No Man’s Land

Till over us we heard the waters close.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx— Dante, Inferno

1. England

Welcome aboard South Western Railway’s
Service to Dorking. Calling at Earlsfield,
Wimbledon, Raynes Park, Worcester Park,
Stoneleigh, Ewell West, Epsom, Ashtead,
Leatherhead, Boxhill & Westhumble,
And Dorking.

Inside my head I count the seconds
Before the voice begins again.

Please ensure you have a valid ticket.
Anyone without a valid ticket
Or payment method will have to pay
A penalty fare or face prosecution
With a fine of up to one-thousand-pounds.

One . . . Two . . . Three . . . Four
Five . . . Six . . . Seven . . . Eight

Any abusive behaviour towards our staff
Will be reported to British Transport Police
And could result in prosecution
And severe penalties for offenders.

I turn to my book and try to read:
‘I never saw that land before,
‘And now can never see it again’.

The next station is Earlsfield.

The tinny beat from a man’s headphones
Buzzes in the ears of a trapped fly
That cannot reason well just now.

If you see something that doesn’t look right,
Speak to staff or text British Transport Police
On six-one-zero-one-six. We’ll sort it.
See it. Say it. Sorted.

Held against her mouth like the lip-plug
Of an African tribe, a smartphone
Records the murder of time by words.

This is Earlsfield. Please mind the gap
Between the train and the platform edge.

I count the dead seconds out again:
Five . . . Six . . . Seven . . . Eight

Welcome aboard South Western Railway’s
Service to Dorking. Calling at Wimbledon . . .

And so the voice continues speaking
Uninterrupted by my thoughts,
Slowly counting down the stops until:

The next station is Box Hill & Westhumble.

And before we enter the tunnel —
There it is! Glimpsed through the unopen-
able window, before I can write
That something doesn’t look quite right
Between the train and the platform edge:

England.

2. The More Deceived

When your local branch of Stand Up To Racism
Contacted you through the WhatsApp smartphone tree,
You cancelled your holiday in the Ukraine
(Where you’d planned to feed the starving refugees)
And went to the demonstration in Walthamstow
In your orange bib, keffiyeh and Palestine flag.
How you cheered, whistled, clapped your hands and waved
The Socialist Worker placard you’d been handed
When the Labour Party councillor from Dartford
Called on the crowd outside the Afghan Market
To ‘cut all the throats’ of the ‘Nazi fascists!’

As eight children, a grandfather and yoga teacher
Lay fighting for their lives (the other three had died
Of their knife wounds, their throats already cut)
In the hospitals closest to Southport.

And when the Essex Police Service escorted you
To the counter-demonstration in Epping Town
With a crew of masked-up Antifa dressed in black
Who stood side-by-side with the riot squad,
You shouted with the rest, ‘Refugees welcome!’
At the far-Right racists, Nazis and fascists
Who had assembled outside the Bell Hotel
Housing those fleeing Britain’s imperialist wars
Because an item of fake news had reported
In the Daily Fail or Elon Musk’s X account
That a refugee had raped one of their children

When, statistically, as you tried to explain
To the Reform racists and Islamophobes,
It’s more likely to have been a White man —
You screamed: ‘A working-class, wife-beating Englishman!’

And then, one summer’s night, it happened to you
As you took a short-cut through your local park
Slightly drunk from the first meeting of Your Party
Where you’d joined the cis-women in a solemn vow
To welcome every refugee into your home.
And as you lay there under his sweating body
His dark hand pressed down hard across your open mouth
(Though you did your best not to scream too loud)
And the others stood around and laughed out loud
As they filmed you on the latest Apple smartphones
Before taking their turn inside you — they told you

(Though you’ve tried, you promise, your best to forget it,
And never, of course, thought of telling the police —
Cause All Cops Are Bastards — or the Your Party comrades
Who’d have rightly expelled you for being a racist):

‘This is what White girls are for’.

3. God is Greater

The beast we bred in Brussels has broken out of prison
And squats today on Europa’s breast. It was not made
To keep us safe from harm but locked in indecision.

And now he crawls the unlit kerbs of every street at night,
Preying on the victims they’ve assigned for sacrifice,
And every park and underpass conceals his dripping blade.

Our public squares his morning snarl has turned to battlefields,
Boasting, like some bully child, that his God is Greater:
The unchanged battle cry of holy rape and murder.

The yellow stars of unity have fallen from his flag
And in their place the crescent moon is blazoned on his shield:
One end is dipped in heaven, the other in our blood.

