Far be it for the cesspit media to take a day off from demonising migrant communities. The eve before voters headed to the polls, the Telegraph got in one more vile and racist attack: a dodgy analysis of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stats on migrants claiming benefits.
As is usual with the right-wing corporate media circus, it’s more manipulation and maligning through figures that don’t actually show what they claim.
Of course, as the public prepared to hit the booths, it was all about stoking division and moral panic as pure ragebait for clicks – and further justification for the Tories, Labour, and Reform to punch down on migrants’ rights.
Telegraph’s anti-migrant rage-baiting with DWP benefit figures
On 6 May, the Telegraph ran an article with the headline:
Nearly 1.5 million migrants on benefits
The piece draws on data from ex-Reform volunteer Robert Bates’ right-wing Centre for Migration Control (CMC). The think tank has a history of peddling dubious and flawed figures to fan anti-migrant narratives. And the Good Law Project has previously investigated its multitude of links with the far-right.
It’s worth pointing out to start that this isn’t the first time the Telegraph (and other right-wing rags) have run with this story. At the time, it was under the headline:
More than 1m foreigners claim Universal Credit every month
This latest transparent attempt to fuel racism and xenophobia for flag-shagging fascists could be a copy-and-paste job.
The only difference is that, instead of looking at the data at a particular snapshot in time, it has deceivingly tallied up the numbers of migrants who claimed benefits at some point within a 12-month period.
Manipulating the numbers
Here’s where the statistics start to fall apart. The Telegraph wrote:
The new figures include migrants who might have claimed at some point during 2025 but then became employed, making them ineligible for the benefit.
Therefore, some of those 1.5m migrants aren’t actually “on benefits” at all. In actual fact, 200,000 of those are no longer claiming them – and are now working. The Telegraph’s headline also ignores the fact that many of those might only have claimed for a short time.
As the Canary’s Steve Topple highlighted in July, the far-right foghorns were wilfully misrepresenting the facts.
Notably, Topple pointed out how:
Nearly three-quarters of these claimants are EU citizens who hold settled status or indefinite leave. That means they are legally entitled to public funds.
He also underscored:
EU citizens who lived in the UK pre-Brexit were granted equal access to welfare – including DWP benefits and the NHS – as part of the Settlement Scheme. That system didn’t create a “new wave” of “migrant” benefit claimants, as the headline falsely implies it did.
The same can be said of the figures in this latest hit-piece. Because, lo and behold, as the Telegraph itself admitted:
Of the 1,497,774 on benefits, more than 200,000 were refugees or had been granted humanitarian protection. The majority had come through the European settlement scheme.
Leaning into a racist and dehumanising image
Obviously, when the toxic Torygraph is parading anti-migrant figures, it’s a blatant dog-whistle and an unsubtle nod to the far-right’s racism.
Its headline blaring ‘1.5 million migrants’ is pushing an image of Black and Brown people from the Global South turned into dehumanised ‘hordes’ and ‘swarms’, vociferously painted as a ‘drain’ and ‘burden’ to the taxpayer.
This kind of ‘invasion’ narrative is rife in the right-wing media. It’s nearly been a decade since fascist Farage decked out Westminster with his ‘Breaking Point’ Brexit poster. The Telegraph is tapping into that very same conception of migrants here.
Subclasses of migrant
The Telegraph is weaponising figures that will have far-right gobshites – and a disappointing proportion of ordinary people (mostly white people) – frothing at the mouths. But the article also underscores that this racist division isn’t simply a problem in narrative alone.
The UK’s immigration system divides EU citizens (largely white) and asylum seekers and refugees (largely people of colour from the Global South) into those ‘deserving’ of support and those who aren’t. Other marginalisations, beyond race, also play a role in determining an individual’s eligibility for citizenship and state services.
But the Telegraph’s headline was leaning into the racist othering of Black and Brown people specifically. It’s likely it was also pandering to classist stereotypes that stigmatise and stereotype white migrants with lower socioeconomic status. For instance, the right-wing press regularly maligns non-wealthy Eastern European labourers as ‘criminals’ and ‘fraudsters’ stealing from the public purse.
In short, if you’re white, socioeconomically privileged, and from a coloniser nation or a geopolitically powerful nation (think: wealthy Gulf states), the colonial capitalist system affords you permanence, power, and access to the state.
But if you’re among its sub-classes of migrant-hood, the immigration system offers only precarity, poverty, and dehumanising surveillance.
Conditioning citizenship and support
Naturally, the Telegraph centres this round on the capitalist-serving caricature of the ‘good immigrant’.
It quotes Conservative shadow home sec Chris Philp pitting migrants against “hard-working taxpayers” that:
get up early and work hard all day.
Meanwhile, a Labour spokesperson echoed this rhetoric, stating:
those who seek to live here permanently contribute to our country first.
In a glaringly sensationalist comment, CMC research director Robert Bates made out that the UK:
is becoming the food bank of the world.
Of course, Britain’s imperialistic warmongering and its role upholding the Western trade and financial systems that replaced colonial empire, have impoverished, disabled, and displaced many of the people it wants to refuse citizenship and support.
Despite hundreds of years of colonial resource-grabbing, de-development, and cultural erasure, the same arbiters of those systems today continue to vilify, oppress, and exclude migrants from the Global South who live with generations of this colonial trauma.
That’s not something Bates, the Tories, or Labour would be prepared to admit, of course. Instead, they are singing from the same racist hymn sheet.
The same system of oppression underpinning welfare and immigration ‘reforms’
The Telegraph noted that:
Migrants are currently entitled to claim benefits once they have been granted indefinite leave to remain (ILR), refugee status or humanitarian protection, although the Conservatives, Reform UK and Labour are considering or are already proposing to delay this until they become UK citizens.
In February, the Labour government closed a stitch-up of a consultation on plans to do just that. In fact, if the Telegraph’s article is anything to go by, it’s already treating its cruel proposals like a done-deal.
A government spokesperson said:
we will double the time that migrants must live in the country before they qualify for any public funds.
Access to the UK’s welfare system shouldn’t be conditional on economic ‘contribution’. But this is precisely how the Labour government is approaching its welfare reforms. It’s using the same ‘deserving’ narrative to justify sweeping cuts to disability benefits.
In trying to fill some fabricated financial ‘black hole’, the capitalist class has exposed an even bigger deficit. It’s one of empathy – and a basic human decency to want to treat people like human beings deserving of compassion, dignity, and respect.
To this Labour government, to the Tories, to Reform: migrant lives, Black and Brown lives, disabled lives – the lives of multi-marginalised communities here and abroad – are expendable. That’s racialised capitalism in a nutshell.
Featured image via the Canary
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