High life | 10 March 2016

 

 Athens

I am walking around downtown Athens watching as thousands of migrants field pitches from smugglers offering alternative routes to Germany and Austria. I ask a friendly policeman 50 years younger than me why he doesn’t arrest the smugglers and throw away the key. ‘Others will take their place quicker than we put the handcuffs on them,’ he tells me. ‘And they pretend to be migrants the moment we approach.’ Smuggling people is big business, and most of the bad guys are Afghans, as far as I can tell. It is grim stuff, especially where children are concerned. Victoria Square is a tree-lined park where long ago my grandfather owned a large family house. The area is no longer chic, hence the influx of migrants and smugglers. Yet there are good Samaritans handing out food despite the fact that Greece herself is the poorest country in the EU and being squeezed daily by the hated troika. I chat with a man called Vangelis who is handing out sweets and bread to migrants. I tell him that I’m Golden Dawn and what he’s doing is commendable. ‘Golden Dawn was good at keeping criminals in line in the past,’ he says. ‘But these people here are victims, and that’s why I’m here.’ What about the people smugglers, I ask him. ‘They should be shot on the spot,’ he tells me with a smile. The ones I feel very sorry for are the poor Greeks whose shops and fast-food joints are totally empty because of the migrants lining the streets in front of them. The next day I’m back near the square but to the east of it, where migrant creep is taking place. What I notice is the relative wealth of many of them, who pay shops in order to charge their mobiles and buy food and drink.