Starmer’s Britain is not a safe place for women

The early release of domestic abuse prisoners, combined with the flood of illegal migrants from misogynist cultures, puts females in danger

What strange, mixed-up times we live in. A 78-year-old farmer has been fined £3,500 and must undergo 25 days of “rehabilitation” for letting his grandchildren ride on his tractor. Howard Walters was handed a prohibition notice by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) four years ago, but was filmed by neighbours (the spiteful sneaks) breaching the notice. An HSE executive explained it was not safe to let children ride on agricultural machinery. Shhhh! Whatever you do, don’t tell the HSE that more than 1,700 prison inmates were released early today with a senior government source warning that a high proportion of those let out would be domestic abusers. 
Given the choice between sitting in a tractor cab with a fun-loving Welsh grandad and walking the same streets as Dwayne the Impaler, a woman-hating recidivist, I reckon I know which kind of health and safety risk most of us would prefer to run. Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice. Jailbirds are being set free across the country after serving only 40 per cent of their sentence, and abused women are glancing nervously over their shoulders, because our prisons are full. Room must be found for all those hastily-tried, middle-aged white people who posted unpleasant racist remarks on Facebook during the riots which followed a massacre of little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport.
According to The Sun, leaked documents show that some of the usual checks done prior to release can now be done up to eight weeks after an inmate is let out – ample time to return to their dastardly ways or assault a former partner at their leisure.
Sir Keir Starmer in his sanctimonious, stony way told BBC News that “no high-risk prisoners” will be released. Really, Prime Minister? Among those who were scheduled to walk free today are a man who told his partner he was “enjoying” attacking her and another who strangled his girlfriend and broke her jaw. 
Another beneficiary of the early-release scheme (due out in December, nine months earlier than scheduled) is Martin Underwood who, in 2021, repeatedly punched his partner, Elizabeth Hudson, in the stomach, hit her in the face with a phone, slashed her arm with a knife and told her he was going to kill her, then himself and make their young children “orphans”. Hudson, who says she would have died if she hadn’t escaped from the attack, has called the early-release scheme “unbelievably cruel”.  
The Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood claims she aimed to reduce the number of domestic abusers set free, announcing that those serving time for coercive control, stalking, harassment or breach of a restraining order as well as non-fatal throttling would be exempt.
Are we reassured by the temporary exclusion of non-fatal throttlers? I fear not. Some of the UK’s worst criminals were released early from jail. In 2022, Jordan McSweeney had been free for just nine days when he sexually assaulted and murdered Zara Aleena, a 35-year-old law graduate. Time and again, we have seen that one man’s benefit of the doubt is another human being’s avoidable death.
This reckless, under-supervised mass early release of prisoners (another 5,500 will be let out through September and October) comes at a time when a record 88,521 are behind bars. The situation could be alleviated immediately if some of the 10,000-plus foreign nationals currently in prison in England and Wales were repatriated. Admittedly, it’s not straightforward, but there appears to be a curious lack of will to do anything. Sometimes, the home country – Pakistan, Jamaica and Romania are the prime offenders – simply refuses to take them. Or, predictably, the FNO (Foreign National Offender) claims his human rights won’t be respected in his home country; his failure to respect human rights in ours doesn’t count, of course.
It doesn’t help that our Home Office is notoriously feeble in these matters. As Kemi Badenoch explained recently, many staff in that department have worked previously for refugee charities. According to Badenoch, they are more “activists” than civil servants. In practice, the result is that thousands of young males arriving illegally in the UK from lawless, misogynist countries are given leave to stay, and to hell with the Britons they endanger. (France’s grant rate for asylum seekers is 27 per cent; the UK’s is 57 per cent. Why do we accept double the number the French take if being a soft touch is not official policy?)
Were it not for those Home Office activists, a wonderful young man called Tommy Roberts, an aspiring Marine, would be alive today. Tommy’s killer, an Afghan asylum seeker called Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, arrived in the UK in 2019 on the back of a lorry having been refused asylum by a non-pushover country, Norway. He told Border Force officers he was 14 and fleeing the Taliban. Had Abdulrahimzai claimed to be gay and a Christian convert, he would have had a full house on the asylum seeker’s Bingo card.
In fact, he was at least 19 and a double murderer. But where age is in question, case workers are under instruction to give the benefit of the doubt. It’s not easy to get up-to-date figures, but Alp Mehmet of Migration Watch tells me that between 2012 and September 2021, of the asylum cases where age was disputed and which were resolved, 5,500 of the asylum seekers claiming to be children were over 18. (If the disputed claims being resolved continued at the 2021 rate, there would be a further 4,000-5,000 lying, cheating Abdulrahimzais living as “children” among us. A horrifying thought.)
