Britain now has the highest level of recorded acid attacks in the world, at 710, rising 45% from 2021-2022. Despite desperate attempts by multiculturalism apologists to link this to crimes in Victorian times, honour-based acid attacks are not a native English pastime. Ninety percent of acid attacks occur in low-income countries in Asia and Africa—where Britain has sourced most of its record influx of immigrants after Brexit. The imported practice has gained salience since Afghan asylum seeker Abdul Ezedi doused a mother and her two children with a corrosive substance in Clapham, South London. These crimes are themselves a solvent for cultural cohesion and faith in politics and the rule of law—but our political class insists on turning a blind eye to them. They would rather weaponise it as a wedge issue for their existing political ambitions.
Ezedi is a convicted sex criminal who was denied asylum twice after illegally entering the UK by smuggling himself aboard a lorry from Calais in 2016. He was then granted the right to remain by the Home Office in 2021-2022, following his professed conversion to Christianity. Neither the Catholic Diocese nor the Church of England has a record of his conversion or of providing a reference for his application. Ezedi’s friend claims he is “a good Muslim,” and planned to return to Afghanistan “to find a wife,” despite claiming on his application that doing so would endanger his life.
The same dubious ‘Road to Damascus’ was trodden by Liverpool taxi-cab bomber Emad al-Swealmeen, and now forty of those aboard the Bibby Stockholm detention barge. A cynic might suggest a symbiotic relationship exists between those seeking to game the asylum system and the Church of England. Desperate to increase the shrinking size of their congregation and relatedly proselytising the religion of institutional racism, the Anglican Church is eager to advocate for sudden converts to stay in the UK.
A suicidal extension of unilateral goodwill to foreign criminals is not unique to progressive Christians. Instead of seeing this as a moment for self-reflection, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan told Sky News, “This is not really about asylum.” An insincere rictus grin adorned her face as she said it—as if she knew how absurd the words leaving her mouth were. Keegan is not a talented politician, a consequence of David Cameron selecting candidates to increase ‘diversity,’ known for mishandling the crumbling concrete scandal in Britain’s schools. I doubt she’s consciously hoping to repeat the lie with a large enough smile that she has a Kaa-like hypnotic effect. But even the cabinet’s best spin doctor couldn’t salvage the government’s ailing reputation on migration.
Under the current government, Britain has become first in Western Europe and joint second on the continent for crimes committed by perpetrators of foreign extraction. The adverse consequences of unfettered immigration are manifesting themselves every day—in the streets, in headlines, and on our X timelines.
The absurdity of this diversion tactic hasn’t stopped others from trying it. On “BBC Newsnight,” MPs Caroline Nokes and Bell Ribeiro-Addy said, “His [Ezedi’s] asylum status is not really the issue of concern,” and that “it’s wrong to comment on that.” They turned the conversation to “misogyny and microaggressions.” On GB News, Barrister Sam Fowles insisted that ‘Abdul Ezidi’s immigration status has nothing to do with acid attacks,” and chose to blame Andrew Tate and online misogyny instead. It is the epitome of detached ‘luxury belief’ to use an acid attack by an illegal migrant to complain about insults sent to MPs on social media.
Yet, this is the unwavering line of the self-appointed elite. In the same week, MP Mike Freer resigned after his office was firebombed. Freer has faced a decade of death threats, including from the proscribed terror group Muslims Against Crusades, referencing Labour MP Stephen Timms, who was stabbed in a constituency surgery in 2010 by Islamist Roshonara Choudhry. Freer believes this is because he is gay and has a pro-Israel stance representing the sizeable Jewish population in Golders Green. Freer was also targeted by Sir David Amess’ murderer, Ali Harbi Ali—but was away from his Finchley office at the time.
Rather than attribute appropriate blame to imported Islamism, Freer expressed reluctance to “tar a whole community,” refused to say “multiculturalism has failed,” and said he is “not quite sure” what Ali’s motivation was for killing his colleague. Instead, he called for “anyone who lives in the UK to agree to our values,” and for the government to legislate against social media abuse. After stalkings, stabbings, and arson attacks, MPs are still unwilling to offend the Islamists they imported into our midst.
