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Telegraph
13 hours ago
- Telegraph
Women will pay the price for Labour's open borders
When property developers applied for permission to turn a former hotel into a 'house in multiple occupation', they claimed it was to accommodate nurses. According to the planning application, the occupants would 'predominantly' be NHS staff who would 'contribute to the local economy'. But instead of being filled with hard-working staff from the nearest hospital, the 17-bedroom property was swiftly packed with new arrivals. Far from breathing new life into a downtrodden area, it became yet another blight – and a new source of anxiety for local women. Mothers and daughters in Barrow-in-Furness have every reason to be fearful. Such is the concern for the safety of female staff working in other migrant hotels in the town that they are said to have been issued with rape alarms. When a concerned resident used freedom of information legislation to find out what was going on, Cumbria Police revealed that in the space of 12 months, more than a dozen potential crimes were linked to 'guests' at the Imperial, including three sex offences. Quite the record for a small premises. There is a mountain of evidence – both official and anecdotal – that what is happening to women and girls in Barrow-in-Furness at the hands of illegal immigrants is happening to women and girls all over the country. The Home Office does not publish crime statistics according to immigration status. Nor are the police required to collect and share such data. Instead, arrests and charges are only recorded by nationality – a system that creates some very convenient ambiguity about how long the perpetrators have lived in this country. When voters are crying out to know just what kind of individuals are pouring across the Channel, and how likely it is that any will ever make a positive contribution to our society, it is an extraordinary omission. Just what are the authorities – along with all those who keep peddling the false narrative that all Channel migrants are good people – trying to hide? What little information is routinely published about crimes by foreign nationals provides a very strong clue. Despite making up less than ten per cent of the UK population, 'foreign nationals' account for around 15 per cent of all sexual offence convictions, including rape. When convictions in which the offender's nationality is 'unknown' – ie not British – are taken into account, that figure rises to almost one quarter (23 per cent) of all sex offences. It is known that only a fraction of sexual assault and rape complaints ever reach court. How many more female victims of sex offences by foreign nationals, particularly the occupants of migrant hotels, are out there, never getting justice? Among the best witnesses to the disgusting attitude of some asylum seekers towards women are female staff in migrant hotels. Unfortunately, they cannot speak out. Forced to sign confidentiality contracts, their experiences at the hands of rude, leering, entitled occupants of migrant hotels have never been documented. Some time ago, on condition of anonymity, I interviewed a cleaner at one of these places in Derby. She too spoke of rape alarms; harassment; and bowls of free condoms in the hotel foyer. One police force has felt the need to draw up a PowerPoint presentation to educate local asylum seekers about British culture. It includes recognising that women 'have the same rights as men' so 'must be treated with respect and courtesy'. What on earth are we doing continuing to provide for foreigners who are so ignorant and disrespectful that they have to be told that 'violence of any kind is not acceptable'? Crimes that do reach court offer a terrifying glimpse of the nightmare our leaders have created. Witness the case of the Qatari camel herder, who as a member of a conservative Bedouin tribe, had never had 'any meaningful contact' with a woman except his mother before coming to the UK to receive treatment for a rare heart condition. During treatment at a clinic in Marylebone linked to the Royal Brompton Hospital in Chelsea, he dragged a woman into a disabled toilet and attempted to rape her. In court, he blamed his 'limited interaction' with females in the Middle East, where his lawyer says he prefers a 'desert environment.' In another case a 29 year old Channel migrant cited 'cultural misunderstanding' and language barriers after luring a teenage girl behind a pub and raping her. The victim had repeatedly told him she was only 15 years old. A cursory internet search reveals umpteen other such cases – along with some very welcome honesty from Baroness Casey. Her report into the grooming gangs revealed that asylum seekers and foreign nationals make up a 'significant proportion' of live police investigations. Finally, someone in a position of power, telling it as it is! Neither the Home Office, nor the police, can justify continuing to hide what is going on. As thousands more undocumented young males continue to pour across the Channel, it is women and girls who are at most risk.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
The racial violence in Ballymena repeats a pattern that's blighted Britain for years. We must wake up to that
In early June, the violence began. Rumours of a foreigner assaulting a local woman resulted in groups roaming through a small British town, breaking windows of homes belonging to 'outsiders'. A few days later, the police attempted to stop mobs from reaching another nearby multiracial area. Eventually they broke through, ransacking shops and burning down a house, while local media reported that the violence had developed into 'something like a fever'. Sound familiar? This isn't Ballymena, the County Antrim town in Northern Ireland that has seen several nights of unrest in which immigrant homes were attacked after reports of an alleged sexual assault on a local girl by two teenagers, who had a Romanian interpreter read them the charges. These incidents actually took place more than a century ago, during the summer of 1919, as racial violence spread throughout south Wales, eventually reaching Cardiff and the diverse district of Tiger Bay. Back then, a