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The safest countries have about one murder per year per 100,000 people. At least a quarter of those will be outrageous enough to make good social media copy. So a group of 5,000,000 people will commit one potentially viral murder per month, if they are as peaceful as the Swiss. And one a week if they are only as peaceful as white Americans or black Britons (both around 4 murders per 100k). Since there are more than 5,000,000 nonwhite people in the UK (and an order of magnitude more than that if you are looking at immigrant crime globally, as most of the Americans poasting about the situation in the UK are), your Twitter feed being full of murders of white people by ethnic minorities could just as easily be caused by the algorithm as by actual crime. If Elon Musk wanted your Twitter feed to be full of white-on-white murders, he could make it so. And if he wanted it to be full of cute cat pictures, he could make that so.
How much do you know or care about white-on-white crime in Belfast? It's a complex issue given the history of the Troubles and the number of ex-paramilitaries hanging around. And yet you feel the need to have an opinion about crime by asylum seekers in Belfast.
There is enough crime in Zurich to fill a tabloid or a social media feed with crime stories. To know whether the constant stream of crime being shoved in your face by people who don't have your own interests at heart (at best they want you to keep staring at the ads between the criminal fnords, and in the case of Twitter coverage of migrant crime in the UK, we know that these posts are being amplified by a foreign billionaire who has made no secret of his desire to foment political violence in the UK and drive the British government out of office) is caused by the people doing the crime or the people doing the shoving, you need to look at statistics. So let's do that.
Murder has dropped since mass immigration started in the UK and continues to fall slowly. Ditto stabbings*. Ditto violent crime where the victim ends up in A&E. Ditto violent crime measured by victim surveys. Ditto property crime measured by victim surveys. There is some evidence that property crimes which mostly target tourists and therefore wouldn't appear in a victim survey have increased, including phone snatching and pickpocketing. Shoplifting (which also doesn't appear in victim surveys because the victims are businesses and not individuals) has definitely increased. Sexual offences by ethnic Pakistanis in the UK were out of control 20 years ago, and these cold cases are being regularly relitigated on social media in a way which suggests to people not paying attention that the crimes are still going on. (I genuinely don't know if they are or not, and the people outrage-poasting about them aren't bothering to check either). Cyber fraud is also rising, but it isn't what right populist agitators or tabloid journalists are talking about when they say that "crime is out of control".
Right now the UK right-populist discourse is dominated by two murders that went viral on social media. One was a case of "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time, unfortunately someone is dead because someone else brought a knife to a fistfight". The murder of Henry Nowak is only newsworthy because of the shockingly poor (and probably racially motivated) police response - and yet the social media peanut gallery are calling for penal laws against a demographic who commit less crime than the white British. Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US). The other case is a real failure of the UK immigration system - the Belfast attacker was a Sudanese falsely claiming to be a Somali who crossed the open ROI-NI border in order to claim asylum in the UK instead of the EU. But you wouldn't have learned about the difference from social media posts by right-populists.
* Police recorded knife crime is up (but peaked in 2024 and is now falling again), but actual stabbings are down, as measured by NHS administrative data. The most likely reason is that the police have been told to be more careful about checking whether a knife was used in muggings and suchlike where violence is threatened but nobody gets stabbed.
** Singh is the second-most common surname of VC winners, after Smith.
What difference does it make? They're building a parallel society. If you give them a street and they commit less crime it's still not yours to live on. If you give them a city and they make it rich it's still not your money to spend. If you give them your country it's not yours anymore, it's theirs.
Unless they were integrating. Are the Sikhs integrating? Apparently they have their own rituals we have to grant them religious exemptions for. And they don't behave like White Britons -- by your own argument they don't commit crime at the same rate. Presumably they are different.
(Not that I would assume they commit crime at lower rates anyways. Basically every immigrant group commits more crime than native Brits with the exception of other European groups and the Japanese. It's possible the Sikh are genuinely exceptional and I know they are different from standard Indians / Muslims / Arabs / etc. But if a random Sikh murders a kid and his family helps him cover up the crime I'm going to assume that they're actually not exceptional: I've never heard of a Japanese immigrant family doing that.)
