Should we be worried about the vast numbers of German-born people living covertly in the United Kingdom? The Office for National Statistics estimates that in 2011 some 297,000 Germans were resident here, the fifth largest non-British-born contingent (after Indians, Poles, Pakistanis and the Irish respectively). What the hell are they all up to? Sitting in smartly furnished homes, biding their time, and waiting, waiting. That’s what I suspect. A report in the Guardian a while back suggested that our German community tended to ‘stay under the radar’, an ability which mercifully eluded them 70 years ago. The paper also reported that while there were a few areas with significant German numbers — Kensington in London, for example, and Richmond in North Yorkshire — mostly they had simply assimilated with the locals, like terrifyingly serene blond-haired aliens from a John Wyndham novel. When the time comes and the signal is given, they will advance like automatons upon their British neighbours and set about them with an implacable violence, their eyes flashing weirdly.
In point of fact, I think the phrase ‘stay under the radar’ really implied that they were not likely to stab you at a cash machine and make off with your wallet. As immigrants go, the Germans are about as good as it is possible to get; economically productive, favouring small families, unlikely to commit crime and more than happy to integrate.
According to a hugely sententious man called James O’Brien, a presenter for the radio station LBC, merely to say this is to paint oneself as a racist. O’Brien had been interviewing the Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who had made the point that most British people would probably prefer to have a family of Germans move in next door than a family of Romanians.
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