As Harrison Pitt, a senior editor of this publication, pointed out, when the docile Sir David was slain, no sleeping lion awakened among his colleagues. ‘David’s Law’ sought to “crack down on social media abuse of public figures and end online anonymity,” not stop Islamist violence. They talked as if Amess were killed by a tweet and then allowed Prevent’s anti-terrorism training to blame Douglas Murray and George Orwell while downplaying the threat of Islamism. Perhaps this is related to an infestation of the civil service and police with Islamists. It is no exaggeration to say that Muslim fundamentalists have infiltrated our institutions, aided and abetted by delusionally liberal members of parliament.
Perhaps this is because, as MP Tom Hunt suggested, safe-seat MPs are detached from the consequences of immigration. Maybe they all think, like the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman, that “high levels of immigration are actually a large part of the London success story”; or The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson, saying our “multi–faith society whose cohesiveness is envied by much of Europe”; or the infamous Question Time audience member who asked, “Who [else] would serve our coffee in Pret?”
My instincts say otherwise. Ezedi’s egregious crime has become a fault line for the different priorities of the progressive establishment and the British public. There is a growing public grievance against the feeling that the country is being run to accommodate foreign criminals at the expense of the native, law-abiding, tax-paying population. The Met Police goes literally cap-in-hand to the attacker, urging him to “do the right thing and hand [himself] in,” and offering a £20,000 reward to the Muslim community who may be harbouring him. Meanwhile, those complaining about Palestinian flags flown in their local high street following the October 7th massacre are tracked to their homes and arrested. It seems to be state policy to suppress expressions of the native population’s culture, to avoid antagonising the volatile new arrivals, and to appeal to the moral sensibilities of sex offenders while telling flag-waving servicemen, “there’s way more of them than there are of us.”
As London’s weekly pro-Hamas protests show, multiculturalism in Britain operates less like a melting pot and more like a blender. Incompatible ingredients are combined in population-dense cities, producing indigestible sludge that is sold to us as a nutritious smoothie. But the strongest ingredient always overpowers the others, leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Point being: illiberal elements will always exploit and subvert permissive sensibilities and upend secular liberalism. There are two solutions: either we abandon the neutral pretences of apathetic liberalism and assert a competing comprehensive doctrine of the good, or the state grows ever more authoritarian as it insists the clashing civilisations it brought together must get along. I believe we are experiencing the latter.
Distraction tactics just aren’t working. The desperation of the aforementioned lies is because insisting ‘diversity is our strength’ or that terror attacks are “part and parcel of life in a big city” doesn’t wash anymore. We know that the UK intelligence services have coordinated Islamic PR campaigns, spreading banal messages of love and tolerance in the aftermath of terror attacks. We were told, “Don’t look back in anger” after asylum seeker Ramadan Abedi killed 22 in the Manchester Arena bombing. Families of the victims were instructed to say “Love always wins” after the Nottingham stabbing. But the narrative containment engine can’t exert enough control over the democratised public square to stop it from reaching a fever pitch on immigration salience. So rather than change course, they seek to seize the means of meme production through internet censorship.
No one exemplifies this more than Dame Caroline Dinenage, MP. After passing the Online Safety Bill, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee chair sent letters to TikTok, Rumble, and GB News, urging extra-legal censorship measures be taken against Russell Brand over sexual misconduct allegations published by The Times and Channel 4—as well as anyone who said he should see his day in court before being labelled a rapist. Like or loathe him, Brand was a prominent critic of government policy during COVID lockdowns. Dinenage is not above such tactics for critics within her own party either. On the same day that MP Miriam Cates received a gag order as part of an opaque investigation into “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the house as a whole, or of its members generally.” Dinenage and other One Nation Tories published an op-ed in The Times, telling ‘extremists’ on ‘the Right’ that “You’ve had your turn. Now the grown-ups are in the room.” Cates is notable as a spearhead of the New Conservatives—one of the Five Families that frustrated the passing of the Rwanda Bill, fearing, as resignee Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick suggested, that it was never meant to work.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy connoisseur like Brand to suggest that the Blob may be moving in concert to quell dissent against its immigration-at-all-costs consensus. At the recent Davos 2024 summit, which cabinet members attended, the lead priority in the Global Risk Report and for the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was ‘misinformation/disinformation.’ That same report euphemised mass immigration as ‘involuntary migration’—and saw it as a problem to be solved within ten years. It is clear that the ruling establishment cares less about crimes committed by the migrants they imported and more about censoring your complaints about them in order to achieve a culturally ubiquitous cosmopolis. Angela Merkel articulated their logic best when she said, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed. It won’t be the Europe we imagine.” We are suffering so that political elites can live their liberal dream.
