Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, looking more beleaguered and sounding less convincing than ever, said yesterday that the police should routinely reveal the nationality and asylum status of those charged with criminal offences. New legal guidance, she promised, would shortly be issued for police forces to provide greater ‘transparency’.
Not for the first time, Labour was rushing to follow in the footsteps of Nigel Farage‘s Reform party. Only 24 hours before, as part of Reform’s ‘Britain is lawless’ campaign, Farage had called for the ethnicity of suspects charged with rape and sexual assaults to be made public. Now Cooper was in a hurry to oblige.
Not before time. The police predilection for saying nothing about such matters – a product of the ‘woke‘ ideology which now grips so many of our police forces where to dwell on ethnicity is in itself racist – has merely served to stoke suspicion and unrest.
Last year Merseyside Police‘s information vacuum about the man charged with murdering three young girls in Southport allowed false claims (including that he was an asylum seeker) and online conspiracy theories to circulate unchecked, fuelling the serious rioting which followed.
At least lessons were learned. This year, when a car ploughed into crowds during Liverpool FC’s victory parade, Merseyside Police quickly confirmed the driver was ‘white British’. But the default position of too many forces is still to keep schtum.
Farage is correct to say there is ‘rising public anger’ over the growth in hotels housing those who’ve entered the country illegally and are claiming asylum, especially when there’s an increase in crime in the communities where these hotels are based.
More than 75 per cent are adult young men – overwhelmingly single, of military age and with time on their hands – so nobody should be surprised when crime rises in their wake.
Police move to arrest people associated with the ‘anti-fascist’ movement as anti-immigration, ‘stand up to racism’ and ‘anti-fascist’ groups gather at a migrant hotel in central London
The Reform leader accused Warwickshire Police of refusing to give details of the backgrounds of two Afghan asylum seekers charged with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton on the grounds that it would ‘inflame community tensions’.
Warwickshire Police defended their cover-up by claiming that ‘once someone is charged with an offence, we follow national guidance. This guidance does not include sharing ethnicity or immigration status.’ This is disingenuous. The guidance is issued by the Royal College Of Policing and makes no mention of whether forces should declare details of race, ethnicity or immigration status, which is at the discretion of chief constables.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that British police would rather sweep the matter of crime and ethnicity under the carpet. After all, this is the country, to its everlasting shame, in which grooming gangs were allowed for years to sexually abuse and assault hundreds of young, vulnerable white girls unhindered, in part, because the perpetrators were overwhelmingly of Pakistani Muslim origin – and police were more fearful of being branded racist than seeing justice done.
Of course most crime in Britain is carried out by British nationals, as you’d expect given they still dominate the population. But it cannot be said that recent arrivals have done much to damp down the crime statistics.
Record numbers of foreign sex offenders and violent criminals are now being held in jails in England and Wales, according to official statistics. More than 1,700 foreign nationals were in prison for sex offences as of June this year, up by almost 10 per cent on the year – a rate of increase nearly three times that of British nationals imprisoned for the same reasons. The number of foreign violent offenders in our jails is also at its highest since records began – up almost
9 per cent in a year to 3,250, nearly double the rate of increase of British nationals incarcerated for violent crimes in the same period.
Metropolitan Police officers surround a bus reportedly waiting to remove migrants and asylum seekers from a hotel in Peckham
Foreign nationals now make up one in eight of the 87,000 prisoners in England and Wales. They account for one in 10 sex offenders and one in 10 prisoners convicted of violence against others.
These facts are no doubt unpalatable to progressives, who like to point out that, overall, crime has been falling in the UK for most of this century and that we are not in the grip of a massive new crime wave. That is true, though there’s been an uptick in the past couple of years in various categories of crimes.
Nor does it gainsay the fact that up and down the land, in communities progressives do not inhabit and rarely visit, there is dismay and despair at widespread anti-social behaviour which, in turn, creates the conditions in which low level crime – shoplifting, mugging, phone theft – can flourish.
Even worse, the police don’t seem to care or can’t be bothered, to more keenly monitor the drivel that pours out of social media for so-called ‘hate crimes’ from the safety of their desks than to pound the streets where yobbery runs amuck. In a way, it’s hard to blame them. So many of today’s coppers are ill-equipped – in height, weight, fitness or self-defence – to handle themselves in a tight situation, more suited to be the Twitter Sweeney than the real Sweeney.
The general sense of lawlessness is perhaps most keenly felt in London, under the dead hand of Mayor Sadiq Khan.
I recently had a friend from Sydney email me to ask if it was safe for him and his wife to visit London this summer. I understand where they’re coming from.
Knife crime last year in the capital was up almost 60 per cent on the three years to 2024, mainly involving robberies. It accounts for almost one-third of total knife crime in England and Wales.
Phone theft is rampant, with 64,000 phones a year pinched in London, the chances of ever getting yours back are literally close to zero – only 0.6 per cent of street thefts ever result in anybody being charged.
Police chiefs argue that on the big crimes – murder, terrorism – they are as effective as ever.
Yet it is getting a grip on everyday crime which matters most to people – and which makes for a safer society all round.
New York discovered that almost 30 years ago when Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police chief Bill Bratton rolled out their zero tolerance approach to crime.
It worked. I was darting back and forth between New York and London in the late 1990s and by the turn of the century if often seemed as if New York was safer than London. But today’s police and politicians have no interest in this sort of bottom up approach to crime, which is why the conditions which spawn crime are spreading.
Into this mix we now add thousands of young migrant men, unchecked and unvetted, into communities the least equipped to cope. It is hard to think of a more potent brew for unleashing a populist backlash which could easily turn nasty.
Farage will be blamed for exploiting it. But at least he is demanding it be given attention when too many politicians would rather look the other way.
More transparency is at least a start: we must insist that when politicians lose control of our borders, as they have, they cannot be allowed to hide the appalling consequences of their incompetence from the rest of us.
