Editorial: Trickery is used to downplay the number of immigrants into the UK

Accounting tricks can disguise the scale of mass immigration into the UK.

​Jeff Dudgeon wrote a long essay, spread over two days on June 20 and June 22 (click here to read it), in which he said immigration statistics are used in a misleading way to assuage public concerns about the influx of people into Britain. He also highlighted the biased way in which the BBC reports the topic.

One misleading statistic happens when the government points to a reduced backlog of asylum bids. That then seems like a reduced number of immigrants when they have only processed applications faster.

Another is to emphasise the fall in immigration – for example, the net number of migrants was ‘only’ 171,000 last year, down from a peak of nearly a million 2022. This is used to imply that immigration is under control but it is misleading, because an arrival of almost 200,000 people is disastrous on top of the net migration of seven million people into the UK over the last 20 years – putting unmanageable infrastructure pressure on housing, hospital and schools.

That is before you consider the social problems of managing huge numbers of people from many different cultures, some of which hate western values.

Yet another misleading statistic, perhaps the worst, is the much-heralded reduced use of hotels. But this is only possible because migrants are being pushed into housing, while the existing population often has long waits for such.

The Labour government is pretending to be shocked after it emerged that up to 83 migrants will be moved into a development in a rural Shropshire village. The Home office says that new-build homes “should never house asylum seekers”, the Home Office has said. But this sort of outrage is inevitable given the UK loss of border control and the numbers of people needing accommodation.