November 3rd 2022.
I occasionally compare the UK to Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass. I can’t do that anymore as real life in the UK surpasses satire. We have had over 40,000 people arrive by boat on the Southern Coast. I hesitate to select a noun to describe these arrivals as whichever one I choose I will offend someone. I leave it to you to decide whether they are Asylum seekers, refugees, undocumented immigrants or economic migrants.
This year about 40,000 of these people have arrived by boat. 10,000 of them are from Albania, an EU candidate country. These Albanians are allegedly disappearing into the criminal underworld shortly after arriving in the UK. In pure irony, a group of Royal National Lifeboat Institute crews were attending a course on hovercraft rescue at the Wirral. On returning from the day’s exercise to their hotel, they found their bags packed and waiting in reception. They had been bumped from their accommodation as the hotel (on Government instructions) had now devoted 100% of their rooms to asylum seekers etc etc. The irony is that the RNLI personnel had just arrived in the Wirral fresh from their duties rescuing the boat people on the south coast.
IRPIMEDIA, an Italian company has made comments on the Albanian underworld in the UK that I have not seen reported in the UK MSM.
On the streets of London and in the British hinterland it is easy to come across semi-empty car washes. According to the latest data that Tony Saggers (EX NCA) had available before leaving the anti-drug leadership to NCA, Albanian criminal organisations are the owners of hundreds of them. “We often found six or seven people working in semi-abandoned gas stations. It is a cover to launder money, but it is also used to recruit new people”, explains the former investigator. “If you pay someone below the minimum wage every day to work in a car wash and then offer them £500 to be a courier for a load of cocaine, you might tempt them.”
Faithfulness, great economic resources, violence and ruthlessness when needed, but also direct contacts with South American producers show that Albanian criminal organisations have the right skills to impose themselves in the geopolitics of organised crime. But how far can they go? According to Tony Saggers, this will also depend on the effects of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. “If Brexit forces a change in trade routes and Albanian criminal groups import directly into the UK without passing through the other European hubs, we could see corruption and violence soar in our seaports as it happened in Belgium and Holland, where, in recent years, there have murders and shootings in the streets of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp”.
This explains why this year there have been 10,000 Albanian cross channel immigrants (mostly young men) as it can be seen how they are fed into this network.
How did the Albanian mafia manage to carve out a prominent place in the UK criminal landscape? The history of their settlement can be traced back to the 1990s and is often associated with the Kosovo war; a conflict in which over 1 million people were displaced between 1998 and 1999. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovars left the country and sought refuge in neighbouring and European countries; and a large majority settled in Tirana, Albania. However, according to British investigators, during those years many of the refugees that reached the British border seeking asylum Albanian citizens who identified themselves as Kosovars to receive preferential welcoming treatment.
Today, there is no unequivocal number of Albanian citizens residing in the United Kingdom. In 2019 the national statistics office released a rough estimate: claiming that about 47,000 Albanians are residing in the country and 29,000 Kosovars. However, according to the British government databases, in the year of the pandemic alone 3,071 citizens of Albanian origin requested political asylum in the country.
“The Albanian criminal groups have enriched themselves patiently. A typical British drug dealer wants to make money as fast as possible and at any cost” explains Tony Saggers. “Instead, Albanian criminal groups have learned that the profit margins are high enough to allow them to halve the prices of the substance at the sale, without decreasing the quality.”
Source IPRIMEDIA accessed 2nd November 2022. irpimedia.irpi.eu/en-albanian-mafia-uk-cocaine-supply/.
This has increased their market share and the number of Albanians allegedly participating in the business means that they have enough strength in numbers to defend their sales channels.
The immigration issue is rapidly becoming the biggest headache for the Government and is gradually overtaking the cost of living as an issue of importance to the voter. There are more and more examples of incompetence and impotence in handling immigration and this is now really irritating the voters.
I have seen commentators suggest that it is this issue that will lose the Conservatives the next election. The cost of living crisis and the economy will of course remain important, but the Conservatives have two years to show an improvement here. The Conservatives may have the ability to fix many of the issues, but they will need a better political mind than Sunak’s to communicate this to the population. If he can get this right then they have a fighting chance with the economic issues.
WHAT DO I DO NOW?
What is becoming a major issue in the UK, is the apparent lack of a political brain in Rishi Sunak. It is all very well being in possession of two brains the size of planets, but if you can’t connect those to a political antenna then life as Prime Minister will become increasingly difficult. This was evidenced by his appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. This was allegedly in return for her bringing her supporters (from the right of the party) in behind his final push in the latest leadership campaign.
The COP27 conference in Egypt has presented him with problems. He has announced that he is not attending and has refused permission for King Charles to attend. Stopping Charles from going makes sense as it would have been difficult to convince him to present a neutral position. Boris Johnson announced that he will be attending, although his credentials and under whose auspices he is going were unclear, but apparently, he has been invited by the Egyptian hosts. Surprise, surprise!!
The problem with writing my pieces is that the situation is so fluid the letter gets overtaken by events as I write it! Rishi Sunak has just announced that he will be attending. Yet another stuff up by the Conservatives that could have been avoided if Sunak had a mature political brain (or better advisors).
One of Sunak’s first actions was to reverse the Conservative policy on fracking and ban it. Whatever the reasons for this, and there are some interesting theories around, it shows a lack of political sense. It was an opportunity for the UK to improve its energy position in a time of international pressure on the industry. One theory, (which is unproven) is that he has agreed to a windfall tax with the current oil companies on the condition that he stops fracking. Fracking would have increased supply and depressed domestic energy prices.
The Bank of England has just increased the base rate from 2.25% to 3%. Somehow, this seems to be too little, too late as the Bank has procrastinated over the previous year when the question of tackling inflation needed to be addressed. A previous boss of the Bank of England, Mervyn King has been very scathing in his recent assessments of the Bank’s performance. The announcement was accompanied by a warning that the recession will now probably continue into 2024.
If the usual voting patterns happen and the Conservatives lose the next election (before January 2025) then Labour will get in power and because of the Conservatives’ prudent financial management will embark on a tax and spend policy. Unfortunately, if they gain power at the next election there will be nothing left in the economy for them to spend.
The country just seems to be getting worse and worse. You can almost see the people giving up, and it is difficult to remember when there has been a lower trust in politicians.
