What’s Wrong With the Brits?
Six years after the Brexit vote, Britain is still drifting toward disaster.
By Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
It was six years ago today that the people of Britain surprised the world by voting to leave the European Union. One of the major reasons why they supported Brexit was a widespread desire to take back control of Britain’s borders from the EU and subject the mass immigration into the country to responsible controls.
This desire to control immigration could be described as having a single cause – namely, public alarm over the ongoing Islamization of Britain – or as having a number of intimately related causes: the increasing segregation of Muslims into sharia enclaves, as painstakingly outlined in Ed Husain’s 2021 book Among the Mosques; the high rates of Muslim crime and welfare dependency; the housing crisis, which is only exacerbated by the influx of new immigrants; the so-called “grooming gangs” – that is, Muslim rape gangs – that, beginning in 2012, were revealed in the media to have targeted thousands of underage victims in cities across England over a period of decades; and, not least, the acts of jihadist terrorism that took 52 lives in London on July 7, 2005, five lives outside the Palace of Westminster on March 22, 2017, 22 lives at the Manchester Arena on May 22, 2017, and so on.
As recently as last October, all of Britain was shocked when an ISIS-inspired son of Somali immigrants walked into a Methodist church in Essex and assassinated a Member of Parliament named David Amess, who was meeting there with constituents. And just four months ago, Tommy Robinson released an explosive documentary, The Rape of Britain, that detailed the reprehensible activities of a Muslim rape gang in Telford. It was an indictment not only of the coldblooded perpetrators but also of the Telford police, who, as I wrote at the time, came off looking “every bit as morally reprehensible as the pimps and rapists themselves” – for like police, politicians, social workers, and other public servants across England, they’d pusillanimously turned a blind eye to the brutal and systematic exploitation of working-class girls.
The ultimate point of Tommy Robinson’s documentary, of course, was that Telford isn’t a one-off. The grooming gangs are a national crisis – a national scandal and disgrace – and that disgrace has everything to do with the fact that a very high percentage of the men and women charged with enforcing the law and defending the weak in Britain are simply too scared of the Muslim “community” to perform their duties responsibly. As the number of Muslims in Britain continues to grow, and with it their ability to wreak havoc in response to any perceived offense, this official cowardice can only intensify. When the British Muslim population finally reaches the tipping point, Muslims won’t have to lift a finger to take power; they’ll already have it.
Now, you’d think that these facts would be obvious to most Brits by this point, and that public pressure to reduce Muslim immigration would be on the rise. Polls taken in 2017-18 showed that 47% of Brits wanted an end to Muslim immigration and that 55% see Islam as incompatible with British values. Yet most Brits have continued to vote for major-party political hacks who have no intention of doing anything about the issue. Tommy Robinson’s 2019 run for the European Parliament failed disastrously. So have the candidacies of other impressive critics of Muslim immigration. Why? And on May 12 of this year, the Financial Times reported that, according to a recent survey, most Brits are now “fine with” the fact that “Britain is now a high-immigration country.”
Again: why? Could it be because there haven’t been any major terrorist actions in the last few months, aside from the murder of David Amess? Or because it’s been a while since the last time the newspapers pulled back the curtain on yet another new grooming gang that’s destroyed the lives of hundreds of young girls? Is it so easy for Brits who’ve seen all the evidence that their country is hurtling toward disaster to loosen up about it simply because things have been relatively quiet of late? Is the need to push away the facts and believe that everything’s going to be okay just that powerful? Have other matters – COVID, Megxit, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – distracted Brits from the Muslim mess? Has a paralysis, an indifference, a lack of a fundamental sense of responsibility to future generations, become endemic in the UK, afflicting not only public servants but millions of other subjects? How can it be that the daily drip-drip-drip of horrifying news stories about the Muslim minority isn’t enough to raise hackles – and keep them raised?
I’m referring to stories like the ones told in a just-released report on the failures of Greater Manchester Police and other officials in their confrontation with grooming gangs. One of the report’s revelations concerns Shabir “Daddy” Ahmed, the longtime head of the grooming gang in Rochdale, which is part of Greater Manchester. As it turns out, Ahmed worked for eighteen years as a “welfare officer” in Oldham, which is also a part of Greater Manchester. The police knew as early as 2005 that this welfare officer was also running a rape gang, but they didn’t share the information with Ahmed’s employers on the Oldham Council until 2012, when the Rochdale rape gang – and the failure of authorities to do anything about it – became national news. Even then, however, the Oldham Council took no action on Ahmed.
On GB News on Tuesday morning, Martin Daubney of the Reclaim Party described the Oldham revelations as an example of how Britain’s working classes have been failed by progressive officials who are scared of being called racists. His emphasis on the rapists’ Pakistani identity, however, was glibly dismissed as “a complete distraction” by left-wing activist Amy Cameron, who insisted that the grooming gangs demonstrate nothing more or less than the fact that, quite simply, “whenever you have people in positions of power they’re often able to exploit the vulnerable.” In short, the grooming gang members’ Pakistani identity – to say nothing of their shared religion – is of no significance whatsoever. It’s a transparent lie, needless to say, but it’s a lie by which Britain’s progressive establishment – as well as a good chunk of the rest of the kingdom’s population – has apparently decided that it wishes to live. And, in time, die.