Though our streets are amplified with his cries of victimhood,
They’re not as piercing as the screams of our savaged children
Who in their millions wait for the justice of Godless men.

And we, who sit in fury for our ravaged homeland,
How many years of tears before we rise and make a stand
Against the enemy that we feed with our own hand?

4. Rutting Season

The toxic masculinity
Of rutting stags in Richmond Park
Is not an accusation
That could be levelled at this hart

Who whiles away these autumn days
(My fallen antlers nests for birds)
Reading about English hinds
Being mounted by foreign herds.

5. The Wave

The wave that gathered off our eastern shore,
Rose on the horizon, blotted out the sun,
Engulfed in darkness the lighthouse towers
That might have warned us of its swift approach,
Drained the springs that flowed from our hills
So that all in its path was made barren,
Unable to resist or to flee its threat
Which held the flotsam of a thousand shipwrecks,
The debris jettisoned by foreign hands,
Frothy with scum and littered with their waste,
Not the envious siege of less happy lands
But a poisoned flood unsustaining of life
And deadly to everything it overcomes
With the weight of its black and teeming mass,
Has broken upon us.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAnd now we are drowned.
Now everything is caught in the ebb and flow
Of forces beyond our control, and all
That we built lies in ruin. Our planted fields
Are turned to swamps, our cities to cesspools.
Our homeland is lost beneath the dark waves
And we can never come home again.
For we are dead in our native soil,
Overrun by incompatible seeds
That have yielded a crop of rankest weeds
And rotting fruit; infested by locusts
That devour the labour of our fathers
And breed in the bodies of our children.
The bloodline of a race that once ran red
Through the veins and flags of an Empire
Now bleeds into drains with the detritus
Of a thousand years of history.

Listen to our cries, like gulls returning
To dry land only to find the abyss
Of a whirlpool sunk to the ocean floor
And filled with the voices of the drowned.
What wings will bear us on our exile
Who have lived with our wings clipped in the nest?
On what hostile shore will we find a home
Who have made ourselves willingly homeless?
In the parched soil of what foreign land
Will an English rose grow out of our graves?
From which scattered seed, in what nation’s womb,
Will our island people be born again?
Where is the wave from whose flames will rise
A child to reclaim our conquered land?

— London/Hong Kong, August-November, 2025

• • • • •

1. England

The quotation is from the opening lines of the poem by the English poet, Edward Thomas, ‘I Never Saw That Land Before’, which he wrote in May 1916 while his unit, 28th Battalion, London Regiment (Artists’ Rifles), was at a training camp in Essex. Within a year, in April 1917, Thomas had been killed during the Battle of Arras.

For the sake of the metre and alliteration, I have left Motspur Park out of the stations between Clapham Junction and Dorking. My apologies to the trainspotters. But my transcript of the public announcements is, unfortunately, exact. Despite the piped warnings of the British Transport Police, on 1 November, 2025, a Black man attempted to kill 11 passengers with a knife on a British Rail high-speed train from Doncaster to Kings Cross in London.

2. The More Deceived

The title is a reference to a line in a 1951 poem by Philip Larkin about the rape of a woman, ‘Deceptions’, and which also supplied the title of the volume in which the poem was published, The Less Deceived (1955). Both my title and Larkin’s inversion is a line spoken by Ophelia in response to Hamlet telling her that he never loved her: ‘I was the more deceived’ (William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1600-01), Act 3, scene 1, l. 124.

Stand Up to Racism, a pro-immigrant, anti-British organisation financed by UK unions, is a sister organisation of the Socialist Workers Party, whose paper, Socialist Worker, writes the slogans and produces the thousands of placards used by its activists at the protests it organises. Its President is the second-generation Jamaican immigrant and Labour MP, Diane Abbott; and its Co-Chairmen include Talha Ahmad, the former Treasurer of the Muslim Council of Britain between 2016 and 2018.

The events in my poem refer to the counter demonstrations held by Stand Up To Racism in Walthamstow, East London, on 8 August 2024, at which the Labour Party Councillor, Ricky Jones, told the crowd to ‘cut all the throats’ of the British people who had demonstrated after the terrorist attack in Southport the previous week, where 3 children had been stabbed to death by a second-generation Rawandan immigrant and Al-Qaeda terrorist; and to the counter demonstrations held by the same organisation in Epping, North London, in July 2025, after local people had gathered to protest against the sexual assault on a woman and a 14-year-old child by Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, an Ethiopian man who had arrived illegally in the UK a week before, and was being housed, with hundreds of other illegal immigrants, in the Bell Hotel. The Bell Hotel is owned by Somani Hotels Ltd., under the directorship of Hassanali Karmali Alibhai Somani, who in April 2025 began using it to house illegal immigrants on Government contracts paid by the British taxpayer.

