After many months of public anger — reflected in the Labour Party’s unprecedented unpopularity and probable decimation in  the next election — at the housing of illegal migrants in expensive hotels to the tune of billions of pounds, Sir Keir Starmer’s “government” has announced plans to begin moving them to ex-armed forces barracks. As befits a prime minister who seems unable to place one foot in front of the other without putting one of them in his mouth, this too is proving to be problematic. 

Sometimes it seems as though Sir Keir is the Red-Adair-in-reverse of British politics, stoically seeking new areas of calm in which to start conflagrations. The first two mooted sites are at different ends of the country — Inverness in Scotland and Crowborough in Sussex  — but the reaction of residents illustrates how this often divided kingdom is oft united by our justifiable reluctance to put out the bunting for the hundreds of thousands of young men from mainly Muslim countries who have fetched up on our shores over the past few years and show no signs of stopping.

Each week there seems to be a headline about one of them sexually assaulting or murdering a stranger in the street; a rapist was last month accidentally set free and left to wander from city to city for days before being caught and given £500 to “agree” to being deported back to Ethiopia. (This reminded me of the parody headline some time back in a satirical magazine, highlighting the increasing brevity of jail sentences for homicide in the UK — “KILL NOW AND WIN A FORD FIESTA!”)

Last week a street cleaner was stabbed in the street by an Afghan who came here illegally. As I write, we are waking up to the news that 11 unfortunate souls were stabbed on a suburban train yesterday evening by a British national. This has yet to be confirmed as a terror attack — and there are enough crazed British-born converts to Islam here, generally while incarcerated, for it well to have been — it’s telling that British Transport Police quickly stated that counter-terrorism officers were supporting the investigation.

The idea was “to establish the full circumstances and motivation for this incident,” adding that it had at one point declared “Plato” — the national code word used by emergency services when responding to a “marauding terror attack” — but later rescinded it, according to the BBC website.

I daresay that this won’t be the end of the matter, though, considering that Muslims make up around 6 percent of our population but are responsible for around 60 percent of terrorist crime. Now lucky old Inverness and Crowborough are to get a chance to play host to these mystery guests. Some 300 male “asylum seekers” will be going to the Scottish site; Inverness is one of the fastest-growing places in Scotland, with around 80,000 people living there, but thus far, in common with the rest of the Scottish Highlands, it has not played host to any of these visitors from afar.

Though the government may believe that the “optics” play better than putting the migrants up in four-star hotels, the Cameron Barracks will undergo a £1 million revamp, and there are questions over whether there might be a legal challenge from the lucky lads over whether the buildings are up to their high standards. The perceived whiff of entitlement on behalf of the new arrivals is a constant.

The situation in the affluent Southern town of Crowborough is even more ill-starred. With a population of around 20,000, 600 single male migrants are looking forward to moving into this pretty place, which guards its semi-bucolic attractiveness so fiercely that some years back a campaign was launched against plans by a golf club to expand its car park into woodland by fifty new spaces.

By no means a racist place — their MP is an Indian-born Conservative lady — the town is understandably alarmed by the idea of hundreds of young men hanging around all day with little more to do but watch pornography on their phones and bother the womenfolk. (Afghan migrants in Britain, for example, have a 22 percent higher rape conviction.) Because the migrants — the “boat people” — are almost always men; hardly ever women or children, as was the case with Ukrainian refugees, whose men generally stayed behind to fight the Russian invaders. These people are not “refugees”; they are economic migrants at best, sexual migrants at worst.

That we are planning to house men among us who may well be a menace in army barracks, of all places, could not make the weakened state of Britain any more tragically graphic. Our armed forces, which were once the envy of the world and which stood alone for a time against the Nazi war machine within living memory, is now woefully decimated.

Last year a defense minister predicted that they could be wiped out within six months of a Russian/Ukraine-type invasion. Forget about armies of volunteers getting stuck in; earlier this year a poll found that nearly half of Britons would refuse to fight for their country “under any circumstances” with just 35 percent saying they would be willing to do so.

As we approach Remembrance Day, and the empty army barracks are overhauled to be made worthy of our mysterious new co-countrymen, it’s hard not to be — yet again — pessimistic about the future that awaits this once-great, post-hope country.