In a stunning indictment of life in modern Britain, a former asylum seeker in Warwickshire is pleading with the government to deport him, claiming he would be safer in his war-ravaged homeland of Somalia than in his adopted town.
Yusuf Ali Hamud, 50, arrived in the UK from Somalia two decades ago.
“Life here is not safe,” Mr Hamud stated, referring to his situation in the UK. “But in my country [Somalia], now, I would be safe. I want to go back.” He expressed intense frustration at his Catch-22 existence, demanding to know, “If I have no right to work, no status, then why am I here?” Mr Hamud insisted he did not come to Britain “to eat and sleep, like [a] baby” and would rather return to a nation that has been shattered by civil war since 1991.
Mr Hamud’s story is a symptom of a deeper sickness festering in Nuneaton. The town has become a tinderbox of anti-migrant hostility. While asylum seeker numbers were once in single digits, they have now swelled to 247. This tension exploded following an incident where two men, reported to be Afghan asylum seekers, were wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl.
The raw, toxic nature of this division was captured during an interview with Zahin, a 32-year-old businessman who has lived in Nuneaton since he was six years old. His conversation was violently interrupted by a mob of women, some holding pints of lager and accompanied by their children, who screamed obscenities at the camera.
“You’re trying to rape our kids!” one woman shrieked. Another shouted, “That’s the issue with having you in our country, you’re raping our kids.”
Zahin, targeted purely based on his appearance, asked them, “What are you teaching your kids?” He later explained he was undoubtedly targeted because the women assumed he was Muslim. “For them to accuse us of a crime, that’s unfair, that is unjust,” he said.
Yet, despite the venom directed at him, Zahin’s commitment to his home remained unshaken. “I love this town,” he affirmed.
These two starkly different realities—Yusuf Ali Hamud, who feels trapped and unsafe, and Zahin, a lifelong local who faces violent bigotry—paint a damning portrait of a community, and a nation, struggling with deep-seated fear and division.