I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
Although it doesn't actively proselytize as much as Christianity, Sikhism is not an ethnic religion; any person of any ethnicity can convert to it if they become convinced that its teachings hold the true answers about the Divine. Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
Now as an atheist, I'm not that big a fan of religious exemptions. But ultimately, they're a Chesterton's Fence whose origins are not very hard to dig up. Bad things happen if the government starts steamrolling over the faithful's objections with "there's not actually an angry sky man who will send you to Hell if you work on a Sunday/do indulgences/mix meat and dairies, get over it". Granted Sikhs are enough of a religious minority that pissing them off on their own wouldn't start a religious war, but it seems straightforwardly more principled for the state to say "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of any recognized religion" than "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of Christianity and Islam, but because there's so few of them we're going to functionally write it into law that you cannot simultaneously act in accordance with a belief in the divinely-inspired truth of the Guru Granth Sahib, and be a law-abiding citizen in our country".
We can do the same thing with tariffs. And then we don't have neighborhoods full of foreigners who will hide the Bataclan bombers after they make their getaway.
I don't agree with it, but the English have adopted weapons bans as a virtue. They also have religious freedom as a virtue. In accommodating immigrant Sikh values, they now have to accommodate exceptions in their weapons bans. These are two contradictory virtues. They can't actually coexist meaningfully. This is a conflict caused by immigration. Your proposed solution, essentially, is to jettison arms control in favor of religious freedom, i.e., that English society should change even more in order to accommodate the Sikh. It can be perfectly English to be Sikh! Well, it wasn't 50 years ago, and it wasn't even common until extremely recently. If the challenges of integrating migrants are to be solved by England changing to accommodate them, what's the argument in favor of accepting migrants? Trade deal: You change your society and culture and values, and we give you welfare consumers, a housing shortage, and endless supply of accusations of racism, and occasional stabbings. We will integrate on our terms, not yours, and maybe, just maybe, statistically, we'll perform better on some made-up statistical measures. Oh and you don't have a choice and this downgrade is permanent.
The UK already had hard-won religious freedom; it just didn't have meaningful representation of a religion whose commandments conflicted with a weapons ban, so the issue hadn't come up. It might very well have come up even with zero immigration, if a lot of white Englishmen had started converting to Sikhism out of some trend, in the same way that so many British hippies got into Buddhism.
And I guess I just don't see that big of a conflict there… I think "virtue" is a weird way to describe the weapons ban. I don't believe Brits think it's deontologically wrong or taboo to carry knives; I think they've adopted weapons bans as a technocratic, utilitarian policy. Whether religious freedom is to be thought of as a deontological line-in-the-sand or consequentialist utilmaxxing is perhaps more debatable, but in either case, this makes it sensible to trade one against the other depending on circumstances. Something like: "I believe that in a vacuum, it is good to minimize the amount of citizens permitted to carry knives, as doing so will reduce violent crime and I do not believe that people have an innate right to bear arms. However, I also believe that the state should rarely if ever ban religious practices. Therefore, the best way to maximize utility while respecting the constraints of respecting religious freedom is a weapons for ban for everyone except people whose religion mandates that they carry a ritual knife on their person at all times" is in no way incoherent or self-contradictory.
(Again, it seems isomorphic to other kinds of religious exemptions, i.e. "I do not believe that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of school whenever they like; but I believe it's important for the state to respect religious practices; therefore parents are allowed to let their kids skip school on their faith's recognized holy days, but not for any other reason". I don't think there's a "virtue" of respecting religious freedom, and a "virtue" of mandatory education, that are in conflict here in any problematic way, it's a very common-sensical status quo to end up with.)
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Are Jews integrated in the United States? Are the Irish? Are Texans? What are the standards for 'building a parallel society' such that we should apply it to British Sikhs?
If an Irish man used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon to murder somebody and his Irish friends and family closed ranks to help him hide the weapon and spin up bogus anti-Irish racism charges, I would not consider that proof of integration.
You put "building a parallel society" in quotes and I'm not sure if I should read that as scare quotes. But to be clear, there are absolutely Muslim, ethnic, and immigrant neighborhoods in major cities in Britain and across Europe that function as parallel societies. There are parts of London where it is not safe to be gay. There are parts of Marseilles where it is not safe to be white. Would it make a difference to you if those areas had lower reported crime stats? It doesn't to me.
That's not what happened here. Sikhs have a religious exemption that allows them to carry a knife as a religious article. If the murderer had converted to Sikhism in order to acquire a knife with which to murder someone, this argument might have legs, but it didn't.
However, the Irish were and are religiously deviant from the US' predominantly Protestant culture, have a long history of "overperforming" the nation as a whole in crime, and to this day many of them live in ethnic enclaves with distinctive social norms. Really, I'm just trying to get some clarity as to what constitutes non-integration by your standards, since you allude to some yardsticks, but don't state them clearly.
