Imagine if you had told someone on 11 September 2001 that in 25 years’ time the streets of New York City would ring out with sympathy for Islamofascism. Imagine if you had said to one of the startled souls watching American lives be incinerated by Islamist filth that one day the West would swarm with youths cosplaying as Islamist filth. Imagine if you had said that in a mere quarter of a century even our leafiest campuses would be awash with jihad chic, with silver-spoon students gushing over an Islamo-army (Hamas) every bit as hateful and medieval as the one that burnt New Yorkers alive.

Imagine if you had said on that apocalyptic day that one day the twisted beliefs of Osama bin Laden would be commonplace in radical circles. Imagine you had said that his anti-Semitic cry that ‘the creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased’ would become the luxury belief of every smug activist. Imagine you had said that the very justification for that day’s pitiless massacre of New York innocents – namely, that America had become the ‘servant’ of ‘the Jews’ petty state’ – would soon be the hot take of the every woke leftist and crank rightist in Christendom. Imagine if over the thud of WTC workers falling to their deaths, you had said that one day Western youths will gush over bin Laden’s writings, and thank him for ‘open[ing] their eyes’ to the evils of America and Israel.

Imagine if you had said there will be further acts of Islamist inhumanity – smaller in scale but equal in evil intent – and that our response would not be horror, but nonchalance. Imagine if you said Islamists will one day massacre girls in Manchester, England and people would say, ‘Don’t look back in anger’. Imagine if you said there will soon be an Islamist atrocity in which more children would perish than on 9/11 – the Nice truck attack – and our response would be awkward silence followed by craven, snivelling amnesia. Imagine if you said that one day it will be a cancellable offence to talk shit about the totalitarian ideology that wreaked such savagery upon New York City.

Imagine if you said that in the near future it will be tantamount to a crime to criticise Islam. That kids in Europe would be interrogated by police for scuffing pages of a Koran. That people would be arrested for calling Muhammad a paedo. That police forces would discuss ditching the word ‘jihad’ so as to not offend Muslims. That people would lose their jobs – even their lives – for ‘blaspheming’ against Islam. And that all the while the intellectual classes would spinelessly whimper: ‘Well, if you’re going to be Islamophobic…’ Just imagine it: you turn to someone as the swirling fires of religious hate consume two of the greatest towers ever built by Man and say: ‘I bet we won’t be allowed to criticise this religion soon.’

They wouldn’t have believed you. More than that, your grim prophesying would have caused them immense pain. It was bad enough that they had to watch as nearly 3,000 lives were ruthlessly sacrificed to the cause of Islamist carnage. The knowledge that aspects of that cause, certain of its tenets, would one day hold sway over youthful imaginations and official policymaking would have pushed them over the edge. The revelation of a future West so consumed by self-loathing that it would wonder if perhaps it deserves the terror and bloodshed of Islamism would have been too much to take. ‘You mean’, they would have said, ‘that the enemies of civilisation who visited New York City today ended up winning?’.

Yes. Yes, that is kind of what I mean.

For here we are, 25 years after the greatest Islamist outrage in history, and it is safer to sympathise with Islamists than to condemn them as a foreign pox on our civilisation. Plaudits await the bourgeois youths who put on keffiyehs and cheer the Islamist foes of Zionism and its Western backers. Shame and blacklisting await the brave souls who say Islamism is the greatest menace the West faces. Hating the West is the intellectual bread and butter of bourgeois society, while those of us who love Western civilisation, and think it infinitely superior to any desert ideology that hates homosexuals and puts women in black sacks, risk being branded as racist. Behold the creeping, sickening victory of the Islamo-imagination, the slow-motion conquest of the West by the rancid anti-civilisational bigotry of the very men who brought terror to New York City 25 years ago today.

We have a tendency to focus on the visceral terror of 9/11. Every documentary, every book, dwells on the sheer pain of the day. The jumpers from the towers. The voicemails people left before being engulfed by al-Qaeda’s flames. The fight for survival on Flight 93 before it plunged into a field in Pennsylvania. All of this is important – of course it is. But the fixation on individual agony can distract us from the almost unbearable moral weight of that day. Emotionalism risks numbing us to the deeper, harder truth of 9/11. Which is that it was not just a tragedy, not even just terrorism, but an act of calculated and savage war against Western civilisation itself.

‘Are you Americans willing to fight for your civilisation?’ – that was the unspoken cry of this Islamist stab at the heart of the West. The selection of NYC as the prime target – alongside the Pentagon – was no accident. On one side, the self-styled Mujahideen of a seventh-century ideology with 21st-century tendencies. On the other, the greatest city Earth has ever known: the teeming, mettlesome metropolis that is the throbbing heart of Western culture and publishing and attitude. ‘The man that hates America hates the human race’, said Brendan Behan. 9/11 was barbarous proof of that. NYC was attacked as a proxy for the West itself, as a gleaming testament to the 20th-century spirit of reason, growth and swagger. Nothing – and I mean nothing – offends the cave-dwelling rich boys of the Islamist disease more than New York Fuckin’ City.

