When 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, armed with a 20cm long chef’s knife, walked into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class and began stabbing teachers and little girls, he not only took the lives of three innocents – six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar. He also triggered a groundswell of resentment, confusion and anger that, one year on, has not abated.
The resulting riots, fuelled by misinformation and, in particular, the erroneous assumption that Rudakubana was an asylum seeker (he was not, although his parents had come to Britain from Rwanda), exposed an ugly streak of anti-immigrant feeling.
This was quickly suppressed by the authorities, and the perpetrators dealt with in uncompromising – perhaps, in some cases, excessively harsh – fashion.
In particular, questions have persisted over the sentencing of Lucy Connolly, who received a 31-month jail sentence for a 51-word post on X (quickly deleted) in which she called for ‘mass deportations now’, urging protesters to ‘set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]’ and adding ‘if that makes me racist so be it’.
Lucy’s supporters – and there’s a growing number of them – argue that, as a young mother who had lost a child, she was overcome with grief for Rudakubana’s victims and simply let her emotions get the better of her. They consider her to be a ‘political prisoner’ of a government that denies free speech to those with legitimate concerns around crime and immigration: concerns that have been suppressed over the years in the name of a multicultural utopian fantasy which exists only in the minds of out-of-touch politicians.
One year on from Southport, and the situation is no less incendiary. Eighteen people have now been arrested following ugly scenes at the Bell Hotel in Essex, which is housing asylum seekers, after a resident, Hadush Kebatu, 41, allegedly left his room at the hotel, walked on to Epping’s high street and assaulted two girls aged 14 and 16 just eight days after arriving in Britain. He denies the charges.
The unrest has since spread to other locations. In Diss, Norfolk, concerns were raised after the Home Office said it was planning to change the occupants of a hotel housing asylum-seeking families in the town to single adult males. Protests broke out, with people shouting ‘we want our country back’. In London, rumours that a four-star hotel in Canary Wharf was preparing for new arrivals also led to trouble.
The usual suspects – Tommy Robinson et al, as well as masked and sinister Left-wing ‘anti-fascists’ (Essex police first denied and then, when confronted with the evidence, admitted ‘escorting’ them to the protests) have been piling in, fuelling the fire. Things are sufficiently concerning that even the Government has deviated from its ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ stance, with deputy PM Angela Rayner warning the Cabinet that it is time to ‘acknowledge the real concerns people have’ about immigration.
More than 21,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats since the start of the year – a 56 per cent rise on the same period in 2024
The National Audit Office said the Government’s spending on asylum accommodation is due to cost more than £15billion over ten years
Even Downing Street admitted that Starmer, who has backtracked on his memorable phrase that we risk becoming an ‘island of strangers’, has been concerned about the unravelling of the ‘unwritten rules that hold a nation together’.
Strong words, but words are no longer enough. This is not a problem that is going to go away on its own. More than 21,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats since the start of the year – a 56 per cent rise on the same period in 2024.
In May, the National Audit Office said the Government’s spending on asylum accommodation is due to cost more than £15billion over ten years – three times the original estimate.
There is no concrete plan on the horizon to tackle any of this. People are fed up. They’ve had enough – and it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re not just going to take it any more, even if that means putting their own liberty at risk.
There are multiple dimensions to this story, and the roots of people’s anger and disillusionment stretch back years. What we are seeing has not just sprung out of nowhere. It’s the result of a social and political paralysis that itself stems from a singular failure to have something decades overdue: an open and honest conversation about immigration in Britain.
I’m not talking about one of those echo-chamber, BBC-style chats, in which middle-class liberals parrot the same old platitudes about cultural enrichment and imperial guilt.
No concrete plan on the horizon
I mean an honest, unfiltered and judgment-free debate, in which those who have set the agenda for the past few decades shut up for once in their lives and listen to what ordinary people have to say about the ways in which wave after wave of migrants are increasingly making them feel about their lives, their futures, their country, their heritage.
About how successive governments’ failure to tackle the huge numbers and vast costs associated with these men – and it is, of course, mostly men – has impacted on ordinary people, their families and their neighbourhoods.
And that’s just the easy stuff. The really hard conversations go much deeper.
Let’s talk about the repeated and flagrant favouritism couched as ‘cultural sensitivity’ that has led to widespread abuse, injustices and scandals – such as the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. Or about the systematic imposition – and, yes, it often has been an imposition – of certain cultures and traditions that run utterly counter to our own way of life.
Let’s remind ourselves of the vast sums of taxpayer money spent defending the supposed ‘rights’ of people who have no reason to be here other than the exploitation of this country’s generosity. The news revealed by the Daily Mail this week that in the past year alone over 6,000 migrants used or tried to use pre-paid cards intended to pay for food and other basics on gambling is a classic example.
