Leniency to vile criminals Ezedi & Calocane shows UK state has lost the plot – & it’s the victims who are being trampled
THE British state has not just lost control of our borders, it has lost its moral authority and its sense of purpose.
Our deluded, impotent politicians and bureaucrats preside over an immigration system that is sliding into anarchy, a legal system that makes a mockery of justice and a welfare system that rewards the enemies of our society while neglecting the vulnerable.
The first duty of the Government should be the protection of its own British citizens.
But we are now ruled by a dysfunctional political class, which often seems to attach more importance to the rights of dangerous criminals than to the safety of the public.
This deepening crisis of integrity has been graphically illustrated by the recent cases of chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi in London and multiple killer Valdo Calocane in Nottingham.
Characterised by warped priorities, epic incompetence, ideological blindness and institutional cowardice, both these grim incidents could have been avoided if our rulers had the guts to do their jobs properly.
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Afghan asylum seeker Ezedi — who remains on the run after perpetrating a gruesome chemical attack on a woman and her two children in Clapham, South West London — should not have been in the country at all.
He arrived illegally in Britain from Afghanistan in 2016, hiding in the back of a lorry.
Having twice had his asylum claim rejected, he should have been deported.
But, as is typical in modern Britain where the Home Office is much keener on celebrating diversity than throwing out foreign offenders, nothing was done to remove him.
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So he made a third bid for asylum on the new grounds that he had converted to Christianity and would be persecuted in his homeland.
The move stank of cynical opportunism.
An equally ugly part was played by the Church of England, which supported his application just as it has done in a host of other cases, most notably that of the terrorist Emad al Swealmeen, who accidentally killed himself in a botched bomb attack on Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021.
Like Ezedi, Swealmeen was a failed asylum seeker who said he had become a Christian convert, though after his death a copy of the Koran and a Muslim prayer mat were found in his flat.
The Church of England clerics do not appear to care whether the motivation for these conversions is genuine.
They are so wedded to the idea that compassion lies in an open-door policy that they welcome the chance to further undermine the credibility of the asylum process.
That explains why they are going through the conversions on an industrial scale.
Only this week, it was reported that the local church near the former Essex base of RAF Wethersfield, now an asylum centre, performed 20 such baptisms, while 40 asylum seekers lodged on board the Bibby Stockholm off the Dorset coast are reportedly converting to Christianity.
Tellingly, former Dean of Liverpool Peter Wilcox said that he was unaware of a single Muslim who already had British citizenship converting from Islam to Christianity.
In the case of Abdul Ezedi, concern about deceit is compounded by outrage at how the church, in its pathetic desperation to support him, even ignored his disgraceful record as a sex offender.
Yesterday, this paper revealed how he harassed a woman who had befriended him, exposing himself to her and hauling down her trousers.
Even after his subsequent conviction for these crimes, which led to a 45-week jail sentence suspended for two years, the church continued to back him.
His victim understandably said of the church’s decision to give him a reference: “Who in their right mind thought that a good idea when he was on the Sex Offenders Register?”
Innocent women and girls paid a terrible price for this approach.
An even heavier price was paid by three of Valdo Calocane’s victims, who lost their lives as he went on the rampage through Nottingham.
Born in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, he was an engineering student at the time of his killings, notorious on campus for the air of violent intimidation he exuded.
Indeed, what was so shocking about this case was not just the barbarity of his attacks, but the leniency with which he had long been treated by the state.
Despite a lengthy catalogue of worrying incidents, including threats, break-ins and assaults, he had never received a criminal record or even a caution.
That leniency continued at his trial, where he was treated as a mental health patient rather than a monstrous killer, as epitomised by the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service to accept a plea of manslaughter rather than murder.
As a consequence, the judge did not give him a jail sentence but ordered him to be detained in the Ashworth High Security Hospital in Merseyside.
It is a savage indictment of this judicial farce that Calocane could be out in just three years. Just as sickeningly, because he is a patient rather than a prisoner, he is entitled to welfare benefits to the tune of £360 a month.
As Emma Webber, the mother of one of his victims put it, the revelation about Calocane’s handouts “adds yet more layers of grief and a sense of injustice to those of us left behind”.
Our modern civic realm has completely lost the plot.
As the integrity of officialdom collapses, the values that build our civilisation have been turned on their head.
We are bankrolling a multiple-killer instead of punishing him, while Christianity has been turned into a flag of convenience for our enemies instead of a bulwark in our defence.
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With immigration soaring and deportations plummeting, the very concepts of British citizenship and British nationhood are becoming meaningless.
These two cases must act as a clarion call for change.