Savile Town: Caution barrier ahead

A visit to Dewsbury gives a vignette of how some parts of Britain are no longer British

After I pressed the shutter button, I heard someone calling out to me. A car came out out of the mosque, with a puzzled looked from the driver as I approached, since there was no reason for us to interact. He clearly wasn’t the one who had spoken, and pointed me back at the cabin by the entrance.

I walked up and shook the security guard’s hand. He was dressed in traditional Pakistani tribal garb, and English wasn’t his first language.

“No photography!” the security guard in the cabin exclaimed, pointing at the sign on the mosque.

“Sorry, that’s not the law… the road is a public place. If I was on your property I would respect it, but I am not.”

“No photography!” he repeated with his Urdu accent, pointing back at the sign, as if that was the final authority and arbiter of the matter. I doubt he understood me, anyway.

I just shook my head and moved on, but the significance of the moment was not lost on me. I took one or two more photographs nearby, but felt nervous. Will the security guard send his mates after me to take my camera? Am I safe taking more photographs of people and buildings in this neighbourhood? Would the police come to this neighbourhood to protect me?

As a relatively spur of the moment idea, I went to Dewsbury in Yorkshire a week ago, based on this Truth Social comment on my previous article on London’s slums:

I grew up in West Yorkshire. A visit to Batley or Dewsbury in photographs would be instructive. Dewsbury for example was a lovely Victorian town, with arcades of little shops, a famous market, and impressive Town Hall. Last time I visited I could easily have thought I was in Pakistan. It’s a no-go area now for English people. The police have moved out as they can’t interfere with the drugs and crime due to political correctness. White families that remain home educate, or start schools anywhere they can find a space — otherwise their kids are a minority of one and would need to learn Urdu to get by. What has happened is a deliberate strategy of the government to undermine the population of whites and replace them, and it has worked in the North as many who are able have moved out — and the rest keep out. Donald [Trump] accurately described some of these places as ‘shit holes’.

Without being unduly prejudiced about what I might find, off I drove in my van.

The full photo tour and everything I observed deserves a separate article of its own. As someone who has lived in London I am quite used to a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural environment. I lived in Limehouse for around 3 years, and the borough of Tower Hamlets is made up (2021 census) of 38% White British/Irish/Other, 35% Bangladeshi, 17% Black, 6% Asian, 5% Chinese, 3% Indian, 1% Arab, 1% Pakistani, and 1% other. (It adds to more than 100% as some people are mixed-race.) That’s my “ordinary”.

This was different, very much so, and quite extraordinary.

What I hadn’t realised before coming to Dewsbury was that it has a subdivision, Savile Town, that is nearly 100% Muslim. My trek through the relatively deserted centre of town on a Sunday afternoon was a fairly ordinary mix of British, Polish, Turkish, and other ethnic shops — at least for a standard modern town centre. There was no obvious outward sign in advance that this was cultural “apartheid country”.

My meander out of town took me past a church, police station, through an industrial area with the mandatory car wash (probably as a money laundering front), a nice pub with canal boats, and a bunch of (white, male) men fishing. I had no reason to believe I was in anything other than a more skewed version of London, rather than it being in a completely different category.

There were a lot of women in cars wearing hijabs, and standing at the traffic light waiting for a queue of cars I reckoned half the travellers were white (of any nationality) and half “local but not so local” and dressed in their religious or tribal clothing. A primary school with all the windows covered with wire mesh was the only hint something might not be well in Dewsbury.

Then I went up Headfield Road, and found something I have never experienced in Britain — a place with neither white people, nor obvious ethnic diversity. The houses were mostly your fairly typical British semi-detached efforts, with quite a few bungalows. Just everyone, without fail, was Pakistani or Indian. Ten people, twenty people, thirty people… all the same. The only other aberration I noticed was an unusually high number of security cameras.

I knew from the map that there was a large mosque, and my only intention was to photograph the building from the street as part of surveying the cultural landscape. It was not my intention to create controversy. I hadn’t researched the place before coming, and merely asked an AI chatbot what are the sights of the town on arrival. As a Londoner, it has always been my base assumption that somehow we’ll find a way to get along. I didn’t know anything about Savile Town before setting foot there.

You get to make the rules inside any private building, and there is nothing wrong with this sign in itself. What is a problem is when a place effective secedes from English law and customs, implements Sharia law, and then cherry picks whatever parts of the indigenous legal system suits their power interests. I had a jarring feeling that someone who wasn’t born here, telling someone what to do on public land, when their forebears fought and farmed for Britain, was deeply offensive.

