The long shadow of crisis hangs again over our nation. On almost every front there are dark clouds ahead. The economy is in deep trouble, as debts soar and job creation plummets. Too many Britons are on welfare; too few can afford a home. Our overstretched public services cannot cope with current levels of demand.
In Liverpool this week, NHS patients were warned to expect 50-hour waits in Accident and Emergency. Yesterday one doctor told the BBC that parts of his local hospital were “like a war zone”.
Public faith in the justice system is collapsing. Acts of random violence now seem endemic, like the murder this week of 14-year-old Keylan Bokassa on a bus in Woolwich, south-east London.
What were once serious crimes, such as drug possession or shoplifting, have effectively been legalised by police indifference. There is a grim feeling of disintegration across our land. The bonds of solidarity that used to hold us together are fraying. Traditional British values of fair play, humour, tolerance and free speech are disappearing.
At the heart of this disturbing process is a profound sense that our rulers have betrayed us by engaging in a reckless, ultimately doomed experiment to transform the very fabric of our nation. Chanting their mantra that “diversity is our strength”, the politicians have torn down proper border controls, allowed illegal immigration to flourish across the channel, and placed an intolerable burden on the civic infrastructure.
Voters yearn for a government that will put the interests of Britain and its people first, rather than pretending that we owe a living to everyone who wants to settle here.
The disastrous open door approach has fuelled the import of alien cultural practices infused with misogyny, and authoritarianism, which is why urban Britain is awash with sectarianism, superstition, sharia courts and sexual exploitation.
Just this week it was officially revealed that migrants are three times more likely to commit sex crimes than British citizens.
Such offences have been seen at their cruellest in the current scandal over the predatory activities of Pakistani men in targeting vulnerable white working-class girls in conurbations across the north and the midlands.
The victims’ suffering has crystallised the public’s despair about the impact of mass immigration, partly because of the industrial scale of the abuse, and partly because of the shameful cover-up by the authorities.
In towns like Rotherham, where 1,400 girls were estimated to have been assaulted, rapists acted with near impunity. Even when they were convicted, their sentences were excessively lenient, while, thanks to the enfeebled courts, many of the worst offenders managed to avoid deportation.
There are grotesque double standards at work here. If gangs of white hooligans had systematically targeted under-age Muslim girls, the entire apparatus of the state would have been galvanised into action.
But the opposite happened in this scandal. In its quest to maintain the illusion of multi-culturalism’s success, officialdom lost sight of essential morality and compassion. In effect, innocent working-class girls were sacrificed on the altar of fashionable dogma. This conspiracy of denial was worsened by Labour’s terror of losing the Muslim votes, so their representatives downplayed the seriousness of the problem.
This week Simon Danczuk, the former Labour MP for Rochdale, told me that on several occasions he was warned by senior colleagues not to campaign against the abuse because of “the damage” that could be done to Labour’s electoral prospects in Muslim neighbourhoods. Danczuk took no notice.
Today Labour’s attempt to conceal the truth drives its refusal to hold a national public inquiry into the scandal. Again, the party’s warped values have been on full display, as Sir Keir Starmer appears to be far more angered by verbal attacks on his front-bench than physical attacks on largely working-class girls.
But even if they won the Commons vote to reject an inquiry on Wednesday night, Labour may ultimately pay a savage price for their shameful collusion with abuse – and for the wider doctrinaire mismanagement of our country.