When is Britain going to realise that some migrants are better than others? - "One lady in Tamworth told me she had started avoiding the canals there after walking them for 30 years; in Darlington, a pensioner confessed to me she was frightened that the sheer number of young men crossing the Channel put her at greater risk of robbery. Certain commentators are quick to dismiss coverage of such fears as dog-whistle journalism. But, at the very least, an emerging pattern of evidence raises questions. Although mass immigration is now falling, the 2.4 million-plus surge in the foreign-born population between 2021 and 2024 was accompanied by a 62 per cent spike in foreign nationals convicted for sexual offences. Court reports also show judges linking the violent crimes of foreign nationals with their disturbed life histories. When convicting Afghan asylum seeker Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai for murdering a 21-year-old man in a row over an e-scooter the judge stated: “There can be no doubt as to the effect growing up in the horrors of Afghanistan would have on a young child.” The trial of Haybe Cabdiraxmaan Nur, who stabbed a man to death at a Lloyds bank in Derby last year, established that the Somali immigrant suffered from PTSD , had a “difficult upbringing” in his motherland. He is a member of the discriminated-against Gabooye tribe and left the country after his partner was executed in front of him in an “honour” killing. People from conflict zones and failed states pose a challenge to national cohesion. This is for the plain reason that it takes more for an individual from Afghanistan to integrate into British society than someone from, say, Germany. If you or your parents have come of age in a society that has no rule of law, no functional civic institutions, and no prospects for meaningful economic participation, common sense follows that you may struggle to assimilate into a society that does. Many of the older Somalis now in Britain witnessed the nadir of the Siad Barre regime’s collapse – a time when Somalia had no police, schools were shut and violence was the organising mechanism of everyday life. It’s no secret that the collapse of the communist regime in Albania left a vacuum filled in highland areas in the 1990s by the medieval Kanun social code, based on honour, fierce loyalty, kinship and blood feuds. The brutal truth is that we may need to shift towards a far more strict and explicitly discriminatory immigration policy, accepting fewer applicants from conflict zones or failed states. The Government has put an emergency visa brake on people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan. But this is to close a loophole that people are exploiting, as they apply for student visas to later claim asylum. What we need is a decisive shift, where we exclude or penalise applications from certain countries of origin. Some might protest that this would constitute a catastrophic moral failure. After all, asylum seekers from war-torn states who have experienced violence and persecution arguably have the strongest refugee claims. But this needs to be weighed up against the national risk. We are spending more putting asylum seekers up in hotels than we are on humanitarian aid in the home countries of the same refugees. The £4bn that we splurged on the asylum system last year would be enough to revolutionise Afghanistan’s irrigation system, converting millions of acres of desert into farmland, or overhaul Somalia’s power grid, jump-starting its coastal economy. It astounds me that so many metropolitan bien-pensants have such a hard time grasping that the West would have a far greater impact on the world’s injustices if it shifted its focus from taking in the world’s waifs and strays to executing game-changing development projects. Some worry that distinguishing between “good” and “bad” migration is the first step towards a racist, white-only migration policy. But surely the best way to prevent people from lumping all black and brown together as dangerous is openly, systematically and effectively identifying and rooting out those within this amorphous group who do pose an elevated risk. A stricter migration policy which hinges on more than economic criteria need not penalise Africans and Asians who come from stable backgrounds and possess similar values. The immigrants who thrive most in Britain are not just those from the EU and America. London’s leading startup gurus are just as likely to hail from Bangalore as they are from Silicon Valley. British-Chinese pupils are two years ahead of their white British counterparts in the classroom. There is talk of Britain having a “Nigerian moment” as members of the diaspora amass music awards and Michelin stars – and even, in Kemi Badenoch’s case, jostle for the top job of PM. What these groups all have in common is that they hail from countries that have been reasonably peaceful in recent decades and have a strong cultural emphasis on family and education. The big question is whether Britain is ready to have a grown-up conversation about immigration. I suspect that the majority of us crave a robust, unhysterical debate. We are left waiting for a political leader who has the guts to go there."