It was later established that Essex police had escorted both the Stand Up To Racism counter-protesters and masked Antifa (supposed Anti-fascists largely composed of under-cover police officers) to attack the protest, which was made up of local people, mothers, fathers and children concerned at their safety. In October 2025, Mr. Kebatu was released by police, who claimed it was by ‘accident’.

In his Sentencing Note in the trial of the Southport terrorist, Axel Rudakubana, the High Court judge, Mr Justice Goose, summarised the murder of the three children as follows: ‘Elsie Stancombe was aged only 7 when Rudakubana inflicted at least 85 sharp force injuries to her head, face, neck, torso and upper limbs; severe force was used to cause her death. Bebe King was aged only 6 when he inflicted at least 122 sharp force injuries to her head, face, neck, torso and upper limbs. It was the opinion of Dr. Cieka, the Pathologist, that Rudakubana had tried to decapitate her. He concluded that severe force was used to kill her. Alice Da Silva Aguiar was aged 9 when he stabbed her, including a chop wound to her head and four stab wounds to her back, causing substantial internal injury. Although she managed to escape out of the building, she collapsed, and despite all medical help, she died in hospital at 1.20am the following day.’ For advocating the same, Ricky Jones was arrested but acquited of inciting violence in August 2025.

In July 2025, the Guardian newspaper reported that two in five of the 899 people arrested the previous summer for protesting against the terrorist attack in Southport had previously been reported for domestic abuse.

Cis, a Latin prefix meaning ‘on this side of’ — as in ‘Cisalpine’ to refer to the Italian side of the Alps — is used by the Left to designate women as distinct from the male transvestites they call ‘transwomen’, and is part of the lexicon of Newspeak with which they seek to transform reality in accord with the ideology of Woke. ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ is a slogan of the middle-class Left, shortened to ‘ACAB’ when printed on placards, sprayed on walls or worn on T-shirts. In July 2024, it was reported that, in addition to receiving free housing, food, medical care and dentistry, illegal immigrants arriving in Britain by small boat had also been given free smartphones by the charity Care4Calais.

Your Party was founded in 2025 with Jeremy Corbyn as its Leader. However, its current directors are Zarah Sultana, the Pakistani Muslim MP for Coventry South, who in September this year described the 1 million-plus Britons who attended the Unite the Kingdom march as ‘fascists’, ‘racists’ and ‘Islamophobes’, and declared that the UK belongs to everyone who comes here, legally or illegally; Ayoub Khan, the Pakistani Muslim born in Pakistan and MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, who in February 2025 tabled a motion in Parliament to make a visa scheme for Palestinians with family ties in the UK that will allow them to move here and claim housing and benefits paid with the taxes of British citizens; Adnan Hussain, the Pakistani Muslim MP for Blackburn, who in June 2025 described the call to ban the cruel and to British eyes barbaric practice of Halal animal slaughter in the UK as a ‘dog whistle for xenophobia’ and compared it to policies in ‘Nazi Germany’; Iqbal Mohamed, the Indian Muslim and MP for Dewsbury and Batley, who in December 2024 argued against a proposed Bill to ban marriages between first cousins among Pakistanis and other Muslims that promote this practice in the UK; and Shockat Adam, a Muslim of Gujarati descent who was born in Malawi and is MP for Leicester South, who last year argued for the appointment of a government adviser on anti-Muslim hate (including characterising Muslims as ‘sex-groomers’) and for a definition of Islamophobia to be adopted in the UK, effectively criminalising criticism of Islam.

Raja Miah, MBE, the former government advisor, political campaigner and whistleblower, has made a ‘conservative’ estimate that 100,000 underage English girls have been groomed by largely Pakistani Muslim rape gangs; but other estimates are that 250,000 underage girls have been victims of this programme of mass rape, which goes back to the 1980s, 500,000 or even a million. Smartphones have repeatedly been used by the perpetrators to record the rapes and advertise the commercial availability of the victims to other rapists.

This year it was reported by Hydrant, the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, that Pakistanis, who in 2021 made up 2.7 percent of the population of the UK, were responsible for 12.9 percent of all group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation crimes (i.e. grooming and rape of minors) in 2024. In the trial of Sageer Hussain, Kessur Ajaib and Mohammed Makhmood, all Pakistani Muslims living in Britain, that was held in Sheffield Crown Court in July 2025, on charges of repeatedly raping an English girl aged 13-15 in Rotherham between 1999 and 2002, the victim told the court that Hussain had told her ‘this is what white girls are for’. In their literature for activists, Stand Up To Racism call the legal evidence of this programme of mass rape, including the testimony of the victims, ‘far-Right lies’ that ‘promote racism, Islamophobia, and division’.