Fellow commentators have written that both these crimes and the censorship that followed “endangers the social contract.” I take umbrage with that French jurisprudential projection onto England. We are a sentimental, not contractual, nation. We operate on consideration and a sense of belonging, rather than within the confines of prescriptive law. Unlike Rousseau’s general will state, our tradition does not appoint parliament as the arbitrator of all interactions and mediator of all conflicts. This is the ideological divide between the ‘anywheres’ of the political class and the ‘somewheres’ living in the heartlands. Westminster and Whitehall believe enough flag-folding appeasement and material prosperity will make converts to secular liberalism of even the most emphatic jihadists. But for those living among the new arrivals, there is an uneasy, unspoken awareness that these people do not consider themselves our neighbours. And any pretence that politicians considered the concerns of the electorate died a long ago—after the desire to reduce immigration was expressed at every election for the last decade, it has been steadily increasing instead. The good will no longer flows both ways. Soon, none will at all.
The short-term consequences of this will be a total Tory wipeout in this year’s general election. But rather than change course, the government is demonstrating late-Soviet levels of denial—persecuting those raising alarm about their coming worst defeat in a hundred years. The replacement Labour government plans to admit more asylum seekers via “safe legal routes.” Mass immigration has been ordained both an inevitability and an a priori good to be managed, rather than an option to be refused to keep women and girls safe. How many more white girls must have their childhoods stolen by grooming gangs in English cities and be ground into kebab meat before politicians stop lying and do something?
Energy is not destroyed but transformed. Gaslighting the voting public will not make the problem go away. British MPs and bureaucrats are sitting on a powder keg. If they continue to be so careless, the establishment will pay a price proportionate to their betrayal of the British people on mass immigration. Without an alternative, attentive to their desire to reduce immigration from all sources, the British public will turn to radical solutions to reverse their cultural and demographic dispossession. If no one from the present political class is willing to do something, then someone in the future will have to. Given the authoritarian appetites of young voters, whether or not this change will be anti-democratic is not a choice—only the flavour is.
An Eye for an Eye
Britain now has the highest level of recorded acid attacks in the world, at 710, rising 45% from 2021-2022. Despite desperate attempts by multiculturalism apologists to link this to crimes in Victorian times, honour-based acid attacks are not a native English pastime. Ninety percent of acid attacks occur in low-income countries in Asia and Africa—where Britain has sourced most of its record influx of immigrants after Brexit. The imported practice has gained salience since Afghan asylum seeker Abdul Ezedi doused a mother and her two children with a corrosive substance in Clapham, South London. These crimes are themselves a solvent for cultural cohesion and faith in politics and the rule of law—but our political class insists on turning a blind eye to them. They would rather weaponise it as a wedge issue for their existing political ambitions.
Ezedi is a convicted sex criminal who was denied asylum twice after illegally entering the UK by smuggling himself aboard a lorry from Calais in 2016. He was then granted the right to remain by the Home Office in 2021-2022, following his professed conversion to Christianity. Neither the Catholic Diocese nor the Church of England has a record of his conversion or of providing a reference for his application. Ezedi’s friend claims he is “a good Muslim,” and planned to return to Afghanistan “to find a wife,” despite claiming on his application that doing so would endanger his life.
The same dubious ‘Road to Damascus’ was trodden by Liverpool taxi-cab bomber Emad al-Swealmeen, and now forty of those aboard the Bibby Stockholm detention barge. A cynic might suggest a symbiotic relationship exists between those seeking to game the asylum system and the Church of England. Desperate to increase the shrinking size of their congregation and relatedly proselytising the religion of institutional racism, the Anglican Church is eager to advocate for sudden converts to stay in the UK.
A suicidal extension of unilateral goodwill to foreign criminals is not unique to progressive Christians. Instead of seeing this as a moment for self-reflection, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan told Sky News, “This is not really about asylum.” An insincere rictus grin adorned her face as she said it—as if she knew how absurd the words leaving her mouth were. Keegan is not a talented politician, a consequence of David Cameron selecting candidates to increase ‘diversity,’ known for mishandling the crumbling concrete scandal in Britain’s schools. I doubt she’s consciously hoping to repeat the lie with a large enough smile that she has a Kaa-like hypnotic effect. But even the cabinet’s best spin doctor couldn’t salvage the government’s ailing reputation on migration.
