‘It's not racist to ask who is committing rapes' says broadcaster Alex Phillips
On the latest Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson speak to broadcaster and journalist Alex Phillips about her documentary for the think-tank, The New Culture Forum , 'Heresies, Britain's Silent Rape Explosion'.
In her documentary, Phillips uses figures provided through Freedom of Information requests to better understand who the perpetrators of sexual assaults are. As she explains, the data was not always easy to acquire: ' When you appeal to police forces to ask for breakdowns of crimes by nationality, very often they will tell you we record that data on the victims, but we don't record that data on the perpetrators.
'Across European big cities, and capital cities that have bigger populations of immigrant communities, you see the statistics leap up, with two thirds of all incidents of women being attacked are being carried out by people who have come into the country.'
Fearing the threat to women and girls will only increase, Alex does not think politicians are doing enough.
'They're too lily-livered to take any affirmative action. And so the only thing they can do is attack anybody trying to whistleblow on the issue, to try and essentially bury it and not make matters worse by provoking further outrage.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Evening Standard
32 minutes ago
- Evening Standard
It's time for a brutal truth: JD Vance was right about free speech in Britain
In fact anyone who thinks we don't have a free speech problem hasn't been paying attention. Police arrest about 30 people a day for potentially offensive online posts — the result of thousands of hours spent trawling social media rather than, you know, getting out to catch actual criminals. If the respectable Telegraph columnist, Allison Pearson, could be visited at home by two coppers for a tweet about Palestinian protests, none of us is safe. In his post, Rubio's aide Samson mentioned the cases of two anti-abortion activists, Livia Tossici-Bolt and Adam Smith-Connor, who were arrested in Britain for 'silently praying outside abortion clinics' as evidence of 'concerning trends'. That, I'd say, is an understatement. The arrests — and £20,000 fine in the case of Tossici-Bolt — were the consequence of a law banning anything that might resemble dissent, even silently, even in thought, within 150 metres of an abortion clinic. It's self-evidently at the expense of free speech on a profoundly serious matter of conscience.
Glasgow Times
2 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Glasgow council 'fails to enforce law' on dump site years on
The railway cutting in North Glasgow, behind Claddens Street, has been a fly-tipping site for more than two decades, causing a headache for locals. Emails obtained exclusively through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed that the council has been in communication with Reigart Contracts Ltd - the owner of the site - since September 2017. Kenny Nisbet and Dorothy McFarland (Image: Colin Mearns) Glasgow council fails to enforce law on dump site years on (Image: Newsquest) (Image: Colin Mearns) The local authority first threatened to enforce Section 59 of the Environmental Protection Act of 1990 on February 8, 2018, saying it would make the move the next week. According to this law, the council can serve a notice to the occupier of the land to clean up the waste. Four days later, a Reigart representative called this action "unnecessary" and asked for a phone call. After this, there was a discussion between the parties about a cleanup. However, those who live in the area claim this never happened. The emails also revealed that council employees repeatedly admitted the dumping had "become an issue" and locals were pushing for action. Throughout this exchange, officials also stated they are keen to "maintain positive dialogue" with the firm. Since then, the local authority has also attempted to get in touch with the company multiple times without success. Residents are outraged at the lack of follow-through and say the emails are an "absolute waste of time and money" without any results. Parkhouse Community Council member Kenny Nisbet said: "It's just ridiculous. For 20 years, we have been going on about this. "We have been trying for a long time but they kept refusing to do it. "The maddening thing is, the company is not even based in Glasgow, they are from Coatbridge." In 2024, in an email to Mr Nisbet, an environmental health officer said the team has "taken the decision to also look at alternative solutions to enforcement for the disused railway". READ NEXT: We visited a notorious fly-tipping site - it's shocking what we found there 'It's appalling': Residents fume at lack of action on historic fly-tipping site (Image: Colin Mearns) (Image: Colin Mearns) (Image: Colin Mearns) The community council has been asking for a proper cleanup for decades and said they feel like "hitting their heads off a brick wall" trying to force the council to serve the notice, which they are legally entitled to do. Mr Nisbet, a resident of more than 50 years, confirmed he has submitted several complaints to the council about the handling of the case and has contacted six local politicians and several public health groups and organisations. A major worry of the group is that, along with household items such as wardrobes, garbage and pieces of furniture, unknown and potentially dangerous substances are also being left at the site. When the Glasgow Times visited the area, which is a former railway cutting, it was littered with dumped objects, including an ironing board, a scooter, Christmas trees and more. (Image: Colin Mearns) (Image: Colin Mearns) A council spokesperson said: 'Fly-tipping has unfortunately been a long-standing issue at this disused railway line in the Parkhouse area. 'It appears that a number of residents in adjoining properties dump waste from their gardens into the former railway cutting and waste is also fly-tipped at other points along this space. 'Due to the steep embankment and the thick overgrowth, removing fly-tipped waste from this site raises highly challenging health and safety risks for staff. 'However, we have previously worked with the major owner of the site to remove waste from the railway line and would do so again in future. 'We understand the ambition of the major owner is to develop the site for housing but we are unaware of any proposals at this stage. 'We will continue to engage with residents to ensure their waste is disposed of properly. 'Where evidence is secured that identifies those responsible for any fly-tipping incident, including eye witness accounts, we will take enforcement action.'
