Could it happen here? I suppose that’s the underlying thought many of us have had as we watch France burn. And the immediate response is, why wouldn’t it? I am old enough to remember in the early 2000s when people used to say France was a model of integration. Then in 2005 the suburbs went up in flames, followed by parts of the centre of Paris and other major cities. The Citroën flambé became a national dish and suddenly talk of ‘the French model of integration’ disappeared. That same year, eight home-grown terrorists of foreign origin attempted to blow up the London transport network, four succeeded and a little bit of that blasé British attitude that we know better than the French disappeared too. In 2011 our own cities started burning, but we learned nothing from that.
However, I would like to linger on that early 2000s period for a moment because of something in a faraway country which happened during that time. In 2004, the British-born Ken Bigley was abducted, held in captivity and decapitated on camera by Islamist extremists in Iraq. While he was in custody, citizens of his native Liverpool held candlelit vigils. But al Qaeda weren’t listening and cut poor Bigley’s head off anyway.
Britain has consistently refused to do the obvious thing: deport and close the borders
Back then, if you’d said that two decades later a member of the same cell that murdered him, who then joined another cell which performed mass executions, would be wandering around Windsor, doing his shopping at the Co-op, even a devout doom-monger like me might have taken a beat.
Yet this past week we learned that one of that cell – Mohammed Yaseen – has been doing exactly this. Yaseen is among the many thousands of people who have arrived in this country illegally by the kind of small boat that we’ve been told carries only aspiring doctors, engineers and children fleeing persecution.
Take a moment to consider that. What country, what civilisation, would be so mad that after one of its citizens is beheaded by a terrorist group, it welcomes in a member of that group and gives him British taxpayers’ money? When you pay your taxes again this year, remember that some of your money has been given to Yaseen – and to many others like him.
Look at any of the terrorist atrocities of recent years and you will see the same pattern. Britain – under Labour and Conservative governments – has consistently refused to do the obvious thing: deport and close the borders. Instead it has repeatedly let in the people who have been the most visible, vocal enemies of this country. Take any terrorist group and Britain has welcomed them in instead of repelling them.
The Iranian regime official who wrote a book justifying the fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Living in Harrow. The former military chief of Hamas in the West Bank? Living in Barnet. Bodyguard of the terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh? Granted asylum in the UK and wandering around planning attacks.
Most of these cases have come to light only because a small number of journalists at an ever smaller number of publications have had the gumption to look under the bonnet of our asylum and immigration system and ask questions. Yet the system is never held to any account. While it busily works out how to persecute members of the SAS and other members of our armed forces, it has apparently spent little time stopping actual terrorists from roaming our country.
Some people think this is pure incompetence. Others believe it is entirely planned. Both have their arguments. In recent days more people have finally realised how completely compromised our institutions of state are. I would normally say that Jonathan Powell – the Prime Minister’s national security adviser – is, like anyone else, entitled to a private life. But Powell is married to one of the most disgusting women in Britain: an activist called Sarah Helm. I had the misfortune of meeting her 20 or more years ago and to say she is a fanatic is to understate things. In recent days more people have discovered just how vicious she is: immediately after the 7 October massacre, it emerged, she devoted her time to contextualising the killing and later questioned whether the mass rape Hamas carried out had actually happened.
Why do we think that we as a country can survive when all the following things happen all the time: we welcome in terrorists, have the people in charge of our security literally sleeping with the enemy and then prosecute anyone British like Danny Tommo who say that they have had enough of all this? While Yaseen walks around the Windsor Co-op, Tommo remains in custody for the ‘crime’ of slashing an inflatable dinghy belonging to an illegal smuggling gang transporting people to break the law by entering Britain.
The French riots have many causes. But among those burning France down are people the French allowed to come into their country. It isn’t that the French somehow failed to give them enough nice things or were racist. They simply invited in people who hated them.
What makes the situation in Britain so different that it hasn’t happened here? Only that the match has not yet been struck.
Of all the things that have been hardest to communicate in my life, this seems the most impossible: that our civilisation is not, by some law of nature, immortal. It has no right or likelihood to continue existing if it insists on committing harakiri. The people who are welcomed onto our airwaves, work in parts of our government and lead some of our political parties include those who would burn down this country in a heart-beat. They would look us in the eyes and kill us. And we know that because they have done it elsewhere.
They don’t do it at the moment because the time is not right. But when they feel it is, they will act. At which point I suppose people will have to decide whether they wish to be spectators at their own funeral pyre or not.
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