Plymouth, a city in the south-west of England historically linked with the Royal Navy, is not these days a place much in the national consciousness. Like many British places with a proud past, it is now somewhat bedraggled, down-at-heel and unloved. Life there continues unnoticed by the rest of the country, plodding along without much interest.
Which is why the news earlier this week that two young men had forced their way into a house there at 4am and attacked another man with acid came as rather a surprise to the nation. That the men then went to rural Wiltshire, the very definition of Deep England, where they wandered around a village asking to charge their phones then received a lift to the railway station from a kindly stranger, added a bizarre twist to the story. It would be a Coen Brothers film come to life, darkly comic, if it weren’t so appalling.
The police have been, in their modern, politically sensitive manner, highly circumspect about the suspects. We have been told that the two are black men in their early 30s, as, it seems, is the victim. We have been informed that it has nothing to do with terrorism or ‘extremist ideologies’, as though the chucking around of acid in naval towns is fine and dandy just so long as the perpetrators don’t shout Allahu Akhbar when doing so. We have been notified that it was the consequence of organized crime, in a rather pathetic attempt to reassure the public that they don’t have to worry about waking up to an attack in their own homes.
As with the unspeakable horror of the Southport atrocity in July 2024, there is a simmering resentment on social media that the public are being taken for mugs by the authorities. We know perfectly well that this is not the sort of thing that happened until very recently in our history. The attempt by police and politicians to downplay the frequency and horror of such incidents, to suppress the thought that this is not how Britain was or should be, to bully into silence those questioning why we live this way, could almost be considered gaslighting if that term were not so utterly insufficient for such a serious matter.
‘There has been more immigration to this country since the turn of the millennium until now than there was from the Norman conquest until the millennium’
With each new instance of our altered country, there is a phase of conservative commentators and some politicians (Rupert Lowe of Reform and Robert Jenrick of the Tories most often) saying: ‘Surely this will be the last straw?’ before another story displaces it and the news cycle moves on. It is as though the sustained thought would be too painful, the necessary conclusions and resolutions too hideous, to contemplate. Much easier, then, to post an outraged tweet or two before returning to the comfort of quotidian badinage about the (sincerely awful) awful policies being enacted by Sir Keir Starmer and Mrs Badenoch’s seeming inability to take advantage of quite how bad this Government is.
Yet there is, I think, a sense now throughout the country that this is quite enough, that we do not need to live like this and that unless our elected officials begin seriously to address why it is and how we fix it, there will be a movement to take matters out of their hands. One in 27 people living in Britain—two and a half million people—arrived in the past two years, 190,000 of them illegally. There has been more immigration to this country since the turn of the millennium until now than there was from the Norman conquest until the millennium.
At no point was the public consulted about this policy. At every point when concerned politicians and commentators raised questions about whether this demographic revolution would be entirely benign, they were howled down (cynically, unforgivably) by the progressives on both sides for whom any query about immigration was racist, intolerant xenophobia. After each new incident, each fresh outrage, the majority of the mainstream media and of our national institutions leapt into damage limitation mode, insisting that this was an aberration, that all who come here do so with peaceable intent and a determination to assimilate and assume ‘British values’—a phrase so unfathomably trite that it serves as an immediate indicator of a defunct intellect.
‘There is an adamantine refusal to accept that mass immigration has changed Britain vastly for the worse’
We know that sleepy Wiltshire villages have not harboured chemical attackers throughout our long island story. We are fully aware that this is not a desirable state of affairs. Yet for the governing class in general (if with specific exceptions), there is an adamantine refusal to accept that mass immigration has changed Britain vastly for the worse, has not only not helped but has actively hindered economic growth by an endless supply of cheap labour, is quite obviously against the will of the people (or at least those who were here before) and is a grave threat to national security. The Utopian idea that we could import millions upon millions of people from the poorest parts of the world, leave them to their lives and expect them by a process of cultural osmosis to become as English as warm beer and cricket on a summer’s afternoon, has been so thoroughly debunked that anyone clinging to it in public life must now be considered an enemy both of common sense and public order.
It was from Plymouth in 1588 that Sir Francis Drake set out to defeat another invading force, that of the Spanish Armada. ‘He blew with his winds and they were scattered’, as the medal struck afterwards proclaimed. Perhaps it is too much to hope that it will be from Plymouth once again that a wind of change blows through our land, blasting to smithereens the remnant of any idea that multicultural society has succeeded and that vast numbers of immigrants are an unalloyed good. But it is not, I think, too much to hope that this latest instance of failure should accrete to the uncountable rest in bringing that day much nearer.
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