Conrad Black: Europe’s Immigration Policy Behind Growing Hostility, Economic Pressure

A man walks down a street where rioting erupted over a stabbing that left the victim seriously injured, in east Belfast, Northern Ireland, on June 10, 2026. AP Photo/Peter Morrison

Commentary

The murder last December of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old university student in Southampton, UK, apparently by a Sikh immigrant using a long tribal knife—which in deference to that ethnic group is permitted to be carried by Sikhs in Britain—followed by the near-fatal assault of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast earlier this month, apparently by a Sudanese man, have both led to extensive rioting in those cities and raised concerns about immigration and racial relations in the United Kingdom to perhaps their highest level.

The Nowak killing was especially gruesome as the assailant’s brother called police to report Nowak for racial hate crimes, while the mother hid the murder weapon. The assailant himself claimed to be acting in self-defense after being assaulted by Nowak following a number of ethnic slurs. Police body cameras and recording devices yielded chilling evidence of the biases and incompetence of police. They handcuffed Nowak, who had been stabbed five times with the eight-inch knife. His protests of having been grievously injured were ignored and as he was dragged to a police vehicle, he died in apparently excruciating pain while being read his rights as a defendant.

The entire nation was shocked by the evidence of the profound incompetence and bigotry of policing in Southampton, a city that would normally be considered civil and relatively crime-free.

In Belfast, the news of the attack on Ogilvie by a non-white person was handled very professionally by police, but the public anger was stoked up aggressively on social media. Left-wing media outlets such as the BBC and the Guardian have implied that the following several days of nasty riots were organized by the loyalist paramilitaries, the successors of the Protestant armed gangs from earlier times of strife between northern Irish partisans of continued union with Great Britain and those who sought secession from the UK and adherence to the Republic of Ireland. The violence and acute friction over that issue has largely subsided, but the factions retain their weapons and bellicose tendencies.

Police in Northern Ireland have found no evidence of activity by either the Unionist or Republican vigilante militias. Of greater concern has been the ability of troublemakers to use social media, almost always anonymously, to incite violence and even target it directly at innocent individuals. The most disturbing instance of this was the widespread circulation of residential addresses of non-white families in an outright invitation to hooligans to force entry into those homes, assault their inhabitants, and commit robbery and vandalism. In Belfast, the conduct of the police was exemplary, but the scope of the threat, with armed gangs of masked people targeting specific families, has, like the disgraceful performance of the Southampton police, alarmed and distressed the entire nation.

Neither assailant in the Southampton or Belfast assaults had entered the UK illegally, but this fact had the effect of raising pre-existing public concerns about non-white immigration generally, and the extent to which some police forces have been infiltrated or intimidated by lawless immigrant communities that not only owe no allegiance to the UK but engage in acts of violent hostility to the traditional British majority.

This is a chronic problem across Central and Western Europe. The European Union, for notorious historical reasons, has been set up in a socialistic model that dispenses so much Danegeld to the urban working class and small farmers that this fact, coupled with aging populations reduced by declining birth rates, has reduced most of the EU to the brink of economic stagnation. The admission of immigrants, as it expands the population, creates an almost illusory and minimal statistical appearance of economic growth. Because that growth is so slight, and because almost none of the European governments have taken remotely adequate measures to provide housing and other services for their increasing populations, the cost of living for citizens of modest incomes has been put under great pressure, and has generated fear and economic discomfort among tens of millions of lower-income Europeans.

This has been a widespread government failure across the continent, compounded by further policy failures that have aggregated themselves into a serious crisis. Europe has failed seriously to reduce illegal immigration and has been insouciant about legitimate immigration. It has failed to provide adequate housing and services, and has purported to regard the concerns of its own citizens economically discomfited by this immigration as racism, rather than legitimate concern for the welfare of low-income families.

The consequences of this shortsighted government policy have been a level of political fragmentation that is unprecedented in several prominent European countries.

In the United Kingdom, the latest polls give 26 percent to the Reform Party led by Nigel Farage, which has only contested one national election; 19 percent each to the traditionally leading Conservative and Labour parties; 14 percent to the Greens (very militant in Britain); and 12 percent to the waffling Liberal Democrats. The burning questions are whether Reform and the Conservatives can coalesce and whether their total share of the vote, now approximately 45 percent, will enable them to form a government after the next election, or whether an arrangement between the three parties of the left, perhaps assisted by the provincial separatist parties, will be able to perpetuate the failed policies of the post-Blair years and in some respects the post-Thatcher years (i.e., 36 years).

Britain has now had seven straight failed governments in 16 years, including five consecutive failed Conservative governments in seven years. There is no shortage of talented people in the United Kingdom, but the quality of the country’s politics has inexplicably declined and is excavating unprecedented levels of inadequacy in what has been considered an admirably stable country for centuries.

In France, the National Rally party seems likely to win the elections next year, and if the Christian Democrats in Germany cannot raise their game, it will not be possible to keep the Alternative Party out of office. This is only a chilling prospect in consideration of that party’s Russophilia; a German government beguiled by the forest murmurs of the East would be, yet again, a German menace to the world.

These matters may seem a long way from the riots in Southampton and Belfast, but they are directly connected to the causes of them.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.