Robert Jenrick’s Mail on Sunday article on “medieval attitudes” and “protecting our women and girls” is not an aberration. It is the latest mutation of a strain of British political rhetoric that runs from Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, through the tabloid “feral youth” scares of the 1990s, to the more recent grooming-gang panic. It’s a politics that pretends to be about safety, but is really about drawing the border through the body. Marking who is to be protected, and from whom.
Jenrick’s piece begins, as the far right always begins, with an appeal to fear for “our” women and children. His three daughters, aged 14, 12 and 10, are given to the reader as moral exhibits: innocent, vulnerable, under threat from the migrant other. The device is deliberate. It places him in the role of protector, his children as symbolic stand-ins for the nation’s daughters, and migrant men (defined collectively by nationality and origin) as predators at the gates. The crimes he cites are real, but his selection of them is not. In each case the perpetrator’s immigration status is foregrounded; the method of arrival is repeated like an incantation; “backward countries” and “medieval attitudes” are presented as the causal factors.
It is the same structure you’ll find on Britain First’s Telegram channel: a mugshot, a nationality, the words “illegal migrant” or “asylum seeker” in the headline, and a crime that becomes representative of the whole category. The point is not to explain or understand violence against women. Which is a problem that exists across all communities. But instead choosing to define it as an import, something smuggled in under cover of the small boats.
He goes further, validating the street politics of the far right. “Peacefully protesting” outside asylum-seeker hotels, Jenrick writes, is “natural”. In practice, these protests are orchestrated intimidation: cameras thrust at windows, chants about deportation, residents filmed and uploaded to far-right networks. Homeland and Britain First have been running such actions for months; Jenrick now wraps them in the flag of parental duty. He offers no acknowledgement that these sites have become focal points for far-right mobilisation, only the nod that these parents have been “pushed to breaking point”.
The “medieval attitudes” line is another borrowed instrument. It is a civilisational frame. The enlightened, progressive Britain versus the barbaric, dangerous outsider. It’s almost word-for-word from the EDL’s heyday leaflets. Misogyny is treated not as a universal problem but as a foreign cultural trait, an essentialist stain that cannot be washed out. When Jenrick says that migrants from such societies “are unlikely to shed that baggage quickly”, he is in the same rhetorical territory as the old National Front slogan “Keep Britain White”: the belief that imported cultures are unassimilable, permanently threatening.
Even the foreign policy angle follows the far-right playbook. Patriotic Alternative has frequently called for entire nations to be punished for the crimes of individuals — bans on visas, cuts in aid, trade sanctions. Jenrick’s proposal to cut £133 million in aid to Pakistan over a deportation dispute fits the mould perfectly. It is not targeted law enforcement; it is collective blame.
There is a second layer to the piece, one that the far right has refined over the last decade: the “gaslit majority” narrative. Britain First’s leaders talk of an “establishment cover-up” of migrant crime. Jenrick accuses the Ministry of Justice of a “scandalous cover-up” for not publishing criminal data by nationality and immigration status. The claim is the same: the political class is hiding the truth, only the brave truth-teller will expose it, and if you disagree you’re in the “metropolitan elite’s ivory tower”.
Why does this matter? Because when a mainstream political figure lifts an entire rhetorical framework from the far right, he legitimises it. Britain First can splice his quotes into their videos; Patriotic Alternative can wave his Mail on Sunday spread at their next hotel protest and say, “Even the Tories agree with us.” It is the laundering of extremism through the respectability of office.
The British right has done this before. Powell’s 1968 speech was denounced by the Conservative leadership at the time, but his language seeped into policy. The “grooming gangs” panic, stoked by the press in the 2000s, borrowed the same protector–victim–predator structure, and eventually reshaped policing priorities. Today’s Tory opposition is rehearsing the same act: adopt the far right’s frame, shave off its rougher edges, sell it as common sense.
From Powell to Jenrick: Britain’s Endless Moral Panic About the Migrant Other
Jenrick’s rhetoric sits in a lineage that begins in April 1968. Powell’s Birmingham speech is remembered for its apocalyptic imagery, but the line that stuck was the anecdote about an elderly white woman “the only white resident left” in her street, “surrounded by Negroes” who took over her garden. The point was the same as Jenrick’s: proximity to the migrant other is inherently unsafe. Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet, but his speech flooded Tory constituency offices with letters of support. The protector–victim–predator frame had national reach.
The National Front in the 1970s and early 80s turned Powell’s imagery into street theatre: marches through immigrant neighbourhoods, slogans about “protecting our women”, leaflets about migrant “rape waves”. The aim was not statistical accuracy but the same conflation Jenrick deploys. One crime as proof of the group’s character.
In the 2000s, the grooming-gang panic (built on real failures in safeguarding) quickly hardened into a racialised theory of cultural pathology. Tabloids and far-right groups focused obsessively on “Muslim men”, “Pakistani heritage” and “Asian gangs”. Britain First and the English Defence League made it their signature cause; mainstream politicians echoed the framing, talking about “communities that don’t share our values”.
In 2016 came Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster: a queue of brown-skinned migrants under the headline, the threat framed not as economic but civilisational collapse. It didn’t matter that the image was from Slovenia. It worked because it was recognisable. It’s the same story Britain had been told since Powell.
By the 2020s, the far right had retooled around the “small boats” image: dinghies crossing the Channel, young men stepping onto Kent beaches. The protector–victim–predator frame was baked in. Britain First’s campaigns outside asylum hotels explicitly claimed to be about “keeping our women and children safe” from “foreign men with alien values”.
And now, Jenrick takes that playbook. Make sure to foreground nationality in every crime report, treat misogyny as foreign, accuse the establishment of hiding the truth, and then runs it through the Tory press machine. He wraps hotel protests in the language of parental duty, repeats the civilisational slur, and offers himself as the lone truth-teller against an elite that sneers.
The target changes. Commonwealth migrants in the 60s, Asian heritage communities in the 2000s, asylum seekers today. But the grammar remains constant. The outsider is not just different but dangerous; the victim is a stand-in for the nation; the protector is the one who will “speak truth” against polite consensus.
What has shifted is not the script, but its reach. Powell was denounced by his leader; Jenrick’s rhetoric meets no serious censure from the Tory frontbench. The line between fringe and mainstream has dissolved. Patriotic Alternative can splice his quotes into their videos and say, “We told you so. Even the Tories agree.”
This is why Jenrick matters. His intervention is part of the long institutional memory of British politics on the right. That reflex to treat migration as a moral emergency, to make “our women and children” the banner for exclusion, and to let the far right write the stage directions. In that sense, his “medieval attitudes” are not those of the migrant other. They are our own. And frankly, I wouldn’t want my family anywhere near little Englanders like Jenrick, and his stench of imperial superiority.
Jenrick’s article tells us less about migrant crime than it does about his strategy for the next Tory leadership election. Keir Starmer is presiding over an authoritarian migration regime of his own (proscribing Palestine Action, tightening asylum rules) but the Tories think they can still outflank him by going harder, louder, and meaner on the “small boats” theme. That means borrowing not just the far right’s grievances, but their moral grammar: the besieged homeland, the pure victim, the corrupt elite, the barbarian outsider.
This isn’t just rhetoric. It’s a staging ground. The protests outside hotels, the online channels dripping with lurid crime stories, the MPs willing to echo them in Parliament. Mixed together they form an ecosystem where far-right politics is no longer fringe but a recognised part of the national conversation. And that, for the likes of Britain First, is already a victory.
