour Exchange building. When I were laid off last summer it was full of ‘em. They fly over from wherever to London, then come up ere. They get everything given to ‘em: money for housing, money for living and money to send back to the family in Wongawongaland.” Despite my doubts about this last point (and later research of the CIA World Factbook reveals that there isn’t actually a country called Wongawongaland), I don’t say anything as I have had a moment of enlightenment.
“What about people that might have, say, studied in Britain and done some part time work when they were at university, but went to Germ, I mean, er, back home?”
“They should send all of ‘em back ‘ome.”
“Er, yes. Quite. But let’s say one of erm, ‘them’ used the education system of this country then went off for say, ooh, 10 years. If he came back, do you think they’d give him any money?”
“They’d give him a bloody mansion” he says and drops the last of my shopping into a carrier bag.
“And all er, he’d have to do was walk into the old Labour exchange?”
The cashier (who I now notice to my mild amusement has a nametag which carries a stupendously unpronounceable Polish surname) answers in the affirmative and five minutes later I find myself standing outside “Jobcentreplus”.
Alas, it turns out that it’s not possible to just walk in and get free money - one has to make an appointment.
It’s a bloody disgrace.