Romanian Aristocrat On Way To UK To Steal NHS’s Blood Supplies

The Daily Mail has spent most of the Christmas holidays counting down to the 1st January 2014, the pistol shot which, if they are to be believed, would signal the start of a mass influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants to the UK.  Whereas I have spent it stuffing my face full of food, avoiding the wind and rain, and taking in a few Hammer House of Horror films on BBC iPlayer. One of those films struck up an unlikely chord with the Daily Mail's agenda: the 1958 production of Dracula starring Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as vampire slayer supreme, Van Helsing.

Romanian ne'er-do-well about to savage one of our women

Long after I had viewed various incarnations of the Dracula story - Francis Ford Coppola’s being the pick, indeed, one of my favourite films ever – my English Literature degree kindly placed Bram Stoker’s novel on my reading list.  What struck me after only twenty or so pages was the appalling standard of writing.  Leaden and clichéd prose, and characters who barely manage to find a second dimension, made for what was an absolute pot-boiler.  I recalled the flak that Keanu Reeves came in for after his portrayal of the book’s hero Jonathan Harker, but given the source material, his wet and wooden performance was note perfect.  Surrounded by some of the other books I was reading for the first time – Anne Michaels’ magnificent Fugitive Pieces and more pertinently, Mary Shelley’s provocative and genuinely chilling Frankenstein, Dracula sucked.  And yet, what a story!  Unputdownable is the word, even if spellchecker doesn’t think so!  Stoker can’t write for toffee, but he did stumble upon an amazing story that, no matter how bad you tell it, is riveting.

     

Anyway, what has all this got to do with the Daily Mail? Well, stick with me.  One of the accompanying lectures to reading Dracula focused on the novel’s subtext of fear of immigration. In fact it’s an obvious one if you give it any serious thought.  Strange and creepy Romanian fellow comes over here, bringing all his foreign traditions with him and polluting our blood lines.  As Jonathan Harker remarks: 

“This was the being I was helping to transfer to London where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.”

Scary stuff!  And if Van Helsing, Harker, and company had let him get away with it?  Well, if he wasn’t a Count to begin with he'd probably be stealing our jobs too.  Although, being a Count, he'd probably be paying absolutely no income tax and would have certainly had all his finances tied up in a Gordian knot of tax loopholes.  And once he'd entered the UK, the rest of the undead would certainly follow. Bringing their undead families behind them, who will in turn beget more undead!  You couldn’t make it up!  Well, as Bram Stoker proves, you actually could.

   

And so, above and beyond their usual call to xenophobic arms, the Mail have really gone to town in the last few weeks.  We’ve had the Romanian Big Issue seller called the ‘Benefits Teacher’ who is urging families to follow her to Britain and claim cash!  The Romanian who told police that she had come to the UK looking for free medical treatment on the NHS!  The Tory council leader Philippa Roe warning that the Roma, who are already in Britain, are now defecating on people’s doorsteps, and that the burden that Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants will place on public services will tip us over the edge!  Indeed, would any of the Mail’s readers bat an eyelid, or perhaps get a little bit cross, if tomorrow’s headline was ‘Romanian Aristocrat On Way To UK To Steal NHS’s Blood Supplies’?   

Shouldn't we be kicking Nigella out?

Enough!  What we really want to know is did those dastardly Eastern Europeans manage to get on the first flight over here? Of course not!  'Transport data shows that no extra flights or coaches were scheduled from Romania or Bulgaria, advance air bookings are down for the first three months of the year compared with 2013, and there were plenty of seats available at prices as low as £135.’  Although, as they didn’t check Whitby, Dracula’s point of arrival in the UK, those figures may yet prove to be very flawed.  Incidentally, what I really want to know, is why in the 1958 film version did Jonathan Harker’s  fiancée’s name get changed from Mina to Lucy?  Lucy is, of course, in Stoker’s novel, but in the film she is the  fiancée of another character.  I have a theory but I'll save it for another time.

   

So what have we learned?  That I love a creepy story about blood-sucking vampires, no matter how badly written it is. Yet, despite my occasionally questionable tastes, I certainly realise that it is just a story, something that casts a playful chill over our bedtimes, and under no circumstances is to be blown up into an irresponsible, bilious, and xenophobic moral panic. Vampires aren’t real. Neither is the Daily Mail’s age old story about the country being ‘flooded’ or ‘swamped’ by immigrants.   

Oh, and just one more thing: an apology for the amount of poor vampire puns in this piece.  There is far too much at stake to be treating this issue so flippantly.