Is Keir Starmer secretly working as Tommy Robinson’s campaign manager?
I ask only because he couldn’t be doing a better job of it if he tried.
His claim at a press conference today that people calling for a public inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal are jumping on the “bandwagon of the far Right” is not only offensive and wrong – it is counter-productive.
For years, governments of all colours have tried to suppress information relating to crime, nationality and ethnicity out of a fear that it might stir social unrest.
By doing so, they have merely ceded territory to the far Right.
It is the same with statistics which were finally published yesterday showing that migrants are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as are UK nationals.
Governments have never seemed to have a problem publishing statistics which show migrants getting a worse deal than British citizens, say on health or housing.
Yet these particular figures had to be teased out of various government departments via freedom of information requests submitted by a think tank, the Centre for Migration Control.
The last thing I would want to do would be to give any support to the likes of Robinson – a rabble-rouser who is serving a jail term not for telling the truth, as Elon Musk would have us believe, but for breaking a legal injunction not to repeat untruths about a migrant youth.
Nor would I want to give a boost to racists or extremists of any kind – who, in contrast to those on the Continent, have rightfully been pushed to the very margins of political debate.
If you want to encourage extremists, however, there is no better way than to refuse to speak about sensitive topics like migration or elevated rates of criminality in certain ethnic or national groups.
That is exactly what happened with the grooming gangs, in which teenage girls were habitually raped, abused and exploited – and yet where whistle-blowers were silenced.
Evidence uncovered by Alexis Jay’s report in 2014 found that police and social services were too scared to take action for fear of being accused of being racist – given that almost all the perpetrators were men of Pakistani heritage and almost all the victims were white girls.
The result of the cover-up was to make sure that for years the only people talking about the scandal were the far Right.
I first heard about grooming gangs when they were raised in a meeting of the BNP secretly filmed for a BBC Panorama programme in 2004.
Like most viewers at the time I assumed it was just a tall tale made up by racists to try to stir up racial hatred.
But then it turned out to be true. No wonder that for several years the BNP found some very fertile campaigning ground in northern towns where many people knew what was going on.
The government will be making a similar mistake if it ignores or tries to suppress statistics showing higher rates of crime among many migrant groups.
The figures are astounding.
In the first 10 months of 2024, 48 out of every 100,000 UK nationals were arrested for sex offences. For foreign nationals the rate was 164.5.
It is a similar story with general criminality. An astonishing 210 out of every 1,000 Albanians were arrested on suspicion of some sort of crime – nearly twice the number of any other national group, with Afghans next on 107 followed by Iraqis on 93 per 1,000.
This does not, of course, prove that all Albanians are criminals – that cannot be emphasised enough. But what it does suggest is that Afghan criminals are targeting Britain as somewhere they can profitably carry out their activities.
And even when they do get caught, too often they can avoid deportation by claiming it would breach their human rights.
In one all-too-typical case a man who was jailed for six years for smuggling hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of drug money out of Britain was allowed to stay on the grounds that he had a ‘right to a family life’ – on the basis he had two children to an Albanian wife who was living in Britain.
He long ago divorced the British wife who had helped him obtain a UK passport.
It is perfectly reasonable to be angered by this sort of thing – and to expect the government to take action.
Just why is it so difficult for elected government to take on activist judges? Given that there is no war in Albania, and that the country is not under a malignant dictatorship, why isn’t the government declaring it a safe country and automatically denying asylum to any Albanian?
We could do the same for several countries whose criminals and terrorists have been abusing the asylum system.
However much a government might wish to sweep awkward issues under the carpet, sooner or later the truth will emerge – with negative consequences.
Every time ministers tell us “nothing to see here, move along now” they ensure that some people will be moving along straight into the welcoming arms of the far Right.
