If migrants need to be told rape is bad, why are we welcoming them?
Shabana Mahmood receives a huge amount of praise, particularly from the right.
And she has unquestionably done some sensible and brave things. But I think it is now obvious that she has failed, and failed lamentably, to stop the boats. Sure, numbers are down, but most Brits wish for illegal asylum to stop completely: no more boats, no more young men, no more crime — 44,000 more arrived in the year to March 2026.
Mahmood’s latest attempt to manage the scale of this influx has been to issue guidance to migrants, living in hotels and HMOs at our expense, about how they can assimilate into the laws of the place into which they have just broken in. It is satire without intending to be, Jonathan Swift without the punchline.
The nine-page pamphlet was written in English, but we didn’t find how many of the recipients are capable of reading it and, if not, whether it will be translated into Somali, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi, Yoruba and more. Worst of all, there was no clarification on what the home secretary intends to do if these people don’t bother reading the pamphlet or just rip it up in the face of whoever gives it to them. After all, she cannot deport them for doing so, nor put them in prison, since human rights laws and international treaties prevent it.
This, of course, touches on a deeper truth: namely, that a great deal of government “action” these days is designed not to cure the underlying disease but to merely manage the symptoms. You might call it the Kafkaesque stage in the evolution of western civilisation, a system built on rationality, patriotism and law but now drowning in the quicksand of moral universalism, hyper-liberalism and other mush. It makes me weep to see how deep we are in the swamp of our own delusions.
But what is most remarkable about this pamphlet is its tone and content, perhaps most fairly described as “Jack and Jill for medievalists”. Don’t rape women. Don’t mutilate their genitals.
Don’t copulate with children. I’m paraphrasing but only a bit. Are politicians like Mahmood so blind that they can’t see that if illegal migrants need such instructions, it is rank betrayal of the British people not to instantly deport them? You’ll note the word I used there: “betrayal”. It might seem pejorative, maybe morally excessive. Perhaps a decade ago, I would have agreed. Today? I am past caring. Nigel Farage is not my favourite politician by any means, but on this topic he has been consistently and unequivocally right. He has even dragged the Conservative Party, which failed for years, towards the shores of moral sanity.
The solution, I believe, is tolerably clear. Change all laws and treaties that thwart robust border control. Detain those arriving. Sign return agreements with nations amenable to them. All the rest, deport to Rwanda or other nations willing to do a deal. Properly operationalised, this will work.
Everything else — smashing the gangs, bribing the French, “one in, one out” — is displacement activity. The only way to smash the gangs is to smash their business model. And having been to Calais and spoken to dozens of African men living in a warehouse in sight of Dover, I can say frankly: nobody is paying £5k to a smuggler to end up back in Mogadishu. But what about the rest of the politicians, civil service and lanyard class who seem determined to keep this evil system in place? Well, perhaps I might offer some simple instructions about what it means to be a public servant modelled on the government’s own pamphlet. Call it Jack and Jill for hyper-liberals. Here goes. Your first duty is to serve your own citizens. Not people from Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan or Nigeria. The British people.
It makes me weep to see how deep we are in the swamp of our own delusion
Oh, and the nation you serve is not just a territory. It is a home. Our home.
It is where we live and work, and where ritual, community, family, and other concepts we might assemble under the rubric of “culture” come together to weave the fabric of a life. Our life. The only life we have and which unfolds in concord with those with whom we share it.
Without borders, we are not a nation, and without a nation, we are nothing.
We are but tribes or clans, scattered here and there, pipsqueak groups unable to operate at scale or to defend what is precious. To open our borders in the name of “compassion” to people, some of whom hate our values and wish to destroy them, is to place your virtue above our safety. It is a form of self-annihilating madness dressed up as enlightenment.
Only the myopic will infer from the above that I am in favour of slamming the doors to those in need. The question of how many of the world’s desperate to allow in is strictly different from the mechanism whereby we take them. If I was seeking public office I would argue for a generous attitude, bringing in people (including, yes, women and children) based on need and cultural fit.
This is a world away from cravenly acquiescing in the criminality of mainly young men who jump the queue, break our laws, and who departed a safe country to get here.
Last week, two Afghan migrants were convicted for raping a woman at knifepoint as she stargazed in a park. Is she not right to feel betrayed? And what of the family of Rhiannon Whyte, stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a Sudanese asylum seeker, or the family of the 12-year-old girl from Nuneaton who was abducted and raped by an Afghan? What of the hundreds more who have suffered at the hands of illegal entrants, the data on whose crimes are still not collected or published, perhaps out of fear of what they would show?
What is now painfully obvious is that decades of illegal immigration can be measured not just in ruinous fiscal cost and crime but attrition to the concept of nation itself. A nation (perhaps this could go in the pamphlet too) isn’t a landmass with a flag but a covenant in which each of us accepts obligations we did not choose in return for protections we have a duty to earn. When thousands enter unasked, having consented to nothing, it makes a mockery of the web of reciprocity and mutual obligation our grandparents understood implicitly.
Farage gets this to his core, and Kemi Badenoch belatedly too, which is why they want to dismantle the entire asylum system. Mahmood, for all her talk, has merely tinkered around the edges — not unlike her predecessors. Even her recent idea of deporting migrants who fail the asylum process to third-party hubs misses the point since deterrence requires instant deportation. It is why, for me, there is only one word to describe this multi-decade failure. And, yes, it begins with “B”.
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