IN A rare appearance last week, my local MP Huw Merriman held a public meeting on a controversial Home Office plan to build a migrant camp.
One constituent, frustrated by Merriman’s failure to answer his question, invited everyone against the camp to stand up. Facing almost unanimous opposition, Merriman blustered that he was affording people their democratic rights. But democracy is not merely letting everyone have their say – it’s about responding to their concerns and doing what they ask, which in this case could not be clearer.
What we get instead is MPs’ concerns for their own safety. Facing aggressive members of the public must indeed be unnerving, as the murder of Sir David Amess so brutally highlighted. Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed by a female Muslim constituent in the East End of London. Mike Freer MP recently announced his resignation following a barrage of death threats over his support for Israel.
He is not the only quitter. This week Nickie Aiken, Conservative MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, became the 58th Tory MP to throw in the towel – another who polls show would have lost her seat. Rats deserting a sinking and unenviable ship comes to mind.
So now the Government, who have failed in their first priority which is the safety of all their citizens, are proposing better protection for MPs yet still refuse to take responsibility for putting us all at risk.
They want personal rings of steel to protect them from the realities of life in Britain today, leaving ordinary people to suffer the conditions they have created.
These are the double standards Tory MP Caroline Nokes recently typified on BBC Question Time. Visibly uncomfortable about discussing the recent acid attack on a mother and two children in Clapham, she said: ‘I think it’s wrong to comment on that’. Why? Because the suspect was an illegal migrant who her government allowed to stay, or because of her multicultural niceties, or both? Insultingly she pontificated instead about (woke) ‘micro-aggressions’. Losing no sleep on the threat to public safety caused by the Tories’ broken immigration system, her only concern was for perceived subtle sexist attitudes in the corridors of power. Though her party face wipeout they remain blind to this massive electoral issue – their reckless migration policy.
While the government tighten the ratchet on freedom of speech, and the police and criminal justice system treat outspoken critics as ‘domestic terrorists’, the real violators and threats to people’s safety and security are left to roam our streets. A claim to conversion to Christianity we now know is enough to secure a right to remain, as in the case of Abdul Ezedi, the Clapham suspect from Afghanistan, who entered the country in the back of a lorry.
What a deep irony that it is against the threat of asylum seekers and radical Islamists that MPs such as Mike Freer routinely wear stab vests.
Suicidally, even the crime itself can used by our corrupted political and legal establishment as a reason to prevent deportation. The super-woke BBC World Service Africa editor Mary Harper, for example, offered her services on at least 15 occasions to defend Somali criminals, in one case telling a court that Yaqub Ahmed, the perpetrator of a horrific sex attack, would be in danger if he was returned to Somalia. Truly, the ruling class have never been so foolish or looked on the rest of the populace with contempt.
Following any stabbing spree, shooting or bombing by migrants comes a predictable instruction from the members of the ‘luxury belief class’ to reject hate, and what’s more to unite against a phantom ‘far-right’ backlash. Of course this is a sugar-coated illusion while the killing and maiming recurs. In the same week as the Clapham incident, Valdo Calocane, a migrant from Guinea-Bissau who stabbed two 19-year-old students and an older man to death in Nottingham, was sent to a high-security mental hospital after a court accepted a plea of manslaughter through diminished responsibility.
The broader responsibility for these shocking events is certainly diminished.
A few years ago, when I lived in a sedate suburb of south-west London, an alley used by parents to take their children to school was the scene of a traumatic incident. Two Romanian men, who had been living on the streets near Victoria coach station, decided to go out of town in search of carnal satisfaction. In the middle of the day they raped a woman in her early 50s. A brave man chased one of the attackers and eventually caught him, with help from a neighbour of mine, as he tried to climb over a garage roof. Radian Cojorcaru and Gabriel Sebastian Bejinariu were convicted, but why were they here? Tom Brake, our local MP at the time, had little to say.
The boatloads of undocumented illegal migrants cross the English Channel every day, aided by the RNLI and Royal Navy, are the young males Merriman feels a moral duty to accommodate in Bexhill-on-Sea.
I sometimes wonder whether the establishment, perversely, sees benefit in these dreadful incidents – that each time they happen contributes to the problem-reaction-solution process and a softening-up of us for more authoritarian laws, policies and procedures. Yet it should be obvious to any MPs with critical faculties that they are no longer representing us but presiding over an ever-more-surveilled society which penalises and disenfranchises the law-abiding but harbours and normalises violence.