The horrific attempted beheading in Belfast has revealed, once again, the weakness of Britain’s borders.
Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker, has been charged with attempted murder after Stephen Ogilvie was left with appalling injuries in north Belfast on Monday night. The case has raised serious questions about how the suspect entered the UK, how his asylum case was handled, and why the British state seems so utterly incapable of protecting its own citizens.
We now know that Alodid travelled from Sudan to Paris, then to Dublin, before taking a bus to Belfast in February 2023. He claimed asylum soon after arriving and was later granted leave to remain in the UK for five years. The borderless Common Travel Area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland meant that Alodid - and potentially thousands of others like him - was able to enter the United Kingdom from the European Union without any checks on his identity or documentation.
Worse still, The Times reports today that Britain has returned just one asylum seeker to Ireland under the post-Brexit returns deal signed in 2020. Leaving the EU should have been an opportunity to build a tougher, faster and more effective returns system of our own. Instead, ministers replaced it with a weak arrangement that, as we can clearly see, barely functions at all. Successive governments have failed to deliver one of the central promises of Brexit - to tighten Britain’s borders.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Sudanese asylum claims like Alodid’s were placed into a streamlined Home Office process designed to clear the backlog. Instead of being subject to the usual face-to-face interviews, many applicants only had to complete a 10-page questionnaire. Almost all (96%) of Sudanese asylum claims were granted in this way. One small mercy is that this system is no longer in operation.
Let us be clear about what this means. A man was able to enter the UK and be granted leave to remain after a process that Home Office staff apparently privately referred to as being a “grant factory”, due to its high approval rate. Now he stands accused of a barbaric attack on a Belfast street. It seems clear that Alodid should never have been in this country in the first place.
What is Westminster’s answer to this farce? As usual, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is more interested in “cracking down on anyone who is fuelling… division” on social media than in understanding why people are so furious. The establishment sees public anger as the problem, rather than the failed asylum system that caused it. Only Reform UK is prepared to say what millions of British people already know: Britain’s borders are broken. And only Reform UK is willing to finally secure and defend them.
Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker, has been charged with attempted murder after Stephen Ogilvie was left with appalling injuries in north Belfast on Monday night. The case has raised serious questions about how the suspect entered the UK, how his asylum case was handled, and why the British state seems so utterly incapable of protecting its own citizens.
We now know that Alodid travelled from Sudan to Paris, then to Dublin, before taking a bus to Belfast in February 2023. He claimed asylum soon after arriving and was later granted leave to remain in the UK for five years. The borderless Common Travel Area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland meant that Alodid - and potentially thousands of others like him - was able to enter the United Kingdom from the European Union without any checks on his identity or documentation.
Worse still, The Times reports today that Britain has returned just one asylum seeker to Ireland under the post-Brexit returns deal signed in 2020. Leaving the EU should have been an opportunity to build a tougher, faster and more effective returns system of our own. Instead, ministers replaced it with a weak arrangement that, as we can clearly see, barely functions at all. Successive governments have failed to deliver one of the central promises of Brexit - to tighten Britain’s borders.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Sudanese asylum claims like Alodid’s were placed into a streamlined Home Office process designed to clear the backlog. Instead of being subject to the usual face-to-face interviews, many applicants only had to complete a 10-page questionnaire. Almost all (96%) of Sudanese asylum claims were granted in this way. One small mercy is that this system is no longer in operation.
Let us be clear about what this means. A man was able to enter the UK and be granted leave to remain after a process that Home Office staff apparently privately referred to as being a “grant factory”, due to its high approval rate. Now he stands accused of a barbaric attack on a Belfast street. It seems clear that Alodid should never have been in this country in the first place.
What is Westminster’s answer to this farce? As usual, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is more interested in “cracking down on anyone who is fuelling… division” on social media than in understanding why people are so furious. The establishment sees public anger as the problem, rather than the failed asylum system that caused it. Only Reform UK is prepared to say what millions of British people already know: Britain’s borders are broken. And only Reform UK is willing to finally secure and defend them.
