‘WE MUST find out what unites us to avoid divisions’, says the fatuous independent commission on community cohesion. Well, I can only speak of what I know, but when it comes to divisions, this got me thinking as to what is happening on my doorstep.
Let me count the ways in which division is apparent.
The Bradford ‘Pakistani’ community is made up overwhelmingly of the Mirpuri diaspora, which occupies self-sustaining ghettoes where they mostly form the majority. The denizens do not mix with outsiders at a social level; they have their own social structures (baradari) which serve to provide a framework for their own governance, independent of the host nation structures.
Many retain their own languages, which are often spoken in their homes – where many wives don’t speak English at all – and increasingly in the streets and public buildings, often demanding state-funded interpreters if English is required. They expect to be provided with translations of official forms and documents.
Almost all females wear the hijab (headscarf), many wear full-length robes (abaya) and an increasing number don religious dress, including the burqa and niqab – which is not the tradition of their region. Most older males wear the traditional garb of their home country, the shalwar kameez and the takiyah skullcap and sport untrimmed beards. Increasingly, younger men and boys are adopting this traditional dress, even third-generation immigrants.
The baradari members are all Muslims. They practise their religion in distinctive mosques, and ostentatiously celebrate their religious festivals, often with banners and street decorations supplied at public expense. They demand public facilities for prayer and have secured exemption from humane slaughter rules on religious grounds to produce ‘halal’ meat.
The religion is intensely misogynistic, treating women as second-class citizens. Offensive behaviour spills over into the broader society, where males will ostentatiously refuse to shake hands with females, and demand adherence to their own dress code.
Religious rituals are associated with some questionable personal hygiene habits, particularly those associated with defecation, which have been directly responsible for at least one serious outbreak of communicable disease (dysentery).
Although blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales in 2008, and in Scotland in 2021, there is an active Muslim lobby campaigning for an ‘Islamophobia’ law which would in effect re-introduce a blasphemy law, applicable solely to Islam, giving the religion a unique, privileged position in the UK.
Notwithstanding the current absence of any specific blasphemy law, communities are known to react violently to perceived slights to their religion, as in the Salman Rushdie affair, the ‘Lady of Heaven’ film protests and the Batley teacher incident, where the teacher in question was forced into hiding.
While demanding tolerance of their own religion, and multiple concessions to their religions sensibilities, they are intolerant of other religions and aggressively anti-Semitic.
Despite being treated as places of worship for tax purposes (to which effect they are exempted from council tax), their mosques also act as community hubs and their ‘town halls’, as well as often housing their religious schools, or madrassas. The communities have their own religious courts which they treat as superior to the host nation courts, especially in terms of divorce and domestic disputes.
The communities support their own micro-economies which operate on a trans-national basis. They have their own banks and financial institutions, and their own financial systems for loans and transferring money, none of which is compatible with Western systems.
Individuals and businesses transfer surplus funds to their home country as remittances, supporting family interests and investments overseas, rather than retaining them in the host country. A substantial number retain dual citizenship and maintain elaborate villas in the Mirpur district, to which they retire, so much so that the city of Mirpur is known as ‘little England’.
Equivalent areas in the British ghettoes lack investment and often present a down-at-heel appearance. Properties are often poorly maintained and untidy, with highly visible litter and refuse accumulations. Gardens are rarely tended, and more often treated as junkyards. Noise is endemic. Shops are cheaply fitted and dirty, their paved areas unswept and weed-infested. Council tax default is higher in Mirpuri areas than in stable, white residential areas.
Substantial numbers of Mirpuris moving into a white area can depress property prices by as much as 60 per cent. Repairs and alterations to Mirpuri-owned properties are rarely carried out in accordance with building codes and regulations – which are poorly enforced by the local authority.
This does not hamper the sale of properties within the immigrant community but, unless subjected to expensive refurbishment, they are unsaleable on the open property market. This means that once properties are acquired by immigrants, that change tends to become irreversible.
Members of the baradari communities are disproportionately represented in certain types of crime, particularly group-based child sexual exploitation (grooming gangs), Class A drug dealing (specifically heroin) and money laundering. Individuals also make up a higher-than-average proportion of the prison system, and are disproportionately associated with terrorism.
