UK politics live: minister pushes back at Tory claims linking small boat arrivals to sexual crime

The Guardian

9 hours ago

Update:
Date: 2025-08-04T08:53:20.000Z
Title: Chris Philp
Content: Good morning. During August, when parliament is not sitting and the tap of domestic news is running dry, opposition parties often like to run campaigns. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is following this model with gusto and today, for the third week in a row, he is holding a press conference on the subject of crime. Reform's success in the polls is almost entirely down to the fact it advocates hardline policies to cut immigration, and small boat crossings, and Farage is trying explicitly to link this issue to crime, arguing that asylum seekers are disproportionately likely to be criminal.
The Conservative party don't have a single theme for their summer campaigning. (Yesterday Kemi Badenoch was campaigning about the uselesness of the Liz Truss mini-budget, a topic where the nation largely agrees.) But in response to an overnight announcement from the government about new measures to crack down on small boat crossings, they have also depicting these migrants (whose numbers, of course, increased dramatically while they were in office) as a threat to public safety. In a statement released overnight , the shadow home secretary, said: 'This weak Labour government has lost control of our borders, and we now see rapes and sexual assaults by illegal immigrants reported on a near daily basis.' And, in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, doubled down on this claim. He said:
I am afraid there is increasing evidence of a serious link between illegal migration, migration generally, and crime, particularly sexual crime against women and girls.
In London, 40% last year of all of the sexual crimes were committed by foreign nationals, despite the fact that they only make up 25% of the population.
And some of the data that – we're seeing we don't have good data at the moment – some of the data we're seeing is very striking. Afghans and Eritrean nationals are 20 times more likely to be convicted of a sexual crime than a British national.
These are very shocking statistics.
Farage recently told the New Statesman, for an interesting, lenghty profile written by Harry Lambert, that he thought Jenrick would 'almost certainly' end up to the right of him on migration by the next election. 'I suspect he will probably go further – that's just my instinct for someone who wants to make noise,' Farage said.
Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, has been giving interviews this morning, and on the Today programme she suggested that there was not firm data to back up the claims that Jenrick was making. She said:
[Jenrick] did actually say that we don't have good data at the moment, and yet he's asserting with great certainty data points, and I don't know where he's got them from. So it's difficult for me to criticise from a data point of view. But he's admitted in that interview that we don't have good data.
Asked if she thought that the Tories were 'playing with fire' by linking asylum seekers with sexual crime, Eagle replied:
I think that we need to deal with all crimes, all sexual crimes, regardless of who has perpetrated them in the same way. And we need to crack down on violence against women and girls, which is why we've actually got Jess Phillips, a minister, whose entire job is about doing that.
Asked if she was open to discussing possible links between immigration and crime, Eagle replied:
I don't mind having debates about anything, but I think we haven't got good data on this, and I think that we've got to look at the principle. And that is that we've got to deal with all sexual criminality, whoever perpetrates it in that way, in an almost colour blind way.
If a girl has been abused by somebody or has been subjected to a vile sexual crime, it doesn't really matter what the colour of the skin of the perpetrator is.
As Eagle said, it is hard to assess the truth about the link between immigration and crime because the data is complicated, and in some respects limited. But one person who has tried recently is the researcher and scientist Emma Monk, who on her Substack blog recently published an analysis of the claim that some people arriving in the UK on small boats are 20 times more likely than Britain to be criminal. This is a claim that Jenrick referenced, describing it as 'shocking'. Monk argues that it is shockingly inaccurate. Her whole post is worth reading, but here is her conclusion.
As you can see, the claim that migrants arriving on small boats are 24x more likely to end up in prison was an easy manipulation of available statistics. It wasn't entirely fabricated - they can point to 'official statistics' to claim credibility - but it's clearly misinformation all the same.
A Tory MP briefed it to a right-wing newspaper, which published it unquestioningly. That was picked up by the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem, and now the 24x figure is firmly in the minds of those who want to believe it, and is being repeated all over the internet, and across dinner tables and garden fences.
There are only two items in the diary for today.
11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
(For readers who keep asking why we feature the Reform UK press conferences, but not the Lib Dem ones, or the Green party ones, the answer is simple; they are not holding any.)
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