More than a thousand foreign felons roam free instead of being bound and deported to the tin-pot republics from whence they came. And the nation is afraid, very afraid. The fiasco couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The UK is in the grip of a terminal moral panic over crime and disorder; terrorism alerts are high and illegal immigrants are believed by millions of Britons to be hiding under their beds, in those places once occupied by Commies.
I too am alarmed about the chaos and lawlessness in our society, about what Islamicist bombers may do next and the effects of the trafficking of desperate humans into these overcrowded islands, where they “disappear” and have to survive like rats in sewers. While scandal rocks the Home Office, dread and wrath course through the areas inhabited by immigrants, refugees and legitimate asylum seekers.
Every time there is a heinous murder, assault or case of brutality I find myself hoping fervently for the perpetrator not to be black or Asian or an asylum seeker. When they are, my feelings of revulsion cannot be described in a civilized newspaper. The bastards feed racists who are always on the prowl, seeking reasons to be hateful. This latest failure of the system means more collective punishment and aggravation. The loathing will spread from the dreadful offenders to the rest of us.
Fatima, a refugee and Sudanese interpreter, describes the feeling well in an e-mail: “Why didn’t they deport these criminals? We don’t want them here. Now look, we will have to suffer — they think we are all crooks, drug dealers and rapists. They already look at us as if we are. For 15 years I have lived like a good person, pay taxes, educate my children. But it is not enough. They wait to catch us even when we have done nothing.”
Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, rightly warns about the potent mix fueling the current frenzy over the released prisoners: “It combines an attack on two groups of people we hate most, foreigners and criminals.” The two are conflated. Only evil outsiders commit crimes. If we could rid ourselves of their pernicious presence we could once more leave milk money out on the doorstep and remake that innocent time and place before the Empire Windrush arrived.
Almost everybody who is a somebody has piled in to add heat to the present crisis — the two opposition parties, the media and campaign groups, all using this government failure to grab attention and score points.
Debauched language and wild claims add toxicity to the immigration debate and poison attitudes and lives. The cold David Davis warns we are now unprotected. Like a vampire, Migration Watch’s Sir Andrew Green rises to dig his fangs in — it is once again all about too many immigrants swilling around in his country.
Calm will return shortly one hopes and some self-reflection. The non-Britons released — from what we know — had done time and were treated just like the 95,000 other ex-inmates of prisons who are let out each year. Fifty percent of them are recidivists and will reoffend. Both groups pose exactly the same danger. But always, the non-national is regarded as the greater threat.
When any homegrown bandit commits rapes and thefts abroad, the same deep vein prejudices arise. For the British public he is our boy in an alien, barbaric place. Imagine how the country might have reacted if Fred and Rosemary West had been Somalis living in Hackney. Instead of being psychological deviants with inner stories, we would have had Somalia itself on trial, and its exported villainy.
All I ask is that we have common standards. Robert Winder, in his book Bloody Foreigner, puts in a plea for this too. “British people can be flamboyant or stolid; honest or treacherous, selfless or sleazy. In the end we may have to admit immigrants are just like us.” I can vouch for that — being both British and a bloody irritating foreigner in one body.
