Immigration and refugees are topics where wandering stories easily occur and are spread, and a key focus area for the extreme right. Because of the danger of developing wandering stories, it is important for politicians and media to describe this with the greatest accuracy. Home Secretary of the United Kingdom Suella Braverman claimed that there was an invasion of migrants to the UK in a parliament speech 31. October 2022, published in Sky news.
Braverman said, without providing substance, that “many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs. So lets stop pretending that they are all refugees. The whole country knows that that is not true”. The facts are that the UK does not receive many refugees compared to other European countries.
The British National Party is described as a fascist party by the researchers Nigel Copsey, Matthew Goodwin and John E. Richardson. Copsey has described BNP as “virulently hostile to liberal democracy and that this hostility derives from its revolutionary, fascist agenda. The point that the BNP is a fascist organisation is significant and cannot be ignored.” BNP refers to Suella Braverman on its homepage: “The Home secretary Suella Braverman has branded the recent channel crossings as an invasion and we in the British National Party totally agree with her.”
“The British people have had enough. I have had enough”, Suella Braverman, wrote in an article in the Daily Mail on 7 March 2023. “Tens of thousands of illegal migrants pouring across the Channel every year, and in ever greater numbers. We cannot sustain it. Moreover, it makes us less safe. We all know that strong border security underpins our national security,”.
The message from Suella Braverman is widely distributed through extreme right wing’s echo chambers in the darkest corners of the web. The British anti-fascist organisation HOPE not hate has issued a research report on over ,500 media articles and following right-wing extremism activity on the messaging app Telegram. HOPE not hate found an increase in far right Telegram communication from 661 to 1136 messages per day following the Conservative government’s “Stop the boats» campaign: “The overlap between Government, media and far-right rhetoric has allowed the latter to become normalised. It becomes more difficult to recognise and call out the extremity of Patriotic Alternative’s ‘End the invasion’ banners when the Home Secretary herself has referred to an out of control ‘invasion of our southern coast’. In recent protests against housing of asylum seekers in hotels, protestors have carried placards using the Government’s own slogan, ‘Stop the boats’.”
What does the facts tell ?
Statistics from The Migration Observatory at Oxford University
As a former global superpower and colonial empire, Great Britain has a significant immigrant population. The British Nationality Act of 1948 allowed citizens of Commonwealth countries to have British citizenship rights, meaning they could live and work in the UK without needing a visa.
In reality UK does not receive many refugees compared with other European countries. The Migration Observatory at Oxford University places the UK as number 19 of European countries.
Chapter 12 shows how a false story of the perpetrator of the terrible murders of three little girls in Stockport “being an asylum seeker who came to the UK last year” circulated widely and incited the violent right wing attacks on asylum seeker centres and mosques.
Exaggerated language and telling stories such as “The invasion of migrants” is probably meant to legitimise further restrictions in the refugee policy and the introduction of legislation like the “Illegal Migration Bill”. It is likely to pave the way for anti-democratic forces on the extreme right, because they can say that “This is what we have said all the time. We are not extreme. We are telling the truth. We are the vanguard, who are leading the way.