Latest news with #BrokenBritain
Telegraph
28-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The secrecy on migrant crime statistics must end
There is nothing more emblematic of Broken Britain than our porous borders. If an island nation can't secure its borders, what can it do for God's sake? Middle England is in revolt at the persistent failure to stop the boats (yes, under multiple governments – as I would be the first to admit). They have been made to endure the costs of illegal migration for far too long and their patience snapped long ago. When I've been in quiet towns this past week, I've heard their worries about asylum hotels. It's the talk at the school gates, at the hairdresser's, in the pub. 'I know you're a father, Mr Jenrick,' a woman said to me, walking her dog beside the harbour in Fareham. 'Would you want an asylum hotel on your street?' I don't want my young daughters to share a neighbourhood with men who broke into this country illegally, about whom we know next to nothing. And I don't want anyone else's family to have it forced upon them either. First and foremost, because they have no right to be here, having entered in flagrant breach of our laws. But it's not just that. They impose economic costs on cash-strapped councils, diverting resources away from Brits in need. They totally change the character of areas. And there's another, darker reason, one that few will confront: small boats are fuelling crime and making everyone less safe. The press reports only seem to get worse: drug dealers, rapists, murderers and even terror suspects are arriving on small boats. If you're unlucky enough to have an asylum hotel in your area, you are almost certain to have been impacted by the petty crime that accompanies them. Somehow it's still a taboo for the Government to admit it publicly. The furthest the Home Office has gone to acknowledge the problem is issuing guidance to migrants in hotels explaining what sexual abuse is and that it's illegal. But sensible countries do not bury their heads in the sand. When I visited the notorious Eagle Pass checkpoint on the US-Mexican border in 2023, America's border force openly displayed the data on the criminal pasts of those they intercepted. In that small section of the border 113 convicted sex offenders had been intercepted that year; across the whole of the southern border they had stopped 15,267 convicted criminals in total. The lesson is that when the unfiltered truth about illegal migration is out there, the authorities have no choice but to respond. This issue propelled Trump to the Presidency with a mandate to end the disorder. Just as in America, the border crisis here is a national security emergency. But instead of trusting the public with the truth, this Labour Government has force-fed the public the lie that the majority of people arriving are women and children. Fact check: 75 per cent have been adult men. In our topsy-turvy world, the British public are asked to deny reality. The facts about crime are covered up because of a toxic combination of bureaucratic inertia and weak leaders who pussyfoot around the truth. It's flat out wrong. I tabled an amendment to lift the veil of secrecy over migrant crime under the last Government and I have just done so again under Keir Starmer. I won't stop until the Ministry of Justice publishes the background of criminals by their nationality, country of birth, visa status, asylum status and their method of entry to the UK. Our membership of outdated international treaties like the ECHR will look trivial when it's clear the safety of our communities – of our children and loved ones – is at stake. We have enough problems with law and order already without making it worse. When the British state finally acknowledges that, they might just be shamed into stopping the boats.
Telegraph
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Reform have shown they still cannot be taken seriously
They could have enjoyed a nice easy win on the Afghan data leak. As former Tory MP Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked on the Daily T podcast he co-presented with me on Wednesday: 'This is very helpful for Nigel Farage because Nigel can point to this and say it doesn't matter who you vote for; doesn't matter if it's the Conservatives or Labour – they don't want you to know anything, they don't want you, the people, to know the uniparty wants to protect information. 'So I think this is damaging both for my party and for Labour.' Reform could have simply responded to this shambles by saying: successive governments have not just cocked up but covered up a taxpayer funded scandal that has resulted in thousands of Afghans being granted asylum in the UK. We now don't know whether some of them might actually be Taliban terrorists. Meanwhile, brave Afghans who actually served alongside British troops may have been left behind. This once again highlights an epic establishment failure in which both the Tories and Labour are complicit. If you want to fix this brazen example of broken Britain, then vote for us. But they didn't do that. Instead, they succeeded in striking an extraordinary own goal by once again descending into petty point scoring on social media. Clouded, as ever, by their desire to 'destroy the Conservatives' – even the ones they agree with – they decided to turn their guns on former home secretary Suella Braverman and former immigration minister Robert Jenrick. Chairman Zia Yusuf, who seems to be developing a dangerous habit of tweeting before thinking, led the charge, posting: 'When the Tories were booted out of office the public didn't even know of their worst crime. That two of their 'good ones' were Home Sec and Immigration Minister when the government got a super injunction is a poetic irony. RIP the Tory Party.' Their worst crime? How ridiculous. Yes, this was a gargantuan blunder, and I cannot for the life of me understand why an injunction was imposed in the first place when the original D-Notice, a non-legal agreement with the press not to publish information related to national security, might have sufficed. There was certainly no need for the imposition of a superinjunction, which prohibits disclosure not only of the underlying information but also of the existence of the order itself, not least for what Defence Secretary John Healey later admitted in an internal memo were 'political and reputational considerations'. Taxpayers now face footing the bill for hefty compensation claims by those on the list, of which 23,900 will be relocated to the UK at enormous cost. But is Yusuf seriously suggesting that no measures whatsoever should have been taken to protect those named from being killed by the Taliban? I'm not just referring to around 1,200 brave Afghans who served as badged members of the CF333 and CF444 – the 'Triples' – alongside British troops. What about the spies and members of the SAS and SBS whose personal details were also exposed? Yusuf claims that 'Ministers who knew about the Afghan scandal had immunity from the super injunction' but that's not quite right. The absolute privilege for freedom of speech, granted by