Steve 🇺🇦 🇬🇧 stefek.bsky.social

You see these scenes from Belfast? That's our future if Reform, Restore, the Tories, GB News, Elon Musk and the right-wing media get their way. Except this will be on a much bigger scale. We have to decide: do we want those inciting hatred to destroy our country?

Reform is now the party of workers. Today I am inviting trade unions to apply for affiliation with Reform UK. We also welcome union leaders to attend our national conference in September and engage in discussions about the policies of a future Reform government.

Some cultures are MUCH better than others.

The scenes in Belfast last night were shocking and completely unacceptable. There is no justification for the violence and disorder that we saw threatening our communities, nor for those who encouraged it, online or elsewhere. It is clear that people were targeted last night because of their background and I will not tolerate it. Those responsible will feel the full force of the law. I’ve spoken to the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland to convey my thanks to them and the frontline emergency services for their bravery in keeping people safe. I’ve also spoken to the First Minister and Deputy First Minister to discuss the ongoing situation. Appealing for calm must be the priority, and that is what I urge now. We must let the police get on with their work.

It is not just the far right. It is the media themselves, including the so-called progressive ones. Violence in Britain has fallen 83% since the mid-1990s. Burglary 86.6%. Vehicle theft 86.4%. ONS, Crime Survey for England and Wales, forty years of data. 89.5% of prisoners serving for violence against the person are British nationals. 89.4% for sexual offences. 73% of the prison population is white. Convictions by ethnicity are 84% white, matching population share almost exactly. Violence is the largest arrest category at 47%, and the MOJ confirms this is "broadly consistent across ethnic groups". The disproportionality is in drug offences and weapons possession, not violent crime. The Oxford Migration Observatory found that controlling for age and sex, foreign nationals are underrepresented in prison: 3,193 fewer than demographics predict. The LSE found "the increase over time in offending is much stronger among the British than the Foreigners. Indeed there is essentially no change in the violent incarceration rate of foreigners over the whole period in spite of the two large immigrant waves that occurred". A study of 55 countries over three decades (Journal of Economic Perspectives) found no correlation between immigration and crime. Homicide fell by a third globally from 1990 to 2019 while the immigrant population grew by two thirds. A separate analysis of 216 regions across 23 European countries found "no significant link between immigration levels and crime rates". Yet the public believes the opposite. A MORI survey found the British public believed 23% of the population was foreign born. At the time, the actual figure was around one in nine. The public perceives the most negative impact of immigration to be crime. The data says foreign nationals are underrepresented in violent crime. That gap is not an accident. It is a product. Violent crime is over 60% of tabloid crime coverage despite being 20% of reported crime. An analysis of 402,819 articles found the immigration-crime link in public perception exists because of selective coverage and breaks when native criminality is given equivalent prominence. Arendt (2010) found over-representation of "foreign crime" articles directly led to readers overestimating foreign offenders. Blinder and Jeannet (2017, British Journal of Political Science) showed media depictions directly affect the accuracy of British public perceptions. The Erasmus study found coverage "disproportionately focused on crimes involving immigrants, fueling misconceptions even when data showed no substantial increase". A CEPR study found this coverage directly increased populist voting by 5%. And it is not just the tabloids. Conservative papers focus on immigrant crime. Liberal and progressive papers focus on "group-related problems". Both frame immigration through threat. A study of 40,000 articles found systematic bias against Muslims across UK media. The BBC, Sky, ITV, the Times, the Guardian: they all amplify crime when the perpetrator is an immigrant or non-white, not because it is more common, but because it is more engaging. A domestic murder in Sunderland does not get 3.4 million views. A white British man who commits one of the nine out of ten violent offences in this country does not trend. The result: a population that believes crime is rising when it has collapsed, believes immigrants are dangerous when they are statistically less so, and believes the country was safer decades ago when every dataset says the opposite. The far right did not build this machine. The media did. The far right just learned how to drive it.