Spectator
9 hours ago
- Spectator
Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I. His book – a guide to the nature of British intellectual curiosity since the mid-16th century – begins there, just as England had undergone a liberation from a dominant European authority: the shaking off of the influence of the Roman Catholic church and the advent of the Reformation, and the new opportunities that offered for the people. He describes how a culture based largely on poetry and on the court of Elizabeth then redirected the prevailing intellectual forces of the time. This affected not just literature (Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson) but also helped develop an interest in science that grew remarkably throughout the next few centuries. The 'imagination' of Watson's title is not merely the creative artistic imagination, but also that of scientists and inventors and, indeed, of people adept at both. The book is, according to its footnotes, based on secondary sources, so those well read in the history of the intellect in Britain since the Reformation will find much that is familiar. There is the odd surprise, such as one that stems from the book's occasional focus on the British empire and the need felt today to discuss its iniquities. Watson writes that the portion of the British economy based on the slave trade (which must not be conflated with empire) was between 1 per cent and 1.4 per cent. He also writes that for much of the era of slavery the British had a non-racial view of it, since their main experience of the odious trade was of white people being captured by Barbary pirates and held to ransom. While this cannot excuse the barbarism endured by Africans shipped by British (and other) slavers across the Atlantic, it lends some perspective to a question in serious danger of losing any vestige of one. Watson does not come down on one side or the other in the empire debate, eschewing the 'balance sheet' approach taken by historians such as Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson; but he devotes too much of the last section of his book to the question, when other intellectual currents in the opening decades of the 21st century might have been more profitably explored, not least the continuing viability of democracy. Earlier on, he gives much space to an analysis of Edward Said, and questions such as whether Jane Austen expressed her antipathy to slavery sufficiently clearly in the novel Mansfield Park. But then some of Watson's own analyses of writers and thinkers are not always easily supported. He is better on the 18th century – dealing well with the Scottish enlightenment (giving a perfectly nuanced account of Adam Smith) and writers such as Burke and Gibbon – than he appears to be on the 19th. He gives Carlyle his due, but cites an article in a learned American journal from 40 years ago to justify his claim that Carlyle's 'reputation took a knock' in 1849 with the publication of his Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. Watson says readers were offended by the use of the term 'Quashee' to describe a black man. They may well, if so, have been unsettled by the still less palatable title that the Discourse was subsequently given, which was The Nigger Question: it appeared thus in a 1853 pamphlet and in the Centenary Edition of Carlyle's works in 1899. That indicates the Discourse did Carlyle's reputation no lasting harm at the time, whatever it may have done since. In seeking to pack so much into fewer than 500 pages of text, Watson does skate over a few crucial figures. Some of his musings on empire might have been sacrificed to make more space for George Orwell, for example. A chapter in whose title his name appears features just one brief paragraph on him, about Homage to Catalonia, and later there is a page or so on Animal Farm, which says nothing new. Of Orwell's extensive and mould-breaking journalism there is nothing – somewhat surprising in a book about the British imagination when dealing with one of its leading exponents of the past century. Watson emphasises scientific discovery and innovation, and the effect on national life and ideas caused by the Industrial Revolution. These are all essential consequences of our intellectual curiosity, and he is right to conclude that the historic significance of Britain in these fields is immense. He includes league tables of Nobel prizewinners by nation in which Britain shows remarkably well. But these prizes are not the only means by which the contribution to civilisation and progress by a people are measured. There are notable omissions. Although Watson talks about the elitist nature of 'high culture' – such as Eliot and The Waste Land – he does not discuss how far the British imagination, and the British contribution to world civilisation, might have advanced had we taken the education of the masses more seriously earlier. We were, until the Butler Education Act of 1944, appalling at developing our human resources, and have not been much better since. It is surprising that there is no discussion of British music, one of the greatest fruits of the imagination of the past 150 years. And there is no analysis of the role of architecture, which, given its impact and its centrality to many people's idea of themselves as British, surely merited examination. The book shows extensive and intelligent reading, but trying to cram so much information and commentary into one volume has not been a complete success, or resulted in something entirely coherent.
