Moral Paralysis

It seems the Britain of 2025 no longer confronts violence but accommodates it. The latest episode of horror, where knife-wielding attackers stormed a London-bound train in Cambridgeshire, slashing passengers and leaving an elderly man bleeding as he shielded a girl, ought to have convulsed the nation in collective outrage. Instead, the government prefers to sigh in weary denial. Within hours, police ruled out ‘terrorism.’

This ritual of minimisation has become a national reflex. The Cambridgeshire attack follows close on the heels of a similar incident in Manchester that left two people dead and several injured in a synagogue rampage last month. In London, knife assaults have risen by double digits this year. The government’s own data show that knife crime in England and Wales has doubled since 2011 despite nearly 60,000 blades “seized or surrendered.”

Nowhere is this moral collapse clearer than in the Keir Starmer-led Labour government’s response. Under Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the Home Office seems to have become less a department of national security than a therapy centre for Britain’s collective guilt. Prime Minister Starmer promises “a Britain that feels safe,” but his ministers seem terrified not of criminals, but of offending anyone who might vote Labour in Birmingham or Bradford. Their obsession with ‘inclusivity’ and ‘multi-culturalism’ has turned into paralysis.

This aversion to truth has roots that stretch back two decades. After the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, Britain ended up producing self-censorship instead of heightened vigilance. The ‘Prevent’ strategy, conceived to counter extremism, soon became a bureaucratic minefield where teachers, police officers, and social workers feared being branded racist more than they feared radicalisation. When grooming gangs terrorised Rotherham and Rochdale, officials looked away lest they inflame community tensions.

Police have confirmed that the Huntingdon train attackers were a 32-year-old black British man and a 35-year-old of Caribbean descent. That fact alone has the government in rhetorical lockdown. Had the attackers been white nationalists, Downing Street would have convened an emergency summit by dawn.

The question must be asked is Britain sliding the way of Syria where the monopoly of violence is lost, where enclaves of lawlessness coexist with islands of civility? That may sound melodramatic, but a society that cannot protect its citizens or even speak truthfully about their killers is one already fraying at the edges. In London, machete gangs operate openly. In Birmingham, Islamist preachers once banned from social media now hold ‘community dialogues.’ In Leicester, sectarian riots in 2022 were airbrushed as “miscommunication.”

The rot seeps deeper still. The Metropolitan Police, under constant political pressure to showcase ‘diversity targets,’ is increasingly wary of aggressive policing in minority-heavy boroughs. Counterterrorism units, once feared, now require ministerial clearance for surveillance operations deemed ‘culturally sensitive.’ The message to would-be attackers is unmistakable: Britain no longer has the stomach to fight.

Britain today presents the picture of a political establishment more afraid of being called racist than of being stabbed. Starmer’s Labour has inherited not only the cowardice of late-stage Conservatism but a moral relativism all its own. Its officials prefer moral lectures to police patrols, hashtags to hard law. Their Britain is one where terrorists become ‘troubled young men’ and victims become statistics in the next quarterly Home Office report.

Even the capital’s mayoralty has become a theatre of denial. Knife crime among teenagers has hit record highs under Sadiq Khan, yet the Mayor prefers to lecture Londoners on ‘Islamophobia awareness.’ Last year, an asylum seeker who had slipped through the border checks attacked pedestrians in Nottingham — another case that was politely dismissed as “not terrorism-related.”

This is not compassion; it is collapse disguised as tolerance. No serious government should treat national security as a diversity exercise. The duty of the state is to protect citizens, not to curate their feelings. Until Labour grasps that distinction, Britain will continue to sleepwalk through its own slow unravelling. If this is Starmer’s idea of a ‘safer Britain,’ it is a chilling vision indeed. Nations that cannot name their enemies soon learn to live among them.