His name was Wayne Broadhurst. He was 49 years old. He reportedly worked as a refuse collector. He was by all accounts well liked in his local town. And yesterday his life was ended in the most savage manner imaginable. He was stabbed to death as he walked his dog on a brisk, bright Tuesday afternoon. The suspect is a 22-year-old Afghan national, who came to Britain on the back of a lorry in 2020 and was subsequently granted asylum.
Which politicians will say Wayne Broadhurst’s name today? Which of them will say his life mattered?
The attack took place in chill, suburban Uxbridge, a part of outer London I know well. A 45-year-old man and his 14-year-old son were also stabbed.
This barbarism in suburbia will leave so much horror and sorrow in its wake. The peace of a leafy street has been shattered. A man is dead. A family will be ravaged by grief. But there is another emotion too, and one that extends far beyond Uxbridge: anger. The political class underestimates at its peril the impact that a beastly act like this will have on the consciousness and patience of the electorate.
Today, tough questions will bubble up from the well of outraged public opinion. Of course, no one in officialdom could have foreseen yesterday’s atrocity. And yet the righteous feeling of many good people in this country is horror that the precious life of a decent Brit has been taken.
The horror in Uxbridge comes just days after the wrongful freeing from prison of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, the Ethiopian national who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl just days after arriving on our shores in a small boat. Abdul Shakoor Ezedi, the Afghan who carried out a horrific chemical attack on a mother and her daughters in Clapham last year, also came here illegally and was granted leave to remain despite convictions for sexual offences.
The Moroccan man who slaughtered pensioner Terence Carney in Hartlepool in 2023 – in ‘revenge’ for the Israel-Gaza conflict – also came here illegally. There are currently numerous trials of illegal arrivals suspected of assault or rape. It is perfectly normal for Brits to feel unsettled by all this. Even irate about it. The politicians and commentators who dismiss such sentiment, who chalk it up to irrational fear or even xenophobia, have no idea of the depths of the public’s contempt for them.
It’s not just the criminal acts themselves that unnerve the public. It’s the sense that the establishment doesn’t care. It’s the feeling that the broken promises of the political elite have led directly to the breaking of actual lives.
People hear politicians promise to patch up our porous borders and then they read about Kebatu and Ezedi. It’s this chasm between the grand talk of our useless rulers and the brutish reality on our streets that is pushing many a voter to the edge of fury.
It feels like there is a low-level terrorising of Britain, and that it has been enabled by a political class that has abandoned our borders and by activist lawyers who care more for the rights of illegal arrivals than they do for the safety and dignity of their fellow Britons.
It’s this that people are sick of – being treated as lab rats in the social experiments of the higher classes. Being left to suffer the consequences of the post-borders ideology that has so much of the cultural establishment in its grip. They might accrue ever more ‘virtue’ through their pro-migrant posturing, but the rest of us, the little people, get nothing but social tension and that deeply dispiriting feeling of cultural insecurity.
Which politicians will say Wayne Broadhurst’s name today? Which of them will say his life mattered? Which of them will ask why these things are happening? Believe me, millions are watching, quietly, to see who speaks and who does not.
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