Pakistan is laughing at us. Over the past three years, they’ve deported a staggering 2.4 million Afghans. It was one of the largest expulsions of human beings in history. Yet when we ask Pakistan if they will please take back one poxy bloke, they say “Nope”. They are allowed to kick out undesirables, you see, but we are not.
Already Guardianista voices are being raised to say it would be “problematic” to tweak Britain’s laws
The case of Shabir Ahmed, the Rochdale rape-gang leader let out of jail this month, gets more enraging every day. Pakistan is now flat-out refusing to take back its criminal citizen. In my eyes that is an act of hostility, and it should be treated as such by our government. Every tool of statecraft must now be deployed to make Pakistan relent and take back its monster who we are done with.
Ahmed was sentenced to 22 years for his reign of rape over white working-class girls in Rochdale. He was let out on licence at the start of July. Virtually no one wants him in the country, least of all the women he so viciously abused. Our incoming PM, Andy Burnham, has promised to exhaust all options for booting out this beastly destroyer of lives.
One problem is the Immigration Act 1971, which forbids the removal of anyone from a Commonwealth country who came to Britain before 1973. That covers Ahmed, a Pakistani who arrived in the late Sixties. The other problem is Pakistan. You “spoiled” this man, so you can keep him – that’s their line. Such jingoistic hubris must not stand.
It was Tahir Andrabi, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who basically told us to get stuffed. It was in Britain that Ahmed was “raised, groomed and unfortunately spoiled”, he said. “Groomed” – what a striking choice of word. A Pakistani’s grooming of vulnerable girls is subtly turned into a tale about Britain’s grooming of monsters.
“The government of Pakistan has no connection whatsoever with this matter”, said Andrabi. Yes you do. Ahmed is a Pakistani citizen. Solely a Pakistani citizen, in fact – his British citizenship was rightly revoked. Pakistan is simply being asked to take responsibility for one of its own. Its refusal to do so is an imperious act of disregard for the sovereign wishes of the United Kingdom.
The Ahmed case is now more than a matter of justice: it is a moral test for our nation. We are about to find out how seriously our politicians take the principle of sovereignty, that fundamental liberty of every free nation to determine which foreigners may reside within their territory. If we fail to deport Ahmed, we will advertise to the world just how deracinated and meaningless the sovereign integrity of our once great kingdom has become.
So much now rests on the successful removal of this foreign repeat rapist from our lands. We need to show that the safety and dignity of working-class women count for more than the faux-virtuous posturing of the radical middle classes.
Already Guardianista voices are being raised to say it would be “problematic” to tweak Britain’s laws just to deport one bad man. Others among the credentialled keffiyeh classes fret that deporting Ahmed will open the door to the deportation of others. (And?) Enough is enough – the self-regarding sloganeering of cossetted activists must not take moral precedence over the existential security of working-class Britons.
The incoming government has a chance to show that it prizes the well-being of working-class women more highly than the cheap moral thrill the bourgeois left gets from crowing: “Refugees welcome!”
In fact, going forward this should be the moral priority across the immigration issue. We should be listening less to self-styled anti-racists who ostentatiously welcome every young man who lands on our shores, and more to women in the poorer parts of Britain who are forced against their will to live cheek by jowl with these undocumented blokes from distant, regressive lands where men rule and women obey.
Here’s what the Shabir Ahmed horror forces us to ask. Are we an independent nation or not? Do we or do we not enjoy that first freedom of democratic nationhood, which is to welcome or expel any good or individual that we so choose? Pakistan’s refusal of Ahmed is an underhand insult to our independence. It is the throttling by a foreign power of the legitimate wishes of the free people of Britain.
Action must be taken. Cancel visas for Pakistanis. Put a stop on the payment of remittances to Pakistan. Freeze aid. Whatever it takes. Pakistan – the whole world, in fact – needs to know that Britain is a sovereign land that will not tolerate the thwarting of its national interest by any foreign actor. Andy, can you do that?
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