Is It Time for the UK To ‘Pull an El Salvador’?

Bukele is now a verb. To ‘Bukele’ something is to fix a problem that liberals say is ‘too complicated’ by simply ignoring their long-winded excuses and just doing the obvious. It is named after the leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has turned a country that was once dubbed the murder capital of the world into one of the safest. 

Meanwhile, Britain, once Europe’s most orderly nation, is mired in rape gangs, knife crime, and shoplifting. The UK doesn’t need Bukele-style mega-prisons, but it certainly needs his clarity.

The problem is that our elites in Westminster have mastered the art of inaction, cloaking their cowardice in excuses about complexity and human rights. They wring their hands over ‘systemic’ issues, treat illegal migration like an unsolvable cosmic mystery, and turn a blind eye to the mass rape of British girls in the name of diversity. 

This has led to a feeling among the public that order is breaking down: our borders are wide open, women no longer feel safe going out alone at night, and shops are looted with impunity. A country that once prided itself on being high-trust is now sliding into suspicion and fear. 

Ask any bloke in the pub, and they’ll tell you the obvious: stop the boats, lock up the criminals, protect the public. But for our elites, this is far too risky if it means a scathing editorial in The Guardian. It’s not resources or nuance they lack; it’s the spine to act.

Is Britain incapable of restoring order? Or is it simply unwilling? 

This is where we can look to Nayib Bukele. His doctrine is refreshingly simple, and utterly alien to Britain’s political class: “We prioritized the rights of the honest people over the rights of criminals”.

While our leaders drafted diversity strategies, Bukele built prisons, dismantled gangs, and, within a few years, cut El Salvador’s murder rate by almost 97%. Ordinary Salvadorans, once prisoners in their own homes, can now walk the streets, send their children out to play, and live life without fear. 

The point isn’t just safety—it’s freedom. Public safety is not the enemy of liberty, it’s the precondition for it.

Western elites and commentators are horrified, denouncing him as a dictator. Yet, at home, he commands 80–90% approval—numbers that Western leaders can only dream of. Why? Because people care less about the abstract “rights” of criminals and more about the concrete right not to be murdered on the way to work.

Of course, Bukele’s model is not cost-free. He declared a state of emergency and arrested tens of thousands. Civil liberties were suspended, due process curtailed, and anyone suspected of gang ties could be taken off the streets—sometimes based on nothing more than having the wrong tattoo or address.

But Salvadorans judged that risk preferable to daily terror. They accepted the chance of a wrongful arrest over the certainty of being robbed or killed. 

Crime is itself a form of tyranny, and it can rob people of freedom more effectively than the state. Bukele chose to break that tyranny and give freedom back to his people. 

That’s a calculation Britain’s elites can’t even fathom, because they never have to face the consequences of their own cowardice. Britain doesn’t need to copy Bukele’s extreme methods, but his success shows that safety and liberty can rise together.

And this is what makes it so tragic. Britain gave the world habeas corpus and trial by jury—the very principles that once guaranteed our rights under the law. Yet, today, we’ve twisted the idea of ‘human rights’ into a parody, where violent offenders are shielded from deportation on grounds as absurd as their children not liking the chicken nuggets in their home country. 

The UK is now fast approaching anarcho-tyranny: the government comes down hard on the law-abiding, while criminals roam free. Post the wrong joke on Facebook? Expect a dawn raid. Join a grooming gang? Don’t worry, the police will look the other way. 

That is Britain in 2025: authoritarian to the innocent, indulgent to the guilty. Free speech is policed and law-abiding citizens are harassed, but the rights of actual criminals are treated as sacrosanct. What kind of liberty is that?

This is an obscene inversion of rights that proves Adam Smith’s warning to be true: “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”

Bukele’s blunt approach shocks Western elites because it exposes this inversion. He flipped the equation back to where it should be: tyranny for the criminals, freedom for the people.

So what would it actually mean for Britain to ‘do a Bukele’ or ‘pull an El Salvador’?

It wouldn’t mean tanks in the streets or abolishing Parliament. It would mean a government finally willing to carry out its fundamental role: protecting the British people.

It would mean mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders, building enough prisons to end early releases, and immediate deportation of foreign criminals without endless appeals. It would also mean restoring public trust by finally rooting out the officials who were complicit in covering up the grooming gangs for decades. 

But most of all, it would mean a decisive shift in focus: Protect the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of the criminal minority.

None of this is complicated. It only sounds impossible if you’ve spent too long marinating in the excuses of a political class that’s forgotten why it was elected in the first place.

Why can a small, war-torn nation like El Salvador restore order, while Britain, with its global legacy, wallows in chaos? Bukele prioritises his people’s safety over elite approval, while our leaders prioritise policing speech over cracking down on actual crime.

Britain doesn’t need Bukele’s mega-prisons. But it does need the one thing our leaders lack: the will to protect the rights of ordinary people. Because without safety, there is no freedom.

The question is simple: do we go on with managed decline, anarcho-tyranny, and elite excuses? Or is it time, finally, for Britain to pull an El Salvador?