Under the current government, Britain has become first in Western Europe and joint second on the continent for crimes committed by perpetrators of foreign extraction. The adverse consequences of unfettered immigration are manifesting themselves every day—in the streets, in headlines, and on our X timelines.
The absurdity of this diversion tactic hasn’t stopped others from trying it. On “BBC Newsnight,” MPs Caroline Nokes and Bell Ribeiro-Addy said, “His [Ezedi’s] asylum status is not really the issue of concern,” and that “it’s wrong to comment on that.” They turned the conversation to “misogyny and microaggressions.” On GB News, Barrister Sam Fowles insisted that ‘Abdul Ezidi’s immigration status has nothing to do with acid attacks,” and chose to blame Andrew Tate and online misogyny instead. It is the epitome of detached ‘luxury belief’ to use an acid attack by an illegal migrant to complain about insults sent to MPs on social media.
Yet, this is the unwavering line of the self-appointed elite. In the same week, MP Mike Freer resigned after his office was firebombed. Freer has faced a decade of death threats, including from the proscribed terror group Muslims Against Crusades, referencing Labour MP Stephen Timms, who was stabbed in a constituency surgery in 2010 by Islamist Roshonara Choudhry. Freer believes this is because he is gay and has a pro-Israel stance representing the sizeable Jewish population in Golders Green. Freer was also targeted by Sir David Amess’ murderer, Ali Harbi Ali—but was away from his Finchley office at the time.
Rather than attribute appropriate blame to imported Islamism, Freer expressed reluctance to “tar a whole community,” refused to say “multiculturalism has failed,” and said he is “not quite sure” what Ali’s motivation was for killing his colleague. Instead, he called for “anyone who lives in the UK to agree to our values,” and for the government to legislate against social media abuse. After stalkings, stabbings, and arson attacks, MPs are still unwilling to offend the Islamists they imported into our midst.
As Harrison Pitt, a senior editor of this publication, pointed out, when the docile Sir David was slain, no sleeping lion awakened among his colleagues. ‘David’s Law’ sought to “crack down on social media abuse of public figures and end online anonymity,” not stop Islamist violence. They talked as if Amess were killed by a tweet and then allowed Prevent’s anti-terrorism training to blame Douglas Murray and George Orwell while downplaying the threat of Islamism. Perhaps this is related to an infestation of the civil service and police with Islamists. It is no exaggeration to say that Muslim fundamentalists have infiltrated our institutions, aided and abetted by delusionally liberal members of parliament.
Perhaps this is because, as MP Tom Hunt suggested, safe-seat MPs are detached from the consequences of immigration. Maybe they all think, like the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman, that “high levels of immigration are actually a large part of the London success story”; or The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson, saying our “multi–faith society whose cohesiveness is envied by much of Europe”; or the infamous Question Time audience member who asked, “Who [else] would serve our coffee in Pret?”
My instincts say otherwise. Ezedi’s egregious crime has become a fault line for the different priorities of the progressive establishment and the British public. There is a growing public grievance against the feeling that the country is being run to accommodate foreign criminals at the expense of the native, law-abiding, tax-paying population. The Met Police goes literally cap-in-hand to the attacker, urging him to “do the right thing and hand [himself] in,” and offering a £20,000 reward to the Muslim community who may be harbouring him. Meanwhile, those complaining about Palestinian flags flown in their local high street following the October 7th massacre are tracked to their homes and arrested. It seems to be state policy to suppress expressions of the native population’s culture, to avoid antagonising the volatile new arrivals, and to appeal to the moral sensibilities of sex offenders while telling flag-waving servicemen, “there’s way more of them than there are of us.”
As London’s weekly pro-Hamas protests show, multiculturalism in Britain operates less like a melting pot and more like a blender. Incompatible ingredients are combined in population-dense cities, producing indigestible sludge that is sold to us as a nutritious smoothie. But the strongest ingredient always overpowers the others, leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Point being: illiberal elements will always exploit and subvert permissive sensibilities and upend secular liberalism. There are two solutions: either we abandon the neutral pretences of apathetic liberalism and assert a competing comprehensive doctrine of the good, or the state grows ever more authoritarian as it insists the clashing civilisations it brought together must get along. I believe we are experiencing the latter.
