That’s how many EU citizens get arrested in London every year, give or take a couple of thousand (always give, actually). That’s on top of 10,000 in our prisons already, taking the room that could otherwise be occupied by our home-grown thugs.
And there I was, thinking that EU membership puts us in a fluffy cocoon of security.
I haven’t seen the total number broken down by nationality but, taking a wild stab in the dark, I’d venture a guess that most crimes have been committed by migrants from the low-rent part of Europe. We’ve already been graced by the best part of a million Eastern Europeans and, on general principle, they’re more likely than, say, the Swedes or even the French to treat the law as merely a statement of intent.
Far be it from me to suggest that Romanians or Croatians are innately prone to criminal activity. It’s not nature that’s to blame, but nurture.
Our Eastern European brothers in the EU spent more than half a century celebrating May Day rather than Easter (which this year happened to coincide – not only with each other but also with Walpurgisnacht).
Two full generations of diabolical (I’m not using this adjective loosely) brainwashing, police tyranny, concentration camps, denunciations of neighbours, abject poverty, lawlessness, crime being the only non-Party way to earn more than sustenance wages – don’t underestimate the corrupting effects of communism.
The Russians had three generations of that sort of thing and much worse, which goes a long way towards explaining their own economy, criminalised as it is from top to bottom. But at least they keep street crime mostly for home consumption.
Russians living in the UK tend to specialise in white-collar crime, rather than mugging and pickpocketing, with the odd bit of prostitution (mostly female, I hasten to reassure you) thrown in for good measure. Yet, being an optimist, I can confidently predict that in the next 200 years or so my former countrymen will learn to bank their money without laundering it first.
Eastern Europeans also contribute aesthetic refinement to central London by reposing in filthy sleeping bags and swigging vodka right out of the bottle outside our ritziest hotels – actually the Ritz itself. Swarms of their well-drilled and organised professional beggars also add nice touches. All part of the rich panoply of life, I’m sure, but let’s just say that some parts are less savoury than others.
This could hardly have been expected to be otherwise. Looking at the experience of the US, large huddled masses of economic migrants have historically contributed more than their fair share to crime, organised or otherwise.
To be sure, some, probably most, roll up their sleeves and get ahead by hard work and enterprise. But there are always large groups of impatient chaps who’d rather take a criminal shortcut to riches. Hence the US East Coast had its Italian and Irish mafias, while the West Coast hospitably welcomed various Chinese equivalents.
Yet nineteenth-century migrants from Italy or Ireland – or even China – hadn’t suffered the corrupting effects plaguing today’s Eastern Europeans. Add a few decades of communism on top of economic deprivation, and you get crime not only widespread but downright pandemic. Laws for them aren’t ‘more honoured in the breach than in the observance’. They simply don’t exist.
And, as Americans like to say, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait till the Muslim part of Europe joins the EU and adds an inimitable Islamic touch to crime. Compared to Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo, Poland or Croatia are paragons of legality, and let’s not forget that 75 million Turks can already travel throughout Europe without visas – that’s before they’ve joined the EU, which they soon will.
Somehow I don’t see millions of Anatolians swelling our ranks of computer programmers and concert violinists (we already have a surfeit of those anyway). It’s much easier to imagine that such arrivals will turn London from the anteroom of hell it is already to the main premises.
In spite of all that, pro-EU spivs assure us that we’ll be so much safer by remaining than by leaving. That too is predictable: ideologies are impervious to facts and reason, which makes them different from Judaeo-Christianity.
“Credo quia absurdum,” wrote Tertullian about his faith, which can be loosely translated as “I believe because you couldn’t make it up”. Federasts could paraphrase this to say “Credo quia malum” – they champion the EU not despite its being wicked, but specifically because of it. They quite like wickedness, provided it serves the principal desideratum of modernity: wiping out the last vestiges of our civilisation.
Hence the watershed between Leave and Remain doesn’t just divide the political Right and Left. It separates those who cherish our civilisation from those who, wittingly or unwittingly, work towards destroying it.
The walls of our civilisation are crumbling anyway, and an expertly wielded battering ram can bring them down altogether. Opening the floodgates to a deluge of aliens will do nicely. Danke schön, Angela. Merci beaucoup, François. Thanks a lot, Dave.
Methinks the anatolians were ethnically cleansed in 1000 years of pogroms by a certain central Asian stock of turkmen!