The migrant crime cover up

The Labour government has taken the egregious step of launching a legal bid to prevent the publication of migrant crime statistics.

Following a ruling by the Information Commissioner’s Office that the Ministry of Justice had “not demonstrated” any justifiable reason for withholding 2018 to 2024 data on convictions by nationality, the first instinct of former Justice Secretary, David Lammy was to go running to the courts.

It was a freedom of information request by the Centre for Migration Control that sparked this stand off, and we will be deploying every available mechanism to block the blocking of this data.

As a party that in opposition talked incessantly about the need for greater transparency and accountability in public life, Labour has found that when in office these are rather inconvenient features of a democracy.

Allowing the electorate to know how badly the country has been run into the ground is never a vote winner — especially when it is on the issue of mass migration that was carried out with no democratic consent in the first place.

But we should not be too surprised. The Labour Party has a woeful track record of cover ups. In October last year, Labour MPs marched en masse through the voting lobbies to block an amendment to the Sentencing Bill that would require the publication of this data.

Of course it was also under their watch, at both the local and national level, that the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to operate with impunity.

Highlighting the crisis, according to Andy Burnham’s new Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, is nothing but a “dog whistle”. This mindset resulted in a criminal level of inaction, allowing the lives of thousands more girls to be ruined, with the public asked to “shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity”.

And it is this same worldview that is undoubtedly the reason behind the Party’s attempt to cover up migrant conviction data. Publishing figures that show certain nationalities commit crime at a far higher rate would inevitably lead to calls for something to actually be done about it.

People would rightly expect for foreign criminals to actually be deported, not allowed to continue living in Britain, and they would expect visa bans to be introduced for those nationalities that commit crime at a disproportionate rate.  

Both these policy measures, that seem brazenly obvious to anyone who actually cares about our society, are the very antithesis of the modern Labour Party’s guiding philosophical principles.

The average Labour backbencher would be appalled at the suggestion that the national interest be placed above the human rights of foreign sex offenders. To suggest that young men from Afghanistan, who pose a greater threat to women and girls than men from Britain, should not be allowed into the country, is an affront to the cultural relativism so loved by party canvassers.

The country is being ordered to hear no evil, see no evil, and ignore the daily slew of news reports that show the barbaric activities of some hotel residents.

There is little hope of Lammy’s successor, Alex Norris, dropping the department’s legal challenge.  It would be a noble thing to do, and one that is in the public interest, but as border security minister when tens of thousands of young men from culturally distant nations crossed the Channel into Britain, it would rather shine a spotlight on the risks that the public has been subjected to as a result of his failings.

Thus the machinery of the state will now grind into gear, led by the praetorian guard of the Government Legal Department, protecting politicians from public scrutiny.

The main thrust of their case, that the costs of producing information on migrant crime would be too great, falls rather flat when one now considers the legal and administrative costs that the department will accumulate during this case. Moreover, in line with the ICO’s investigation, much of the data has already been produced, now sitting under lock and key in Petty France.

There is no doubt that something uncomfortable is being hidden from the public. We can all sense it.

But until the data is released, and the argument won emphatically, the current data desert will allow politicians, along with former magazine editors who have fallen from grace and now spend their time blogging, to continue telling us we live in a mass migration utopia.