Let's talk about the Southport killer.

For a start, police have confirmed that he was born in Britain to migrant parents, so he's British even under a hardcore nativist definition of the word. But his nationality doesn't really matter for the point I am about to make.

I have seen the claim made by multiple people that the “British political class” (which apparently covers everyone from Suella Braverman to Jeremy Corbyn) have “blood on their hands” as a result of this attack because of loose migration controls. Let us put to one side that the attacker was not even a migrant, let us assume that he was.

Let us further assume a counterfactual, that this young man had wanted to emigrate to Britain but had been successfully rejected and had stayed in his birth country. He is still a violent young man living in Rwanda, a country whose homicide rate is three times that of the UK's. He kills three Rwandan children.

Does the UK government still have blood on its hands? If they had allowed him to live in Britain then he wouldn't have killed those children, he would have been living thousands of miles away. How are the two scenarios not total mirror images of each other? Obviously I find it absurd that the British government should be considered complicit in murder in this hypothetical scenario, but then the burden is on the migrant-bashers to explain how a migrant killing people in the UK is morally any different.