Friday, 2 May 2025 — Institute of Race Relations
Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s shameless decision, in the run-up to the May local elections, to publish statistics on the nationalities of foreign offenders and their crimes, and her amendment to the Borders Security Bill to bar all foreign nationals on the sex offenders’ register from making asylum claims, haven’t gained Labour votes, but have added fuel to a racist feeding frenzy of the kind that led to the far-right riots last summer.
Shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick and Reform had demanded the crime statistics by accusations of a ‘cover-up’ of the true extent of migrant crime. Anti-migrant thinktank the Centre for Migration Control went further, publishing data on arrests by nationality. But a glance at our criminal justice statistics page reveals the baked-in institutional racism which generates high arrest rates for ethnic minorities and migrants – the statistics then become self-justifying, and fuel for mischief-makers.
Since 1991, the Press Complaints Commission and its successor IPSO have recognised the potential for mischief in reporting on race: the Editors’ code of practice says the press must not report an individual’s race, colour, religion etc, unless ‘genuinely relevant to the story’. And research in 2023 for the Cabinet Office’s Equality Hub warned against using ‘ethnic terminology’ in a way which is ‘stigmatising or reinforces stereotypes’. But Labour, following most of the press, has no qualms about producing misleading, context-free data on the criminal propensities of particular nationalities.
Another dangerous response to a pernicious propaganda campaign – this time the revival of the ‘grooming scandal’ – is the amendment to bar sex offenders from Refugee Convention protection. The Convention allows exclusion of refugees who have committed ‘particularly serious’ crimes, and previous governments have weaponised this for electoral gain: in 2002 Labour excluded anyone sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, and in 2022 the Conservatives lowered the threshold for disqualification to 12 months’ imprisonment. If this amendment goes through, it gives more ammunition to far-right campaigns labelling asylum seekers as dangerous paedophiles, and opens the door to malicious accusations.
Labour has revealed itself as having no migration policy of its own: it simply follows Reform. At a time when the Right and its press are gunning for anyone with progressive principles – whether on migration, climate change or Palestine – the party which the country needs to stand up for humanitarianism, if not Social Democrat principles, has turned its back on all principle, overtly and cravenly pursuing base populism.
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