The importance of this historic atrocity is not only that it laid brutish waste to so much precious life but also that it set a moral test for the West. And while we have done our moral duty by the former – righteously commemorating all who died – we have catastrophically failed at the latter. For 25 years we have shirked our generational responsibility to assert the greater moral virtue of Western civilisation over the infantile, murderous rage of Islamism and its braindead apologists. On the contrary, we have bowed to the truthless creed of anti-Westernism, all but agreeing with the death worshippers of Islamism that our moral universe is in fact a violent, polluting, marauding and Zio-cucked horror show.

This is what 9/11 exposed: the pre-existing self-hatreds of the West. It raised to the surface of our societies, like scum on water, our shame at being modern and powerful and enlightened and special. Some clocked the explosive impact 9/11 would have in terms of entrenching and worsening our moral malaise. Martin Amis called it an act of ‘horrorism’, of ‘maximum malevolence’, of ‘pure totalitarian evil’. All should have united against this ‘fantastic vehemence ranged against [America]’, he said. But we didn’t. We ermed and ahhed. We said the West has done bad things too. We said, ‘What about Vietnam?’. To hell with your moral equivalence, said Amis. Whatever the undoubted sins of the West, the ‘paranoid, irrational, death-loving, freedom-hating’ Islamist ideology is worse. He was right. Others were too. Yet their words, like the World Trade Center, crumbled and evaporated into the dust of history.

Twenty-five years on, our moral corrosion has worsened. Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda is a busted flush, yet on 9/11 those religious tyrants planted a seed that continues to grow. The seed of doubt. The seed of self-loathing. It was this disease of self-flagellation that was animated like Frankenstein’s monster 25 years ago. The West needs to learn to love itself again. For the 3,000 dead, for New York City, for civilisation itself, it’s time we reminded ourselves of our greatness. Say it with me: we are better than them.

Among the first items of parliamentary business for new UK prime minister Andy Burnham is yet another attempt to introduce assisted suicide into British law.

Labour MP Lauren Edwards reintroduced the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in July, just before parliament’s summer recess. In doing so, she took up the baton from Kim Leadbeater, who failed to pass her bill during the previous parliamentary session. Edwards’s bill will have its second reading in the House of Commons on Friday 11 September.

Leadbeater’s original assisted-dying bill contained so many flaws and loopholes that the House of Lords simply ran out of time to amend it into a functional piece of law. Yet the bill introduced by Lauren Edwards is to all intents and purposes identical to Leadbeater’s. That’s no accident: Edwards must present the same bill if she wants the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 to come into effect. These acts allow for the same legislation, if passed in the House of Commons in consecutive parliamentary sessions, to automatically become law regardless of what the Lords think.

The decision to use the Parliament Acts is revealing. Supporters of assisted dying could have brought back a radically reworked version of Leadbeater’s bill that addresses the criticisms raised by doctors, psychiatrists, disability campaigners and legal experts over the past year. But instead, they have brought back exactly the same bill. The goal seems simply to get the legislation over the line, whatever state it’s in or however widely experts may critique it. This should concern everyone, whether they support the principle of assisted suicide or oppose it.

Over the past year or so, in both houses of parliament, the assisted-dying bill has received one of the most exhaustive examinations ever faced by a private members’ bill – that is, a bill introduced by MPs and members of the Lords who are not government ministers. Royal Colleges, professional bodies, domestic-abuse charities, disability organisations, mental-health experts and the Equality and Human Rights Commission all identified significant flaws in the bill. Many of those organisations and experts were not ideologically opposed to assisted dying. Several supported assisted suicide in principle or were neutral on the issue. They were concerned above all with whether this particular legislation is safe, and whether it can protect vulnerable people.

Even Lord Falconer, one of Britain’s longest-serving advocates for assisted suicide and sponsor of Leadbeater’s bill in the Lords, has acknowledged that important changes are needed. He questioned the safeguards for younger adults, the treatment of patients with suicidal thoughts, the risks of remote consultations and the absence of proper recording requirements.

Using the Parliament Acts to push the legislation through is not simply about avoiding the Lords. It also means that MPs will be unable to amend the bill in the House of Commons. This is a wholly inappropriate way to legislate on a question of life and death.

Private members’ bills have never before been forced through parliament using the Parliament Acts. Nor has this bill earned anything approaching an overwhelming democratic mandate. It was absent from Labour’s election manifesto, and passed the Commons only narrowly, with fewer than half of all MPs voting in favour at the third reading. Now, after months of criticism, it has returned unchanged.

