A dose of reality?

Katya Adler, so often just another of the BBC’s pro-immigration cheerleaders, has come up against the uncomfortable truth, and decided to print it…

The arrival of so many asylum seekers in one go will impact Germany’s economy, its society and its politics.

And she can’t do the usual BBC thing of dismissing this as the concern of a few far right neo-Nazis…

It didn’t much look like a protest.

Lots of casually dressed, smiley very middle-class Germans – some with children, others with dogs, chatting animatedly in beautiful parkland on the outskirts of Hamburg on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

But this was indeed a protest group, putting together a petition in an attempt to stop a new refugee centre being built on the green.

Adler though can’t help but slip in a bit of the usual ‘reassurances’…

People here were keen to emphasise that they were not anti-immigrant.

To be clear: most Germans don’t question a duty to help those fleeing war or human rights abuses…

And there’s the claim so often denied but known to be the truth, and admitted by the migrants themselves more often than not, about why the migrants flock to countries like Sweden, Germany and the UK…benefits….

“We have to get the balance right,” said Lorenz Caffier, CDU Interior Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

“The German constitution demands that we look after refugees but the benefits we give them are too generous.

“Frankly, I’m amazed at any migrant who doesn’t choose to come to Germany. Our benefit system acts like a travel agency. We must put the wellbeing of our own people first.”

German newspapers are full of reports about the benefits refugees receive compared to German citizens on welfare, leading, in some quarters, to a sense of injustice.

There’s also a more widespread worry about strains on the national health and education systems.

‘Just a bunch of racists’ is the usual response to such talk in the UK.

Is the BBC going to start to reflect the genuine concerns of people in the UK about immigration and admit that those concerns are based upon very real problems that mass immigration causes or will this type of report be a flash in the pan, a one off, that does nothing to change the tidal wave of pro-immigrant sentiment that floods out of the BBC?

Perhaps Adler was unnerved by reports of journalists coming under attack for spreading lies and smearing anyone who speaks up about immigration…..

In earlier days, Pegida members often derided the media as the “lying press,” but those calls, increasingly, are being supplanted by actual physical attacks on journalists. Two weeks ago, Pegida supporters attacked journalists with MDR and the Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten newspaper, with one reporter getting punched in the face. Officials at MDR, which is the public broadcaster for Saxony, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, have reported insults, vandalism and physical attacks by Pegida supporters at all of their state studios and say the number of incidents is growing, particularly in Saxony. The “growing aggressiveness” toward its employees, officials say, is a “new experience.”