I'm quoting you. You are claiming that Sikhs are building a parallel society in Britain. On what basis do you claim this? So far, the primary justification you've offered is that they get a religious exemption that allows them to carry a kirpan.
Ok I see how you read what I wrote to connote something different than what you just wrote, but I mean that he "used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon" which was used "to murder somebody". Which I think is the same thing.
British society was changed in a small way to accommodate an immigrant. (A normal British man would not have needed a Sikh religious weapons exemption, even if a normal British man could have theoretically converted to Sikhism.) What did British society get for this? In this case, a murderer and his family. Maybe there is some other greater benefit that renders this a price worth paying? I'm not seeing it.
Yeah, and I'm not sure whether to read your quotation back to me of my own words as using scare quotes or not. I do not think it is controversial to say, however, that many immigrants to Britain are building a parallel society. This is why I am repeating my claim. I think it is evidenced, at a minimum, by the fact that a Sikh immigrant murdered someone and his Sikh family sheltered him and advised him on how to get out of it. They don't act like integrated citizens putting Britain's interests above their prior clannish loyalties. We could start looking at other examples if you like. But to me it's a claim so obviously in evidence that when you quote my words back to me in that form, and I can't read your tone of voice, it becomes unclear to me what is actually under dispute. If you are disputing the point that I find totally uncontroversial, then we have a really different disagreement than if you just want me to elaborate on a related or unrelated point.
Right, mass migration changed America permanent ways, many of them negative. Some American cities are still governed by the descendants of the political machines the Irish (and other immigrant groups) begot. Nobody today would claim (I would not claim) that the Irish aren't American. It basically worked out. But it was not an easy or painless process! In some sense we're still paying the cost today.
So if you want to tease out what it means to be integrated, that's one thing, but if you want to dispute the costs and benefits of mass migration, that's another. I think the case of the Irish proves my point in fact. Unless you're just trying to tease out what it means to be integrated. Which is why it matters whether I read your quotation of my own words back to me as a case of square quotes or not.
Hundreds of thousands of orderly, productive citizens? Like, you bring up the costs and benefits of migration, and this has always been the slam dunk for immigration. The cost of Irish immigration was not primarily in material damage caused by Irish immigrants (which was minimal, and more than offset by the benefits of millions of additional people, not to mention the fact that they helped save the Union), but in the backlash against them by nativists (which gets to the broader problem of nativists hating immigrants more than they love their countries).
Also, I just double checked the details of the case, and Nowak wasn't stabbed with a kirpan but another knife. As far as I can tell it wouldn't be covered under religious allowances (which is presumably why efforts were made to hide it), so that detail is most likely irrelevant.
And I think this is taking a singular event and treating it as a trend. The friends and family members of criminals providing support to the guilty part, while unfortunate, is not particularly unusual. We'd need to have some reason to think British Sikhs are unusually bad about this compared to other Britons. If you have affirmative evidence of such a trend, I would be interested in seeing it. As far as I can tell, @MadMonzer 's claim that British Sikhs are, on the whole, more law abiding than the general British population seems to be correct.
It was covered, the refutation is a lie put around by Redditors. If you read the judge's closing statements, he makes it clear that both knives are kirpans and that Digwa was permitted it because of the religious exemption. Usually Sikhs wear one small one, but he was part of a group that wears an additional massive sharp one and this is permitted.
Digwa specifically got a reduction in his sentence because, as a Sikh, it was legal for him to have the murder weapon. For a normal UK citizen that would be considered a serious aggravating factor and result in an extended sentence.
I didn't get it from reddit, I got it from public reporting on the case. If that's actually the case, my mistake, but I'll need to take some time later to check the judge's statements directly to verify.
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The sentencing remarks said (emphasis mine):
In other words, the Court didn't rule on the legal question of whether the big knife was legal to carry*, it ruled on the factual question of what Digwa's motivations were in carrying it. If Digwa's motivation for carrying the knife in the first place was to use it as a weapon, the starting point is a life sentence with a 25 year minimum. If his motivation for carrying the knife was something else, then the starting point is a life sentence with a 15 year minimum. The judge ruled that Digwa's motivation was religious. The same analysis would apply if a pastry chef murdered someone with a breadknife - the non-murderous reason for having the knife reduces the presumed level of premeditation.