Andy Burnham’s recent intervention makes the problem even sharper for supporters of the bill. The PM has now said the debate on assisted dying should not happen while palliative and social care remain poorly funded, confirming, ‘that’s the position I will stick to’.

This is a major setback for the assisted-dying lobby, which had relied heavily on the backing of then PM Keir Starmer. Burnham has correctly made clear that the question of assisted suicide cannot be separated from the state of palliative and social care, and that the funding and reform of the latter must come first. At the very least, that puts him at odds with the strategy of forcing the bill back through parliament and hoping to avoid scrutiny.

Those MPs backing this zombie bill need to think again. Making it acceptable to bypass parliamentary scrutiny because it is convenient to do so sets a very dark precedent indeed.

The UK’s asylum system has been broken for years. As the British public knows all too well, anyone can arrive and seemingly no one can be deported. This week’s revelation that just one per cent of asylum claims are genuine strips the British state of the little credibility it had left.

The Home Office whistleblower who leaked this information to The Times has caused a predictable degree of outrage. But we shouldn’t be so shocked. Our asylum system has been completely overwhelmed and incompetently managed for some time.

Since the start of 2021, there have been over 200,000 grants of leave or protection at the initial decision-making stage. This inexplicably includes individuals from Canada, Ireland, Germany and a host of other developed countries that are quite clearly not in a parlous state.

The UK government will point to a recent increase in initial rejections, but three-quarters of these go on to appeal. This adds to the already huge immigration-tribunal backlog, where a significant number of claims are subsequently upheld on spurious, scarcely credible grounds.

Historically unprecedented pressures are being placed on the asylum system. Between 2003 and 2021, the number of annual asylum applications rarely exceeded more than 45,000. In 2024, there were a record-breaking 108,000 applications. Despite Labour’s talk of bringing down applications since entering office, there have been 86,000 lodged in the past 12 months.

The Home Office is not fit for purpose during the best of times. It is manifestly incapable of dealing with an escalating crisis such as this.

The department’s own data suggests that just half of asylum claims are actually being processed to a satisfactory standard. This week, the UN – hardly a cheerleader for strong border protection – has warned that Britain is awarding asylum to undeserving individuals.

Rejecting a claim takes time that caseworkers do not have. When faced with a mountain of paperwork, it is much easier to copy and paste a boilerplate approval letter than to spend hours refuting every point raised by the applicant. In the rare instance that the Home Office does issue a rejection letter, it acts as nothing more than a stimulus for more inventive claims to be conjured at the appeal stage.

This is how we end up with, according to the Home Office whistleblower, hundreds of Kurdish men being granted asylum on the basis of being in a relationship with the same woman – the daughter of Kurdistan’s prime minister. A running joke in the Home Office apparently, but an example of what most of us have long suspected: that our asylum system is a farce.

In March, home secretary Shabana Mahmood proposed that refugees should be expected to return home once their country is deemed to be safe. But this misses the point. Asylum seekers are not being allowed to stay because their country is in upheaval. They are here because they have been able to concoct tales of woe that hit all the right notes for our naive human-rights and modern-slavery framework.

We have on our hands here a system that is beyond reform. The longer it is allowed to continue, the greater the social corrosion and economic ruin that must be contended with.

The Home Office spent £4.9 billion on core asylum provision last year, not including the eye-watering amounts squandered on legal aid and healthcare. And these are just the immediate costs. The cost to the British state stretches far into the future. Even eight years after being granted asylum, less than half of migrants will be in work. The median wage of those actually in a job is less than £14,000 per annum.

The pressure on the UK’s infrastructure and finances is one thing, but it is nothing compared to the impact on our social fabric. Outrage over the near-daily reports of sexual assaults and heinous crimes carried out by asylum seekers is ubiquitous. The anger is exacerbated by the fact that these atrocities are entirely avoidable – each one the direct result of government failure.

Our public spaces have now been commandeered by groups of young men, squeezing the pre-existing citizenry into the margins. The average British town is now an asylum seekers’ playpen, which just happens to have a community attached. Public order has been obliterated by the number of illegal immigrants brazenly working for delivery companies, in vape shops and at car washes.

We have voted against this mess, consistently. We have been told the problem will be sorted, and that the very best brains are working on a solution. But the situation only seems to get worse.

We are staring down the barrel of a democratic crisis. Regaining public trust will require more than simply a commitment to prevent future error. Those mistakes already made must be reversed. This entails not just the suspension of the asylum system, but a root-and-branch review of all grants made in recent years, and the removal of all who entered via illegal means. Enough is enough.

Rob Bates is the research director at the Centre for Migration Control.