Times Readers Unshakeable In Belief That Eastern Europeans Covet Our Insanely Generous Benefits

The scene outside every single Jobcentre tomorrow, probably

The British public absolutely refuses to accept the idea that Eastern Europe will not empty overnight as the entire population west of Vienna makes a beeline for Folkestone’s Jobcentre, following the announcement that migrants from the so-called A8 countries - the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - which joined the EU in 2004 would be able to claim the full, lavish range of UK benefits from May.

This morning’s Times painted a horrifying picture of legions of workaholic Slavs greedily draining every last drop of glorious British benefits from our dole offices, then racing round to the nearest estate agents in their new Bentleys to buy up every single property in Mayfair thanks to the open-handed naïveté of the British taxpayer.

A timorous lackey of the Department for Work and Pensions vainly tried to suggest that if there really were any such thing as ‘benefit tourism’, all of Britain’s jobless would be in Germany - but his quavering voice was drowned out by an ugly crowd marching towards the nation’s ports and air terminals, armed with blunt instruments and chanting, “They took our British jobs, now they’re coming for our British benefits.”

Cricket bat-wielding Alvin Sweetman, 82, spoke for Britain when he snarled, “Mark my words: £64.30 a week is a king’s ransom to an unreconstructed ex-KGB communist living in a tin shed in Bratislava. He might get fistfuls of monopoly money anywhere else in Northern Europe, I grant you, but what your Ivan really craves above all else is the everlasting value of the trusty British pound in his pocket, and maybe even two.”