The disintegration of Britain’s border is complete

The disintegration of Britain’s borders is nearly complete. We can say this not only because the government has lost all control over who enters the country, but because the public no longer expects the state to do anything about it. Two news reports from this week speak to this bleak new state of affairs.

The first was that 900 illegal immigrants arrived in Britain in just three days, from Saturday to Monday. A drop in the ocean compared to the 200,000 illegal immigrants who have arrived since 2018, you might say, but still a number that would have once provoked far more concern than it does now. The second, and more significant revelation, is that thousands of foreign offenders remain at large in the community, despite being subject to deportation orders. Yet you will struggle to find a politician in Westminster talking about either of these reports.

Monday’s story in The Times found that, in June last year, there were 20,000 foreign offenders living among us in the UK. This included nearly 1,500 Jamaican and Nigerian nationals, of whom only 61 had been deported in the previous year – a rate of below five per cent. In fact, the statistics show that there is very little chance of any foreign offender being deported unless they hail from an EU country. Even then, they have a better chance of remaining than being forced to leave. Yet surely the most depressing aspect of this story is how remotely unsurprising it is.

We are no longer shocked by cases like those of Radiet Meles. This is the Eritrean national who smuggled himself into England in the back of a lorry in 2015, when he was 24. Three years later, he raped an unconscious woman in Newport, Wales. Despite being told by his sentencing judge in 2019 that he would be deported after his prison term, Meles was released back into the community and ignored by the authorities. In March, he raped another woman. He will be sentenced in November.

The same applies to the crimes of Gift Oladele. No one appears to know how or when Oladele, a Nigerian, arrived in Britain. What we do know is that he was jailed for a sexual offence in 2022. In this case, the Home Office at least tried to deport him – only it was thwarted on human-rights grounds. So Oladele was at large to rape a woman in Wrexham in September last year, a crime for which he was sentenced to 17 years prison in April.

There is a reason these cases no longer spark as much outrage as they once might have done. It is because the British public has been worn out by attrition. There can only be some many cases of rape and murder, and so many instances of government failure and dishonesty, before people eventually begin to shut their eyes and block their ears.

At first, the British public was shocked by the sudden dismantling of its border. Then it was angered to discover that the government spent close to £3 billion pounds a year in housing people who had broken into the country illegally. It was outraged by the wave of rapes and even murders committed by men who should never have been here in the first place. It was speechless when the government’s only response to this crime wave was to give booklets to illegal immigrants in which they were politely asked not to sexually assault people. Now, presented with men like Radiet Meles and Gift Oladele – and thousands of others like them – the public has no more fury left to give.

The brutal reality of borderless Britain has achieved what no government spin ever could. It has numbed the British public to the point of apathy. This is how UK sovereignty dies: not with a bang, but a whimper.