January 23, 2024 - 4:00pm
The long shadow of Rotherham hangs heavy over British politics. Yesterday the Daily Mail reported that Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan, convicted ringleaders of the Rochdale grooming gang, are still living at their homes in the UK nine years after their deportation was ordered. One of Khan’s victims — whom he impregnated at 13 — recently came face-to-face with him in an Asda, unaware he had been released from prison after serving around half of his eight-year sentence.
This is a rare case in Britain. Their deportation hasn’t been stopped by the constant court appeals on increasingly spurious grounds of the defendants’ human rights, but because Pakistan is refusing to allow them to return.
What power does the UK have to force Pakistan to take them? It appears, at first glance, rather a lot: Pakistan is “the top bilateral recipient of UK aid”, receiving over £1 billion since 2009. Pakistan also received nearly $300m in remittances from the UK last year.
Foreign aid is often cited as essential to the UK’s much-vaunted “soft power”. But Pakistan’s refusal raises questions: if this amount of aid cannot convince Pakistan — a formal ally — to allow us to deport dual nationals, how much use is soft power to the national interest?
Tellingly, the concept of soft power originated with a former Clinton administration official, Joseph Nye, who defined it as a tool for mobilising a nation’s moral and cultural assets so that they can be leveraged to support ongoing foreign policy goals. It is a co-optive rather than coercive process. “If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes,” Nye wrote. “If its culture and ideology are attractive, others will more willingly follow.”
Britain is supposedly ranked second globally for soft power. Yet it does not seem to serve us well. Britain gave over £50m to Colombia last year, none of which was spent on fighting the drug cartels that plague the country — or on preventing them spreading to London. The UK also spent £47m in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but not a penny went towards preventing the country’s slide towards war with another huge beneficiary of UK taxpayer money, Rwanda, which would seriously hamper the Government’s flagship immigration policy. Then there’s the £46m that the Government lavished on nuclear-armed space power India last year, despite the strong possibility that Modi’s government sanctioned an assassination in Canada after UK Sikhs received similar threats.
One of the many problems with soft power is that it can only ever remain soft: the moment it is used for coercion, it becomes hard power. But Britain’s hard power is fast eroding — the Royal Navy will soon have to decommission two ships in order to free up enough sailors to man two of its new frigates. By 2026, the size of the British Army will have dropped 40% from 2010.
Soft power is at best a luxury of questionable value, an idea created by and for the world’s dominant cultural, military and financial nation at the height of its hegemony. America could afford to spend resources on an idea still waiting for proof of concept, but Britain is no longer that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven. We cannot afford to admire soft power only in its idleness.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeExcellent article. The mirage of this value-free neo imperialist indulgent ‘soft power’ needs exposing. Our ability to protect ourselves with hard power is fast evaporating under progressive state groupthink.
If these are dual nationals it is unclear why Pakistan should have any more obligation to accept them than the UK does. If the UK wants Pakistan to accept deportations, it should make this a condition of its financial aid. But in truth it has no more desire to do that than it has to adequately punish serious criminal offences against young girls.
Or we could refuse to issue visas – until Pakistan accepted it’s responsibility
We should stop all visas from countries that don’t have a returns agreement in place with which we are happy.
And all direct flights
And block remittances too
Let’s stop calling it foreign aid and start calling it what it is: danegeld.
Don’t you mean PAKIGELD?
“Soft power” has always been a nonsense. Most recipients just take the money, laugh behind our backs, and then beg for more.
No more egregious example than India, cited in the article. Spending billions on its space programme whilst raking in “foreign aid”.
Simple but crude response: WTF?
More nuanced response: why do those who set the “aid” budget think the recipient governments can’t set aside the fractional proportion of their national spend for the purposes which “aid” is intended?
As for the undeported criminals: their sole intent is to exploit the UK in any way they can get away with. Their time in jail will have cost the tax receipts of several thousand working people. If you’re in work and paying tax, just think about that. All those hours days, weeks you spend at work, contributing tax to enable criminality to be tolerated.
I don’t think that’s correct. I am familiar with Government finances and the so called ” aid” is to think tanks, media houses and other assorted private entities.
Any government to government aid requires a certification process by the auditor general which hasn’t happened for several years now.
I’m glad to hear that the ‘Paris agreement’ with the OECD has been dumped.It simply led to Western aid trying to pay for things we thought important, while the government ( the Treasury) simply used the money for its own ends.
Agreed! State aid is much better regulated than that provided by NGOs, including both charities and the UN. That’s where the biggest sources of inter-state corruption lie.
One question that has no been asked/answered is how much Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan and their families are receiving in state benefits
And legal aid.
Raping a 13 year old girl should result in a whole life sentence.