It was only after I left Dewsbury and researched what I had seen, that the full significance hit me. This Daily Mail article has some key points:

Fewer than 50 people of Savile Town’s 4000 inhabitants are ethnic White British.
A Sharia court governs most family matters, to the loss of women’s rights under English law.
The women generally do not speak English and are isolated from British culture and society.
Businesses that cater to a non-Muslim clientele have closed or gone away.
The schools are dominated by teaching Islamic culture and values.
There is little to no desire for integration.

This is geographically a part of Britain, but has seceded in terms of language, culture, law, business, and religion.

As I walked past the petrol station another man in foreign costume (not pictured) stopped me, and in extremely poor English either asked me where he could buy “smoke”, or offered to sell me some — I couldn’t quite make it out. Either way, it wasn’t happening. It’s not the first time I have been approached on the streets to do a drug deal in Britain, but it was rather glaringly in contrast to the structures of Islam. I didn’t feel right, and didn’t want to stay.

Coming away, I realised that not only could I not realistically live in Savile Town, nor could any of my family, especially my two young adult daughters. Furthermore, there was no prospect of forming a jury of my peers in this context. As such, constitutional rule of law in accordance with English traditions was dead. This is the textbook definition of treason, and a very serious matter. I don’t generally swear in articles, but (as reported speech only) my view of Dewsbury is “totally fucked”, and the most troubling place I have been to.

Should the indigenous population become conscious of genocide and betrayal, then Savile Town will not be a happy place to be. It wasn’t being challenged on taking a photograph that was the issue for me — that is reasonably common, as people can be sensitive, and security guards especially so. It was the implied presumption that this is “their” land with “their” rules and I was under a duty to obey “their” edict.

Sorry, I don’t submit to your rules in my country, and never will.

English law counts for nothing here in this part of Dewsbury. The indigenous British are becoming second- or third-rate citizens in their own ancestral lands. You have to experience it to believe it and internalise what has already happened. Abandon your liberal presumption of an accommodating brotherhood of all men, it is a lethal fantasy.

Up until recently I have been blasé about immigration and the decline of Britishness, to the extent it has ever been meaningful to me. This experience was part of shocking me out of my complacency. At one level it is trivial, but at another it is catastrophic. The issue isn’t merely one of mixing and the weakness and chaos that historically brings. It is the total loss of the base culture and country that keeps the peace.

The Bill of Rights and Magna Carta are no longer enforced by higher courts, and we now have a Talmudic law in disguise that financially rapes the population via taxes, levies, licenses, fees, and charges. London has a new Sikh court, the Metropolitan Police in London recognise the authority of the Turkish Police Association in adjudicating matters. Along with courts of revenue and star chambers, we have a resurgence of the millet system of religious courts at all levels. It doesn’t end well.

I am very wary of efforts to divide humanity and to pitch Jews, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Druze, Buddhists and more at each others’ throats. The matter of having a shared cultural and societal base, with respectful boundaries between bloodlines, is not unique to Savile Town or Britain. America has places like Hamtramck, the first city with an all-Muslim council. The deep fractures and contention between individualists, statists, and theocratic absolutists is not bridged via ecumenical means.

The Sikhs and Hindus to the north of Heathrow airport have worked their asses off for decades in low-paid jobs. The Afro-Caribbeans have staffed the busses and tube stations. No doubt many Muslims in Savile Town have ancestors who came here to labour under sweatshop conditions. One can only respect that toil. I have no bone with the individuals, including the security guard doing his job at a mosque. But we do have a major existential problem with the rule of law, and the failure of that leads to civil war and death.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction was when I got to the town hall. There was the “woke national flag” of LGBTQ++ “pride” as well as the Union flag. I am not particularly concerned with flags and the nuances of British makeup, but the potential violence against sexual minorities in an environment subjected to Sharia was impossible to neglect. There is an engineered collision of communities and values, and that is not a basis for peace.

I have a feeling Dewsbury is about to crash into the barrier of post-Covid military law, and it is not going to be a pretty sight. On the surface it is a reasonably well-functioning community and I have seen far worse deprivation, squalor, and decay. What made Dewsbury shocking to me was not deprivation, but alienation, and in that I was unaware of how far the process of British national dis-integration had gone.