Imagine for a moment that you are employed by the Home Office to vet asylum seekers and decide who should be allowed to remain in our country. You are a kindly soul: you believe in the need to Stand Up to Racism and are deeply conscious that the asylum seekers who come under your jurisdiction are “human beings”, rather than sacks of carrots, dachshunds or cyborgs.
Your name is Oli. You cycle to work, sometimes pausing at pedestrian crossings to allow people to cross, and your lunchtime treat is a falafel wrap. Your IQ does not quite stretch to three figures, but you are largely sentient and while you have not yet, during your three-year career, denied anybody the right to remain in the country, you tell yourself that you do have your limits. There must be some people we should not let in.
And then one morning you come across the file of Abdelrahmen Adnan Abouelela, an Egyptian gentleman aged about 40. Now, what should we do with him? You learn that Mr Abouelela is a member of the somewhat radical Muslim Brotherhood and that he has run away from Egypt, where he has since been convicted of trying to blow up pylons and gas pipelines. Could this possibly be a first deportation?
You read on, becoming acquainted with Abdelrahmen’s coherent and measured views: “Egypt’s lions are either hunted, imprisoned or martyred. May Allah liberate the Middle East from the filth of vile rulers and the slaves of the people.”
Oli can’t make his mind up. Perhaps he thinks: hey, people can change and Abdelrahmen may one day train to be a surgeon and take part in fun runs, plus he might not receive a terribly fond welcome in Cairo. So for 17 months Mr Abouelela is given leave to remain in the UK and we pay for him to live in a four-star Hampton by Hilton hotel in west London, rooms about £200 a night, without breakfast.
The reason we know about Abouelela now is not that he has forsworn Islamic terrorism and retrained as a surgeon, but that he raped a woman in Hyde Park and has just been handed an 8½-year sentence. The Home Office is now determined to deport him. Let’s see. Don’t forget, Oli’s still there.
Sure, Abouelela is an extreme case of what might be going wrong with our asylum system. Trouble is, there is an extreme case almost every day, each one more surreal than the last, each one stretching my ability to be satirical about it because the truth trumps the satire every time — such as the chap who was given leave to remain here partly because he was a terrorist but largely because he kept his house nice and clean and hadn’t blown anyone up yet.
On the issue of asylum seekers, as on so many others — the trans nonsense, white supremacy, rainbow flags, DEI and all this rest of this identitarian rubbish — the liberal establishment is marching determinedly towards oblivion, and it worries me a little. You have seen the people lined up behind Tommy Robinson, the huge rise in support for Reform, the gradual realisation among our main parties — even Labour — that things have gone too far. Somehow the Narrenschiff on which we are travelling needs to be turned around — a cumbersome procedure requiring a rather more resolute skipper than Sir Keir Starmer — before there is real trouble.
There is a microaggression almost every day, whether it be the details of Abouelela’s case, or an asylum seeker sexually assaulting a young girl in Epping, or even the hilariously named Centre for Hate Studies at Leicester University instructing people living in the countryside that they had to change their way of life to ensure that ethnic minority people didn’t feel “challenged” or “excluded” when they went for a walk up a nice hill.
For too long the scales have been weighed down, rather heavily, against an indigenous population which is showing real signs of being in ferment. And justifiably being in ferment, frankly.
The Abouelela case is very simple, really. Oli should have the safety of British people at the forefront of his mind, not the sensibilities of Abouelela himself. The questions to be asked are these: first, is there any possibility that Abouelela poses a risk to people in this country? Once you’ve found out that he’s been part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the answer is a resounding “yes”, even before one takes into account his pyrotechnics.
If an asylum seeker manages to pass that first question, the second is: will this person be of value to the UK and find the local culture amenable? If it’s a no, then goodbye and we’ll worry about the appeals procedure later, when we’ve changed the law.
In short, then, the Home Office should make its priorities the safety of the public and the threat to social cohesion. But then, shouldn’t Oli and co have been doing that all along?
Free speech under threat
Your Farce
Well, who would have predicted this? (Me, actually, two months ago.) Your Party, the vehicle set up by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana to usher in a sunlit upland of socialism in this country is coming apart at the seams.
Sultana is furious with Magic Grandpa and claims the party is being run like a “sexist boys’ club”.
Not a very fun sexist boys’ club, I suspect. Bet there are no lap dancers, for a start. And now Magic Grandpa is reaching for the ice pick, by way of legal action against Sultana.
The party has already been riven by the trans issue, the hefty Muslim contingent being slightly less progressive on the issue than the rest had hoped.
Why is it all ending like this? Scholars of Marx have a term for it. Historical inevitability.
Driving into trouble
Road pricing might put an end to the great British pastime of adultery, according to the Earl of Erroll.
His point was that the surveillance required would be an invasion of privacy which might, down the line, cause spousal discontent. As in, “You told me you were going to the golf club. But this receipt from the A449 suggests you were heading to the Premier Inn for a lunchtime quickie with that tart from accounts, the one with the Croydon facelift and the tattoo of a dolphin leaping out of her butt crack. I have instructed the lawyers.”
I fear His Lordship is attempting to close a door that has long been flapping wildly open. You can’t hide anything from anyone any more.
Incidentally, the Earl of Erroll was once prime warden of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers.