The modern state is very powerful when dealing with the law-abiding, and strangely helpless when dealing with the wicked. The case of Shabir Ahmed exemplifies this perfectly. He has never expressed even a word of remorse for his many crimes. In fact, he seems to consider himself a victim.
At his trial, where he was convicted of organizing and being the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, whose reign of sexual terror saw it repeatedly groom and abuse girls as young as 13, the closest Ahmed came to expressing an opinion was when he called the presiding judge a “racist bastard”.
Nor did he ever deny his crimes. To him, the children he abused were, in his own words, “prostitutes”. To this day, Ahmed believes that his repeated sexual interactions with children were perfectly legitimate.
Ahmed was sentenced in 2012. The British courts sentenced him twice: once for his role as ringleader of the rape gang that became infamous, for which he received 19 years in prison, and once on a separate charge involving a sustained campaign of rape against one young woman, whom he had abused since she was a child. He received 22 years for that crime, for a total sentence of 41 years. However, because the two sentences were to run concurrently, meaning at the same time rather than one after the other, he has now been released after just under 14 years in prison. That might in itself be considered a scandal, but the story gets worse.
Rules Are Rules
Ahmed, a Pakistani national, came to Britain in 1967. At some point (no date has been provided), he was granted British citizenship, though this was later stripped from him following his conviction. He is, therefore, still a citizen of Pakistan. Given his public statements and lack of remorse, he also remains an active threat to the welfare of female British children.
Nevertheless, it is the legal position in the United Kingdom that he cannot be deported. The British Home Office takes the view that because he is a citizen of a British Commonwealth state who arrived in the UK prior to the Immigration Act of 1971, he has an indefinite right to remain in the country, despite being a foreign criminal convicted of harms against British citizens.
Justified Anger
The public anger that has broken out over this absurd state of affairs is not difficult to understand. In fact, it would be much more difficult to understand if there were no anger.
To recap: here is a man who came to Britain from Pakistan. He was welcomed into the country. He was eventually granted citizenship. He then used the country that had welcomed him as a hunting ground for the rape and abuse of its children. When finally exposed, he did not apologize. He did not beg forgiveness. He did not even have the decency to pretend to be sorry, as many criminals do to secure a shorter sentence. He called the judge a racist and described abused children as prostitutes. Despite all of that, he served just 14 years in prison out of the 41 to which he was sentenced.
And now the British state, having stripped him of the citizenship it once conferred, says that it cannot actually send him anywhere.
A Curious Definition of Sovereignty
This is, to put it mildly and in terms suitable for publication, a curious definition of sovereignty.
It is worth pausing on the sheer perversity of the position. The Home Office has already concluded that Ahmed is not fit to be British. That is the whole moral and legal basis for depriving him of citizenship. But having decided that he is not British, the same state now says that he must remain in Britain anyway. He is too foreign to be a citizen, but too British to be deported.
There is also, inevitably, the question of priorities. British governments have spent years insisting that the state must be ever more vigilant in the protection of vulnerable children. Vast bureaucracies have been constructed around safeguarding. Teachers, youth workers, priests, football coaches and even ordinary parents are now subject to layers of suspicion, regulation and training, all designed to ensure that no warning sign is missed and no child is placed at unnecessary risk.
Yet when confronted with an actual, proven, remorseless child rapist, the system suddenly discovers the limits of its imagination. This is not a theoretical risk, not a safeguarding concern, not a man who has made an inappropriate joke in a staff room. It is a convicted organizer of systematic abuse.
Sorry, the system says. Nothing to be done. Rules are rules.
Enough to Drive Anyone Half Mad
This is the kind of thing that drives ordinary people half mad, because it reveals something they have long suspected: the modern state is very powerful when dealing with the law-abiding, and strangely helpless when dealing with the wicked.
It can demand that a grandmother produce identification to vote. It can fine a man for putting the wrong rubbish in the wrong bin. It can police speech on the internet, monitor bank accounts, regulate school lunches and launch consultations on the emotional wellbeing of dogs. But when asked to remove from the country a foreign-born child rapist who has never shown remorse for his crimes, it shrugs its shoulders and points sadly at the paperwork. Computer says no, it says.
One need not be a lawyer or an expert or a politician to detect that something has gone badly wrong.
The Absurd Hierarchy of Compassion
Nor is this simply an immigration story, though it is certainly that. It is also a story about the absurd hierarchy of compassion that dominates modern public administration. There will, no doubt, be official concern about Ahmed's rights. There will be careful language about legal obligations, international duties, procedural fairness and the danger of rendering a man stateless, even though Pakistan, inconveniently, appears still to be his country of citizenship.
But where, one wonders, is the comparable concern for the girls?
For years, the Rochdale scandal has stood as one of the great moral stains on modern Britain. It was not simply that terrible crimes were committed. Terrible crimes, tragically, will always be committed. It was that those crimes were allowed to continue because institutions were frightened.
Frightened of being called racist, frightened of confronting uncomfortable facts, frightened of the political consequences of telling the truth. It was easier to permit girls to be raped than to say “perhaps this is a cultural problem specific to immigrants”.
The victims paid the price for that cowardice.
And now, years later, the British public is being invited to accept a second humiliation: that even after conviction, even after imprisonment, even after citizenship deprivation, the state and its feckless politicians still cannot bring themselves to act decisively.
There is an obvious answer, of course. There are things they could do. Parliament can change the law, since Parliament is sovereign in Britain.
Ministers could test the legal position in the courts. Alternatively, politicians could make clear to Pakistan that one of its citizens, convicted of appalling crimes in Britain, should be and will be returned to Pakistan. If necessary, bilateral pressure can be applied. If necessary, new legislation can be drafted. If necessary, His Majesty's Government can spend as much effort trying to remove Shabir Ahmed as it routinely spends trying to remove unpopular opinions from the internet.
That would require political will. Admittedly, this is where the plan may run into difficulty.
But the alternative is, and must be, intolerable. It is to tell the British public that citizenship means almost nothing, borders mean very little and some academic concept of human rights must always trump the right of the public to be safe. It is to tell victims that the rights of their abuser will always be examined with greater tenderness and care than they will.
And it is to tell the country that, in the final analysis, nobody is really in charge. Except, of course, the human rights lawyers.
A Similar Case in Ireland
At about the same time that Shabir Ahmed was leaving prison this week, Riad Bouchaker was entering it. Bouchaker was convicted in Dublin on Wednesday of the attempted murder of three preschool-aged children, having attacked them with a 36-inch (91 cm) blade outside their school in November 2023. One of his victims, aged just five, suffered such severe injuries that she will never be able to speak, walk or swallow independently. She has received a life sentence. Bouchaker's sentence is yet to be determined.
The attacker had lived in Ireland for 20 years, and been granted citizenship. The motive for his attack? That he had not received adequate social welfare payments, and therefore "hated" the "stupid country" that had granted him asylum, but not a lifestyle he believed himself deserving of.
In both jurisdictions, the pattern is the same: the foreign criminal is afforded every chance and every benefit, while their victims are left to suffer.
If an explanation is needed in Europe for the rise of populist and anti-immigration sentiment, the state's conduct with regard to Ahmed and Bouchaker will more than serve.