* Digwa was also convicted of illegally carrying a knife, but on the technicality that whether or not the knife was legal originally, it became illegal when used for an illegal purpose.
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What a despicably misleading gloss of the Nowak murder. There is zero evidence that Nowak assaulted Digwa, or that he was a "hothead".
The video shows Nowak calling Digwa a "bad man" repeatedly while filming him shortly before the murder, and continuing to do so when Digwa is walking away from him. That isn't legal provocation, and nobody suggested it was, but it pattern-matches to "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time" much more closely than "unprovoked attack by crazed thug from violent foreign culture".
We don't know what happens in between "Digwa is walking away from Nowak, who continues to abuse him verbally" and "Digwa attacks Nowak with a big-ass knife", but "Digwa turns round and demands satisfaction, and a series of mutually escalatory threat displays lead to a fight" is quite plausible, as is "Digwa turns around and chops up the guy who he incorrectly thought was stalking him with no further warning", or anything in between. If we were trying to adjudicate Nowak's Darwin award nomination, the crucial point would be whether Nowak follows Digwa. Following someone while filming them and verbally abusing them is genuinely provocative (though not a provocation in the technical legal sense), and culpably stupid if the guy is visibly armed in a way which means they will win a fight. But the police didn't find any evidence either way on this point, and in any case it is legally irrelevant to Digwa's guilt.
If that exact scene were put into a Sopranos style prestige drama, the point of the scene would be to show that the murderer was an unhinged psycho with a pathetic, brittle ego and "random encounter" levels of impulse control.
Apart from the "psycho" part, I would agree with your characterisation. Brittle egos and unhinged responses to perceived minor insults are normative in some barbarous cultures like prisons (because they show you are not a pushover), and deliberately cultivated as necessary survival instincts by non-psychos who spend long enough in such cultures, but unacceptable in civilised cultures.
You think stabbing someone, and then recording yourself mocking them as they bleed to death is not "psycho" behavior?
In the context of disproportionate retaliation for a perceived insult, no.
Nor did the judge, given that Digwa is going to an ordinary prison and not a secure mental hospital.
Plenty of serial killers go to ordinary prison despite having traits that the vast majority of people would label as indicative of being mentally unwell.
I think this is now a disagreement about the meaning of the word "psycho". I think it implies, or ought to imply, a level of fucked-in-the-head-ness comparable to a serious diagnosable mental illness. The average violent criminal is somewhat fucked-in-the-head, but not that much, and Digwa appears to be in the same boat. I'm happy to agree to disagree on whether this reflects common usage.
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Indeed, there are two scenes in Goodfellas in which Tommy DeVito responds to comparably mild insults ("Now go home and get your fucking shine box", "Why don't you go fuck yourself, Tommy?") by outright murdering the people who voiced them. The point of these scenes is to establish that Tommy is a psycho.
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The term "fight", to my mind, implies that the two men were attacking each other. Likewise "fistfight" implies that both men were punching each other. I don't think "one man insults another man, to which the second man responds by physically assaulting the first man" can reasonably be characterised as a "fight". Despite Digwa's insistence that Nowak attacked him first and he was defending himself, he was unable to present any evidence that this was the case, and there were no cuts or bruises on his person at the time of his arrest.
So: I think the claim that "Nowak and Digwa got into a fistfight" is simply untrue. No one has presented any evidence that Nowak punched (or even tried to punch) Digwa. If you said "Nowak insulted Digwa, and Digwa responded by stabbing him", I'd have no objection.
Even calling it an insult seems unreasonably charitable to Digwa's otherwise made-up and evil version of events.
I believe the videos recovered from Nowak's phone/Snapchat depict him calling Digwa a "bad man". I guess technically calling someone a "bad man" is an insult, although a laughably mild one. Even in the parallel woke universe in which calling a person of colour a "nigger" or a "Paki" constitutes such a grave insult to their character that they are entitled to murder you in retribution, "bad man" doesn't rise to that level of insult.
AIUI, "bad man" is Brit slang equivalent to "gangster". Asking someone "What are you, a gangster?" after an interaction has already begun is not a proper insult, especially when they say "Yes, I am".
Probably because the dude had a giant knife…
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I think this is mostly slang among Brits of Caribbean extraction (see "London multicultural English").
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It also implies some level of evenness and length. Digwa was armed with a massive knife; Nowak was unarmed, and Digwa killed him with a single lethal blow. Nothing about that says "fight" to me. That's just a straight up killing, bordering on execution of an unarmed man.
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