Reform’s dream of mass deportations hinges on these key companies - "In the US, companies that have assisted the Trump administration’s crackdown have faced heavy criticism. However, Palantir, a tech company that provides software used by ICE officials and other government agencies, has repeatedly defended what bosses call its “ideologically neutral” approach. When questioned about why his company had accepted work from the US government, Alex Karp, the company’s chief executive, warned that businesses should not be setting themselves up as a rival power centre to democratically elected governments. “Immigration policy is not a software challenge; it’s a political one,” he wrote in 2019. “The solution lies with our political and judiciary system, not with Silicon Valley’s C-suite.” Although it is still early days, Reform is understood to have held discussions with businesses, including about its plans for Operation Restoring Justice."
Andy on X - ""Could the far-right please stop weaponising the constant unrelenting stream of events that vindicate their worldview?""
Anyone could have predicted | Chris Bayliss | The Critic Magazine - "There was a time when people who earned their living from political commentary tried to convey the sense that they had seen it all coming well in advance... That’s all changed now — the rise of 24 hour news channels pushed broadcasters into trying to maintain a sense of urgency, to keep people tuned in during the many hours in which there was little new to report. Those who appeared on our screens learned to cultivate a natural tone of hyperbolic disbelief. In the age of social media, a fashion for exuberant displays of personal authenticity made donnish unflappability seem corny. Outrage, bewilderment and fear were more raw reactions to breaking news, and were considered somehow more genuine. As a result, our news media has adopted a far less learned and more histrionic tone. Overall, this is but a single addition to the long list of annoying trends that define modern political life. However, it has opened the door to a strange kind of inverse insouciance, as commentators feign surprise and outrage at things they knew perfectly well were going on, but which are nevertheless inconvenient to acknowledge. If there is no longer any cost to credibility in not being aware of an emerging trend, then there might be a benefit in pretending that something foreseeable was in fact a surprise. This is most obviously the case when people are confronted with the negative consequences of policies their own side favoured — especially those consequences their opponents warned them about... Lewis Goodall knew exactly what he wanted to get out of the interview, and he pressed all the right buttons to get it. He was aware that South Asian political culture has a strong tendency toward machismo, which Yakoob plays up to by adopting elements of African-American “gangsta” aesthetics, and that he would react badly to persistent questioning in an undeferential tone on subjects he didn’t want to talk about. Goodall was also aware that, far from being a career-ending disaster, a prison sentence is considered a right of passage for many South Asian politicians, and can be a great enhancement to their personal credibility. Furthermore, Goodall knew perfectly well that Yakoob does not operate within a political milieu that selects for political sophistication, or which places much value on answering questions in a way that does not shock or horrify gentle English sensibilities. Figures such as Yakoob, as well as an earlier generation of Labour-aligned but Pakistani-focussed local politicians, only avoided causing this type of offence in the past because journalists like Goodall knew quite well not to ask them those kinds of questions. Exposing how starkly different the political culture of the Pakistanis who were settling in our towns and cities was from the British mainstream was not something that left-leaning journalists were willing to consider doing until very recently. The fact that the community was “getting involved” in local democracy and party politics was held up as evidence of their integration into British society, and of their compatibility with democracy. The community was assumed to be a natural ally of the forces of progress in British politics, and one of the few growing bulwarks against the Right. That they had some decidedly old-fashioned sounding ideas about social and sexual issues could be ignored or wished away as they were shoring Labour up in areas where the party’s natural voter-base was being dissolved by the forces of economic change. More recently, Labour and others on the Left have retreated behind the defences of a political dichotomy that contrasts a mythical “unity” against “those who seek to divide us”. The latter in this context being code for pointing out ways in which the politics of the Pakistani diaspora diverge sharply from liberal assumptions. The fact that an outfit with the politics of The News Agents now apparently has licence to indulge in a bit of division is a simple consequence of the fact that the Pakistani “independents” are becoming a hindrance rather than a support for established centre-left parties. For those who long insisted that diversity came only with benefits and no drawbacks, the projection of shock and anguish at Yakoob is a useful means of maintaining deniability, whilst cutting him loose. This is a pattern that is becoming increasingly acute, having grown steadily more obvious over the last few years. The outbreak of aggressively and explicitly antisemitic language and symbolism in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks was met with a tragicomic wringing of hands about where all this ghastliness had all suddenly emerged from. The most recent outrage — the stabbing of two identifiably Jewish men in Golders Green by a Somali-born British citizen with an extensive record of violent crime — triggered a similarly