Re: Lucy Powell Defends Taxpayer-Funded Posters Telling Illegal Immigrants Not to Rape Women

On 20/08/2026 13:12, Julian wrote:
> The posters were published yesterday by the Home Office. They warn 
> asylum seekers, among other things:
> 
> https://order-order.com/2026/08/20/lucy-powell-defends-taxpayer-funded- 
> posters-telling-illegal-immigrants-not-to-rape-women/

The Victorian moralising of the Home Office’s migrant rape advice

The legacy of the Victorians is everywhere; we depend on them for our 
sewage disposal, our railway networks, much of our infrastructure and 
housing stock. Even the hooded eyelids of our Royal Family mark them out 
as descendants of Victoria herself. The right often dwells on how far 
we’ve fallen from Victorian greatness – painting modern Britain’s 
existence amongst the physical debris of Victoriana as akin to living in 
the ruins of a superior civilisation, like mud-smeared Visigoths 
prowling around the remains of the Colosseum. Less discussed is how the 
Victorians are still very much with us.

We seem to have heartily taken on the characteristics for which the 
Victorians came to be most despised by succeeding generations; their 
mawkishness, hypocrisy and above all, their moralising. The Victorian 
belief that humanity can be finger-wagged into being ‘good’ and that the 
wholesale improvement in manners and morals was always just one 
corrective step away pervades our society. The Victorians thought this 
could be ​through novels, or sermons, artwork or campaigns of organised 
lemonade-drinking. And to be fair, they brought about significant 
declines in a great many social ills.

Now, this intense moralising attitude has been taken up wholeheartedly 
in Britain, not by nostalgic revanchists on the right but by the 
progressive, lanyard class who dominate all of our public institutions. 
However, where they do fall short of their Victorian antecedents is that 
they seem to believe that full conversion of behaviour, belief and 
indeed the full inculcation of western civilisational values is 
achievable through a properly-worded public statement. Nothing 
illustrates this better than the Home Office’s recent attempts to teach 
newly arrived migrants the differences between morality in the lands 
from which they have come, and morality in Britain.

‘In the UK, both people must say “yes” to sex’, scolds one of the 
posters, which were handed out to asylum seekers. ‘This is called 
consent’. There’s something unnerving about the combination of Janet and 
John language with the grim message it contains. It does at least 
suggest that the Home Office knew all along that the migrant crisis 
posed a different and specific threat to women, which some organs of the 
state have been reluctant even to acknowledge. Acknowledging the 
specificity of this doesn’t mean you are automatically minimising the 
dreadful reality of sexual assault by native-born men as well, which was 
the kneejerk defamation of choice thrown at anyone who even tentatively 
brought it up.

‘If you break these rules, you could be arrested by the police and sent 
to prison. This could affect your asylum claim’, warns another poster. 
Note the use of the conditional tense here – if you don’t pay a parking 
ticket for 30 days you can expect stronger-worded notices than this.

What is bleakly comic about this is that for all of progressivism’s 
voiced commitment to racial and cultural equality, this is in fact 
nothing more than a dressed-up version of the intensely racist concept 
of ‘the white man’s burden’, beloved by the Victorians. The idea that 
someone with the correct education (in this case, civil service training 
courses, rather than acing the Cambridge tripos), wearing the right 
uniform (in this case, a rainbow lanyard rather than a sola topee or 
pith helmet) can by the simple use of the right formula of words, 
magically convert those engaging in barbaric practices like child rape, 
genital mutilation and the beating-up of women, into fully-fledged 
converts to the religion of the state from whence they came. The idea 
that people from nations which take a very different view of the 
sexualisation of children can simply be HR-ed out of their worldview is 
pure Victorianism, only with the morality completely inverted.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the similarities. As with the 
Victorians, the civil service is at the forefront of these efforts. Were 
Cecil Rhodes alive today he would probably be an HR manager with painted 
nails and a passive-aggressive ‘out of office’ email response. That the 
great ‘civilisers’ of today cannot see, and would be outraged by, the 
directness of this lineage is amusing. However, the continuation of this 
– at best, naive, at worst, aggressively deluded – strategy is becoming 
a serious problem.

The belief that the systematic rape of young women and girls which has 
occurred in this country can be stopped by an appropriately vigorous 
verbal chastisement and the very, very loose threat of a change in 
asylum status is for the birds. That it remains the stubborn stated 
policy of the people in power poses a continued threat to the poorest, 
most vulnerable and most marginalised people in our society.

Victorian moralising, for all of its faults, was at least informed on 
the whole by a sincere conviction and intense Christian belief which 
knew that obligations to the widow and the orphan trumped the desire to 
protect the strong and powerful. The moralisers of our age have 
abandoned even this; or rather, so re-categorised it as to present 
violent rapists as worthy of our sympathy because of their culture and 
the colour of their skin and their victims as irrelevant for exactly the 
same reason. Whatever criticism we could level at the Victorians, they 
could never be as racist as that.


Madeline Grant