'Tory failure to respect asylum seekers has led to acid attacks on our streets'

02 February 2024 , 13:08

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Police are hunting Abdul Ezedi after a mum and two girls were injured in an acid attack in Clapham

It's the lawyer's fault. And the vicar. The wokerati, north London podcasters, the Bible-clutching Lefties, the diversity-obsessed police, are responsible for the fact a convicted sex offender was given asylum in the UK, and is now on the run after launching an acid attack on a mum and her two little girls.

Abdul Ezedi is subject of a nationwide manhunt as the likes of LBC radio host Nick Ferrari address those "seeking to obstruct" asylum laws, and say: "I hope you're proud of yourselves."

And if you're stupid enough to believe all that without asking why no-one with a platform is making the same "it's just one bad apple" argument about Ezedi as they tend to do about others - like murdering cop Wayne Couzens, or child killer Ian Huntley, or convicted stalker Bryce Hodgson who was shot dead by police this week after he tried to enter a woman's flat armed with a crossbow - then you are stupid enough to be part of the real reason Ezedi was granted asylum.

Ezedi, originally from Afghanistan, got leave to remain on the third time of asking, even though he had been convicted of sexual assault and exposure in 2018. Part of his evidence was a priest's letter saying he'd converted to Christianity. But so what? Peter Norgrove was a British-born Jehovah's Witness, and he still got sentenced to life this week for bludgeoning Sharon Gordon to death at the foot of her stairs because she thought he wasn't doing a good job building her conservatory. Halleluj - ah, yes, well, um.

What's he listening to, white noise? (@LBC/Twitter)

That the asylum system is broken is something agreed on by Left and Right. How it got that way, though, has nothing to do with the sort of people Ferrari was blaming, and everything to do with the fact that they're blamed.

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Blame is a very important part of the asylum process. Those in it are blamed for coming here, those who work with them are blamed for helping, those who run it are blamed for letting in too many. And the politicians, to whom blame is a ping pong ball that must be constantly batted away in the never-ending campaign to be re-elected, always blame the other side.

Everyone loathes the asylum system, the Left for not being kind enough and the Right for being too kind. Yet despite an increasingly authoritarian, populist, cost-cutting approach to the whole thing over the past 14 years of Tory rule, it's become no more better or cheaper.

In 2011, the asylum system cost taxpayers £538m a year and spent £15,000 a head making decisions which, 87% of the time, were decided in 6 months or less. In 2021, it cost £2bn a year, still spent £15,000 a head, and only 10% of the decisions were made within 6 months. The number of asylum applications went from 37,000 to 168,000 in the same period, and while the unit costs stayed the same efficiency dropped off a cliff. This, dear Reader, is now known as The Backlog.

Home Office data on the number of asylum decisions versus the number of case workers

The Blame for The Backlog meant Rolling Back The Welcome Mat, which meant Cutting Costs, which meant Firing The Asylum Decision Makers. These were trained and experienced civil servants, a good chunk of them former police officers, who were skilled at interviewing and spotting the wrong-uns. In 2011 there were just 380 of them, making on average 1,641 decisions a month. That's about 4 each.

By 2015 their numbers had been cut to 260, and they made on average 7 decisions a month each, and the cost of each decision had fallen by half to £7,000. This, it would appear, was cheaper and quicker. Yay! But soon afterwards Ezedi entered the country, was convicted of his sexual offences in 2018, and won asylum a year or two ago. You might well come to the conclusion that fewer case officers, and a drive to spend less and make quicker decisions, let a wrong-un in.

By December 2022, after a massive recruitment effort, there were more than 2,000 staff, making 2,992 decisions - but that's an average of 1.4 each. And only 72 per cent of them involved an interview.

There are now a lot more staff, spending a lot more money, but they're inexperienced and, as a result, inefficient. Throw in the political vows to "clear the backlog", and you have the perfect recipe for another wrong-un to sneak past. In fact scratch that - they don't need to sneak. They can saunter.

And what will happen when the next Ezedi emerges? Everybody will blame everybody else, there'll be promises to cut costs and increase efficiency, the case workers who've finally figured out what they're doing will be made redundant at our expense, and the whole sorry cycle starts again. No-one will call the next criminal "one bad apple" because that's reserved for white men, and even if they did they'd never notice that the entire barrel was MADE BY IDIOTS.

The Home Office budget has been slashed every year in real terms since 2010. It could no more properly fund the asylum system and border force than it could stand a round at the pub. The cost of cuts was selling off parts of the government estate, which in turn meant asylum seekers had to be housed in hotels, which as the backlog grew has given us an annual bill of £2.9bn.

And that's not being spent on aslyum seekers. It's going to private hotel owners, who can abandon the regular refurbishment and repairs while doubling their room rates. As a result the Home Secretary James Cleverly has just asked for £2.6bn from the foreign aid budget, which means the cash we WERE going to spend on helping other nations be better so their people didn't flee is NOW being spent on putting up the people who have fled.

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There is a simple solution. It is counter-intuitive, but the evidence from other nations shows that it works. We need only treat asylum seekers with respect. Respect would mean we stop blaming them, stop blaming each other, stop talking about welcome mats or hostile environments. Respect would mean the system was properly funded, professionally run, proper government accommodation was built, and the process made as painless, but as thorough, as possible.

Respect would make a religious conversion irrelevant. Respect would mean sex offenders get returned. Respect would, strangely, mean the Lefty lawyers, bishops and other bête noires of the Right would quieten down, and everyone could look at a fairer process more critically rather than through the lens of politics or race or hatreds. We need have no barges to divert our attention, if the whole thing actually works properly.

Respect would probably piss off Nick Ferrari and the others like him who seem to subsist on a diet of blame and finger-pointing, but it could also give him exactly what he wants: we could be proud of ourselves. Wouldn't that be nice?

Fleet Street Fox