As long as Britain’s official orthodoxy remains that diversity is our ‘strength’, will the authorities ever be straight with the public about the realities of migration-linked crime?
This week, a Pakistani national, Sheraz Malik, was found guilty of two counts of raping an 18-year-old girl in Nottinghamshire. The woman had been drinking at a park in Sutton-in-Ashfield when she was attacked by Malik. She had already been taken to an isolated area and raped by another man he was with, who has yet to be identified. Malik followed proceedings at Birmingham Crown Court via a Pashto interpreter.
These crimes are sickening enough in themselves. But the secrecy raises a further troubling question: just how many more migration-linked offences are going on that are being kept from the public?
This horrific crime happened last year, but it was not until this week that it was legal to report that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker. Nottingham Crown Court had seen fit to place a reporting restriction on this crucial fact, with the defendant referred to in the press simply as a ‘man’.
Malik’s provenance is not incidental. It means the crime he committed was completely avoidable. The life-changing ordeal was visited on a vulnerable young victim by a man who never should have been in this country at all – but whom the Home Office was putting up in a hotel and giving a stipend of £50 a week. And yet for much of the time this case was in the news, we had been prevented from stating where the real responsibility for it lay.
This lack of transparency remains all too common. Last May in Leamington Spa, a girl was abducted and raped by two Afghan asylum seekers who had arrived by small boat just months before. Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as ‘two 17-year-old boys from Leamington’, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a ‘young woman’. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the Daily Mail was granted. Meanwhile, the ‘horrific footage’ played at the trial has still not seen the light of day, with their barrister saying: ‘I have no doubt that if the general public were exposed to that, we would have disorder on our hands.’
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In 2016, Police Scotland took down a Glasgow grooming gang whose 55 suspected members were all asylum seekers – but didn’t disclose it to the public. The unspeakable offences were only exposed four years later after an investigation by the Daily Express.
These crimes are sickening enough in themselves. But such secrecy raises a further troubling question: just how many more migration-linked offences are going on that are being kept from the public?
It’s hardly implausible. We know that asylum seekers, almost all of them young men from countries with backward attitudes towards women, have frequently been linked with crime. Last year, Baroness Casey’s rapid grooming gangs audit reported the bombshell that asylum seekers make up ‘a significant proportion’ of those currently being investigated for the grooming of British children.
We also know that when it comes to migration and crime, the courts see part of their role as muffling public anger and protest. During the legal wrangling over the Bell Hotel in Epping last year, the Court of Appeal sided with the Home Office’s efforts to keep the asylum hotel open in part because it wanted to mitigate ‘the risk of acting as an impetus or incentive for further protests’. Whether this was in practice likely to work, the court’s reasoning was that such protests ‘may be disorderly’ and ‘there is a risk of encouraging further lawlessness’ should Epping Council have its way and the hotel be forced to close.
Indeed, two men involved in protests at the Bell Hotel last summer were sentenced to more prison time for ‘violent disorder’ than asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu was handed down – let alone served – for his sex crime which had sparked the protests. Judge Jamie Sawyer admonished the pair for their ‘racially motivated’ protest, which included climbing on the hotel and kicking a police van, saying they ought to have waited for ‘due process to run its course’ (Epping residents have been complaining about the hotel since 2021). Likewise, after the Southport unrest, the justice system threw the book at people over almost any form of protest and even over social media posts, which had been misleadingly presented as a primary driver of the disorder.
A desire to shore up faith in multiculturalism, meanwhile, also lies behind the state’s foot-dragging over the rape gangs, as well the justice system’s refusal to treat the offences themselves as hate crimes. Hate crimes were designed by New Labour for the courts to reinforce an ‘anti-racist’ political message – that such crimes were ‘particularly odious’, in the words of the Home Office minister who introduced them. But the inflammatory yet vital message that gangs of Pakistani-Muslim men were preying on white girls is one the justice system never have wanted to send.
All of which suggests that the true scale of the migrant crime problem remains hidden from us and that there are fresh horrors we simply haven’t been allowed to know. Rob Bates, research director at the Centre for Migration Control, believes the public are being ‘kept in the dark’ by all arms of the British state: ‘The government is doing all it can to resist publishing crime stats by nationality and immigration status. Police forces are required to immediately ascertain the immigration status of any foreign national in custody, yet in the vast majority of cases this is not happening.’
Timorous officials may believe that squashing these stories buys them a temporary reprieve, but this will only heighten the fury when the details eventually emerge, as they inevitably will. We need transparency and we need the truth.
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