D id Anthony Albanese and his British counterpart, Sir Keir Starmer, take the same progressive course in multicultural crisis management? Both have been confronted with horrific events that challenge the leftist dogma that diversity is our strength, and their woeful, bloodless responses have been remarkably similar.

In Starmer’s case, two months before the Bondi massacre, during Yom Kippur, a Syrian-born ISIS-inspired maniac attacked Jewish worshippers at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, resulting in the death of two and the serious injury of three. Echoing Albanese’s nervous avoidance of contact with the Jewish community after Bondi, Starmer made a brief ‘shielded’ visit to the synagogue the following day, where he thanked police but avoided interaction with the Jewish community or the victims’ families. He also didn’t visit the victims in hospital, seemingly to avoid confronting Jewish fury at what many saw as his indulgence of the Muslim antisemitism fuelling such violence.

An alliance of leftists and Islamists has been a key feature of both the Albanese and Starmer governments. Both feel dependent on the Muslim vote, so they indulge Islam at every opportunity, including by bashing Israel. Still, briefly after Bondi, it seemed that Britain might ban inflammatory anti-Israel and antisemitic chants such as ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘death to the IDF’. Reflecting on Bondi, the chiefs of the Metropolitan and Manchester police said the laws were inadequate to protect Jews, and those who publicly used such language could expect police action. But only a week later, it became clear that Britain’s indulgence of Islamist extremism hadn’t changed. Avon and Somerset Police announced that no legal action would be taken against punk duo Bob Vylan for leading chants, six months earlier, at the Glastonbury music festival, of ‘death to the IDF’, which were broadcast live across the UK and seen by millions. This was because the chant didn’t ‘meet the threshold’ for criminal prosecution. The British state has effectively said anyone is free to use such violent, inflammatory language. It has yet to clarify if this means anyone is free to call for the murder of members of any institution – Avon and Somerset Police, for example – or just Israeli ones.

The capture of the British police by a left-Islamist alliance has also been highlighted by revelations that the West Midlands Police force has essentially become the paramilitary wing of Birmingham’s Islamists. It capitulated to them when, threatening violence, they demanded that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans be banned from the November 2025 football match against Birmingham’s Aston Villa. The police lied, claiming that the ban was imposed ‘exclusively’ because Dutch police had warned of the fans’ hooliganism during an Amsterdam match in 2024 – a claim the Dutch described as nonsense.

The depth of Islam’s capture of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, is a startling development reflecting the city’s dramatic demographic change: at the most recent census in 2021, 30 per cent of the population was Muslim, up from 22 per cent a decade earlier. If the pace of mass immigration of the last three decades continues, there is a serious risk that Britain will eventually fall under Islamist control. Britain’s indulgence of extremist Islam is even a concern in the Muslim world. The UAE recently decided to stop sending its students to Britain because it fears their radicalisation in British universities.

The Tories bear much of the blame for this situation, doing nothing during their 14 years in power to stop the capture of institutions by the Left and their soft-on-extremist-Islam policies. Between 2013 and 2023, under the non-existent surveillance of Tory home secretaries, the Metropolitan Police, desperate for ‘diversity’, recruited 114 applicants who’d failed vetting. Twenty-five went on to commit serious crimes. A further 22,000 were recruited without proper vetting.

The Tories also failed to keep out dangerous extremists. Under then-prime minister Boris Johnson, citizenship was granted to Egyptian-born activist Allaa Abd al-Fattah, a violent maniac who has tweeted that he wants to see whites, ‘colonialists and especially Zionists’ dead and calls Britons ‘dogs and monkeys’. The useless Foreign Office claims it was unaware of this catalogue of hate, despite the campaign for his release from prison in Egypt being a ‘top priority’ for Labour and Tory governments.

As with Albanese, Starmer signals his friendliness to Muslims with immigration policies. Regardless of what he says, he has no interest in reducing the sky-high numbers of legal and illegal immigrants (respectively 900,000 in the year to June 2025 and 65,000 since Labour was elected). He announces endless initiatives that he claims will stop the boats, but all are farcical. He promised to ‘smash the gangs’, but they operate openly. Since the ‘one for one’ deal on returning illegal immigrants to France was announced last August, a grand total of 153 illegal migrants have been sent back (in exchange for 134 in return). Despite Britain having paid France £770 million to prevent illegal Channel crossings, French efforts have been so hopeless that British vigilantes have taken to sabotaging the boats themselves.

Only two of Labour’s illegal immigration policies deserve to be taken seriously: to ‘clear the backlog’ of asylum-seekers, it will waive most through, and to end the use of hotels for illegal immigrants, it will move them into less visible accommodation. Labour won’t say it, but it likes mass immigration, especially from the Third World, which it sees as a generally reliable support base. It’s also uncomfortable with strong border control. Its solution to the political problem of people disliking these policies is to call them racist. Other parts of its survival strategy are to criminalise criticism of Islam, which would probably mean an article like this would be banned in a future Labour Britain.

Fearing Reform UK’s triumph in the local elections scheduled for 7 May, Labour has manufactured excuses to postpone many of these policies and suddenly announced its passionate concern about the AI degradation of women and girls but only on the platform of its most powerful critic, Elon Musk’s X. This from the party whose view of girls abused on an industrial scale largely by Pakistani men was that they should ‘shut up – for the sake of diversity’. Still, the possibility that Starmer might try to block X – possibly in league with allies such as Albanese – isn’t as far-fetched as many assume.