fatuous response questioning what it would take for the British public to “stand with” the country’s Jews. No suggestion is ever given about what this unspecified gesture of solidarity might look like. It is considered vulgar to point out that the majority of this kind of commentary is coming from voices who have long been the most insistent that immigration is an unalloyed social good, but it is true, and is a point worth making. While this point is made by antisemites on the Right, they are mistaken for the same reason that those who insist that the point itself is inherently antisemitic are also mistaken. This hypocrisy and insouciance has come from the ranks of the metropolitan commentariat, among whom Jews are comparatively overrepresented, as they are in law or medicine. But the overwhelming majority of this commentariat are not Jewish, and the overwhelming majority of Jews are not members of the metropolitan commentariat. Very generally speaking, British Jews have similar opinions to their gentile peers in whichever socio-economic and geographic category they inhabit. In a culture in which being wrong about things still carried some costs, the colossal mistakes of the multiculturalist project could be reckoned with in terms of the damage it has caused... As predicted, the dawning of the age of mutli-racial electoral politics in some English towns and cities is engendering ethnic patterns of voting, even among the white voters for whom it was presumed inapplicable. The emergence of a distinct, autonomous Pakistani political machine in such places is introducing a tawdry and rather threatening new political culture that is decidedly not to liberal tastes. Yet rather than be confronted by this, those who spent years dismissing all the warnings that it was coming are permitted to hide behind incredible protestations of outrage and disbelief."
EastAnglian on X - "Shock, horror! Pakistani politics in Britain is just like... politics in Pakistan. Brilliant piece on how progressives contort themselves to finally acknowledge the bleeding obvious."
Migrant crisis: Wearing England badges during World Cup 'intimidating' to asylum seekers, immigration officers told
If asylum seekers are intimidated by the country they are seeking asylum in, they need to be protected from this by deporting them
Afghan men accused of fleeing UK after raping girl in Bristol - "Three Afghan nationals fled the UK in the back of a lorry after allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl, a jury has heard. Mehrab Safi, 21, Awal Ahmadzai and Salman Habibkheil, both 19, and a 16-year-old boy who cannot be named for legal reasons are on trial for a string of offences against the victim at Bristol Crown Court. Safi, Ahmadzai and Habibkheil were arrested in Calais on 3 December 2025, three days after the alleged sexual offences took place, while the 16-year-old was arrested at a property in St Werburghs, Bristol... He added it was "deeply unusual" for the men to leave the UK in the back of a lorry, rather than enter. Mobile phone footage recovered from Safi's phone showed the men in the lorry laughing and gesticulating, which Hetherington said suggested they thought they "got away with it". When they were found by French police in Calais on 3 December, they were returned to the UK. Hetherington said the trio had no travel documents or identification and had given false names to French authorities."
Damn Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forcing them to rape her! We need to get reparations from Russia!
Modern Folk Beliefs VII: “Immigration built Britain” - "Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact. Traditionally, these were things like a maxim about health or wealth from your grandmother, or an old proverb of forgotten origin. But from the mid 20th century, ideas originating from academia or political activism, transmitted by mass media and mass education, came to be ever more influential in determining mainstream culture. This has given rise to what I have come to think of as modern folk beliefs; simplistic, muddled and often moralistic versions of the original ideas that have become widely held among large segments of society. The folk belief that is the subject of this article holds that immigration is a central theme of British history and a core aspect of Britain’s identity. It further holds that immigration is always a positive story, responsible in large part for the good things about the country. You can see it in recent statements from various politicians, such as Zack Polanski’s “Migration is our DNA as a country” [sic], or Diane Abbott’s “Immigrants built this land”. Various journalists, public officials and activists now claim things like “immigrants built Britain”, “Wales and Britain is the great country it is because of centuries of immigration”, or “we are a country that’s been built on immigration”. In my experience, the belief has also filtered down significantly into the general population. There’s a trivially true version of the claim, in that there has always been some immigration to Britain, and that these immigrants have made various contributions to national life. But it’s generally made in a far stronger way – not just that some immigrants made contributions, but that immigration was central and foundational. In this article I will interpret the claim in its stronger form, as I think it’s pretty clear that that’s how its advocates intend it... The mythmaking begins with the attempt to force the early settlement of Britain into an ‘immigration’ conceptual box. Stewart Lee’s well-known comedy sketch from 2013 offers a good example, mocking the idea that there is anything unusual about current immigration, which has always consisted of nothing more than newcomers bringing useful new goods and services to a benighted and prejudiced native population. In this conception the ‘immigrant’ beaker folk in 2000 BC brought, naturally, their beakers, while the Anglo-Saxons