3. God is Greater

In Greek myth, Europa, which is the origin of the name for Europe, was a Phoenician princess who was raped by Zeus in the form of a white bull, by whom she had three sons. The first of these, Minos, became King of Crete, in which capacity, every nine years, he sent seven girls and seven boys from Athens into the labyrinth of the Minotaur, where they were devoured. After his death, Minos became a judge of the dead in the Underworld.

Allahu Akbar (‘God is Greater’), which begins the Islamic call to prayer, is played from amplified speakers five times a day in the more than 2,300 mosques in the UK, is repeated, according to Islamic practice, at least 100 times a day by the 46 million Muslims in Europe, and is screamed by Muslims while committing acts of terrorism against Europeans, of which there were 24 recorded as such in the European Union in 2024. 63 percent of prisoners in the UK arrested on terrorist-related charges are Islamic terrorists. MI5 lists Islamic terrorism as the most significant threat to the UK by volume. Islam is the only religion with a higher representation among prisoners in the United Kingdom than among the general population. The proportion of Muslim prisoners increased from 8 percent in 2002 to 18 percent in 2022. That’s more than 2.5 times their 7 percent share of the population, with 15,909 Muslims in prison in 2024. 

The yellow stars are the twelve stars on the flag of the European Union that was adopted by the Council of Europe in 1955 and again by the European Economic Community in 1985. Although both the blue ground and the twelve stars are symbols of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the ‘Woman of the Apocalypse’ (Revelation 12:1), today the flag is described as avoiding ‘religious or national symbols’ and embracing the supposedly ‘universal ideals of unity and harmony’.

The crescent moon is the symbol of Islam, and appears on the flags of Algeria, Azerbaijan, Comoros, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Northern Cyprus, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Western Sahara.

Under-age English girls have been raped over five decades by a grooming-network of Muslim men, largely from Pakistan, operating across England under protection of their local councils, police forces and successive UK governments, and with the knowledge of their wives, families, friends, imams and mosques.

Of the 8,500 arrests of foreign nationals for sexual offences in England and Wales in 2024 alone, 23 of the 40 nationalities with the highest arrest rate were from Muslim majority countries, and a further 3 were from countries where at least 30 percent of the population are Muslims. The likelihood of these Muslim foreign nationals being arrested for sex crimes was between 5 and 25 times that of British nationals. Despite this, the Muslim population of Europe is predicted to triple by 2050.

4. Rutting Season

Richmond Park is a royal park and nature reserve in South-West London. Known for its herds of red and fallow deer, rutting season is between late September, when I visited, and early November.

Police-recorded offences for rape in England and Wales have increased from 16,374 offences in 2012/13 to 71,667 in 2024/25, the highest rate per capita of any developed country in the world. Across the UK, in the year to March 2022, 798,000 women aged 16 and over reported being sexually assaulted (including raped). In 2023, more than 8,800 rapes were reported to London’s Metropolitan Police Service, a rate of one reported rape every hour of every day of the year in our capital city, with a further 11,000 reports of other sexual violence. Between 2021 and 2023, 23 percent of sexual offences, including rape, were committed by foreign nationals, two-and-a-half times their percentage of the UK population.

5. The Wave

The epigraph is from Laurence Binyon’s translation of the final line from Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, in which Ulysses recounts the circumstances of his death to Dante during the latter’s descent into the Underworld: ‘infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso’. Unlike Homer, Dante did not return Ulysses to Penelope but sent him from Circe on a voyage into the West on which he would ultimately perish. My first encounter with this passage, however, was not in the Inferno but in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (1947), where, in the chapter titled ‘Il Canto di Ulisse’, the author struggles to recall it to a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz.

The ‘envious siege of less happy lands’ is a reference to Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (1595-96), in the famous passage that so accurately describes England today, in which John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, on his deathbed, prophesies the downfall of England under the youthful and feckless king (Act II, Scene 1, ll. 43-66):

This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
[ . . . ]
Is now leased out — I die pronouncing it —
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Although I drew on Dante’s image of the engulfing wave when trying to describe the fate of Britain and Europe, which to my knowledge is unprecedented in the history of conquest, I realised afterwards that, beside that of Dante, my other (and more positive) image of the wave was from Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (1869), where it carries to these shores the defender of Britannia against invasion:

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried ‘The King!’