Distraction tactics just aren’t working. The desperation of the aforementioned lies is because insisting ‘diversity is our strength’ or that terror attacks are “part and parcel of life in a big city” doesn’t wash anymore. We know that the UK intelligence services have coordinated Islamic PR campaigns, spreading banal messages of love and tolerance in the aftermath of terror attacks. We were told, “Don’t look back in anger” after asylum seeker Ramadan Abedi killed 22 in the Manchester Arena bombing. Families of the victims were instructed to say “Love always wins” after the Nottingham stabbing. But the narrative containment engine can’t exert enough control over the democratised public square to stop it from reaching a fever pitch on immigration salience. So rather than change course, they seek to seize the means of meme production through internet censorship.
No one exemplifies this more than Dame Caroline Dinenage, MP. After passing the Online Safety Bill, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee chair sent letters to TikTok, Rumble, and GB News, urging extra-legal censorship measures be taken against Russell Brand over sexual misconduct allegations published by The Times and Channel 4—as well as anyone who said he should see his day in court before being labelled a rapist. Like or loathe him, Brand was a prominent critic of government policy during COVID lockdowns. Dinenage is not above such tactics for critics within her own party either. On the same day that MP Miriam Cates received a gag order as part of an opaque investigation into “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the house as a whole, or of its members generally.” Dinenage and other One Nation Tories published an op-ed in The Times, telling ‘extremists’ on ‘the Right’ that “You’ve had your turn. Now the grown-ups are in the room.” Cates is notable as a spearhead of the New Conservatives—one of the Five Families that frustrated the passing of the Rwanda Bill, fearing, as resignee Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick suggested, that it was never meant to work.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy connoisseur like Brand to suggest that the Blob may be moving in concert to quell dissent against its immigration-at-all-costs consensus. At the recent Davos 2024 summit, which cabinet members attended, the lead priority in the Global Risk Report and for the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was ‘misinformation/disinformation.’ That same report euphemised mass immigration as ‘involuntary migration’—and saw it as a problem to be solved within ten years. It is clear that the ruling establishment cares less about crimes committed by the migrants they imported and more about censoring your complaints about them in order to achieve a culturally ubiquitous cosmopolis. Angela Merkel articulated their logic best when she said, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed. It won’t be the Europe we imagine.” We are suffering so that political elites can live their liberal dream.
Fellow commentators have written that both these crimes and the censorship that followed “endangers the social contract.” I take umbrage with that French jurisprudential projection onto England. We are a sentimental, not contractual, nation. We operate on consideration and a sense of belonging, rather than within the confines of prescriptive law. Unlike Rousseau’s general will state, our tradition does not appoint parliament as the arbitrator of all interactions and mediator of all conflicts. This is the ideological divide between the ‘anywheres’ of the political class and the ‘somewheres’ living in the heartlands. Westminster and Whitehall believe enough flag-folding appeasement and material prosperity will make converts to secular liberalism of even the most emphatic jihadists. But for those living among the new arrivals, there is an uneasy, unspoken awareness that these people do not consider themselves our neighbours. And any pretence that politicians considered the concerns of the electorate died a long ago—after the desire to reduce immigration was expressed at every election for the last decade, it has been steadily increasing instead. The good will no longer flows both ways. Soon, none will at all.
The short-term consequences of this will be a total Tory wipeout in this year’s general election. But rather than change course, the government is demonstrating late-Soviet levels of denial—persecuting those raising alarm about their coming worst defeat in a hundred years. The replacement Labour government plans to admit more asylum seekers via “safe legal routes.” Mass immigration has been ordained both an inevitability and an a priori good to be managed, rather than an option to be refused to keep women and girls safe. How many more white girls must have their childhoods stolen by grooming gangs in English cities and be ground into kebab meat before politicians stop lying and do something?
Energy is not destroyed but transformed. Gaslighting the voting public will not make the problem go away. British MPs and bureaucrats are sitting on a powder keg. If they continue to be so careless, the establishment will pay a price proportionate to their betrayal of the British people on mass immigration. Without an alternative, attentive to their desire to reduce immigration from all sources, the British public will turn to radical solutions to reverse their cultural and demographic dispossession. If no one from the present political class is willing to do something, then someone in the future will have to. Given the authoritarian appetites of young voters, whether or not this change will be anti-democratic is not a choice—only the flavour is.
READ NEXT
Mazan Affair: A Trial of Moral Misery
Milei Disrupts the Cosy Consensus at the G20
The Albanian Conservative Institute: An Intellectual Beacon for Albania’s Center-Right