My essay in the Mail: EU nations tell the TRUTH about migration and crime – so why won’t Britain?

Hiding the reality is even more dangerous

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This piece appears as the main op-ed in the Daily Mail today.

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Extraordinary figures emerged at the weekend. Fresh analysis of police data suggests that foreign nationals are up to twice as likely to be arrested on suspicion of committing crime as Britons.

The arrest rate for foreign nationals averaged 22.2 per 1,000 of their population com- pared with 10.3 per 1,000 for British citizens holding UK passports, according to figures from 26 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales and census data.

It’s the first attempt to compare arrest rates according to people’s nationality and immigration status – because the Government does not publish analysis of crime figures.

The figures are astonishing in themselves, but they are even more shocking given our current political climate. At the Tory party conference last week, leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick claimed that there was an ‘institutional cover-up’ of the truth about the scale of crime migrants commit – and which nationalities are the worst offenders.

And yet almost immediately his assertion was met with howls of outrage from the progressive establishment. ‘Unvarnished xenophobia,’ one commentator called it.

Such a knee jerk reaction is entirely typical of the sort of comments spouted by members of the metropolitan elite when anyone dares to express concerns about soaring immigration. Often, they are backed up by ‘studies’ apparently showing that any rhetoric linking immigrants to rising crime rates – or anything else from a lack of housing to problems accessing health care – is exaggerated or false.

Indeed, I recall a widely quoted 2018 study published by the European Economic Area – a trading bloc consisting of the EU and three non-member countries – which found ‘no evidence’ that migration had had an effect on crime rates in England and Wales.

But as the new analysis of arrest figures demonstrates, this is almost certainly untrue.

Unlike many other countries in Europe, the British public is being continually – and I would argue deliberately – left in the dark.

Sometimes the authorities simply do not collect this information in the first place – on other occasions, more worryingly, there is evidence to suggest they suppress the data, as it does not fit their pro-immigration dogma.

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How else to interpret the response to the Freedom of Information request submitted by Conservative MP Neil O’Brien earlier this year?

When he asked the Home Office for nationality-linked crime statistics, he was told his request could not be processed on the grounds of ‘disproportionate cost’.

Several other MPs and campaigners – among them Reform UK leader Nigel Farage – have crashed into the same brick wall, despite the fact that many of our European neighbours do release it.

Let me be clear: this is deeply sinister behaviour on the part of the State. If the data is there then, in a democratic society, we taxpayers should have access to it.

Time and again we have been told that mass migration is good for Western economies, as it drives growth and productivity and makes our societies more prosperous – to say nothing of endlessly cited improvements to our cuisine.

Some figures which are publicly available, however, give the lie to this argument. In the UK, where net migration has added nearly 6 million to our population since 1997, economic growth has remained low for years.

Britain also has more illegal migrants than any other European nation: this week, a major study has found there are up to 745,000 illegal migrants in the UK, accounting for one in 100 of the population – double the 300,000 in France.

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And we still don’t have the booming, dynamic, innovative, prosperous economy that the pro-immigration lobby promised.

Studies conducted in mainland Europe, meanwhile have found …