Britain does not have an immigration problem, it has a nuance problem writes Natasha Devon
By endlessly repeating that people’s anxieties are ‘legitimate’, politicians are giving credence to the far-right’s propaganda and inadvertently stoking the tensions they were designed to rile up.
On Sunday night, hundreds of protestors descended on Portsmouth to intercept a small boat with 140 asylum seekers on board.
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This of course follows significant disruption in Dover on Saturday after masked protestors blocked roads, chanting ‘stop the boats’. Whilst we are yet to learn who is responsible for the former, a close associate of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon called Daniel Thomas has claimed credit for organising the latter.
When being interviewed by Nick Ferrari on LBC on Monday morning, Labour’s Emma Reynolds condemned this disorder, but still took the opportunity to emphasise (as many of her colleagues have done before her) that people have ‘legitimate concerns’ around immigration.
In my new book ‘The Nuance Drought ’, I talk about how binary thinking, polarisation and sloganeering are affecting communities, society and our mental health. I discuss how important it is for our leaders to embrace complexity, and how their failure to do so makes people feel gaslit, unacknowledged, confused and as though they’re always voting for the least-worst option. Which is why phrases like ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’ are so profoundly unhelpful.
Since Labour came to power in 2024, small-boat crossings have reduced by 43%, reaching a seven-year low. This has coincided with a steep 48% reduction in overall net migration. Although they are so often conflated, arrivals by illegal means like small boats and ‘immigration’ are not the same thing. In fact, small boat crossings account for only 5% of total migration to the UK – about 16,000 people so far this year. Asylum seekers make up less than 1% of the population and yet their presence is disproportionately scrutinised and often exaggerated in much of the media and political discourse.
On social media, outright lies are not only permitted, but increasingly financially rewarded. Crimes committed by asylum seekers are either invented or endlessly recycled and amplified to give the impression of greater rates of criminality within that group (whereas in reality there is no evidence suggesting non-UK citizens commit crimes in larger proportions than the general population).
If you’re caught within a certain algorithm, pretty much all you’ll see on Facebook or X is content about how dangerous asylum seekers are and how they’re the reason communities are in decline. When you combine this with the often-alarmist headlines, it’s little wonder so many people are concerned.
I believe ordinary people, whose political views don’t align with the far right, when they say they are frightened. However, they are scared because a huge, well-organised, and well-funded far-right network is deliberately stoking division by producing and promoting this type of online content, as well as organising events like the ones we have seen in Portsmouth and Dover over the past few days. Indeed, the Crime Agents podcast discovered that many of the social media posts encouraging people to protest outside the Bell Hotel in Epping last year were created by far-right groups posing as ‘concerned local citizens’.
Politicians seem to believe that if they acknowledge the role the far right is playing in all of this, they’ll alienate their voter base because they’ll think they’re being called extremists. But by endlessly repeating that people’s anxieties are ‘legitimate’, politicians are giving credence to the far-right’s propaganda and inadvertently stoking the tensions they were designed to rile up.
People’s fears are understandable given the current legacy-media and online landscape, but they are not ‘legitimate’ because they aren’t founded in robust data or empirical reality. The distinction might seem subtle, but it’s this type of nuance our politics so desperately needs right now.
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The Nuance Drought: Reclaiming Truth and Complexity in a Polarised World by Natasha Devon is out on Thursday 10th September, published by Icon Books, priced £16.99.
You can also listen to Natasha Devon on Saturdays from 6-9pm on the LBC app.
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