So far, this summer, those warnings have amounted to little. The riots of August 2024, an eruption of misplaced anger grounded in false rumours about the murder of children in Southport, have not been repeated, though not for want of trying on the part of online agitators.
At its core, though, immigration is the product of hundreds of thousands of individual decisions – those of people across the world choosing to come here to work, or to seek asylum, and those of the immigration system deciding whether to accept them or not.
On a recent day in court six of Taylor House Tribunal Hearing Centre in central London, people are assembled to decide just one of those cases, of an Albanian man we’ll call Atlin Bardhi (his name has been changed). On paper, he is exactly the kind of ‘criminal’ immigrant that Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and the British press all warn about.
In person, Bardhi – dressed in a smarty navy collared shirt, black jeans, and FILA trainers – sweats profusely in the sweltering, airless courtroom as he tries to explain, in broken English, why he shouldn’t be deported.
As Bardhi explains the story, through his witness statement and courtroom interviews, his troubles began in November 2019, when a magnitude 6.4 earthquake hit Albania, killing 51, injuring thousands and damaging some 14,000 buildings – including Bardhi’s home. To get medical care for his father and brother, and to rebuild the family home, Bardhi borrowed €25,000 from an organised criminal, intending to repay it through construction work.
Instead, he says, he was first forced into prostitution and then trafficked against his will into the UK, where he was forced to work in a cannabis farm in Reading. He escaped in 2022 – causing criminals to visit his family home in Albania to try to track him down, leading to a disintegration of relations with his family – and claimed asylum. His mental health has deteriorated to the point is lawyer says he is a suicide risk if returned.
Those taking the Daily Mail’s portrayal of a laissez-faire asylum system on face value would assume this story would be enough to guarantee that Bardhi will stay. The reality is different.
Oddly, the Home Office doesn’t bother to argue with Bardhi over whether or not he was trafficked against his will – a common tactic in these cases, I learn. Instead, they argue, it doesn’t matter.
Even if we accept Bardhi’s story on trafficking as fully true, the Home Office lawyer tells the judge in a tone that indicates he certainly doesn’t, it shouldn’t matter. He says that adult men who have been trafficked are not a protected or vulnerable group, so it is safe to return him.
The lawyer continues that Albania has mental health facilities and healthcare, so care can be provided there. He says Bardhi claims his family relationships broke down in 2022, but said he had good family relations in his asylum interview in 2023. He points out that it is six years since he borrowed the €25,000, and the criminal gang has not troubled his family for it, despite knowing where they live.
By the time he sits down, the Home Office lawyer seems confident he has poked enough holes in Bardhi’s case.
This process is what the overwhelming majority of the British public says they want. Poll after poll, focus group after focus group, shows that extremists talking about “closed borders” or “remigration” are a tiny fringe. Most people want legitimate refugees to be accepted, others to be thrown out, and want the UK to admit immigrants to work if the UK needs their skills.
The odds are stacked against Bardhi. In 2022, 49% of asylum claims from Albania were successful. By 2024, it was just 9%, and even lower for unaccompanied adult men like Bardhi. The problem is the huge amount of time and effort the process takes: Bardhi’s has been pending for more than two years since his first interview, and the bundle of documents the judge has to consider is 1,100 pages long.
Asylum seekers need somewhere to live while their cases are considered, and when those cases take years, that is a considerable drain both financially and on scarce housing resources. Asylum seekers are forbidden from paid work, and hotels that were once the pride of a town being used as Home Office accommodation is particularly visible.
The cost of asylum hotels last year was £2.1 billion, around £70 for every UK household, or four days of the NHS’s running cost. That bill is actually falling – it was £3 billion in the last year of the Conservative government – but it is still significant.
Small boats have become the focal point of both the asylum and the immigration debate, in part because they are an almost entirely new phenomenon. Across the entirety of 2018, just 299 people arrived by small boats, rising to 1,843 in 2019. By contrast, during Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership, more than 10,000 people arrived by those means.
There are two reasons that small boats started arriving en masse in 2020. The first is a renewal of multiple conflicts that displaced millions of people, often leaving them looking for sanctuary in Europe. The second is Brexit – once the UK’s exit deal was finalised, the UK was no longer party to the Dublin procedure, which allowed for the extradited return of asylum seekers to the first EU nation in which they entered.
Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal did not include any replacement for this mechanism, meaning that the UK would be responsible for processing any asylum seekers that arrived via small boat from France – meaning France no longer had much incentive to stop people trying. Ever since then, Johnson and his successors have been left floundering for outlandish means to fix the problem he created.
Those of us on the liberal side of politics tend to argue that small boats are a relatively small share of immigration claims, and asylum seekers are vastly outnumbered by people who come here legally to work and study. Both of these are true – and it is also true that two special schemes set up by Boris Johnson for Hong Kongers and Ukrainians led to hundreds of thousands more arrivals than asylum.