Baradaris themselves, in some instances, are directly linked to organised crime, with involvement not only in child grooming, Class A drug dealing and money laundering, but also in prostitution, large-scale cigarette smuggling, counterfeit goods and immigration fraud. These have assumed the characteristics of crime syndicates not dissimilar to Mafia families.
The communities have ethnic shops where goods are often labelled in their home (foreign) languages, in contravention of UK law. They frequently resort to unlicensed street markets which also operate outside UK laws. They eat the foods of their home nation and do not drink alcohol or eat many of the traditional foods of their host nation.
Increasingly, they have their own schools, where religious dress is enforced and religious teaching forms a large part of the curriculum. They are taught their own customs and traditions, with scant regard for their host nation, the history and traditions of which they are largely unaware.
They do not patronise the host nation’s social and entertainment venues, and have little interest in local sporting events, with very few supporting the city’s football team, despite the stadium being in a high-density Mirpuri-immigrant area.
They have their own cinemas with films in their home languages, their own books, newspapers and magazines, their own radio and TV stations, and their own music. They are more interested in their home nation politics than they are those of the host nation, except where sectarian interests are involved.
Within baradaris, intermarriage is forbidden (not uncommonly on pain of death, as in honour-killing). Despite the known adverse medical effects and the drain on NHS resources, consanguinity rates within the Mirpuri baradari are the highest in the world. Furthermore, despite decades of adverse publicity, rates seem to be marginally increasing.
Many of the marriages are arranged, with brides selected from the home-country ‘mirror’ family, with which the immigrant baradari have close ties, and to which they owe their ultimate loyalty. Despite its illegality in the UK, they commonly practise female genital mutilation.
There is considerable evidence that the inflexible nature of endogamy and consanguineous marriage have adverse economic effects on the communities that practise them, hampering institutional development, suppressing female education, discouraging innovative free inquiry and entrenching economic deprivation.
The wards occupied by the Bradford Mirpuri diaspora are amongst the most economically deprived areas in Britain yet, rather than address one of the more obvious causes (another being the siphoning of potential investment funds into home country remittances), communities prefer to blame racism and other extraneous factors for their misfortune, exploiting a carefully nurtured victim status.
As groups, they form alliances with others of the same ilk at clan level to elect their own politicians (councillors and MPs) on a block vote principle, with the candidates being decided by the elders of the baradari, the selection often being brokered though their mosques.
Voting fraud is not uncommon and the postal ballot system is widely abused, with family heads casting the votes. Candidates are known to canvass and produce election materials in their home languages.
Communities expect successful candidates to act exclusively in their sectarian interests, disenfranchising the indigenous electorates. Local councillors tend to gravitate to licensing and planning committees, where they can control the issue (or refusal) of licences to pubs, night clubs and other places of entertainment, while influencing decisions on the grant of planning permission to commercial premises – and new mosques. Often, the development of a new mosque in an area is used as justification for the closure of pubs and other premises selling alcohol in the vicinity, paving the way for colonisation by the Mirpuris.
At the national level, MPs in the House of Commons tend to concern themselves disproportionately with issues of interest to their electorates, many focusing on Gaza to the exclusion of domestic concerns.
Not for nothing has Oxford academic Patrick Nash observed that Mirpuri baradari kinship groups ‘represent one of the most underappreciated threats to democratic governments in the 21st century’. The Mirpuris have only a vague understanding of the notion of democracy and exploit its weaknesses for their own benefit.
Yet these people are in our midst. It would be hard to imagine a more disagreeable community, one which makes few if any concessions to the host nation. And yet we are supposed to craft ‘a shared vision of how we want to live together’ with these people.
For those of us on the edge of these ghettoes, who watch with dismay their steady encroachment into the white enclaves, the differences are too great. The is no question of a shared vision – only rejection of these alien communities which have next to nothing in common with us.
And the worst of it is the gaslighting where we are told that ‘the UK is a thriving, multi-ethnic and multi-faith democracy where most people in towns, cities, and rural areas get on with each other’. When, through bitter experience, we disagree, we are branded ‘racist’ and told to change our ways.
If these communities continue to be forced on us, many believe that our destiny will be civil war.
This article appeared in Turbulent Times on June 27, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
