Have you heard the story of John Finch, a 65 year old homeless man, who was found dead in his tent this morning in a car park in Cleethorpes? It’s “absolutely tragic”, say a number of Facebook groups. “And all while illegals are lounging around in hotels, being fed watered and kept warm. With private healthcare, it’s utterly obscene.” I am not sure what the reference to ‘private healthcare’ is all about, to be honest, but I am saddened by the death of a homeless man. Except that John Finch didn’t exist and this is a made-up story.
The story of Mr Finch’s supposedly unfortunate demise has no imprint on the internet, with the exception of far right extreme fascist groups like Turning Point UK. In a nutshell, someone has come up with the idea of pretending a homeless, presumably British, person has died while sponging ‘illegals’ – foreigners, for sure – are living the life of Riley “and you’re paying for it”, as the Mail might put it. And why? To wind up and recruit the hard of thinking, to spread hate, bigotry and ignorance.
Let us take a slightly deeper dive into this lie. There are no “illegals lounging around in hotels, being fed watered and kept warm”. A good few hotels are housing refugees and asylum seekers, but there is a reason for that. Under the Conservatives, the asylum system all but collapsed and an enormous backlog of people got stuck in a queue for their claims to be processed. The government – the same right wing Conservative government – commandeered hotels in which these people were told to wait until the likes of Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman got their arses into gear, except they never did. The new Labour government has inherited this mess, as well as a chaotic open door immigration policy, if you can call it a policy at all.
Unfortunately, thousands of people have “liked” and shared the story about the imaginary Mr Finch, provoking anger among the gammon population, many of whom believe anything they are told, as long as it’s on the internet. Tell a big lie often enough and sooner or later – usually sooner these days – people believe it’s true.
It certainly works in America where President elect Donald Trump’s default position is to tell lies. We laugh, but there are millions of people who now believe that migrants – ‘illegals’ as some call them – eat people’s cats and dogs. I laughed when I first heard the lie but not so much when it turned out that Trump’s supporters took it as fact. But come on: this is no different from people believing a homeless person in Cleethorpes, who didn’t exist, died in his tent. What happens in America is already happening here.
Finally, I blog about this story as much to remind my loyal reader that there are always people who want to scam her/him. If, for example, you believe the non-story about John Finch, is it really a big leap of faith to then believe that email from a scam artist who wants your bank details is entirely genuine? If someone is gullible enough to fall for a fake story on the internet, God knows what else they’d fall for.
RIP John Finch, or rather RIP the lie about your demise. This won’t be the last ‘story’ like this.
