THE NEXT BIG SCANDAL: The Government won’t give us official figures, but there are growing grounds for thinking that Britain is suffering from a migrant crime wave.
Are women in particular having to run a gauntlet of abuse from young migrant males who come from countries and cultures steeped in misogyny?
THE dominant media narrative when it comes to race relations is of black and brown immigrant communities being oppressed by bigoted white British people.
This Monday evening a new series starts on Channel 4, documenting the appalling racism suffered by Asian immigrants in the 1970s and early 1980s. “Defiance: Fighting the Far Right” is just the latest orthodox treatment of the subject, reinforcing the idea of a strict binary in the very complex arena of race relations in a multi-ethnic society. Naturally it was given a puff piece on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning.
Nobody should pretend that there was not indeed a lot of anti-Asian and indeed anti-black prejudice going on in deprived white communities in that era. As the series will highlight, the National Front had made inroads in several areas and a skinhead revival was in full swing.
I remember the look featuring heavily among away support at Cambridge United when I was a young teenager. One day I found myself near the away end when Charlton Athletic were visiting and not only was the intimidating skinhead look predominant, but I also heard the fabled “no black in the Union Jack” chant getting regular outings.
So the left didn’t make up white racism. It did, however, invent the ideas that only white people can be racist and that black and brown people are paragons of virtue by comparison with the indigenous peoples of these islands.
The penalties for challenging this narrative tend to be quite high across the public realm. For example, back in the summer of 2020, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick decided to recite the shocking real data about crime committed by black youths in London while being berated by woke MPs on the Commons home affairs committee over alleged unequal policing.
“You are four times more likely to be a victim of homicide if you are black and eight times more likely to be a perpetrator. The overlap with my key metric, which is knife injuries for under 25s… shows enormous disproportionality in the way if affects our young black men as victims and, I am sorry to say, as perpetrators. That is horrible,” she told them.
Until that moment most of the griping against Dame Cressida had come from right-of-centre sources who judged her too woke. After it, the left was out for her blood. They ousted her 18 months later in an onslaught spearheaded by the leftist London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
There have been other examples of the left seeking to keep the lid on evidence of criminality in ethnic minority and immigrant communities. The grooming gangs scandal (in reality a “rape gangs scandal”) involving many thousands of Pakistani heritage men preying on vulnerable white working class girls is one that comes to mind.
After the horrific chemical attack by Afghan Abdul Ezedi on his former girlfriend and her two young daughters the media code of omerta on this issue started to break down. Was it any surprise that someone from the most misogynistic culture in the world would attack a woman who had spurned him in this way, pundits asked.
That question is being asked again at the time of writing, as police hunt for Bangladeshi immigrant Habibur Massam. He is wanted for questioning over the brutal on-street assassination of a 27-year-old woman in Bradford on Saturday. The woman, who was pushing her five-month-old baby in a pram, was said to have been known to Massam.
Bangladesh, along with Pakistan and Afghanistan, is another society which has not fully experienced female emancipation and in which “honour” attacks on women are sadly common.
Given the refusal of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice to divulge statistics they hold on crime by foreign nationals, I decided to do some digging of my own a few weeks ago. I started by investigating every homicide of a woman by a man in Britain in the 12 months to March 2023. A list of 106 names had been read out in the Commons by the redoubtable Jess Phillips MP. It proved possible to track almost every case back through local newspaper reports of the incidents and subsequent court cases.
It should immediately be said that the most common case profile was of a woman killed by a partner or former partner, with every race represented among the male perpetrators. Scotland seemed a bit of a hot spot. In many cases men with documented drug and alcohol dependency issues were the killers. In dozens of others psychosis and schizophrenia were mentioned. But there was also an over-representation of foreign-born men. I was able to establish that at least 18 of the 106 homicides had been carried out by men born abroad, about one in six.
White and European men featured among these killers, including two Romanians, a Lithuanian, a Greek Cypriot and a Spanish national. There were several African killers. But Asian men, and particularly South Asian men, formed the biggest tranche.
My conclusion was that there is an issue of concern here, but also that the over-representation was not sufficiently marked as to justify a deflection from the main question of why our society is apparently unable to stop men of every race and creed killing women at a rate of more than two a week.
Then another piece of evidence was dropped into the public domain. Following growing public concern, Denmark has begun publishing statistics on violent crime conviction rates by national origin. And it is the MENAPT countries (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey) who predominate, with conviction rates many times higher than indigenous Danes.
( https://x.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1770773231869231364 )
More unsettlingly still, it emerged that Germany now publishes specific statistics on those responsible for sex crimes. By 2020, the proportion of suspects who were foreign
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to State O’ The Nation to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.