Her bravery has inspired the world. But in her hometown, her actions have met a muted response. To find out the truth, I visited the exact place in Dundee where the now-famous video of the Scottish lassie defending herself and her sister was taken. What I saw left me deeply shaken.
Dundee, a port city north of Edinburgh in Scotland, has been in slow-motion decline since the late 19th century. The intricately carved sandstone facades of its historic buildings are the only reminder of its glory days, when it was the world’s centre of jute fabric production.
In 1909, when Winston Churchill came here for a political visit, the city’s decay was already undeniable. Churchill stayed at the imposing Queens Hotel on the centrally located Perth Street, then the city’s finest lodging. “This hotel is a great trial to me. Yesterday morning I had half eaten a kipper when a huge maggot crept out and flashed its teeth at me,” he reported back in a letter. The hotel has since come under new management, but Churchill’s handwritten missive still has pride of place on the wall of its entrance hall.
Image by the author.
Half an hour’s walk north, uphill from the storied Queens Hotel, lies Lochee, the neighborhood that is the roaming ground of our heroine, the Scottish lassie. Once, this was where the world’s largest jute mill was located. Its towering, but now disused factory chimney, called Cox’s Stack, still overlooks the neighborhood.
Lochee, by the author (enhanced using AI).
Back in the day, thousands of Irish immigrants toiled in the mill, and many people who live there today still trace their ancestry to those workers. But much has changed since their days. Even the once-bustling old parish church was burned down in an unsolved arson attack in 2017, and its ruins were set on fire a second time in 2021.
Image by the author.
On a sunny late Sunday afternoon, I reached the little grass embankment where the now-famous video was recorded. It was past six, so the local Farmfoods frozen food store next to the embankment had already closed, and the place was mostly deserted. Not entirely, though. At a traffic roundabout opposite the grass embankment, a group of intoxicated young men was brawling. One of them had a large stick and was trying to keep the others at bay, while mouthing insults. I phoned the police. Soon enough, a police car arrived, and the men scattered in all directions. The cops didn’t get out of the car to investigate further; they just drove on.
None of the people I talked to in Lochee agreed to talk on the record. Most seemed scared. At one point, I started a conversation with a local man who might have seen the incident involving the lassie first-hand. His wife soon interjected, telling her husband something to the effect of “don’t give him any names, don’t get us into trouble.” The man subsequently insisted that he had seen nothing at all. I also tried to reach out to Lassie’s mother to set up a meeting via someone who knows her, but despite this person’s best efforts, it didn’t happen.
Those locals who did talk to me, anonymously, off-the-record, mostly told a similar story. Crime in the area is out of control, and the authorities are said to have largely given up. Cocaine is as easy to find as booze in Lochee.
The problem is neither of recent origin nor was migration the original cause. Even decades ago, locals recounted, the “Young Lochee Fleet” gang ruled the neighborhood, fighting bloody turf wars with the “Huns” gang from neighboring Hilltown. Then, as now, most teenagers loitering around the neighborhood are white. Many carry blades. What else can they do when everyone else carries one too?
The obvious vulnerability of these kids has attracted a whole ecosystem of outside criminals to the area: Drug dealers who want to turn them into addicts. Ganglords who want to recruit them. Grooming gangs who want to abuse them. Earlier this year, a gang of five Romanian migrants was convicted of raping and pimping out girls as young as 16 in the area. Fear lurks at every corner in Lochee.
As dusk set in, I walked down Lochee High Street one final time. Suddenly, two white local young boys, barely 10 years old, walked up to me. They asked me to go to the local store, Alcohol Express, and buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for them, offering me money to do it.
When I refused, one of the boys suddenly put his hand on his pocket. He looked me in the eyes and said, “If you don’t do it, I’ll stab you.” For a moment, we locked eyes, silently. He seemed dead serious. Then, I looked at his pocket. It seemed empty, no obvious bulge suggesting a knife might be inside. So, I walked on—and then turned into a busy local pub, where the lads couldn’t follow me in. This time, I didn’t even bother calling the police. I had been lucky.
Earlier this year, Dr Fortune Gomo was not so lucky. Lochee’s affordable rents have drawn in numerous, mostly female professionals from English-speaking countries in Africa, who immigrated legally, looking for a better life. Many work as nurses at the nearby Nine Wells Hospital, which is the main one in the city and also hosts a university campus.
Dr Gomo had come to Dundee from Zimbabwe to study environmental science. After finishing her PHD at Dundee University, she found a job as a specialist at the local water board. Then, she was stabbed to death in a random attack as she walked on Lochee’s streets one Saturday afternoon, this July. The suspect who has been charged with her murder is Kyler Rattray, a 20-year-old white Scottish man, currently awaiting trial. Rattray didn’t come from a broken home. His father, Kenny, is extremely well-liked locally, seen as someone who always helps those in need.
In a heartbreaking video made after the murder, Kenny Rattray said, “My son is going to spend the rest of his life locked up...which is going to be completely justified... It is an absolutely horrendous, horrific crime.”
In the video, Kenny details how his son had been severely mentally ill, psychotic, and violently schizophrenic. The family had worked to place him in secure, appropriate care. With tremor in his voice, Kenny recounts how officials eventually released Kyler from a closed psychiatric unit where he had been receiving care, putting him back onto the streets against the family’s desperate objections. “This could have been completely avoided. There was absolutely zero need in this getting to this stage... The public should have been protected from my son,” said Kenny.
Authorities can’t claim ignorance of the crisis in Lochee. They’ve known about it for decades. In 2003, disgruntled pensioners in Lochee famously chased Scotland’s socialist First Minister, Jack McConnell, around the neighborhood during a campaign visit until he agreed to sit down with them to listen to their concerns over rampant insecurity in the area. But the crisis remains, and not because the government lacks resources to address it.
The British government spends more than 100 million pounds each and every month to house unvetted boat-arrival migrants in comfortable hotels across the UK. Not one single one of these irregular migrants has been escaping from immediate persecution or starvation. They cross the English Channel illicitly from France, where all of them already had a full legal right to apply for asylum.
Benefits in France are less generous than in the UK, but still plenty for survival. Thus, even though none of the immigrants are in any situation of actual need, the woke state puts them at the front of the queue, ahead of the neediest locals, and ahead of law-abiding immigrants like Dr Gomo as well.
They’d never give the same comfortable hotel rooms to troubled families from Lochee, even though there is nothing those families would need more than a safe room in another neighborhood or city where their kids don’t have to carry around a knife simply to survive. For girls like our Scottish lassie, Britain’s elite offers only arrest and criminalization, not a future based on human dignity. This is how a nation dies.