George Orwell, that great chronicler of British patriotism, wrote during the Second World War that ‘the gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic’. Eight decades later, it would be absurd to use such language about our country.
In today’s Britain, restraint is being replaced by aggression, solidarity by conflict. In the face of rising crime and social disorder, fear and friction cast their shadows over too many of our neighbourhoods.
There are many reasons for this crisis, including the breakdown of the traditional family and the leniency of the justice system. But perhaps the most important factor has been the state’s unhinged, destructive addiction to mass immigration, with the net annual influx reaching over 900,000 in 2023.
In addition, there has been a dramatic recent surge in the number of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel. As a result, British taxpayers have to fork out £8 million a day on accommodation for
these opportunists, the vast majority of whom are young men of military age with enough money to buy a one-way ticket to England from the people smugglers.
The Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer came to power last year promising to ‘smash the gangs’, but the only thing he looks set to smash is the record for illegal entry, with the number of small-boat migrants this year (over 21,000) already 54 per cent higher than the same period in 2024.
This failure to take control has been a disaster for our social fabric. The images of asylum seekers inhabiting once-prestigious hotels – often in struggling seaside resorts – are potent symbols not only of our economic decline but also the mishandling of the fight against crime. In a spectacular act of self-harm, successive British governments decided we owed a living to millions from North Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia. It is a stance that has led to the import of disaffected migrants, united by their masculinity and entitlement and, for a dangerous few, a hostility to British liberal values, especially on women’s rights.
A brilliant investigation by The Mail on Sunday has exposed the damaging consequences of this policy, which has seen no fewer than 708 charges for criminal offences brought against 312 asylum seekers in 70 taxpayer-funded hotels across the country.
Included in this catalogue of crime are 18 charges of rape and 51 of theft. In one chilling case a Sudanese asylum seeker was jailed last year for trying to rape a woman in the female toilets of a nightclub in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, while he strangled her.
President Donald Trump is ploughing billions into building new immigration detention centres, the most infamous being a facility in Florida dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
Beds behind cages inside the detention centre in the Everglades, which is designed to house 3,000 migrants
The exterior of the Alligator Alcatraz site, which the President was shown around earlier this month
The MoS’s analysis backs up other evidence highlighting the dangers of creating migrant enclaves in some of our most deprived towns. Official data shows that Afghans, for instance, are 20 times more likely to be convicted of sex offences than British citizens, a profoundly worrying point given last week’s revelations that 18,500 Afghans have been settled here after the MoD leaked sensitive information about them.
In fact, 66 nationalities here have higher conviction rates than Britons. The pro-immigration lobby, desperate to maintain their narrative of multi-cultural success, does not like to face such realities. But their retreat into a cocoon of delusion and concealment only feeds the anger of the British population, as happened over the cover-up of the activities of predatory gangs in the north of England, who targeted vulnerable working-class girls.
Only last week, in an echo of last summer’s anti-immigration riots triggered by the Southport killings, anger boiled over at The Bell Hotel in Epping, which is now being used as an asylum centre.
More than 40 protesters mounted a furious demonstration at the venue after an Ethiopian asylum seeker was accused of trying to kiss a schoolgirl as she ate pizza in the town centre, eight days after he arrived in the UK.
Despite the deluge of fashionable official propaganda about the hard-working, law-abiding nature of the newcomers, in truth migrants from outside the EU are far more likely to be unemployed, dependent on welfare, living in social housing or behind bars, than the native British population.
In one remarkable piece of research in 2023, Conservative MP Neil O’Brien revealed that of the two million migrants who settled in Britain from outside Europe over the previous five years, just 15 per cent came to work – a figure that makes a nonsense of the claim by Left-wing campaigners that free movement is the key to prosperity.
In fact, it is the ultimate route to national bankruptcy, especially when 1.2 million migrants are claiming universal credit, as was revealed last week. At a time when the public finances are in dire straits, it is the economics of the madhouse to pay unemployed foreign nationals to live here at the expense of British workers.
Apart from the occasional spasm of bureaucratic tinkering, the PM’s biggest effort in tackling the migrant crisis has been put into reaching bilateral deals with France and Germany. President Macron’s arm was twisted into agreeing a ‘one-in-one-out’ scheme, whereby a small-boat migrant landing in the UK would be swapped with another in France who had a stronger claim to settle here. And German Chancellor Friedrich Merz agreed to amend legislation to arrest people smugglers who stored dinghies in its warehouses.
Paris and Berlin have deigned to make these concessions only because Starmer has ‘reset’ relations with the EU, which has required the UK to hitch her wagon to those of Brussels rule makers on everything from energy prices to food standards.
Had he not done so, Britain’s two ‘allies’ would have continued to abet, or at least fail to stop, the migration crisis at our shores.
Why? Because France and Germany have been far more concerned with pulling Brexit Britain back into the EU’s orbit, and if illegal migration was their principle leverage, then so be it. It’s a ploy as cynical and morally bankrupt as Putin’s funnelling of migrants through Belarus to the Polish border to destabilise the EU.
Whether the measures agreed with Macron and Merz reduce the numbers arriving remains to be seen. What is clear is that Starmer has to find a better way of housing asylum seekers already here.
Labour has made a vague promise to end the hotel model by the end of the Parliament without specifying how. They should look to the US. President Donald Trump is ploughing billions into building new immigration detention centres, the most infamous being a facility in the Florida Everglades dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.
Were centres like these erected in the UK, they would not only remove new arrivals from deprived towns, reducing crime and community friction, but also deter other chancers seeking to come.
The Tories grasped this by housing asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm prison ship. Given that Starmer chose to close it down rather than improve conditions on board, it’s clear he hasn’t the stomach to weather the inevitable controversy around creating more immigration centres.
In the meantime, small communities across Britain are left to fend for themselves as their towns become doss houses for bored young men with alien values honed in the far corners of the world. And their town’s shopkeepers, homeowners and teenage girls remain prey to the inevitable crime that ensues.