Let’s recognise the obvious determination, once here and safely cradled in the bosom of our welfare state, of some of these visitors to repay our generosity by seeking to impose their own undemocratic and frankly medieval social codes, such as sharia law.
Let us speak openly of how these practices and their ramifications – the oppression of women and girls, predatory male behaviours, lack of respect or even hostility towards other religions – have taken hold in certain parts of the country. One thinks of the Batley schoolteacher hounded out of his job and home for daring to show his religious-studies class an image of Muhammad.
The Mail this week revealed that in the past year alone over 6,000 migrants used or tried to use pre-paid cards intended to pay for food and other basics on gambling
All these, and more, are ugly and troubling truths. No wonder no one wants to confront them, no wonder there’s a reluctance, especially by those insulated by wealth or status, to confront them. Far easier to order another artisan latte and pretend none of this is happening.
But not having the conversation has led us to where we are today: groups of spittle-flicked protesters, crazy conspiracy theories swirling on social media, confusion, misinformation and heightened emotions – including from millions of perfectly ordinary and non-political British people. All this is happening because no one has been listening. And when no one listens, people feel compelled to break the emergency glass.
And, boy, are they breaking it. That is what we are seeing. Angry, frustrated men and women who feel ignored, disenfranchised, patronised, vilified and above all desperate, saying enough is enough.
We ignore these people at our peril. I’m afraid Nigel Farage was right when he said recently after the Epping protests: ‘I don’t think anybody in London even understands just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country.’ Unless we have these conversations, and have them quick, Britain is done. The rage and resentment that has been bubbling under for years now will build under the pressure of denial – and violent, lawless outbursts such as the ones we have seen this week will only become more frequent and more fraught.
Our politicians continue to gaslight us
Troublemakers like Tommy Robinson will sink their claws even further into the impressionable and the ignorant, and others like him will garner support from legions of disillusioned voters sick and tired of being dismissed as ‘deplorables’ by mainstream politicians, some of whom see the problem but refuse to acknowledge it because they fear the repercussions of doing so.
But the truth is that we are witnessing a gradual but determined appropriation of a nation’s identity.
It’s evident in the way certain sectors of society – the white working class, the Jewish community, women – are being slowly but surely pushed into a corner. But it’s also there in the sinister rise of religious-based political sectarianism, supported by useful idiots such as Jeremy Corbyn and his new outfit (‘Your Party’? ‘Jezbollah’?) and expressed in the increasing number of ‘independent’ Islamic MPs.
In some parts of the country it can feel almost like a hostile takeover, as though the historic population – the indigenous people, if you will – no longer belongs or is welcome.
And unless some sort of balance is seen to be restored, unless we openly and honestly confront these challenges as a nation and accept that, as Suella Braverman once so bravely put it, multiculturalism has failed because immigration without controls and integration is a recipe for societal breakdown, then things will only get worse.
Sectarianism, racism, isolationism, protectionism and fear will be the only winners. Resentment will deepen.
And yet, apart from the odd speech here and there, our politicians continue to gaslight us. Anyone who dares voice even mild concern about these issues is still shouted down by the authorities, dismissed as a mindless, knuckle-dragging thug.
To be honest, some of them are. But the vast majority are not. They are just ordinary people who have no objection to genuine refugees coming to build a life in a modern liberal democracy such as ours, far away from whichever lunatics happen to have taken over their world.
But increasingly that’s not what people see. They see boatload after boatload of young males arriving, some of them jeering and making TikToks about how they’re going to fleece the welfare system. They see alarming acts of criminality (such as Mohammed Wahid Mohammed, 22, an asylum seeker who this week was convicted of raping a 12-year-old).
And they see a desire not to integrate, but to intimidate.
Of course, troubling behaviours are by no means unique to people who come here illegally. There are plenty of born and bred Brits who are just as sinister, just as criminal. But the difference is they don’t have armies of human rights lawyers exploiting the ECHR to get them off the hook because their child can’t do without chicken nuggets. Nor are they sometimes protected from facing the consequences of their actions, as the Rotherham rapists and others like them were, by ‘cultural sensitivities’.
It seems to me that the weight of liberal guilt about our imperial past and cases of historic racism made this country vulnerable to exploitation. Our kindness and tolerance were interpreted as weakness.
And instead of helping the truly vulnerable, the women and girls living under the yoke of the Taliban, or the victims of Iran’s Islamic regime, or any of the other victims of terrible injustice the world over, we have ended up offering refuge not to the weak, but to those ruthless enough to clamber over these poor souls to get to us.
This must change. Because if it doesn’t, Britain will change. It will cease to be the peaceful, prosperous haven we have all taken for granted for so long – and become a place which few of us truly recognise as home.