We should be handing out c.500 whole life tariffs per year to all murderers, the worst sex offenders (like this pair of paedos), terrorists, drug importers and repeat violent offenders . To do so we need to leave the ECHR, ditch any restraining laws and build more prisons.
We could pretty much end serious crime if we did this.
“Raping a 13 year old girl should result in a whole life sentence”.
No, it should be a capital* sentence every time. We need a national referendum on the subject. Why should the taxpayer be expected to spend £90,000 pa to incarcerate a degenerate for life?
The only contentious question is should the execution be public or private.
(*Death.)
You know I agree with you Charles but until the referendum is held and the law changed, I would settle for lifelong incarceration. That this pervert served 4 years (!), probably claims he is innocent and probably led daily prayers in the nick is enough to make your p**s boil.
I’d happily put a bullet in the PoS and help save the taxpayer the upkeep.
Spot on. The only way to stop the groomers is to bring back the rope. Nothing is sacred when it comes to protecting the children. No mercy for the groomers .
The pedophile rapists, Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan, are only a danger to non-Muslim girls. In Pakistan, there will be hardly any potential victims for them: they are only a threat whilst in the UK. Our ludicrous human rights legislation is not capable of taking such factors into account, yet that legislation is allowed to trump all other considerations.
Perhaps the reason he is still here is that Pakistan revoked his citizenship before we revoked his UK citizenship. We can expell dual citizens under ‘Uman Rights law but, like with Begum, we have to move first.
The gallows revokes citizenship FIRST time every TIME.
The report I read said that he renounced his Pakistan citizenship pre-emptively, so that we couldn’t make him stateless.
Rapists should be chemically castrated. Child rapists physically castrated.
One of the many many unaddressed issues with the “grooming gang” fiasco is a refusal by the authorities to come to terms with scale of the problems. There are thousands of perpetrators. The idea that hundreds or thousands of Pakistanis are to be sent back is untenable, yet of course this is what should have been done. Instead, some token prosecutions, and paltry sentences, are the limit of the response to what are the most egregious and widespread crimes ever committed in the UK. I blame the Labour Party more than anything else for this vile stain upon our national conscience.
Bravo sir!
Just do what the rest of the world does and abandon the failed ‘dual citizenship’ concept.
Pakistan expelled two million Afghans into Afghanistan. But the UK cannot expel one Pakistani? How odd ….
I agree with you, sir.
And the Tories have been in power for how long. Just another nail in their rotten coffin. And as if Labour would do any better. I despair.
It was the labour party who started it, or at least, turned a blind eye when it started. Starmer was director of public prosecutions which first covered up all this filth, in Rotherham, Oldham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford etc etc.
Pakistan only exports their criminals. They do not import them. Britain should learn from our Pakistani “brothers” how to deal with the problem, rather than impose our ways on others.
It’s easy to export when you have such a large surplus!
Wait – The Uk can’t deport him. That’s bad enough. But he’s out on the streets and not in a prison cell? One of the girls he raped ran into him out on the streets? WTF???
According to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, since 2015 the UK has given no financial aid to the government of India. Most of UK funding now is focused on business investments which help create new markets and jobs for the UK, as well as India. UK investments are also helping tackle shared challenges such as climate change.
https://m.timesofindia.com/world/uk/uk-still-gives-aid-to-india-dressed-up-as-business-investments-rather-than-direct-handouts-britain-watchdog/amp_articleshow/98641083.cms
It’s a failure of leadership….
“Pakistan is “the top bilateral recipient of UK aid”, receiving over £1 billion since 2009. Pakistan also received nearly $300m in remittances from the UK last year.”
Among the breathtaking cases of government waste, this has to be one of the very most amazing categories: Millions in aid to developed nations.
Government aid means that all taxpayers, including the ones not yet born, are compelled to pay.
Better to leave the money in the taxpayers wagepackets, or not borrow it on the market, and if we then wish to give to a charity for foreign causes we are free to do so.
Halt all visas for people from Pakistan till these Scrum are taken back to their home countries.
Good luck!
It will be immediately vetoed by Labour and the courts.
The evidence from across Europe is very clear that immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan are committing sexual crimes at alarming rates. The most recent, official numbers from Germany show that Afghans and Pakistanis are committing sexual crimes at a rate of 16 times that of German citizens. Immigrants from North Africa are committing sexual crimes at a rate of 11 times that of German citizens. Women and men, the young and the old, are targeted. As evident from the testimony of returning soldiers who served in the region, child sexual abuse is endemic in Afghanistan and tolerated. Academic studies show that child sexual abuse is very prevalent in Pakistan, with boys and girls victimised in nearly equal numbers. These findings are validated by cybercrime statistics that show that Pakistan is among the top producers of child pornography on the planet.
Put both of them on a plane/boat to some remote jungle in the Congo and leave them. Be sure to give them a bagged lunch and a copy of Heart of Darkness.