Article IX of the Bill of Rights 1688, places a significant responsibility on parliamentarians to exercise it in the public interest. Moreover, the sub judice rule may also have applied in this case because court proceedings were ongoing – the MoD had appealed to the Court of Appeal. As well as posting countless messages on social media, Yusuf has taken to the airwaves to describe it as 'probably the biggest scandal, biggest political cover up, certainly in my lifetime', claiming it 'begs the question of treason'. Really? Bigger than infected blood, Horizon and rape gangs? How about the expenses scandal? Cash for questions? Cash for honours? Cash for influence? Cash for access? I'd add in the Covid fraud scandal, in which one of Yusuf's own former colleagues, James McMurdock, has now become embroiled. The public as a whole doesn't appear to be as exercised about this as those in Yusuf's social media bubble. Granted, Reform voters are more likely than the general public to think transparency was the priority. But when it comes to the electorate as a whole, almost half (49 per cent) think it was more important to evacuate the Afghan nationals who had worked with British forces, even if this meant covering up the breach, with just one in five disagreeing. Reform cannot have it both ways. They cannot argue that it's all The Blob's fault – and then only blame politicians like Jenrick and Braverman and not the incompetent civil servants who presided over this shambles. We know why they're doing this – they hate Tories despite both Farage and his deputy Richard Tice both once being one. In one swipe, Yusuf described former defence secretary Ben Wallace, as 'the ultimate Tory', whatever that is supposed to mean. This is a man who fought for Queen and country in several armed conflicts. He wanted to protect British troops and the Afghans who served with them from being murdered by terrorists. Guess what? Tice agreed with him at the time, tweeting: 'We must protect the brave Afghans who helped us and their families by settling them in the UK'. What makes Wallace a 'typical Tory' – but not Dame Andrea Jenkyns and Sir Jake Berry when all three served under mass migration loving Boris Johnson? Yusuf added for good measure: 'The list of former Tory ministers who should defect to Reform is shorter than the list that should probably be in jail.' As a result of the attack on Braverman, her husband Rael, who defected to Reform in December, announced he was resigning from the party. There is now surely no chance Braverman – who had been top of the Tory defection watch list – will jump ship. While that may suit Yusuf, who many consider responsible for Rupert Lowe's departure after the member for Great Yarmouth loudly criticised the impact of mass migration on UK culture, I'm not sure it serves Reform. Nor do these repeated ad hominem attacks on Tories they not-so-secretly agree with on almost everything. Righties can see through this nonsense, which only emboldens Labour, the Greens and God forbid, newly enfranchised Jeremy Corbyn. Such is the animus that Yusuf apologised after his X account liked an anti-Semitic post targeting Robert Jenrick and his family. It's all so unedifying. If Reform really wants to be taken seriously it should stop behaving like an anti Conservative protest movement - not least when it will need the votes of these 'typical Tories' to win power.
Daily Mail
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
JIM SILLARS: SNP settled for mediocrity and paid the price with this result
The by-election: two winners, one major casualty and a lot of questions answered. Against a background of anger in a 'Broken Britain' alongside 18 years of a SNP government (the last ten seeing ferry fiascos, a failing NHS, declarations of a housing emergency without emergency action, falling school standards and more time spent politically on trans identity and dodging the definition of a woman than on child poverty) the electorate in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse gave their verdict. There is a sea change taking place in UK and Scottish life. People have had enough of the virtue signallers; they are fed up with lectures about what they can and cannot say; they have come to despise spin as a substitute for action; they are no longer afraid of being labelled bigots and racists for strongly opposing illegal immigration. Reform has caught that tide, and their Hamilton by-election and local equivalents is the result. Reform, which came within 869 votes of the SNP, accomplished its two objectives: find out if it could pass the acid test of significant support via the ballot box in Scotland, and if so, become a serious participant in the Scottish political scene. It enters the fray for the 2026 Scottish general election in the happy position of having a base, no government record to be attacked on, and opposition parties not understanding that it has risen because of their failures allied to their woke agenda and still clueless on how to combat it. If the parties Reform now threatens do not grasp their contribution to its advance, and stay with their by-election tactic of denouncing it as 'racist' and 'poisonous,' they will make the same mistake as the Democrats in the USA who, in demonising Trump, failed to realise that they had substituted lecturing to the people instead of listening to them. Perhaps even the Greens will look at their derisory 695 votes at Hamilton and reflect on the role they have played in the lecturing game at Holyrood. The big winner was, of course, Labour, who took the seat. The announcement of the result must have been sweet music to the ears of Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie, given all the pundits fell for the John Swinney claim that they were being outclassed and heading for a poor third place. Being umbilically attached to the unpopular UK Labour government was thought to be their fatal weak point. That proved not so. Even with a candidate who, as his reading of his victory speech showed, is not exactly inspirational, they took a safe SNP seat. What makes Labour's win important is that Hamilton is smack in the middle of the central belt, where lies the seat of Scottish political power, and where the SNP-Labour contest will be settled. A repeat of Hamilton in 2026 and Labour will be, at least, a minority government or the majority in a coalition. But for the SNP this was a very bad result. John Swinney, whose manifest failure to read the street shows a man with a tin ear and poor judgement, unfit for the leadership role the misguided SNP membership put him in. Their 7,957 votes at 29.4 per cent share of the vote was down by 16.8 per cent and much lower than the 33 per cent they have been getting in opinion polls. The old adage you reap what you sow remains true. The Sturgeon legacy of elevating mediocrity above talent turned the SNP government into a calamity for Scotland. On every issue that matters to the people, tax, jobs, education, housing, health, roads not built, and chid poverty they are failures. They got the defeat they deserved. Under the dead hand of Swinney there is more of that to come.