brought their jewellery, ship burials and epic poetry. In reality these groups were not immigrants joining an existing society but settlers establishing a new one, a process which was catastrophic for the existing population. The arrival of the beaker folk led to the replacement of 90% of Britain’s gene pool, a process which I imagine involved something rather more traumatic than the exchange of beakers, while the negative impact of the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons on the Britons hardly needs to be spelled out. Stewart Lee would probably respond to this in the vein of “it’s just a joke mate”, yet it’s now common to hear people genuinely equate this early settlement with modern immigration. Once we get into more recent centuries, which saw something like immigration in the contemporary sense, it still remained on a far too small a scale to have possibly ‘built Britain’. The largest and best-known example prior to the 19th century was that of the Huguenots, around 50,000 of whom came in the last decades of the 17th century, but making up only around 1% of the overall population. In giving sanctuary only to those who shared the dominant religion, it was also entirely unlike our present asylum policy. The closest analogy to Huguenot migration today is probably Trump’s offer of asylum to white South Africans. Irish immigration came in the 19th century, with there being around 800,000 Irish-born people (3.5% of the population) recorded at the peak in the 1861 census. Considering that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom at the time, whether this truly counts as immigration is debatable, but I’ll allow it. Here we can see how much the left has changed tune on this issue. Both Marx and Engels were very clear that Irish immigration into British industrial towns was in the interests of the capitalists, and that its impact was to depress wages and degrade the condition of the native working class. This was the mainstream view on the left well into the twentieth century, but has now disappeared from British left-wing politics. In the US, Bernie Sanders advanced this position in 2015, to the vociferous opposition of the less traditional left. Then, in the late 19th and early 20th century around 300,000 East-European Jews came to Britain, coming to make up around 0.7% of the total population prior to the first world war. These were the largest groups to come in this period, various others came in small numbers, including various Europeans such as Dutch or Italians, and a very few from Asia or Africa, mostly seamen who settled in port cities. During these centuries, the foreign-born never made up more than a few percentage points of the British population, which was in fact expanding massively through natural increase, while sending millions to settle abroad. After the second world war, immigration started to become more significant, and the core focus of today’s mythmaking is on the non-white immigrants who arrived during these decades. Most prominent in the narrative is, of course, the ‘Windrush generation’ from the Caribbean, who, Kier Starmer claimed last year, “laid the foundations for modern Britain.” We even have a National Windrush Monument at Waterloo station, including the inscription “You Called ... and We Came”, despite the fact that the Caribbean passengers were not called for and that the government of the day was alarmed at their arrival. In fact, in another example of how much the left has changed, it was Labour MPs who wrote to Clement Attlee urging stronger immigration control.
Twenty-seven young migrants are hired for every British youngster as youth worklessness 'fuelled' by soaring non-EU immigration, analysis reveals - "Mass immigration is directly fuelling the crisis for young people trying to find work, research reveals. A staggering 27 migrants from outside the EU aged under 25 are hired for every British youngster, according to the analysis. And while the young British workforce has grown by less than 1 per cent since 2020, the number of non-EU youth on the UK payroll has increased by 355 per cent in that time, the research from The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found... The CSJ think-tank's research shows how young migrants are taking up roles at a much faster rate to young Britons, with them snapping up three times as many jobs as young Britons. Between 2024 and 2025, the number of non-EU under-25s on payrolls increased by 33,200, while the number of UK-nationals of the same age fell by 32,200. This is despite almost one million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK currently not currently in education, employment or training (NEET). And the research shows that migrants are mostly taking entry-level positions despite Alan Milburn saying today that the first rung of the career ladder is 'simply out of reach' for young Britons after he was commissioned by the Government to review soaring levels of youth unemployment in Britain. Non-EU workers of all ages nearly doubled in retail and hospitality roles between January 2020 and December 2025 for instance, while UK nationals in such posts fell by more than a quarter of a million. Chris Philp, shadow home secretary, said: 'Young British people are being locked out of the labour market as immigration into entry-level work continues at scale. Mass immigration undermines our society and low wage immigration is bad for the economy. 'Labour must go further and reform indefinite leave to remain [ILR] before their hard-Left flank forces them to abandon reform altogether. The window is closing and they know it... The think-tank is now calling on ministers to introduce a tax cut for businesses hiring young people worth 30 per cent of their salary. It also suggests restricting benefits for young people with less severe mental health conditions and requiring employers to advertise vacancies to the UK workforce before offering roles through work visa schemes."
