Silencing Criticism Only Fuels Dissent
By hiding the costs of illegal immigration in the welfare system, Labour has made a recipe for disaster
Towering Columns
At The Spectator, Madeline Grant examines how the secrecy and suppression of speech around the asylum hotels are only polarising the country further.
Last year, the Home Office abruptly opened up a migrant hotel not far from a school in Warwick, giving nearby residents less than 24 hours’ notice. The site was immediately fenced off with zero communication from Warwick District Council to local residents. Overnight, concerned local parents became vigilantes and began patrolling the streets themselves. Some families won’t allow their teenage daughters to go outside in the evening; unsurprisingly, given the age profiles of some of the children recently allegedly targeted for attack and kidnap…
…Across the country, similar tensions erupt wherever a hotel or HMO opens nearby. A further problem for the government with the most recent demonstrations is the changing profile of protesters. Women and mothers turned out at the protests in London and Epping Forest, along with local professionals like Maxi Gorynski, an IT worker who helps organise a local residents’ group in Canary Wharf opposed to housing asylum seekers at the Britannia International. There were also scores of legal migrants; understandably annoyed that they came here via proper means and worked hard while rule-breakers receive freebies. These protesters can’t easily be dismissed as mere far-right agitators, however much the government might like to try…
…The authorities are evidently eager to give away as little as possible; the Online Safety Act has been used to suppress footage of protesters while the National Security Online Information Team, a shady and secretive unit within the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation, has deployed terrorist-tracking software to monitor critics of asylum hotels. Yet in the age of social media it simply isn’t possible to conceal information as it was in the past. YouTubers regularly sneak into migrant hotels and livestream the whole thing to their followers. Social media has made people hyper-vigilant to the signs of the latest HMO occupancy in their neighbourhood. Enough people either live near a hotel themselves or hear stories from a friend who does. When the history of this era is written, the decision to shuttle migrants into provincial towns and hope no one will notice will be seen as fatal.
On ConservativeHome, Katie Lam argues that Britain cannot grow again until the government learns how to live within its means.
The UK is now spending more than £111 billion a year paying the interest on our national debt. That’s more than double the entire defence budget, nearly double the schools budget, and enough to cover the entire NHS workforce’s salaries, with £30 billion left over. If it were a government department, it would be the fourth largest in Whitehall; interest payments on our national debt are now higher than at any point in my lifetime.
Of course, borrowing isn’t inherently bad. Just as it’s perfectly reasonable to take out a mortgage to buy a house, it’s sensible for governments to borrow to invest in hospitals, roads, or energy infrastructure, things that will make the country better off in the long run. What’s not reasonable is racking up debt just to fund day-to-day spending. But that’s exactly what governments have been doing. Public sector net investment as a percentage of government spending has basically remained flat at around four per cent since 2002, but over the same time the size of our debt in proportion to GDP has nearly quadrupled…
…If investors start worrying about whether the UK can be trusted to pay them back, or if they think our long-term prospects are weak, they’ll start demanding even higher interest payments to lend to the government. Britain is now staring down the barrel of a full-blown debt crisis – not unlike what we saw in Greece during the Eurozone crisis, or Italy in the years that followed. That’s how fragile our fiscal position has become.
On his Substack, M.F. Robbins explains why boomers believe they are the generation more hard done by, rather than millennials or zoomers.
Avocadoism is the idea that the reason millennials can’t buy houses is because they spend too much money on expensive luxuries like avocado on toast and fancy coffee. It sprang from the mind of an Australian millionaire with a penchant for making dumb statements for attention, but it captures a core belief - that millennials are actually well-off but profligate - that I would argue is common among Brits of a certain age, and subtly manifests in a range of topics from the triple-lock to the winter fuel allowance to the WASPI campaign itself…
…Compared to boomers, millennials are both rich and poor at the same time, and I think it’s this duality that explains avocadoism, and makes inter-generational discourse so frustrating. It’s not as simple as ‘housing got more expensive’; the ratios between prices have completely altered in a way that makes the economics of a modern young household utterly incomprehensible to retired homeowners.