But small boat crossings are substantial and accelerating. It was 1,066 (really) days into Johnson’s premiership until 50,000 people arrived by small boats. The same figure for Rishi Sunak was 610 days, and for Keir Starmer, just 404.
There is also little sense in us as liberals ignoring the fact that immigration and asylum are connected in the minds of many voters to the problems facing Britain, especially when we’re trying to work out how to respond to a movement actively trying to inflame a social problem into a national crisis.
People connect small boat arrivals, and immigration more broadly, with crime. The reality of this is complex: those born overseas are actually slightly less likely to be convicted for crimes than those born here, and there is no correlation between serious crime and the location of asylum hotels (not of immigrant populations more broadly).
However, there is an uptick of visible antisocial behaviour in areas with asylum hotels, and suggestions it is at least partly connected to an uptick in shoplifting – which would be at least explicable, with people barred from working looking to feed their families. But the bigger issue is that antisocial behaviour and low-level crime are plainly on the rise more broadly in the UK.
Most people assume that an increase in antisocial behaviour tracks an increase in more serious crime. This is both common sense and logical – if we see vandalism nearby or see security guards in shops, we are likely to feel less safe, and thus assume we’re in more danger. Moreover, we have been told for decades that antisocial behaviour is connected to, and even causes, serious crime – “broken windows policing” was the mantra of modern policing for decades.
The problem is that it isn’t true. Britain’s streets are about as safe as they’ve ever been, when it comes to violence. We can track violent crime and murders in multiple ways: police record crime reported to them, the public is surveyed as to their experience of crime, and hospitals record when people are treated because they’ve been attacked.
All of these are trending the same way – serious violence and murder is down, both in the long run and the short run. On crimes like burglary, the statistics are so good they’re unbelievable: burglary is down 90% since the 1990s. But being safer counts for very little if none of us feel the benefit of that, and until low-level crime is tackled, fear of crime will abound.
Claims that immigration is causing the UK to be at “crisis point” are overblown, but they are extremely convenient for a new political coalition. One part of that coalition is the hardcore racists and nationalists, who are seizing upon a new political mood to try to make their previously fringe ideology a reality.
The other part is made up of political opportunists who are happy to give the first group their chance if it will propel them to power. The UK is beset with crises that are difficult but which can be solved if they are tackled boldly, and with tough decisions. Instead of doing that, it is much easier to find a scapegoat for the electorate and blame them for everything.
The root of the UK’s problems are under-investment in everything, public and private, and under-funding of public services. The UK hasn’t built enough houses for decades, and in the last ten years has coupled that sluggish housebuilding with immigration in the high hundreds of thousands.
The justice system has been cut to the bone, leaving cases like Bardhi’s taking several years to process – adding hugely to costs elsewhere in the system – and itself serving as a draw for more people to arrive here and work illegally for a few years until they are deported. Policing has been cut, leading forces to prioritise serious crime and leave vandalism out there.
As all of that has happened, the Conservative government – especially under Boris Johnson – used immigration to cover over the cracks, propping up our otherwise stagnant economy and papering over the cracks in the NHS and social care by importing workers. Asylum claims in the UK have never topped 100,000, but net migration peaked close to one million a year.
By keeping the focus on small boats, cynical political operators could both cover up their own negligence, avoid a reckoning with their voters, and pretend that the issues caused by large-scale immigration could be addressed without major impacts on the UK economy, the NHS, and more.
What has turned all of this into something resembling a full-blown crisis is not a change in anything fundamental in the nation, but instead in its elite. When the Conservatives were in power, respectability was still a valuable currency on the political right. The patronage of the prime minister was still in play – MPs could become ministers or join the cabinet.
Their supporters might join the Lords, or get quango jobs, or otherwise be allowed in the hallowed circle. Turning around and attacking the government with lurid claims would lead to social sanction.
That is no longer the case. Kemi Badenoch is both unable and unwilling to enforce even basic standards of message discipline on herself or her party, leading her shadow justice secretary to all but openly flirt with the far right in his public bid to succeed her.
With the rise of GB News and Elon Musk’s X, the media ecosystem rewards the wildest claims, and the Telegraph and Mail have shifted even further rightwards to try to keep hold of their audiences as they radicalise. Speakers who say multiculturalism has failed and who “say the unsayable” aren’t risking social sanction – they are more likely to secure a spot on the lucrative US right-wing lecture circuit.
With at most a handful of notable exceptions, the right wing of Britain’s commentariat and its politicians have embraced an agenda they would have condemned just 18 months ago out of expediency and self-interest. If the UK is on the verge of an incipient crisis, it is this – more than those risking their lives on small boats – that is behind it.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House has shown that dangerous cynicism can work, at least when it comes to getting its perpetrators into office. Trump is now enacting his entire programme unchallenged – with jobs falling, prices rising, and satisfaction plummeting as he flails.
If the UK doesn’t start tackling its real problems soon, the people saying Bardhi and the small boaters are the source of our woes will hold the reins all too soon. Should that happen, their answers will prove no better than Trump’s.