Sorry, sad, but glibly predictable

I grew up in this street. The town is Boston, Lincolnshire. It is, by any benchmark you may care to employ, a shit hole.

Of late, Boston has become a national paradigm of all that has gone wrong with mass, unfettered immigration. The court reports bare the simple truth that on average, more than half of the names in them are certainly not of English origin. The place is violent, but it has always been so. The place attracts a malevolent underclass, but it has always been so. But of late, the crime rate has, (if it has not soared) become rather more serious than the common arrest for riding a bicycle without a light.

The local paper reveals that a common trait among the thousands of immigrants from all the gin joints in all the world is to drive a car without insurance, tax or MOT. Of course, then there was the explosion in the illicit still that killed five Lithuanians.

And now, in my own street, in the place I grew up, a double murder. In the frame is a Turkish born man. Mehmet Ali Ozen. A third person, a female, escaped her attacker and is recovering. According to the Lincolnshire Standard report, the suspect has been resident in this country for more than ten years but needed an interpreter to plead before magistrates.

It is the first murder in Boston for decades as far as I know. In fact the last one was famously that of a prostitute, one Ivy Virgin, in November 1970. In that case, the perpetrator was a local youth who never strayed far from trouble and was arrested for rape shortly after his release.

As for my house - a reasonably pleasant one with a lot of history - it was sold by my step-father in the 1980s, became for a while a shop selling cheap sex underwear and finally fell victim to the undignified fate of being part demolished and the rest turned into multiple occupancy. I moved on from Boston in the 1970s and rarely returned. In the last four decades I have made maybe, four or five  fleeting visits and believe me that was enough.

I have to say that Boston is much less stagnant than it once was. The local economy is thriving, and that is due in no small part to immigration. But a pall of evil hangs over the town. There is an atmosphere of latent and not so latent violence. In some pubs and shops, no English is spoken and none acknowledged. The national news papers hold it up as an example of immigration gone wrong. They may be right, but the sorrows and mores of this little market town are rooted in the malevolent character of its indigenous stock and the exploitation of cheap labour from former Eastern Europe.