Britain’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is big on tough-sounding gestures. The boats, however, keep coming: 44,000 more illegal arrivals in the year to March 2026. Most ordinary Britons want the flow stopped dead: not managed, not reduced by a few percentage points – stopped. Mahmood has not managed that.
Her latest masterstroke is a nine-page pamphlet solemnly distributed to the young men already living in hotels and shared houses at public expense. It explains, in English, how to behave once you have broken into someone else’s country. Don’t rape women. Don’t cut their genitals. Don’t have sex with children. The tone is pure John and Betty for people who somehow missed the memo on civilisation.
Mahmood’s latest attempt to manage the scale of this influx has been to issue guidance to migrants, living in hotels and HMOs at our expense, about how they can assimilate into the laws of the place into which they have just broken in. It is satire without intending to be, Jonathan Swift without the punchline.
No one has explained how many of the recipients can even read it, or whether it will be rendered into Somali, Pashto, Urdu or the rest. More to the point, no one has explained what happens if the pamphlet is ignored or torn up on the spot. Deportation is off the table. Prison is off the table. Human-rights law and international treaties have already tied the state’s hands. So the exercise is pure theatre: symptoms managed, disease left untouched.
This, of course, touches on a deeper truth: namely, that a great deal of government “action” these days is designed not to cure the underlying disease but to merely manage the symptoms. You might call it the Kafkaesque stage in the evolution of Western civilisation, a system built on rationality, patriotism and law but now drowning in the quicksand of moral universalism, hyper-liberalism and other mush. It makes me weep to see how deep we are in the swamp of our own delusions.
The word betrayal is not too strong. It applies to decades of successive British governments, every bit as much as it does to reviled historical figures like Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling or Kim Philby. When a government must spell out that child rape is wrong to people it has just waved in, the betrayal is already complete. Nigel Farage has been saying so for years. Even the Conservatives are finally being dragged, kicking and screaming, toward the same conclusion.
The only policy that works is the obvious one: rewrite the laws and treaties that prevent real border control, detain arrivals, sign return deals with any country that will take them and send the rest to Rwanda or wherever else will do business. Everything else – smashing gangs, paying the French (who just keep on hand-waving the invaders through anyway) and one-in-one-out schemes – is displacement activity. Nobody pays a smuggler five thousand pounds to end up back in Mogadishu.
Your first duty is to serve your own citizens. Not people from Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan or Nigeria. The British people.
A nation is not a landmass with a flag. It is a home: the place where shared beliefs, community and family weave the only life most people will ever have. Without borders it ceases to be a nation and becomes a collection of temporary and invariably mutually hostile camps. Opening those borders in the name of compassion to people who despise the host culture is not enlightenment: it is self-annihilation dressed up as virtue.
Last week two Afghan migrants were convicted of raping a woman at knifepoint while she watched the stars. A Sudanese asylum seeker stabbed Rhiannon Whyte to death with a screwdriver. An Afghan abducted and raped a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. These are not isolated tragedies: they are the measurable cost of decades of uncontrolled entry. The data on the rest of the crimes remain carefully unpublished.
Farage understands this in his bones. Kemi Badenoch is starting to. Mahmood, for all the press notices, is still tinkering at the edges. The multi-decade failure has only one accurate name and it begins with B.
