Give us back our High Streets from evil scourge of Kurdish mafia’s robber drug barons
Ever hear of the broken windows theory? It is a principle dating back to the eighties, which holds that visible signs of petty crime and disorder encourage more serious crime to flourish.
I was reading about it in an interview with former U.S. police chief William Bratton, 78, who cleaned up the crime-ridden cities of first New York, then Los Angeles.
He was talking to The Times about our scourges of shoplifting, robbery and street drug dealing. And it made me think of one of the finest pieces of reporting I have seen for years.
This is the investigation by the BBC’s UK editor Ed Thomas and his brave and dogged team into the hidden scandal of our high streets.
Half the convenience stores and takeaways on many of our high streets are in the grip of the Kurdish mafia, Thomas revealed.
They are brazenly selling drugs, illegal vapes, smuggled cigarettes (three quid a pack) and counterfeit goods. Some “cash intensive businesses” such as Turkish barbers, nail bars and vape shops are laundering the profits.
How ever did we allow this to happen? Did no one notice organised crime moving in? Of course they did.
Every 14-year-old scrote in a 10-mile radius knew this was where to buy their “baggies” of weed or cocaine. Some locals say even heroin is available.
It was all under the counter. They only had to ask.
Trading standards officials certainly knew, police too. But no one adopted the broken windows approach of zero tolerance to make the crime not worth the risk.
The Kurdish crime lords must have been laughing at how easy it was to set up a lucrative racket. Buy a small business through a fixer for £10,000-£20,000, register it in the name of a “ghost” director, then fill your boots.
Occasionally, someone would get caught. But the fine was an amount they could make up in a day’s dodgy trading.
Now the task of cutting off the head of the snake is overwhelming. As fast as police investigate these shops and shut them down, they re-open under a different owner.
Council officers are threatened and intimidated and some fear for their lives. The Kurdish crime syndicate has its tentacles in towns and cities from Aberdeen to Bournemouth.
Investigating the curse of the Kurds, Thomas went from town to town all across Britain, employing Kurdish speaking undercover reporters to reveal how convenience stores openly sell drugs and are often run by illegal immigrants with no right even to work.
The sale of cheap smuggled cigarettes facilitates illegal immigration and modern slavery – and it cheats the Treasury of £2.2 billion in revenue.
It is difficult to know precisely how many Kurds live in Britain. A 2021/22 census suggested the number was about 94,000. But some estimates put it much higher, perhaps as many as half a million.
It is hard to be accurate because Kurdistan is not a country but a region that spans Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Kurds claim it as their homeland but none of the four countries wants to give up its land to the minority.
Those who come here are often classified according to the country of their birth, rather than as Kurdish. They began arriving in the 1980s, claiming to be fleeing oppression. Most are Sunni Muslims but some are Shia and other religions.
They are a fierce, patriarchal society with a family code that sometimes clashes with British values and laws. There are examples of “honour killings” of young women who fell in love with men whom their families disapproved of for racial or cultural reasons.
Not all Kurds are criminals, of course, but those who are have been part of the process that has laid waste to Britain’s town centres. If we want to remove the blight and give them new life, we have to reclaim them, one high street at a time.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch offered some hope in yesterday’s Daily Mail when she suggested that “there must be consequences” for shoplifting and vandalism.
She promised to come down hard on welfare, asylum and petty crime and promised funding for an extra 10,000 police officers, who would implement the broken windows strategy. “We need to bring toughness back,” she said.
But first they have to get elected, which is far from certain. Perhaps our best chance lies in the reorganisation of the police proposed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. It will be the biggest reform of policing in 200 years.
It will mean merging many of the 43 small local forces that now exist to save money and make them more efficient.
The aim is to create a National Police Service (NPS) for England and Wales, seen as a British version of America’s FBI dealing with the big stuff, such as counter-terrorism and organised crime, and freeing local forces to concentrate on such offences as shoplifting and anti-social behaviour.
So let the first task of the NPS be to root out the crooks and chancers and mafia kingpins from our stores and give us back our high streets.
*One last plea: Ed Thomas’s work in uncovering this scandal deserves serious praise. He has already received awards from the Royal Television Society for other work. Now it is time for the television industry to recognise his serious and determined exposé on the Kurdish mafia.
*****
They call it the nervous nineties. A century is there for the taking if you can just keep your head.
I had been pushing singles for months, steering the ball through the gap between gully and third slip; turning it off the hip down to long leg; pushing it to cover’s left hand.
And then, on 99, an old sporting injury flared up and I had to limp from the field, one short of shared glory.
So it was that the World’s Greatest Lunch Club’s 100th meal was reduced to three old codgers sitting at their now customary window seat in Wellington Street, Covent Garden, telling the same tired old tales.
How I wish I had been there, though. To drink. To laugh. To remember the fine times we had in Fleet Street and in lesser places.
It was good to see from the picture in the Drone that the last men standing enjoyed it as much as ever. And as for my falling one short of my century, at least I’m in good company.
Graham Gooch did it in the third Test against Australia at the MCG in 1980; and Mike Atherton in the second Test at Lord’s in 1993. That single run prevented him from seeing his name on the honours board at Lord’s during his illustrious Test career.
It took a hernia to put me in their company. Almost worth it, really. Well, the batting was never going to do it.
*****
My wife called her sister in France and they got talking about a young woman who is a mite garrulous. Once she’s got you on the phone, she is impossible to get rid of.
But my sister-in-law revealed she had a cunning plan. “When I can’t take any more,” she said, “I go to the front door and ring my own doorbell, then say, ‘Got to go, there’s someone at the door’.”
A brilliant wheeze. I will certainly try it.
*****
Our police officers have had many nicknames down the years: Peelers, bobbies, coppers, rozzers, the old bill, the filth, the fuzz, bluebottles, bizzies, to list only a few.
But I have just come across one that was new to me... Dibbles. It is a reference to Officer Dibble in the TV cartoon Top Cat and originated in Manchester, apparently. I can’t help admiring the imagination behind it.
Mind you, I doubt the Dibbles share that view.
RICHARD DISMORE
6 May 2026
