Editorial: ​Justified concern about migration has been ignored, and now the latest violent attack has taken place in Northern Ireland

Once again, there has been a vicious, violent attack in the United Kingdom by an immigrant – and this time the attack, which has flashed around the world, was in Northern Ireland.

The video footage of the north Belfast knifing is shocking. Bystanders genuinely feared that the victim, who has significant injuries to his eyes, face and back, might have his head cut off. The people who rushed to stop the attack and beat the man off the victim deserve our warm thanks for saving a life, by using significant and appropriate force.

Further details will emerge in due course. The PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher said the suspect is thought to have travelled from Sudan to Paris, and then from Paris to Dublin, on unknown dates, before taking a bus to Belfast in February 2023 where he immediately claimed asylum, before he was given leave to remain in the UK in September 2023.

We cannot yet be sure that asylum was granted too soon but it looks like it. We can certainly say the wider immigration and asylum system is utterly broken. In fact it is a situation, millions of net arrivals into the UK over the last decade, that this column raises almost weekly (and for which the last Tory government above all is to blame).

Foolish and naive politicians, at Stormont and elsewhere, rushed yesterday to criticise people who are outraged by the attack, and tried to shut down the debate about immigration. Meanwhile, the police information flags up the problems with an open immigration border with Ireland (in response to which weak UK governments might well add a people border in the Irish Sea to the trade one).

It was good yesterday to hear unionist politicians such as Timothy Gaston, Jim Allister and Gavin Robinson express outrage at the way concerns about mass immigration and its impact on poor communities are dismissed.