Restore Halifax

This is our final action day this month, it has been a fantastic campaign so far with many members signed up. Hope to see you there. 💪🏻 🇬🇧

In one of his last acts as Justice Secretary, David Lammy has put Lynne Berry in charge of selecting judges. It's just been confirmed. She says judges should not be appointed solely on merit. Labour are wrecking our justice system in the name of diversity.

Wayne Broadhurst went out to walk his dog on an ordinary street in Uxbridge, and he did not come home. Dawood Safi, a man he had never met and never wronged, stabbed him to death where he stood - the neck, the chest, the side - and turned the knife that same day on two more people, a landlord and a boy of fourteen. Safi is an Afghan national. He reached Britain by lorry in 2020, and in 2022 this country granted him asylum - which is to say we heard his case, accepted his account, and took him formally into our protection, on the old understanding that a nation which shelters a stranger does it to keep him from harm, and to keep harm from itself. The man Britain took in under that promise then killed one of the people it was meant to protect. This week, at Southwark Crown Court, the charge for what he did to Wayne Broadhurst was moved from murder to manslaughter. The prosecution accepted a plea of diminished responsibility on the evidence of four psychiatrists that Safi was in a psychotic state when he killed, that he had, in the phrase, lost contact with reality. He denies the attempted murder of the two he attacked afterwards and will be tried for it. He has not been sentenced. None of this is finished. The medical question I leave to the doctors; four of them agree, and the law has held for centuries that a man severed from reality does not kill with a murderer's mind. But take the psychiatry out and a plainer fact stands behind it, one no expert was asked to weigh: Wayne Broadhurst is dead because the British state took a man into its keeping and that man killed him. That was not a medical event. It was the downstream cost of a decision - to grant the asylum, and then, across a whole system, never to look at the grant again. An asylum system is a promise a country makes, and every promise has two sides. We hear without end about the side owed to the claimant. The side owed to the public - that the people already here, who asked for none of this, will be kept safe from what is admitted in their name - has been treated for twenty years as something faintly shameful, a concern decent people are meant not to raise. Wayne Broadhurst was on the wrong side of that silence. So was the boy of fourteen. A country that meant to go on surviving would grant asylum with extreme sparing, watch closely what it had granted, and make the safety of its own people the first charge on the whole arrangement, before any other claim upon it. Britain does none of these things, and a man out walking his dog has paid for the omission with his life. That will not be set right by grief, and it will not be set right in a comment thread - only by people willing to take the power to change it and then use it. If Wayne Broadhurst's name is more to you than a bad afternoon on the timeline, come and help us take it.