𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Every summer, girls leave our country for what they are told is a holiday. Some of them do not come back the same. Some do not come back at all, not as children at least, but as wives. That is not something our great country should tolerate.

Equality between men and women in this country was hard won by women who chained themselves to railings, who fought for equal pay, and who forced the country to accept that a wife could not be raped by her husband with impunity.

And yet, today, in modern Britain, there are women in this country living under coercive control, facing domestic abuse on a daily basis. Many of these women know perfectly well that what is being done to them is against the law, but sadly, know equally that nobody is coming.

Part of the reason is that people have arrived in this country from places where the treatment of women bears no resemblance to what is expected here, and too many of those communities have failed to integrate. Microcosms of British society operate on standards imported from somewhere else, at the expense of the women who live under them.

It is unforgivable and unacceptable that there are households, and I dare say post codes, where the settled understanding is that the law stops at the front door. It is usually the daughters, wives and sisters within those same households who suffer first, and then the violence, and belief in an entitlement to any woman’s body, spreads.

Previous generations of migrants did the hard work of assimilating, proudly finding their place in our great country. More recent arrivals, in too many cases, have not.

Violence against women and girls is a national epidemic. A woman failed by a British husband and a girl failed by a family that considers her marriageable at 14 are both failed by us.

I refuse to choose between them and will fight for both. But it is precisely because the scale is so grave that we cannot afford blind spots or indulge political taboos.

Barely a day passes without another report of an immigrant charged with raping or assaulting a woman or young girl. The Home Office poster campaign trying to force immigrants to recognise women are equal in our country and that the age of consent is 16 is an admission of this danger.

Pretending it is not happening silences the survivors, re-victimises them, and leaves other women less safe.

For too long, fears over undocumented young men entering the country illegally have been dismissed by the Left but this shows that the government knows the risk is real.

That is why we need to make sure that the people we welcome into our country respect our law and customs, embrace and not evade them, and will integrate into British society. Our Cultural and Integration Commission starts from the principle that Britain can be multi-racial without being multicultural, and that shared values are a condition of living here rather than a suggestion pinned to a wall.

Immigration cannot mean opening the door and hoping for the best. It has to mean insisting that the people we admit accept British law and the equality of British women, without exception.

Men who abuse women should not be granted the right to settle here. Those who abuse women after settling here should lose it.

Women chained themselves to railings so that this country would never again treat a woman’s rights as a matter of whose house she happened to live in. That principle was not won so that it could be quietly suspended at certain front doors.

It applies to every woman in Britain, or it applies to none of us.