The attempted beheading of a man in Belfast by a Sudanese asylum seeker last week has continued to reverberate across the United Kingdom, with riots following the initial attack, ongoing public anger at a government seen as incapable or unwilling to police the borders, and a defense minister’s resignation adding another credibility blow to Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer at Spiked and author of A Heretic’s Manifesto, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the state of British politics, the immigration crisis, and the growing strength of Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
O’Neill said the violence in Belfast has calmed somewhat but the anger has not. He said the broader public attitude is that whatever the victim’s background may be, and there are suggestions he may have had a criminal history of his own, the government bears direct responsibility for the attack by refusing to police the borders and allowing unvetted men to enter the country in large numbers every week without any meaningful screening. He said the political class’s failure to take border security seriously is an indictment that cuts across party lines and that the government of the richest, most powerful democracies has an obligation to know who is entering the country and why.
He pushed back against the idea that the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch represents a clear alternative, saying the Conservatives were in government for fourteen years before Starmer and were responsible for a massive influx of low-skilled labor from the developing world, with Boris Johnson in particular opening the floodgates that Labour has since failed catastrophically to close. He said the political class across both parties has for twenty years openly discussed the benefits of diversity and the usefulness of immigration as a corrective to British patriotism, with government ministers on record making those arguments going back to Tony Blair. The economic and political incentives pushed in the same direction, which is toward open borders, and ordinary working-class communities in the places where arriving migrants are housed are now paying the blood price for elite virtue.
He said the response from Irish media and political figures in the wake of the Belfast attack, which focused substantially on the circulation of the video documenting the assault rather than on the assault itself, is illustrative of the establishment’s preferred solution: hide the truth from the public rather than address the problem. He said every single week, sometimes more than once a week, a news report emerges of an illegal immigrant being convicted of rape, murder, or assault. He cited two convictions from the same week as the Belfast attack, one involving a man from Iraq found guilty of raping seven women and girls, and another involving a Pakistani national found guilty of raping a drunk woman in a park. He said he understands the counterargument that British citizens also commit rape and murder, but asked why any government would knowingly admit people from cultures with documented records of treating women as second-class citizens when the data now shows illegal immigrants are considerably more likely than native Britons to commit sexual assault.
On Reform’s electoral prospects, O’Neill said Farage’s party is now number one in national polling and that the Brexit spirit, which will mark its tenth anniversary next week, is very much alive in working-class communities. He said he was in Merfield in northern England over the weekend ahead of an important by-election and that immigration is unambiguously the number one concern of local voters, not because of racism or xenophobia, but because they want a sovereign country with borders that work and a government that knows who is coming in and why. He said those are entirely reasonable things to want and that Farage is well positioned to channel that sentiment into political results.
He closed by noting American polling data Proft cited showing that seventy-one percent of self-identified Democrats now support deporting criminal migrants, up eight points from April alone, and agreed that as reality becomes harder to suppress, the right policy conclusions become more politically accessible on both sides of the Atlantic.