The idea that millennials could afford houses if only they cut back on avocados makes complete sense to people who needed £4,000 for a deposit in 2025 money, for whom food prices were effectively twice what they are today once you account for their lower income. Boomers bought houses at a time when saving a couple of pounds per day taking a packed lunch to work would give you a house deposit in eight years. For a millennial this would take two centuries.
On his Substack, Rian Chad Whitton believes we should promote alternative understandings of the industrial economy to combat net zero claims.
If I were Blue Labour, the Conservatives or Reform, I would use the [Low Carbon and Renewable Energy Economy] LCREE to point out that the sacrifices we are making today are not going to translate into milk and honey later on. Overall, turnover for LCREE, excluding electricity generation, is barely keeping pace with inflation. I propose the foundational industrial economy (FIE). This would include all energy-intensive industries listed by DESNZ, and the entire mining and quarrying sector.
As of 2023, the EII sector is £170 billion in turnover and £36 billion in GVA. The mining and quarrying sector, minus those subsectors already in the EIIs, is £34 billion in turnover and £22 billion in GVA. Combined, they are £202 billion in turnover and nearly £60 billion in GVA. This is 10 X the turnover of the green manufacturing sector (> £20 billion). While the LCREE does not outline GVA, we can expect FIE GVA to be between 7-9 X that of LCREE manufacturing…
…If arbitrary economic constructs can be used to push Net Zero, alternative constructs can be made to prioritise critical industries. While we would not say the FIE is going to carry British economic prosperity through this century, its health and vitality will be crucial to any prospective attempts at reindustrialisation. There are not too many countries where people cannot make steel, but can scale up advanced robotics and semiconductors. If we are betting on a more turbulent and unpredictable world, then we need the capacity to build the basics.
The Economist provides a reminder of what Britain is still good at, but a change of mindset is needed to turn things around.
Britain will never have the data centres or computing power to compete with America and China. But it does have deep expertise in machine learning, and firms eager to deploy ai. Wayve, a startup that recently raised over $1bn—the largest-ever investment in a European AI firm—worked out that the best approach to autonomous driving is to have an ai learn human driving patterns on its own. Many graduates of Palantir, an American data firm that employs a quarter of its staff in London, go on to found their own startups. One such spin-out is Arondite, which uses ai as the “connective tissue” between disparate defence systems. Both Wayve and Arondite are based near King’s Cross—the nascent tech hub in London that DeepMind still calls home.
Britain is also learning to pair technology with its strengths in services. Proximity to the City has already helped fintech firms like Revolut, one of the world’s largest challenger banks, to flourish. A new marriage of technology with legal services might do the same. And as a world leader in video games, Britain excels in combining creativity with code.
To fully realise these strengths, however, Britain must improve its track record in scaling and retaining high-growth firms. Being bought by foreign investors is one thing, but seeing firms leave Britain’s shores because they feel they cannot continue to grow there is quite another. Too often Britain serves as a launchpad for world-class companies—and in some cases not even that. After being informed that there are no launch slots available at British spaceports in 2025, Skyrora, a Scottish space firm, is now considering launching its rockets from Australia.
At The Spectator, Dean Godson looks at Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister of France, and his approach towards confronting Islamism.
Success or failure in crime or immigration policy can at least be measured in numbers. It’s much harder to mark progress in the struggle against political Islam – which Retailleau believes constitutes the greatest subversive threat to the Fifth Republic. ‘They are a formidable enemy, despite the relatively small numbers of their core cadres,’ he says. ‘They have a smooth narrative: to employ our freedoms to destroy our freedoms. It’s an all-of-society project. For example, they aim to “Islamise” knowledge. And their message is as follows: “We will colonise you and we will dominate you.”’
One of the first steps he took on Islamism after assuming office was to declassify the Interior Ministry’s 74-page report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe: his purpose was to alert the public via an approach of ‘name and shame’. It’s little secret now that Retailleau struggled with the Elysee to maximise its revelations about individual Islamist institutions; partly because the President’s office was initially reluctant to be seen to be dancing to Retailleau’s tune.
Retailleau is thus the one making the political weather on this issue: the Defence Council met again recently under the chairmanship of Macron to discuss, in the light of this most comprehensive official analysis of frère-isme to date, just how to enforce the landmark 2021 French separatism law. The old pre-war French right saw laïcité as the enemy of Catholic France; now, it sees it as a bulwark to protect the country. As ever, practical implementation is the key to Retailleau’s way of doing things.
