Just once – once, I would like to go a single week without hearing about some alleged miscreant making a mockery of this country's asylum and immigration system. But I suppose this is not that week. Because once again a man has been charged following a horrific attack, this time on a street in Belfast, and once again the questions it raises are ones our political class would rather we left alone.
The case is now active and before the courts, where it belongs and where my commentary most certainly does not. But the wider system around cases like this is another matter entirely, and on that I have plenty to say. Far be it from me to speculate on the particulars. But the broad shape of it is familiar enough by now to raise eyebrows, and I can already hear the curious media politicos asking who on earth designs a system like this.
Well, dear reader, the same people who brought us Abdul Ezedi, the family of the Manchester Arena bomber, the parents of Axel Rudakubana, and countless other menaces in waiting. This is not, before anyone reaches for the phrase, a "right-wing conspiracy" to besmirch all immigrants. The suggestion alone is insulting; as if anyone – migrants included – wants to live next door to the dangerous and the deranged? Nobody wants to feel unsafe on their own street, and much less live somewhere racked with lawlessness.
Protests erupt across UK after Belfast attack
Unfortunately for the scenes that followed the attack on Monday, the disorder has not stayed in Belfast. There have been protests in Portadown, Derry and Newtownabbey, and across the water in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Southampton, the latter still raw from the Henry Nowak murder trial the week before. Burning homes, a torched supermarket, a hijacked bus, masked men kicking in doors and windows in the name of "getting the foreigners out". It is indefensible.
If this was meant to be a defence of British values, I hardly saw any of it. Setting fire to a man's home because of the colour of his skin is not patriotism; it is thuggery, and it deserves to be called exactly that. First Minister of Northern Ireland Michelle O'Neill was right to say the people stoking it do not speak for the rest, and the police are right to ask for calm. Rage is understandable; arson is not.
Government hypocrisy on immigration and employment
But while our politicians are quick to ask the public for restraint, what exactly can we expect of them? Keir Starmer and the halfwits loitering the halls of Westminster spend a great deal of time telling us, the law-abiding public, how we might keep the peace. Yet we never hear a word about how they intend to keep it. Why do they never spell out their half of the bargain?
And lest anyone think the deafness is confined to asylum, look at what this government chose to announce in the same breath. With nearly a million young Britons out of work or training – the worst worklessness crisis in a quarter of a century – ministers have decided the pressing priority is to hand British firms £5,000 a head to hire workers from abroad. You read that correctly. At the very moment our own graduates are firing off CVs into the void, the Chancellor's bright idea is to subsidise the competition. Since 2020, the country has taken on 27 young non-EU workers for every additional young Briton in a job. You have to wonder whether the government has a vendetta against this country.
Proposed reforms to asylum system
So allow me to make a few suggestions. If a country carries a travel advisory warning Britons not to set foot there, perhaps the journey in the other direction warrants a closer look. If a nation throws homosexuals from rooftops and treats its women more or less like hairless, perfumed cattle, asylum should be off the table. Our system is overstretched, under-resourced, and in its current execrable state a genuine threat to national security. A man arriving from France is not fleeing a war zone. And when a grown man arrives alone, it is fair to ask why the women and children were left behind.
Sir Keir Starmer has perfected the theatre of thoughts and prayers that follows every tragic and often preventable horror. I would gently suggest he redirects a few of those towards the British public – the people left to live with the consequences of decisions made by those who will never have to.
