A stabbing in suburbia

A man is dead, and a nation is seething. The blood-curdling murder on Monday night of Wayne Broadhurst, who stepped out at 5pm to walk his dog and never returned home, has left his neighbours along with millions of his countrymen wondering ‘what if?’. What if they had turned a corner as Broadhurst did, only to have a knifeman rain blow after blow down upon them. The killing in Uxbridge, a suburban town in the western reaches of Greater London, speaks to fears that run wide and deep.

Broadhurst was 49. He was a bin man. He was well known in the community. Two days ago, he was living a normal life. Now he’s gone. The suspect is a 22-year-old Afghan national. From what we know, the attack was utterly senseless. The Afghan was chasing a 45-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy when Broadhurst tried to intervene. For that act of instinctual courage, he lost his life. The 45-year-old, meanwhile, has sustained ‘life-changing’ injuries. The boy got off more lightly. Residents believe the alleged killer had been lodging with the 45-year-old, when he chased his landlord out on to the street. He was tasered at the scene, before being carted off by police.

It was senseless, too, in that it almost certainly could have been avoided. While there is much we do not know, while the law demands we still use ‘suspect’ and ‘alleged’ when describing the killer and the crime, we cannot help but notice that it appears to fit an awful pattern. The suspect entered the country illegally, in a lorry, in 2020. Two years later, he was granted asylum and leave to remain. The horror in Uxbridge comes after a long line of murders, terror attacks and rapes committed by those who in any sane nation would never have been here.

There’s Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, who plunged a knife into the heart of aspiring Royal Marine Thomas Roberts, outside a Subway in Bournemouth on 12 March 2022. Abdulrahimzai also came here illegally, also from Afghanistan, fleeing murder charges in Serbia. There’s Ahmed Alid, the Moroccan asylum seeker in Hartlepool, who was so inspired by Hamas’s exploits on 7 October 2023 that he stabbed his Iranian housemate before murdering a 70-year-old British man on the street. There’s Abdul Ezedi, another Afghan, who was granted asylum on his third request, despite racking up two sexual offences here. He threw alkali on a refugee woman and her children on 31 January 2024, before going on the run and killing himself.

Ethiopian national Hadush Kebatu had been in the country just eight days when he sexually assaulted a woman and a 14-year-old girl in the Essex town of Epping in the summer. Kebatu’s crimes sparked protests outside the Bell Hotel, where he and hundreds more migrants resided. It also inspired months of unrest outside the nation’s migrant hotels. Following his conviction – and farcical, accidental release last weekend – Kebatu was finally deported this morning – proving that the authorities can deport people after all, when they really apply themselves. If only they had got to Abdulrahimzai, or Ezedi, or Alid, a little more promptly – all of whom similarly arrived in this country illegally, festooned in red flags.

The reason the issue of asylum has come to roil our politics is not because Brits are racist, or uncaring, or ill-informed – ginned up by sinister forces keen to distract us from Amazon not paying its taxes or whatever. The public have simply realised that our asylum system has become a route for illegal migration, and so dysfunctional that it struggles to deport convicted criminals – let alone those with no legitimate claim to asylum, or those who are unable and unwilling to integrate into society. It has become a menace to the safety and security of British citizens, and of law-abiding migrants and refugees alike.

You may have noticed… it is never the elites who pay the price for their own feckless virtue-signalling. Poor and working-class communities have borne the brunt of the small-boats crisis, simply because the hotels and rental properties are cheaper there. One analysis found that a quarter of all asylum seekers housed by the Home Office had been placed in just 10 local authorities, nine of which are among the most impoverished in the country. Illegal migration is a class issue. The bin man slain on a once-safe street is perhaps the grimmest symbol of this.

This crisis reminds us of the wisdom of the masses – and the necessity of democracy. Working-class people aren’t just as capable of deciding the fate of their nation as the establishment, they are infinitely better at it. It’s a point the Chartists would often make, when they were agitating for universal male suffrage in the 1830s. For ordinary people actually live in the society their ‘betters’ preside over from on-high. They shoulder the consequences of grand schemes and failed orthodoxies. Illegal migration is only the latest example. The people were right, the elites were wrong. Again.

At election after election after referendum after election, the public have made their views clear: that porous, uncontrolled borders are an affront to safety, sovereignty and national belonging. They were ignored, scorned and patted on the head, despite being absolutely right. After Uxbridge, it is surely, finally, time for the politicians to listen. Or make way for those who will.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater