There was a bizarre story three years ago about a man who had a nasty accident.
He was at his computer around midday when he read a news story that offended him. He threw his curry lunch against the wall, started swearing loudly, stamped his feet, then ran outside straight into the path of a bicycle courier. Not good.
A photograph from the scene showed a white man in his mid-60s or early 70s with pale legs (he was wearing shorts) lying on the pavement being attended to by paramedics. The courier sat nearby holding his head (he had been wearing a helmet). Later, what upset the injured man was revealed.
Someone living on the Kentish coast had taken a photo of a dinghy filled with economic migrants about to make landfall. The photographer told the newspaper, which published the story, that he found the image ‘troubling’ ̶ inferring that lucking-out on bloated welfare nets wasn’t exactly the image the country should be projecting ̶ and this enraged the man who had the accident.
He was of the view that those people in the boat were tomorrow’s astrophysicists and neurosurgeons, so how dare anyone think otherwise. He got very cross, then endangered the lives of others.
I’ve thought about that man a bit in the past few days because up until Wednesday, his feeling that Great Britain should be especially welcoming to people fleeing climate change was something you had to agree with. The Home Office responded accordingly: hotels are booked out along with other benefits such as phone sims, football shirts and cold cash itself, available via preloaded bank card. Tomorrow’s geniuses can’t survive on boomer goodwill alone.
When Hollywood’s elite issue statements in support of luxury beliefs, people get annoyed, but some authority has assured me that many of these are extracted with menaces. Take an actor like Sir Ian McKellan.
Seems like a nice enough, sensible fellow, but when an agent storms into his make-up studio and shoves a finger in his face with, “Now listen up, you loopy old queen, if you don’t sign this open letter demanding the release of a Palestinian terrorist, you’re going to end your days mopping out the bidets at a gentlemen’s club in St James”, he’s not exactly going to go all Winnie Mandela against the narrative now, is he?
Too scared
But there’s been no need for celebrity with Great Britain’s small, medium and now large boat arrivals, because everyone’s too scared to say anything. That changed last week.
New ‘guidance’ was issued by the Home Office for climate refugees (they’re not actually ‘climate refugees’ but let’s not infuriate that man). The advice, published in a pamphlet and available on the Home Office website, explains to new arrivals that there this thing called rape (or nonconsensual sex), when the woman (or man: an 81-year-old Church parishioner was recently raped in a cemetery by a strapping young Eritrean) says ‘no’. Now, when a woman says ‘no’, she does not actually mean ‘yes’.
Furthermore, Great Britain doesn’t encourage beating women or children, making sexualized remarks, or badgering women with sexual noises on public transport. If a woman is drunk and passed out, it does not mean you are entitled to mount her. Oh, and women need to be 16 or older. Sorry.
The reaction has been interesting. Cynics have argued that something must be going on for authorities to express this warning. Lots of people have been raped, particularly in the north of England, and the response of the establishment to date has been to deny, then dither on an appropriate remedy.
In recent months denials have withered, but those previously denying will not accept the number of 250,000 (women raped) bandied about…until they do. Then, the only course of action available will be to suggest that rapists who come from places like Pakistan are more tender than the usual white rabble.
The updated rape statistics do not make for breezy chit-chat. The rise correlates with an increasing population, sure, and improved confidence in reporting, but even so, you’re still left with some profound questions. Chiefly: how could it be that in 1990, there were 1,554 reported rapes, yet in the year to March 2026, there were some 74,727? That’s, what, a nearly 5000% jump?
“Bit too rape-y”
The bulk of anger has been directed at the Home Office, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to suspect that people like the man who had the accident with the courier are behind that. Occam’s Razor suggests that the Home Office possibly cross-referenced those statistics with their database, noticed a few patterns and went something like: “Oh…well now…this is a bit too rape-y.”
People who think as intransigently as the man who had the accident, and who are now furious with the Home Office, do nobody any favours. Moreover, their aggression in defending processions of sea migrants diminishes genuine success stories, as with the case of the young Sudanese man (whose country has been torn apart by two Muslims), who came to Great Britain as an actual refugee, did not speak English and has recently triumphed in his exams.
But ‘the right’ are not interested in what appears to be the exception, because the present rule, they argue, does not include assimilation to the young man’s example. They claim they’re called liars and pilloried in the press (much like March & March). Then the Home Office goes and quietly vindicates them.
One would like to think that there was a time when Great Britain could rationally, without fear of offending anyone, solve problems before they reached a level of lightning rod.
If that era ever existed, it is now distant, so the only consolation is to think of that man from the accident discovering the Home Office guidance last week, flying off the handle once more, perhaps driving his car into a swimming pool.
[Image: by Chalabala]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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