Bridges for the World, Walls for the British
Sadiq Khan's Progressive Paradox
If Sadiq Khan has been consistent about one thing, it is his distaste for walls. “In London, we’re building bridges—not walls,” he has tooted ad nauseam. The irony, aside from Hammersmith Bridge sitting closed for years, is that since his election in 2016 he has overseen a wall-building boom. From Westminster to London Bridge, South Bank up to St Pancras, Sir Sadiq has lined our streets with walls unaffectionately nicknamed “diversity barriers”.
The black and yellow barricades, officially “hostile vehicle barriers”, have become the trademark of Khan’s rule. Some are not so aesthetically glaring. Driving through the West End yesterday (in a vehicle I was assured was not hostile) I noticed the more subtle variety: adorned with shrubbery, weaving between the theatres and Shaftesbury Avenue, interstices dotted with metal bollards. Boris had his bikes. Peel had his Bobbies. Sadiq has his barriers.
It is of course neither “diversity” nor “hostile vehicles” that Sadiq’s walls are protecting us from. It’s radical Muslims. After the July 2016 Nice attack, when Tunisian immigrant Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne cargo truck through the Promenade des Anglais and killed 86 innocents, in Britain a public-facing push for protective barriers was launched by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI). And in 2017, after Islamist attacks in Westminster, London Bridge and Borough Market, temporary and permanent Hostile Vehicle Measures (HVMs) were rapidly installed at high-footfall locations by the Home Office, Metropolitan Police and the Mayor of London’s office.
But it’s not just London. From Cambridge city centre down to the Brighton boardwalk, from Southampton up to the seaside town of Ayr on the west coast of Scotland, barriers are blooming like daffodils in spring.
It is the same story across Western Europe after vehicle-ramming Islamist attacks in Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona, Munich, Berlin and Modena. From Christmas markets to Gay Pride, such attacks have become a mainstay of European life.
How much exactly we are coughing up on our national wall-building frenzy is not clear. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park paid out £4.57 million in 2022 for their barriers. Birmingham City Council had a tender for HVM works valued at £2.9 million. York city centre footstreets scheme has cost up to £3.4 million. Cardiff spent £1 million on multiculturalism bollards. The National Barrier Asset (NBA), a collection of temporary vehicle security barriers and fencing managed by the counter-terrorism police National Vehicle Threat Mitigation Unit (NVTMU), costs £35 million for four years of storage, maintenance and deployment.
Suffice to say it is not cheap.
I for one am not against walls. My home has walls on four sides, which I think more practical than barriers within my home as a security measure against those who might have entered a wall-less home uninvited.
Nor am I against walls around our country, even though it might be a tad trickier for us as an island nation. But that technical issue certainly didn’t stop the Spanish authorities using floating barriers around Ceuta last month, after 70,000 Moroccans casually trooped around their land barriers in a short 48-hour window. Floating walls are very much possible – as I have long suggested.
There are other parts of the world where walls have become a mainstay: Israel, Gaza and the West Bank come to mind. Or indeed Northern Ireland. In all these places, of course, they don’t use euphemism. The walls are explicitly to keep out terrorists. Sadiq’s walls are an implicit admission that the terrorists are already in our home. And that he’d rather put up walls between us British than have those anti-British, uh-hum… vehicles… permanently banished from our little island.
Progressivism has many paradoxes. Its insistence on tearing down walls around countries offset by the building of walls within countries is perhaps the most absurd. Britain has morphed from a high-trust, culturally coherent society without walls to a low-trust diversity-dystopia littered with barricades. Much of the same can be said of our neighbours in Western Europe.
This is a new normal I do not accept. Nor should you.
WM
Is Islam Compatible With The West?
On 11 September at the Emmanuel Centre in London journalist and author Maajid Nawaz and historian Raymond Ibrahim will be coming together to debate the most important question of the age - and you can be a part of the action!
THE WINSTON MARSHALL SHOW LIVE!
Get your tickets now before they sell out: https://winstonmarshall.eventbrite.co.uk
What I am reading…
12,000 arrests are made every year in Britain for social media posts. Bernie Spofforth was one such case. At the height of the Southport murders in 2024 one post on X cost her a night in a police cell. Bernie is now bravely telling her story, and I was pleased to host her on The Winston Marshall Show this week. Her interview will be published soon but in the meantime do get a copy of her book ‘A WAR TO WIN BACK YOUR WORLD: BECAUSE SILENCE FEELS LIKE DYING’ which I’ve been reading this week.
WM
If you don’t have walls at the borders, you have walls everywhere within the borders. This is cultural enrichment from vibrant doctors and engineers. Diversity is our greatest stength!
Floating barriers would be more cost effective than walls which may as well not be there and the cost of housing and benefits for invaders.
But typical maexust Communists - waste, waste, waste.
Tax payers need to withdraw their labour hence their taxes.