number of things were blamed for the violence, among them a lack of jobs and housing for returning white servicemen, many of whom were disgusted by the relationships between local women and black men who had served in the merchant navy and made Wales their home during the first world war. The media also played their part. The South Wales Daily News claimed that it had never seen 'so black a blot on an otherwise fair and thriving town', before suggesting a fire like the Great Fire of London 'would be a godsend' that could cleanse Tiger Bay (now known as Butetown). In Ballymena, the spark was the alleged attempted rape, coupled with the recent influx of immigrants who rioters said have 'invaded', 'infested' and 'ruined' their community. In the 2001 census, just 14,300 people, or 0.8% of the overall population of Northern Ireland, belonged to a minority ethnic group. By 2021, it was 65,600 people, or 3.4%. Still small numbers compared with England (18%), or Scotland (11%), but each of those countries saw a similar outburst of racial violence when immigration was at a comparable level. England also witnessed riots in 1919. There was violence in North Shields and Liverpool, where a sailor called Charles Wooten drowned after being chased by a mob. Liverpool again saw Ballymena-esque scenes in 1948 when a seamen's hostel was assaulted and in 1972 when a racially mixed housing estate was attacked by skinheads. (Housing is still a flashpoint; last year, at least eight African families – half of them including nurses – were forced to flee an estate in Antrim town.) In between those incidents in Liverpool there were the race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in London in 1958, followed by the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in the capital by teddy boys a year later. Throughout the 1970s, the rise of the far-right National Front, which had 12,000 members at its peak, created a dangerous environment in England: the historian Peter Fryer estimated that between 1976 and 1981, 31 people had been murdered by racists in Southall, Brick Lane (both in London), Swindon, Manchester and Leeds. Politicians also inflamed the issue: in 1978, in an attempt to outflank the NF, Margaret Thatcher claimed in an interview that 'People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.' There's a much more recent history of violence in England too: last summer, mobs attacked mosques, hotels housing migrants and the homes of 'foreigners' in Hull, Hartlepool, Manchester and Liverpool after the murder of three children in Southport. Scotland also had its, albeit delayed, racial reckoning. Although Glasgow saw race riots in 1919, it wasn't until 1989 and the murder of Somali student Axmed Sheekh that a group of activists and Black Scots forced a conversation about racism north of the border, which until then had been presented as an 'English disease'. Anti-racist activists were told that there wasn't a problem because there simply weren't any black or brown people in Scotland. In 1991, ethnic minorities accounted for 1% of the population, but a Runnymede Trust report showed that there had been a huge spike in racist assaults north of the border as these tiny communities became more visible. There's an established pattern that Ballymena is a part of: an influx of immigrants, hostility to their presence, a denial that there is a problem with xenophobia, then a spark followed by indiscriminate violence. But many people in Britain can't see this pattern – or choose not to. The years 1981, 2001 and 2011 linger in the memory and are what many people think of when they hear the phrase 'race riot' in a British context. Each one of those years saw unrest in black and brown communities triggered by policing (1981), far-right activity (2001) and the killing of Mark Duggan (2011), followed by hand-wringing and commentators wondering where Britain went wrong on race. The events of 1919, 1948 and 1972 dissolve quickly into the forgotten past, footnotes at best; they are certainly not woven into the national story of racial violence. These incidents – of white violence – are presented in isolation. In Ballymena, it's impossible to understand what's happening without engaging with the recent history of Northern Ireland. The fact that most of the people attacking immigrants and the police were Protestants whose own families emigrated to Ireland generations before places the violence not just in the context of the Troubles, but also British colonialism. But they're also part of a continuum, one that links different eras and parts of the United Kingdom. This history of violence is part of an established pattern that isn't inevitable but instead manufactured by a combination of political failings, distorted media coverage and opportunism by the far right. It is this context that made Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech so offensive. That language isn't benign; it helps set the stage for another inevitable spate of attacks. Less than a month after the speech, Ballymena exploded. Now the rhetoric doesn't just seem opportunistic but dangerous, a shameful decision that now sits alongside Thatcher's 'swamped' comments as a political intervention that further causes divisions for short-term gains. The NF collapsed in the 80s, but today Reform – led by a man whose political hero is Enoch Powell – is pulling Labour to the right. What happens next in Northern Ireland is crucial. History shows that in the UK it's often the victims of racial violence who are blamed. After 1919 in Wales, there was a voluntary repatriation scheme, while authorities installed a new piece of draconian immigration legislation, which forced all seamen to carry an identity card, known as a 'certificate of nationality and identity issued to a British Colonial Seaman'. It was a measure that treated them like criminals. Immigrants have already started to leave Ballymena but, as in Cardiff, many will stay. Their lives will be shaped by whether or not political leadership learns the lessons of Britain's history of racial violence. Lanre Bakare is an arts and culture correspondent for the Guardian. He will be discussing his new book, We Were There, at the Southbank Centre in London on 11 July