Weird. We keep being told that immigration doesn't increase unemployment
One in 10 successful candidates in UK local elections elected on Muslim issues - "A total of 574 candidates were elected on Gaza-related or Muslim issues in the recent British local elections, according to an analysis by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). In other words, these are individuals whose campaign focused on Muslim transnational grievances, rather than local issues... over 10% of candidates who were elected to English local councils are Muslim sectarians. Broken down by party, 351 of the candidates were from the Green Party, 133 were Independents, 84 from the Labour Party, and six Liberal Democrats. HJS noted the distribution shows this phenomenon cuts across traditional party boundaries and is better understood as a distinct mode of political mobilization rather than as something confined to an individual party. The wider pattern made clear by HJS was that sectarian-style electoral success is associated with wards combining higher voter turnout, younger population profiles, and a larger Muslim population share. Among some of the 574 candidates are Mohammed Suleman, who was elected as a Green to Newcastle despite being suspended for antisemitism. Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate for Lambeth, was elected despite being arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred by posting antisemitic statements online. Green Party candidate for Manchester, Shams Syed, previously admitted he had “no interest in politics” apart from Gaza. He was elected. “The focus after the results may be on which political leaders are fighting for survival, but the real battle is for the integrity of local democracy,” said Emma Schubart, Research Fellow, Henry Jackson Society. “With 574 sectarian-style candidates elected, it is clear that this form of politics is gaining ground and cannot be ignored.” She noted that local elections are increasingly being used to fight political battles on issues councils have no power to resolve - and that risks distorting democratic accountability. The fact that local councils have no power over foreign policy was confirmed in a letter by Local Government Minister Alison McGovern... While McGovern said she recognized that local authorities are concerned about investments linked to conflict zones, she said that “decisions on boycotts, divestment and sanctions are matters of UK foreign policy and are for central government, not local authorities. “It is therefore not appropriate for local authorities to adopt investment policies that go beyond or differ from UK Government sanctions or foreign policy positions,” she added. Nevertheless, the aforementioned 574 candidates were elected on the basis of Muslim transnational grievances - such as the situation in Gaza. According to both HJS and Shadow Equalities Minister Claire Coutinho, the success of these sectarian candidates is at least in large part thanks to endorsement from “The Muslim Vote” campaign. The Muslim Vote is a sectarian Muslim political campaign group aimed at making the Muslim voice “heard across the political spectrum – on issues like Palestine and much more,” according to its website. “Peace in Palestine” is listed as one of its three high level pledges – with the stated aims as “Ceasefire, recognition of the State of Palestine, lifting the siege and occupation of Gaza, strengthening laws barring bilateral British trade with Settlements, denying Visas to Israeli politicians and militants involved in settlement expansion, and sanctions on all companies named by the UN as operating in occupied territories [sic]. The Muslim Vote has scores of partner organizations, three of which have been empirically linked to terror organizations. The first of the three is the Palestine Forum in Britain, whose chair, Zaher Birawi, has been sanctioned by the US Treasury for ties to Hamas and as part of a network allegedly used to support Hamas overseas. The second is the Islam Channel, a UK-based Islamic TV channel licensed by Ofcom, but which has been investigated and sanctioned for broadcasting antisemitic hate speech. The third is the Muslim Association of Britain, which has reported historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and has been described by UK officials as a group of concern under counter‑extremism definitions. While not linked to terror or hate speech as such, three others – MEND, Islam21C, and Prevent Watch – have all been alleged to have radical opinions and promoted antisemitism. In a letter to X/Twitter, Countinho cited some of the sectarian candidates as evidence that the Muslim Vote campaign is explicitly promoting sectarianism and antisemitism. “These are not the views of moderate Muslims in Britain”"
If you talk about dual loyalty, that's Islamophobic
