People are growing restless about the failures of governments across Europe, the US columnist writes
Young people are being murdered on the streets of Europe because of failed immigration policies, open borders, and a political class that puts the feelings of migrants and asylum seekers above the safety of its own citizens.
People are outraged over two-tier policing and governments that fail to address the root problems. They look at the news, they look at their streets, and they wonder if the country they grew up in still belongs to them in any real way. Enough must be enough.
On 19 June, Louis, a seventeen-year-old French boy was lured to a construction site in Narbonne and beaten so badly he died in hospital three days later.
The savage attackers filmed it. Reports circulating widely describe the group as having North African migrant backgrounds.
French authorities have said the suspects were local youths known to Louis through child welfare placements and found no racial motive in the attack. The details are still disputed in public, but the violence has fed straight into the same anger that is building across the continent.
Henry Nowak’s death in Southampton last December burns in our memories. He was eighteen, a university student walking home after a night out with mates. Vickrum Singh Digwa stabbed him five times with a large ceremonial dagger. When police arrived, Digwa lied and told them Henry had racially abused him. Bodycam footage later showed officers handcuffing the boy as he lay bleeding on the pavement, repeating that he had been stabbed and could not breathe.
They treated the false racism claim as the priority. Henry died there while they sorted out the story. The case has ripped open the argument about two-tier policing. It is not abstract anymore.
Rhiannon Whyte’s murder sits in the same raw category. She had just finished her shift at the hotel in Walsall where this Sudanese man had been put up after crossing on a small boat. He followed her to the train station and stabbed her twenty-three times with a screwdriver. She was a young mother heading home to her son. The policy that housed failed asylum claimants in ordinary hotels put her in his path. That is not theory. That is what happened.
The grooming gang scandals showed the same rot years earlier. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and plenty of other places, groups of mostly Pakistani men groomed, raped and trafficked thousands of vulnerable British girls. The inquiries laid it out. Police and councils had the evidence. They buried it because they were terrified of being labelled racist. Working-class white girls were the ones left unprotected. Their suffering was treated as secondary to keeping community relations smooth. That betrayal still burns.
Of course not every migrant who arrives causes trouble. Plenty settle down and cause no harm at all. But the worst failures keep falling into the same pattern, and the people running the country still will not name it properly. Whole neighbourhoods change without anyone asking the people who already lived there. They put strangers in hotels and then lecture locals for noticing the consequences.
Sweden has its no-go areas and gang shootings. Germany has seen spikes in certain violent crimes linked to recent arrivals. The Netherlands and Italy are having the same arguments. In each place the mainstream parties spent years insisting that more migration and less talk about culture would make everything better. Instead trust has collapsed and parties that promise to close the borders and remove criminals are gaining ground fast. People are not buying the old reassurances anymore.
The power to change direction still sits with governments. They can scrap the hotel policy tomorrow. They can tighten the rules that make deporting foreign offenders so difficult. They can tell police forces to treat every victim the same way, without weighing the attacker’s background against the optics. What they have chosen instead is to manage public anger rather than remove its causes. Realistically, nothing will change until governments like Britain’s Labour are defeated and replaced.
Henry Nowak had his life ahead of him. Rhiannon Whyte left a little boy without a mother. Louis was seventeen. These are not distant headlines. They are the price that keeps being paid while the political class worries more about sensitivities than about the basic safety of the people who built and paid for this country.
Inconveniently for cowardly governments, the question is not going to fade. It is getting asked in more places, by more people, and with less patience every month. And they will vote. Leaders can’t keep pretending the pattern does not exist. They must start acting like the safety of their own citizens actually comes first or be replaced. How many more young Britons and continental Europeans will die until leaders concerned about the security of their own populations come to power?