Foreign thugs and their filthy crime-ridden camps have turned London into a hellish war zone
The Barbarians are not just at the gate – they have picked the lock and are inside, making themselves at home.
If you doubt it, take a stroll round the West End some time. I’ve heard it described as a “war zone”.
My friend and fellow columnist Alan Frame reported that Romas who pulled off a land grab in Park Lane – arguably the capital’s swankiest post code – have been moved on.
But only as far as Oxford Street, where some of them were last seen pitching their tents outside John Lewis.
When the heat is off, you can bet they will be back at their encampment opposite the Dorchester, bringing with them their foul personal habits, their knives, the menace they direct towards outsiders and their criminal endeavours.
These include gangs of highly efficient pickpockets, who prey on tourists throughout central London.
Other Romas relieve the gullible of their cash with the three-cup trick on Westminster Bridge, within sight of Parliament and New Scotland Yard.
They are hostile and threatening if anyone confronts them or even films them. There is a phone camera video online that shows them surrounding, threatening and spitting on a man trying to record their criminality.
Still more are dispatched to rook passers-by with three-card monte in shabby down-at-heel Oxford Street, once the shining jewel in London’s retail crown.
I remember as a kid enjoying outings to Oxford Street. Dad would leave the Ford in the underground car park near Marble Arch. Mum would make a beeline for Selfridges.
I and my brother and sister, guided around by Dad, would marvel at this West End wonderland.
Then we would all have lunch. Nothing fancy, but the setting made it seem that way. Not any more.
Don’t let anyone tell you that these Romas are a downtrodden minority fleeing persecution and forced to live on their wits in London. They are gangsters. This is organised crime.
And they are not the only ones. Egyptian and Eritrean gangs are active around Marble Arch. They deal drugs and rob shops for food and alcohol, often while wearing designer clothes. Many of them are known to be here illegally but are seldom referred to Immigration Enforcement.
Even some of the shops they rob are trading illegally. They sell outlawed vapes, stolen or smuggled cigarettes and “baggies” for drug dealers to package their wares.
Some of these are operating out of pizza shops or food delivery hubs, so that users can have ecstasy or coke or skunk with their takeaway.
There is an epidemic of anti-social behaviour. Thuggish youngsters from the tough estates down the Edgware Road organise car and bike races in Soho and New Bond Street and police are impotent to stop them.
Under-staffed, under-funded and confused as to what their role is, they are overwhelmed and helpless in the face of this flagrant lawlessness.
Recently, officers have been taken away from dealing with crime to police demonstrations in central London over Gaza or antisemitism.
A recent Survation poll revealed that 57 per cent of women do not feel safe on the Streets of London. This rises to 68 per cent among women aged between 18 and 24. Fifty per cent of women surveyed thought the capital had become less safe in the past five years.
In a well ordered city, you might expect that the mayor could sort things out. Sir Sadiq Khan is Police and Crime Commissioner with overall responsibility for policing.
Khan has proposed putting up an extra £10 million this financial year for policing, with another £73 million to come from central government. He claims it brings the mayoral funding of the Met to a record £1.16 billion in 2025-26.
Despite this, the Met says it still has a budget shortfall and will have to make “substantial tough choices” including cutting the number of officers and services.
Meanwhile, Khan presses on with his plan to ban motor traffic from Oxford Street. Apart from adding to the chaos elsewhere in the West End (does the muppet seriously think the cars will just disappear?) the newly paved pedestrian area will make a fine camp site for the next wave of boat people.
Reform’s Nigel Farage and his two rather odd women allies, Sarah Pochin and Laila Cunningham, addressed policing in a policy initiative on Monday.
He pledged to spend £17 billion on halving crime. He would recruit 30,000 extra police officers, build new pre-fabricated prisons and send home foreign crooks. He would also do deals with Albania, Estonia and Kosovo to lock up the criminals we haven’t got room for.
Farage talks a good game without ever really explaining in detail where he’ll find the money.
The phrase hell in a handcart – or perhaps purgatory in a rubber dinghy – comes to mind.
*****
Funny, how a godforsaken patch of scrubland can suddenly assume geopolitical importance. Suspicious, too.
Keir Starmer recently gave back the Chagos Islands, bought for £3 million, to Mauritius. The deal cost us (yes, us) £3.4 billion. On the very small upside, we did secure a 99-year lease on the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia.
It is considered strategically vital because Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, is becoming chummy with the munificent Chinese (sometimes, diplomacy can bear an uncanny resemblance to the grooming of children).
Now we learn that the Falkland Islands are at the centre of talks between Britain, which has sovereignty there, and Argentina, whose 1982 invasion of the islands triggered a conflict in which 255 British Servicemen died.
I should probably tell you that I have skin in this game. As a young man, I lived on the Falklands for a year and returned in 2002 to report on the 20th anniversary of the war. I strongly believe they should remain a British Overseas Territory.
The talks with Argentina are low key and very much under the radar. They are also fiendishly complex, a report in the Economist reveals.
Russia and China have 15 bases in the South Atlantic, trying to lay claim to Antarctica’s hidden riches. This worries President Trump’s generals, who count chainsaw-wielding Javier Milei, Argentina’s far Right president, as an ally.
But Argentina’s armed forces are not up to much. Since the 1982 conflict Britain has placed tight restrictions on selling them arms. They have been buying weapons from China, which worries Trump. He now wants us to sell them the good stuff.
