What happened?

I met a man from Kosovo yesterday. I didn't ask him where he was from. I've learned in the last few years not to ask that of anyone in Scotland who looks or sounds different from me. He volunteered the information.

We started off talking about the weather and he said he liked the weather here. In fact, he likes Scotland a lot though he's only been here three years. He went to London from Kosovo in 1998. He had been in a prison camp, held for months by the Serb army and only released because the West imposed a settlement on the Serbs and western countries agreed to take some Kosovan Muslims as refugees. I looked up the entry for Kosovo in Wikipedia. It's worth a look: this country of 2m people probably has a longer Wiki entry and a more tangled history than most of Europe.

The man praised the western powers for their actions in Kosovo. (He's probably one of Tony Blair's few fans.) In fact, he praised a lot of things here in Britain and is glad to be here even though he can't work at his profession (mechanical engineering) because his qualifications are not recognised and so has taken a lot of what he called 'random jobs', that is the ones Brits don't want to do. He likes Scottish people. Most of them are friendly, according to him.

That, sadly, led him on to describe some pretty horrible experiences he's had in Scotland. Like being told by one Scot: 'I hate all foreigners.' And by another: 'You people are taking over my country.' It's not just that these remarks are ridiculous. In fact, stupid. How can you hate all foreigners? Since Scotland has the lowest level of immigration and the lowest population density in the UK if not the EU, how can immigrants possibly take over?

But it's not just the stupidity involved. It's that there are people who think it's okay to talk to other people like that. In Scotland. In the 21st century. I remember a friend telling me how she'd been berated over the phone by a stranger - a Scot - on the grounds that Americans (she's Canadian) are responsible for the state of the world right now - warmongers, murderers all of them. And a South American friend was insulted in a shop by a Glaswegian Asian because he thought she was Muslim and he disapproved of her hanging around with a white man (who was in fact her Scottish husband).

It's certainly true that there's been a frightening rise in right-wing groups all over Europe in the last twenty years. But there's something else happening in Britain.

Before I blocked them, I was getting Facebook ads for the Conservative Party. They all invited me to have my say. But only on two subjects: immigration and 'welfare'.

The Tory Party has latched onto these topics and made immigrants and people on benefits scapegoats for everything that's gone wrong in this recession (and no, it's not over as far I can see from Scotland, even if it is in central London). The bankers, stock markets gamblers and most of the Ponzi scheme managers are still free and making money.

The British public seems to have bought into the idea that Britain is 'full' and can take no more immigrants, when in reality the population density here is pretty low and we need immigrants to do the 'random' jobs my Kosovan acquaintance talked about, more so in Scotland than elsewhere. And people on benefits are said to be getting something for nothing or spending their benefits on drink and drugs, whereas most of them are either pensioners or working families earning so little they need tax credits or folk who are sick or disabled or have lost their jobs but paid into tax and national insurance for years before they were laid off.

The politicians could help set the record straight but the LibDems keep quiet in case they're tainted with the same reputation as the Tories and Labour edge closer and closer to the Tories in order to get into power, taking on the same punitive policies. Then there's Ukip - but I'm not going there. Newspapers and TV stations like Sky, the BBC and ITV play their part too, as do some Facebook and Twitter groups like Britain First. Stories appear that clearly have no substance and the flames of hate are fanned by poor and sensational reporting that is never contradicted because, well, who is there to contradict them?

For example, there was a programme on ITV last week about migrants in Calais trying to get into Britain. There was no attempt to investigate how these people had ended up in Calais and whether they had been offered help in other countries on their way north; no attempt to find out if they were aiming for Britain because they had family there; no reporting of what the French government or the EU were doing to manage this influx of - well, I would call some of 'refugees' but that's a word that's totally out of favour right now. There was a faint air of panic in the reporting.

A friend of mine told me in all seriousness a couple of weeks back that post office employees reported handing over benefit payments of £1000 a week to 'foreigners.' I said it was impossible for anyone to get payments like that because there's a benefits cap in place of £25,000 or £26,000 a year. What he was telling me suggested people could get £52,000 a year in benefits, which is clearly nonsense. But who could tell him he was wrong, apart from me? And I'm not sure he believed me.

We live in a very unkind country now.

And the terrible thing is this is all a distraction from the real issues: poverty wages (Tories talk about the UK as a 'low wage economy' as if that's a good thing); the scapegoating of the disabled; the triumph of capitalism which is making lots of money but at the cost of the fabric of our communities.

Normally I'm an optimist. I'm the person who is told to give up the ideals and get a sense of 'reality.' If this is reality, friends, you can keep it.