“One in 12 in Londoners is illegal migrant”; this was a front-page splash in the Telegraph, picked up and repeated across not just the right-wing press but in “mainstream” publications and by supposedly respectable but gullible or lazy commentators, not to mention Nigel Farage and Lord Frost, and no doubt other eminent politicians.
In fact, this claim contained not just one mistake but several. It was based not on new research but on a rehash of existing and now outdated estimates for the UK’s undocumented population. It took the upper limit of a wide estimate as fact—a more accurate description of this estimate would have been “between 1 in 13 and 1 in 20”.
Worse still, it omitted to note that the higher estimates include a large number of people who have indefinite leave to remain, and so are not, and in most cases never have been, irregular migrants, as well as children born in the UK, who may indeed be irregular but are most certainly not migrants.
Following my complaints to Ipso, the press regulator, the Telegraph and others corrected the story, albeit inadequately, and in small print on the inside pages. Ipso has the power to require them to publish a front-page correction, and have done so in the past; but their ruling will not come for some months.
There is no doubt that this is part of a broader strategy; the author of the Telegraph story, Sam Ashworth-Hayes, is not a “journalist” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but an anti-immigration zealot, whose screeds usually appear on the Opinion page and who is part of a broader network of young right-wing activists.
The playbook is simple, drawn partly from the US, but adapted to the more centralised UK media landscape, where there is less of a clear firewall between “old” media and more overtly propagandistic outlets such as GB News, with many commentators featuring in both. Flood the zone with a mixture of lies, half-truths, misleading claims and statistics taken out of context, often sourced from “thinktanks” with little or no actual expertise. By the time these are belatedly corrected, or put in context, move on.
Other examples include the false claim that only a small fraction of recent migrants are working, which allows politicians to say that migration is pushing down GDP per capita. The origin of this is the accurate statistic that most recent migrants are indeed not principal applicants for a work visa. But it ignores the fact that many of those who come as dependents (or students) are entitled to work, and that all the available data suggests that a very large proportion do so.
Similarly, claims that the vast majority of recent migrants are on very low wages are not only based on arbitrary assumptions but are directly contradicted by the available data on what they are actually earning. Still, this gives rise to endless complaints about the supposed burden of “low-skill” migration.
For balance, I should note that pro-immigration (or pro-Rejoin) advocates are known to make similarly dubious assertions, albeit usually not so systematically.
Pushing back against all this is time-consuming and sometimes thankless. It’s not often I get the chance to debunk falsehoods on live TV, as I recently did on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live. Ipso is generally good when, as with the Telegraph story, a claim is straightforwardly false; much less so when “real” facts are twisted to be misleading. And corrections take time. Meanwhile, there is little or no recourse against the endless stream of falsehoods on TV, radio and of course social media.
And while the BBC is generally reliable on facts, and its specialist correspondents have a wealth of expertise, it too falls into the trap of “balancing” facts or evidence against opinion; I was recently disinvited from a BBC 5Live discussion of the impacts of Brexit on the grounds that the discussion required a fervent Rejoiner and an ardent Brexiteer, rather than any actual economic expertise.
What’s the answer? Some pro-immigration advocates argue that the solution is to make a broader political or moral case for a liberal immigration policy, and that basing it on on economics or statistics is a trap.
I recognise this argument has some force. But I still think evidence and facts matter, even if they are by no means the only thing that matters. Taking on the falsehoods directly may not change people’s minds immediately, but it helps set the backdrop for the wider debate. And it’s important for editors, commentators and journalists, of all political persuasions, who want to do their jobs well, to grasp that this is incompatible with giving equal credence to facts and fiction, or to genuine researchers and charlatans.
Despite everything, the media landscape here—and public debate on immigration—remains very different from the US. This is still a fight that can be won.