Wonky thinking
Onward has published Loophole Nation by Caroline Elsom. The paper discusses how the temporary visa system has been manipulated by judicial activism under the ECHR to create loopholes when migrants are supposed to support themselves. This means the path to settlement is being fully funded by the taxpayer. The paper argues that more “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF) should be published, the loopholes eliminated, and the Human Rights Act repealed.
The perception that the system is being gamed to gain illegitimate access to benefits is fuelling negative views of immigration as a whole. An Ipsos poll carried out in May 2025 found that two thirds of Britons think that the number of people coming to the UK is too high. Among those who held that view, the top reason given for what had contributed to this the most was the availability of welfare benefits.
While some of this is likely more directly connected to the salience of hotel accommodation for those claiming asylum (although immediate support is not delivered via mainstream welfare), the sentiment applies to wider net migration too. A separate Ipsos poll in April 2025 found that 57% thought that the number of people coming to the UK to live with family was too high, and 41% thought the number coming here to work was too high.
Having a visa condition of NRPF does not mean that there is no way to access any public funds at all. As mentioned above, it is possible for migrants to receive care from the NHS without paying the IHS. There are blanket entitlements to a range of employee benefits like statutory maternity pay and sick pay that fall outside of an NRPF condition. Since 2020, families with children in England who fall under the usual maximum income thresholds have been eligible for Free School Meals, regardless of NRPF conditions. These entitlements are all conferred separately from the NRPF framework, despite the significant cost to taxpayers.
The downstream impact of NRPF being disapplied are part of the newly published statistics on Universal Credit by immigration status. Almost 75,000 people with Limited Leave to Remain, excluding those on the EU Settlement Scheme but including family reunion visas, were on Universal Credit in May 2025. Around two thirds of these claimants were not in employment. These figures will be skewed by those here on family reunion visas as they have recourse to public funds by default, but there is no breakdown yet that splits out these categories. According to an analysis of the Labour Force Survey by Migration Observatory, an estimated 10% working-age non-EU citizens who arrived in the five years to 2021 reported receiving at least one kind of benefit.
Tentative indicators of the effect may be seen in the number of those recently arriving in the UK gaining access to social housing. There were almost 66,000 households in social housing in England and Wales that had arrived in the UK less than five years prior to the 2021 Census. This will include those gaining access via refugee status, resettlement schemes and the five-year family route, but also those who may have had a Change of Conditions.
Local authorities often have long waiting lists and can impose local connection tests typically between two and five years. Recent legal cases have resulted in councils having to ensure that they do not apply rigid or excessively long rules that effectively bar recent migrants from access and discretion or exemptions must be built into these policies to avoid unlawful discrimination.
Applicants would have to demonstrate high levels of need to meet the criteria for housing within this timeframe – many of which are similar to the criteria for making destitution, child welfare or exceptional circumstance cases. However, once a social tenancy is secured, it can be a home for life – even if an NRPF condition is subsequently re-applied. 78% of new social lettings in 2023/24 were lifetime tenancies, with some councils explicitly abolishing new fixed term tenancies altogether.
Podcasts of the week
On Triggernometry, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster discuss the Online Safety Act, British policing, and blasphemy law with free speech advocate Lord Young.
On spiked, Eric Kaufmann, director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, argues that the post-progressive era has arrived.
Quick links
Nearly one million asylum seekers have recieved NHS ‘free passes’.
Taxpayers covered a record £47 billion for public sector pensions.
A major oil refinery is halting operations after running out of crude oil supplies.
Police have used facial recognition technology to build a secret national ID system.
The Energy Secretary has refused to publish details of a net zero cooperation deal he has signed with China.
Data shows that benefits replace 60% of an unemployed person’s income in Germany, but it’s less than 20% in Britain.
Trump’s ‘one, big, beautiful bill’ earmarked $300 billion to modernise US defence tech.
Maps show how Britain’s lack of road connectivity compares to France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
A Christian teacher was sacked after criticising two-tier policing in the Lucy Connolly case.
Pope Leo XIV is the world's most popular global figure.