This is what the horrific case of Shabir Ahmed has confirmed. That Britain is so broken – our sovereignty so deracinated, our self-respect so shattered – that we can’t even remove a foreign man who visited untold barbarism on our female citizens. ‘Government “cannot deport”’ this rape-gang ringleader, says the BBC. An ‘anomaly’ in our immigration law means we have no choice but to continue to host him even following his release from prison, says the Telegraph. May I humbly suggest we incinerate every law that meddles in any way whatsoever with our sovereign right to deport this monster, because otherwise we are a nation in name only.

Shabir Ahmed was the ringleader of the Rochdale gang of Pakistani men who used, abused and raped poor white girls. It was one of England’s worst rape gangs, those mobs of mostly Muslim men who for decades groomed and raped vulnerable girls as cops and officialdom looked the other way. His crimes were sickening. He led a group of men who preyed on girls as young as 13. They would ply them with alcohol and drugs and pass them around like sexual objects. The girls were gang-raped above takeaway shops. They were ferried in taxis to the drab flats of Ahmed’s fellow rapists. The judge in Ahmed’s case called him a ‘violent, hypocritical bully’. In 2012 he was sentenced to 22 years in jail on multiple counts of rape. He’s due to be released this week.

Let’s be clear: these were acts of classist bigotry and xenophobic loathing as well as sexual crimes. Following the belated smashing of the Rochdale rape gang, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said there was no ‘racial or cultural’ driver to the men’s reign of terror against working-class girls. But that wasn’t true. It was yet another lie amid all the ‘serious multiple failures’ committed by the GMP in their half-arsed investigation of the Rochdale rape gang. In truth, as the judge said, the girls were treated as though ‘they were worthless and beyond any respect’ because they were ‘not part of the gang’s community or religion’.

This was racial terror alongside sexual terror. It was the violent subjugation of girls on the basis of their heritage. They were seen as ‘white trash’, as worthless ‘kafirs’, to whom the mob of men could do as they pleased. It was the girls’ very Englishness – alongside their whiteness and their poverty – that led the men to view them as subhuman sex toys. And still we can’t deport the foreign-born members of this rape gang. Still we must provide a home for the ‘violent, hypocritical’ leader of this mob of predatory bigots who treated non-Muslim Brits as their moral inferiors deserving of apocalyptic levels of exploitation. If Britain cannot even deport foreigners who are consumed by a violent loathing for Britishness itself, then we are done. It’s over.

In the case of Shabir Ahmed, it’s an ‘anomaly’ in the 1971 Immigration Act that means he can’t be booted out. The 73-year-old is coming out of jail on Thursday this week. But because he arrived from a Commonwealth country – Pakistan – before 1973, he’s exempt from deportation. He held dual British-Pakistani citizenship until 2016, when the government successfully stripped him of British citizenship. Rightly – immigrants to Britain do not get to systematically and violently demean scores of British girls on the basis of their class and race and then continue to enjoy the privileges of citizenship. Get real. Yet even now, even with only Pakistani citizenship, we can’t get rid of him.

It’s partly because of our own archaic laws, and it’s partly because Pakistan says it will not take him back. Huge pressure should be put on Pakistan in cases like this. The UK gives Pakistan around £100million in aid every year and yet Pakistan thinks it can lumber us with one of its citizens who subjected British girls to unspeakable horrors? It is essential that Britain’s leaders show Pakistan’s leaders that we take the dignity and security of our working-class girls seriously. Take back this predatory bigot or face the consequences. But more importantly, we need to get our own legal house in order. We need to find a way to restore that most essential element of sovereign integrity – a nation’s right to determine who may cross its borders, and who must leave.

This case is primarily about justice for the girls, who were so grossly mistreated by this gang and so horribly ignored by officialdom, all because they were white and poor. But it is also about the restoration of our sovereign integrity, of nationhood itself, which is arguably the most important cause of our time. Other migrants who commit heinous crimes here use human-rights law to demand the right to stay. Time and again, we are forbidden, whether by ‘human rights’ or legalistic loopholes from the Seventies, from deporting foreigners who have committed grave and in some cases barbarous ills against our people. It is an intolerable interference with statehood for any law to restrict a nation’s power to cast out foreign-born individuals who commit sick crimes against its people.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. The nation that cannot remove a foreign-born repeat child-rapist is not a free nation. It is a vassal state of the suicidal ideology of anti-Westernism and its attendant creeds of self-loathing and post-nationhood. The Shabir Ahmed case exposes the monsters that have been birthed by the state-driven cult of grievance. Alongside branding his judge a ‘racist bastard’, Ahmed also bemoaned the ‘11 white jurors’ who found him guilty and said: ‘It’s become fashionable to blame everything on Muslims these days.’ This is the moral inversion that has been inflicted on us courtesy of the cloying cult of ‘Islamophobia’ – a situation where even a Muslim man found guilty of the industrial-scale rape of girls can fantasise that he is the victim. What cruel and depthless self-pity to use a case about your own violent tyranny against girls to pose as a victim of ‘Islamophobia’. The truth, of course, is that the only religious bigotry on display in this case, bigotry of an exceptionally violent kind, came from the men who treated the girls as sinful sluts deserving of abuse.

Our abandonment of our sovereignty means we cannot remove even the most serious foreign-born criminals. And our inflaming of the martyr complex of minority groups means even a child rapist can wallow in the opportunistic moralism of self-victimhood. What a mess. We must kick this scumbag out – one way or another – and then devote equal energy to repairing our national integrity and defeating the grievance industry. We won’t be a nation until we do.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.

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