In politics, numbers rarely speak for themselves. They must be framed and interpreted. They are often weaponised. In Britain’s increasingly toxic debate over asylum and migration, the question isn’t just how many asylum seekers arrive on small boats. It’s what those numbers are made to represent – and why polls suggest a large proportion of the public now believes things that are simply untrue.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has staked her political credibility on restoring a sense of grip over the asylum system: reducing the backlog by processing cases, accelerating returns of those with no legal claim to stay and launching an as yet small-scale “one in, one out” returns deal with France. In balancing operational realism with symbolic reassurance, Ms Cooper walks a knife-edge between policy and perception.
The small boats issue is no longer just about shortcomings. It is a cultural firestorm – and one increasingly fuelled not by facts, but by misinformation. According to new YouGov polling, nearly half of Britons wrongly believe that illegal migrants now outnumber those here legally. A staggering 72% of those who support mass deportations hold this belief – even though official estimates show legal migration outnumbers irregular migration by at least 10 to 1. That gap between belief and reality is not accidental. It is the outcome of years of distortion by populist media and politicians who conflate asylum, illegality and criminality. Figures like Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick have led the charge, using cherrypicked statistics and lurid anecdote to foster the sense of a country under siege. Hotels housing asylum seekers have become flashpoints for far-right protest. Last summer’s riots, frighteningly, appear to be no fluke. They look like a trial run.
Ms Cooper’s strategy to confront this with better data and a functioning system is, on paper, entirely rational. She wants to reassert the difference between political theatre and policy. But data alone cannot win a cultural war. Publishing the nationality or immigration status of offenders, even in the name of transparency, may serve only to reinforce the belief that “foreignness” explains criminality – particularly when the dominant public narrative is already so skewed. Amnesty’s warning that disclosing suspects’ ethnicity risks becoming a “lightning rod” for racist sentiment is well grounded. Moderate former Tory ministers have rightly urged caution, calling for accurate data and cooler heads. The former counter-terrorism chief Neil Basu is right to compare Faragism to Trumpism: both rely on lies about migrants that outpace the truth to win votes.
The real problem isn’t the number of small boats, but the growing number of Britons who see all migration as a threat to identity and safety. YouGov finds that a significant proportion of the public now supports not just border control, but mass removals of migrants who have already settled here. That is a policy with no precedent in mainstream politics since 1971. Worryingly, it is now slithering back into public debate.
Labour inherited a broken asylum system. But it also inherited a poisoned political environment. The risk is that by trying to neutralise extremism with incremental reform and datasets, it lends legitimacy to the deeper narrative: that the migrant is, at root, the problem. Britain is playing with fire, not just because its systems are failing, but because the public’s trust in those systems has been methodically eroded. That is harder to repair. And far more dangerous to ignore.
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.