They still don’t get it. Even after the grooming-gangs scandal, covered up for the sake of multiculturalism, even after the Southport riots, fuelled by the information vacuum left after those horrific murders, British police appear desperate to follow the same failed playbook. Namely, inflaming community tensions in the name of easing them, and treating the public with contempt.
This time, in Nuneaton. The Warwickshire town has been shaken by a horrific crime. On Tuesday 22 July, a 12-year-old girl was allegedly raped. Two Afghan asylum seekers, living in taxpayer-funded houses just 70 yards from one another, are in the frame. Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, has been charged with vaginal and oral rape of a child. Mohammad Kabir, also 23, has been charged with aiding and abetting rape, as well as strangulation and kidnap of the girl. She is receiving ‘specialist care’.
Fearing the kind of unrest we’ve seen of late in Epping, Canary Wharf, Diss and now Waterlooville, where local residents are agitating against migrant hotels or so-called houses in multiple occupation, over fears about the safety of their children, Warwickshire Police tried to conceal the identity of the alleged perpetrators.
According to the Daily Mail, police briefed local councillors and officials on the situation, but urged them not to reveal that the suspects were asylum seekers, for fear of ‘inflaming community tensions’. Mulakhil, reportedly, came to Britain on a small boat. ‘They’re hushing it up because they don’t want an Epping situation on their hands’, says the Mail’s source.
Indeed, the protests in Epping were sparked by a chillingly similar situation – an Ethiopian asylum seeker who managed to rack up three charges of sexual assault, one of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity and one of harassment without violence, just eight days after he stepped off a dinghy on the south coast.
Warwickshire Police, who have refused to confirm nor deny the revelations, insist their caginess is about protecting any future trial from contempt of court. In a statement, they claim they are following national guidance, which warns against revealing the names and ethnicities of offenders. But there are plenty of cases recently in which other forces have been more, well, transparent. In May, Merseyside Police were strikingly swift to tell us that the man they had just arrested on suspicion of ploughing his car into Liverpool fans following the club’s victory parade was a white Brit.
Contempt seems to drive every police decision these days, but not concerns over contempt of court. From Rotherham to Telford, police forces turned a blind eye to Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs because they feared what locking up these child rapists might spell for ‘race relations’. When a violent or sexual attack takes place, they can apparently flood the airwaves with information, or keep decidedly shtum, depending on the identity of the perpetrator. Contempt for the public, presumed to be a race riot in waiting, has become their guiding star.
Of course, it is precisely these efforts to avoid inflaming community tensions that have inflamed community tensions. Reasonable concerns left unaddressed, even horrific crimes left uninvestigated, are a recipe for social conflict. In turn, official silence only creates the space for the kind of inflammatory BS we saw after the Southport massacre, when online influencers spread the baseless rumour that the killer was a Muslim small-boats arrival. So often, the issue is not the existence of misinformation – which has always been around and always will be – but the suppression of plain old information.
Ordinary people could be forgiven for thinking that the point of these cover-ups is not the protection of future trials, but the protection of the elites. Elites who have presided over an asylum system so lacking in common sense that new arrivals can commit a string of sexual offences, during their time in Britain, and still be granted safe haven. Elites so keen to appear virtuous at Soho drinks receptions that they will happily allow women and children – born Brits and migrants alike – to pay the price for our broken borders.
Every rape, every acid attack, every murder – committed by someone who should never have been here – reveals an elite that has sacrificed its right to rule. No wonder it would rather we didn’t talk about them.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
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