Asylum Seekers Pissing on Dickens’ Grave

For obvious reasons I never read Richard Littlejohn’s novel: To Hell In A Handcart, but I did read several reviews of it; each seeking to outdo the other in the vitriol aimed jointly at its bigotry and lack of literary merits. While doubtless much of the criticism was warranted, the result was that I ended up with the idea of this impossibly overblown rant. So this is not necessarily how I suggest Littlejohn would write the story, but how the monstrous caricature that the reviews depicted, en masse, might write it. And all the bad writing that follows is as much in character  as the bigotry.

Chapter 1

It was the best of times if you were a foreigner, a criminal, a layabout, or a black lesbian. It was the worst of times if you were a good honest Briton. It was 2017 and with Labour having been in power for 16 of the last 20 years, political correctness had gone so insane that it could have been locked in an asylum with a team of therapists and regularly subjected to ECT, and it would still have been mad.

Dave sat at the back of the train as it dragged itself from London towards the coast, making endless stops. Some of these were actually scheduled, most that were enforced by another mechanical failure. Dave hated trains.  Unfortunately given the ridiculous level of taxation extorted from him every year to pay for juvenile delinquents to be taught about Bangladeshi culture while getting a free tattoo on the NHS, he needed the money. And with punitive road tolls having driven freight off the roads and back on to the railways, the trains now needed armed guards to deal with a new generation of train robbers. Not that these new gangsters were anything like Ronnie Biggs and his mates, Dave mused, genial cockneys who’d give half of what they stole to their mum, and only hurt someone if they really had to. No, nowadays it’d be some Eastern European greaseball who’d knife you just for kicks.