Why we must resist the urge to weaponise the Clapham chemical attack against asylum seekers

Clearly, something has gone very wrong in the asylum system, as far as the case of Abdul Shakoor Ezedi is concerned. Now the subject of a police manhunt, he is wanted in connection with an appalling corrosive substance attack on a woman and her daughter in London, as well as injuries sustained by people who’d intervened to help. One can only imagine what horrors lie behind that dead, official phrase “life-changing injuries”, which the victims are said to have suffered.

We now learn that Ezedi was convicted of sexual offences in 2018 and after that was eventually granted asylum in 2021 or 2022, after two failed attempts. His claim was that he would have to face the Taliban if he was sent back to Afghanistan.

One decisive factor seems to be that he had converted to Christianity, and had a letter from a priest attesting to that. An immigration tribunal allowed him to stay.

So what we should be doing now is discussing the sentencing of people convicted of sexual offences, and how to make women and girls safe. We probably also ought to be discussing the treatment of those in need of mental help.

In all fairness, we should also be talking about how to make the asylum system work so that it protects the public in rare cases where a refugee is actually going to pose a threat. Perhaps the system is prone to abuse, and one weakness is spurious claims of religious conversion.

Instead, and with depressing predictability, Ezedi’s status as a refugee is being weaponised to make the argument, none too subtly, that asylum seekers are bound to be criminals and evil, and that the best way to protect the public is to end the right to asylum and shut the borders. Then we’d all be safe from attack, wouldn’t we?

Well, obviously not. Attacks using acid and other corrosive substances didn’t start when the boats arrived or immigration began. If we ended asylum in the morning and deported everyone on the waiting list for processing back whence they came, or to Rwanda, there would still be thousands of these types of attacks, disproportionately committed by males against females. There would still be many other crimes.

To use what Ezedi did to condemn the whole principle of asylum, to deny the obligation to offer sanctuary to those in fear for their lives and to send innocent people back to their original homelands to face possible torture and death, would not only be cruel, but pointless. It would not prevent crime in the general population, and there’s no evidence to say that refugees are more likely to commit crimes than anyone else.

Yet now they are demonised not only for taking jobs (that no one else wants to do and at a time of labour shortage), and simultaneously claiming out-of-work benefits, but also as people who will throw acid at others in the street.

The facts are that refugees aren’t allowed to take paid work, they get about £40 a week in subsistence and a temporary hotel room (which they have to live in because the processing of claims is so slow), and generally don’t attack members of the public or commit serious crimes, because if they did they’d have their claims rejected – as Ezedi found, before he eventually succeeded under older asylum rules.

It’s a terrible false logic that says that, if Ezedi hadn’t been allowed into the country, he’d never have been able to attack anyone (which is true) – but then extend that to presuppose that if asylum seekers weren’t allowed in the country, there would be fewer crimes. That is ridiculous.

What is plain about this case is that Ezedi shouldn’t have been eligible for asylum because of his criminality. But that’s an argument for changing the rules, not scrapping the entire system.

It is, in fact, the same false logic that tries to demonise all Muslim people for the crimes committed by Islamist extremists. It’s the same logic, as I can well recall, that smeared all the Irish in Britain in the 1970s as aiders and abetters of IRA terrorism. It’s absurd – but it’s what happens when appalling acts of violence are perpetrated by people who are sick or evil, or both, and a distressed public looks for answers and justice, but ends up with paranoia and scapegoats.

This never happens, of course, when the violence is committed by, say, white middle-class professionals. We didn’t call for the incarceration of all doctors or people from Nottingham when Dr Harold Shipman was arrested for the horrific mass murder of his patients.

If Ezedi is found and found guilty, then that doesn’t mean we have to send all the Afghans who worked for the British and fought with the troops back to Kabul just because of what Ezedi did. It does mean we should take yet another sober look at how the asylum system works.

You can take any view you like of the benefits and challenges of migration, and you can also argue for the death penalty for acid attacks if you like, but it’s a mistake to mix these things up. Crime is crime, and we forget that at our peril.