It gets worse. Deemed to be 14, Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai was placed with a foster carer and given a place at a secondary school in Bournemouth. None of the teachers or teenagers had any clue that the new classmate had killed two fellow Afghans in Serbia with a Kalashnikov rifle. In January 2020, a dentist said Abdulrahimzai was older than he claimed. While the authorities agreed an age assessment was required, they felt that a mental health assessment was needed first. Once again, the needs of an illegal migrant were deemed paramount. Try getting a mental health assessment for a British teenager. 
From 2020 onwards, there were several incidents of Abdulrahimzai carrying knives with which he was obsessed. He was accused of assaulting a student. Frankly, it’s a miracle no children were killed.
In January 2022, the grievously complacent authorities confirmed an age assessment would finally be carried out because Abdulrahimzai had been “bringing females back to his placement”. Just two months later, police received a call about a youth carrying a machete-style knife in public. In the early hours of March 22 2022, Abdulrahimzai got into an altercation with a friend of Tommy Roberts. Tommy intervened to protect his mate and Abdulrahimzai stabbed him to death. 
The catalogue of errors is grotesque. Only after Tommy Roberts’s murder was Interpol contacted and Abdulrahimzai’s criminal record revealed. A heartbroken Roberts family was dumbfounded to discover their beloved boy lost his life because Border Force had neither checked the Afghan’s age nor his identity, and failed to share the fingerprints which would have revealed both. Last year, a pre-inquest hearing was told that a review commissioned into the Home Office’s role in processing Abdulrahimzai’s immigration status had been completed but would remain confidential as it contained details of the procedures used when processing applicants, which were “highly sensitive”. 
I bet they were. We don’t want the public finding out how insanely negligent and pro-migrant is the system which is supposed to protect us, do we? Angry people might, you know, take to the streets and get arrested for being the PM’s favourite whipping boys – “far-Right thugs”.
To rub salt in the family’s open wound, last week Rachel Griffin, senior coroner for Dorset, ruled that there was no need for a full inquest into the circumstances surrounding Tommy Roberts’ death. Griffin said the case did not meet the criteria because, although there were “individual errors”, they “do not amount to a systemic failure”.
Would that be the same system which was so hoodwinked, so hellbent on accommodating an illegal arrival from a dangerous country that it allowed a murderer to attend school with innocent British children? Any fair person would call that a “systemic failure”, I think.
Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai is now a Foreign National Offender, serving 29 years in our overcrowded prison system. We don’t want him. He should never have been here in the first place. Ten days ago, Germany deported 28 hardened criminals to Afghanistan after secret talks with the Taliban. Among the deportees were an Afghan found guilty of raping an 11-year-old girl, and another who took part in a notorious gang-rape where the victim was 14. Sexually assaulting Western girls is practically a perk of illegal migration. What do we expect? Afghanistan is now the world capital of misogyny. A hellish Handmaid’s Tale of a place where women are lower than livestock. Not only must they cover every inch of themselves, they are no longer permitted to speak in public or sing, let alone dance to Taylor Swift.
One in five of the young males arriving every day on small boats crossing the Channel is Afghan. Does Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, think their misogyny magically dissolves on arrival at Dover? Does she believe it’s consistent to announce she’s thinking of making extreme misogyny a terrorist offence while continuing to grant admission to some of its foremost exponents?
If Germany can deport those varmints to Afghanistan while still under the European Convention of Human Rights, what excuse does the British Government have? Afghanistan is the largest single recipient of our aid – to my astonishment, I learnt the country received £350 million of taxpayers’ cash in 2022-23. Is it really beyond the wit of the Home Office to leverage our largesse and get Kabul to take back its criminals and make Britons safer?
Across Europe, liberal politicians who have been disastrously soft on migration are rapidly changing their tune. Talking about the Afghan deportations, Nancy Faeser, German interior minister, declared: “Our security is what matters. Our state has shown that it can act.” Germany is also tightening its borders.
Our Home Office has taken the opposite view: Refugees Welcome, Tough Luck, Britons. Tommy Roberts deserves a full inquest to reveal how those deluded activists betrayed him.
I was talking the other day to a friend who works internationally in the field of VAWG (violence against women and girls). She said it was increasingly accepted that the rapid influx of migrants from countries that don’t share Western values was “gradually limiting the space in which women and girls can safely exist”.
I flinched because I suppose I knew it was true. We all know it’s true, which is why we are angry and so helpless. A country obsessed with health and safety has let in the biggest risk of all. From naively welcoming dangerous foreigners to releasing domestic abusers, Britain no longer feels like a safe country to be a woman.