Britain already has a military presence on the Falklands – including Typhoon fighter jets and the Royal Navy patrol vessel HMS Forth – to protect them from any new attempt to seize them by force.
That is unlikely for now. “It’s militarily unthinkable,” university historian Alejandro Corbacho told the Economist. “Britain would wipe us off the planet.”
Milei, it seems, is relaxed about the status of the Falklands. It is what it is, seems to be his mindset. He says he won’t try to take them by force and hints that the islanders have a right to self-determination.
He is also a devotee of Margaret Thatcher, who dispatched a task force to drive Argentinian invaders out of the Falklands.
Last September, the British and Argentine foreign ministers arranged a visit by Argentinian families to the graves of loved ones on the Falklands. They also agreed to restart monthly direct flights to the islands from Argentina, and to share fisheries data, though neither of these has yet happened.
Meanwhile, tensions remain. Many Argentinians still think the Falklands – or Malvinas, as they call them – are theirs. However, no one lived there until they were settled by Europeans. The Dutch tried, so too the French and Spanish.
But only the Brits were willing to endure the numbing winters, the constant howling winds, the bleak, treeless landscape and the loneliness that can drive a man mad (or, in my case, to drink).
Political worries dog the talks. What happens after Milei? He could go on to 2031 but there is no guarantee his successor would share his moderate views on the Falklands.
“We feel very secure,” Leona Roberts, of the Falklands Executive Council, told the Economist. “But we would probably not be wildly comfortable with the UK supplying military equipment to Argentina.”
She is right to be wary. Trump’s team is playing its own game, and at the very best we are on the bench – if not playing in goal for the other side.
I am convinced that one of the unspoken aims of Keir Starmer’s self-styled progressive Government, is to rid us of every last vestige of colonialism, real or imagined.
That makes not just the Chagos Islands and the Falklands vulnerable, but also outposts such as Gibraltar, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands.
Natalio Wheatley, Prime Minister of the British Virgin Islands and president of the UK Overseas Territories Association, has already twigged this.
Last week he demanded the British Government guarantee security for the islands and put up cash to combat climate change.
He has seen what happened to the Chagos Islands and fears it will happen to his territory.
The Falklands should take note, too.
*****
Veteran journalist Ferdinand Mount falls into a special category for me: Never met him, wish I had.
He is such an interesting bloke, although that is probably not the right word for an Old Etonian baronet, columnist, novelist, memoirist, aide to Margaret Thatcher and relative of Lord (David) Cameron.
Mount, 86, had an aunt, whom he called Munca, after Beatrix Potter’s mouse, and who he thought had only ever been married to his uncle. In fact, this glamorous charlatan had been married, sometimes bigamously, seven times before.
She claimed to be the daughter of a New York banker; actually, she was the daughter of a Sheffield scrap dealer. The man she called her brother was in fact her son.
Mount gives an entertaining interview to the Sunday Times Magazine because he has just brought out a new novel, his 14th, called The Pentecost Papers (Bloomsbury, £18.99). He knows how to tell a story, so I suspect it’s going to be a good read.
By the way, others in his category include Harry Evans, not just the finest editor of his generation, but a student of our craft and a teacher, too. If you haven’t read his five-volume series Editing and Design, then shame on you, you’re beyond redemption.
Mike Molloy, youngest editor of the Daily Mirror, is there too, not just for having reached the editor’s chair via the art desk, or for presiding over the best poker school in Fleet Street, but for bringing out the finest newspaper I have ever read, the Mirror of the late 1970s.
It was intelligent, superbly subbed and had the best columnists in the Street. Alas, to be this good it had to edge upmarket, leaving a gap that was brilliantly plugged by Larry Lamb’s soaraway Sun. The Mirror never regained its pre-eminence. Now look at it.
*****
Why is it, do you think, that every new Labour Government suffers from collective amnesia?
It happens every time. They cock up the economy, get booted out and over the next five or 10 years forget why.
Eventually, they return to office and do it all over again.
They are busy once more creating economic Armageddon and the smart money is saying: “Armageddon out of here.” (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
All this with a Chancellor who is a former “Bank of England economist”. Though, as the old Queen once said, recollections may vary.
Trouble is, Labour think all the money is theirs, when actually, none of it is. When we think they are taking too much in taxes we shut off the tap, stop spending, stick the cash under the mattress and hunker down to wait for the other lot to sort it out.
It is time they stopped borrowing money they can’t afford to pay for, ceased spending money they haven’t got and remembered Margaret Thatcher’s dictum: “The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
*****
The case of the Coldplay kiss cam brought to mind a similar episode allegedly involving a high-ranking journalist in Fleet Street.
He was invited to watch the tennis at Wimbledon from the Royal box (those were the days when the high heidyins of the Press were still on everyone’s freebie list).
The story goes that he took his seat alongside his paramour from the office. There was none of the compromising behaviour that gave away the tech company boss and his HR chief at the Coldplay gig in Boston, Massachusetts.
But the BBC cameras caught the journalist and his girlfriend in warm conversation – witnessed at home by his tennis-loving wife. Perhaps she wondered why she wasn’t there. In any case, it was enough to confirm her suspicions.
I was told there was hell to pay when he got home.
RICHARD DISMORE
23 July 2025
