Britain’s Rage and the Politics of Misdirection

Britain is angry. And with good reason.

For more than a decade, wages have stagnated, rents have spiralled, and public services have been stripped back to the bone. The promises of prosperity and security that once underpinned the social contract feel increasingly hollow. The NHS strains under record waiting lists; housing has slipped beyond the reach of ordinary earners; and energy bills, food prices, and transport costs have become constant sources of anxiety. For many, the sense is not simply of decline, but of abandonment.

This anger is neither irrational nor fringe. It is the predictable consequence of political and economic choices that have favoured austerity over investment, deregulation over stability, and private profit over public welfare. Yet the energy of this collective frustration is not being channelled toward the structures that have failed so comprehensively. Instead, it is being diverted toward migrants.

I was compelled to write this after scrolling through Facebook and seeing a headline from The Independent (UK) appear between unrelated posts. I wasn’t seeking it out, I don’t read the hate stuff they write or go looking for such coverage but in just a few words, it captured how effortlessly public anger is redirected toward migrants and away from the policymakers, institutions, and systems truly responsible for the crises we face.

This redirection is not accidental. It is a deliberate political strategy one with a long history in Britain and far beyond. By encouraging the public to associate complex social crises with immigration, leaders and media outlets absolve themselves, and their policies, of blame. The slogans are familiar: “deport them,” “take back our streets,” “protect our children.” They present as moral imperatives. But beneath the urgency lies a politics of scapegoating that collapses under scrutiny.

Perhaps the most potent narrative is the claim that immigrants are responsible for rising violent crime. High-profile cases, especially those involving violent acts by non-British nationals, are seized upon, amplified, and repeated until they appear to form a pattern.

The evidence tells a different story. Official data from the Office for National Statistics and repeated independent fact-checks show that such cases are statistical outliers. When examined in context, offending rates vary by group, by social and economic conditions, and by the specifics of local contexts. The blanket assertion that “foreigners are driving crime” is not supported by the data. It is an emotional trigger designed to conflate the actions of individuals with the character of entire communities.

Another enduring claim is that migrants are a drain on the public purse that they take more from the system than they contribute. These narrative gains traction in moments of economic difficulty, when competition for resources feels acute.

Yet comprehensive fiscal analyses contradict this assumption. Studies by the Migration Observatory and the Office for Budget Responsibility show that, overall, migrants make a net positive contribution to public finances. They pay taxes, start businesses, and fill labour shortages in critical sectors. To argue that public services are failing because of migrants is to ignore the far more significant pressures of underfunding, privatisation, and regressive taxation policies.

A third claim often made in the same breath as the previous one is that migrants undermine public services. Here, the contradiction is almost self-parody: the same voices that label migrants as a drain simultaneously overlook the fact that many of those services would collapse without migrant labour.

The NHS is a case in point. Nearly one in five NHS staff is a non-British national. In adult social care, agriculture, and logistics, overseas workers are equally indispensable. Removing these workers would not improve the services on which Britons rely; it would deepen the crises already straining them to breaking point. The House of Commons Library and The King’s Fund have both documented the structural nature of these shortages: they are the product of workforce planning failures, poor pay, and chronic underinvestment not immigration.

Underlying all of these claims is a more subtle one: that public perception is itself evidence. If people feel that crime is rising, or that the economy is collapsing under the weight of immigration, then it must be true.

But perceptions are shaped by what is most visible, most repeated, and most emotionally charged not necessarily by what is most common or most significant. Social media and rolling news cycles privilege stories that provoke outrage, and algorithmic amplification ensures that such stories dominate the public imagination. This does not mean that problems do not exist, but it does mean that the causes we assign to them are often filtered through distortion.

What is happening in Britain is not unique. Across the Atlantic, the United States has deployed the same playbook.

When Ronald Reagan came to power in the 1980s, he inherited an economy struggling with inflation, deindustrialisation, and wage stagnation. Rather than confronting corporate deregulation or tax cuts for the wealthy, his administration amplified fears of “illegal aliens” taking jobs and draining welfare programmes. This rhetoric persisted through the Clinton years, intensified under Trump, and remains a central plank of American right-wing politics. Yet the data has been consistent: immigrants, documented or not, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, and their labour underpins vast swathes of the U.S. economy from farm work to tech innovation.

Europe has its own versions. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous 1978 warning that Britain was being “swamped” by immigrants preceded her government’s austerity measures and industrial restructuring, which hit working-class communities hardest. In France, politicians from the far right and centre alike have linked North African immigration to social disorder, even as many of these communities supply vital labour to construction, public transport, and healthcare. In Italy, successive governments have blamed migrants arriving by boat for economic woes, despite their small proportion of the population and measurable contributions to GDP. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government has used anti-immigration campaigns to deflect from corruption and democratic backsliding, painting asylum seekers as an existential threat to national identity.

The pattern is strikingly consistent: in moments of economic or political crisis, migrants become the chosen scapegoat. The formula works because it offers a simple, visible “enemy,” and because migrants, lacking political power, cannot mount a proportionate defence. The public energy that might have been mobilised toward structural reform is instead channelled into border crackdowns, deportations, and cultural hostility none of which address the underlying issues.

Learning from History: Refusing to Be Divided

The use of scapegoats in times of hardship is as old as politics itself. But history also offers a counternarrative: moments when people recognised the manipulation and turned their anger toward the real sources of their suffering.

In 1930s America, during the Great Depression, corporate and political leaders attempted to pit white and Black workers against each other in the competition for scarce jobs. But the most successful labour movements of that era from the integrated picket lines of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to local tenant unions refused that trap. They understood that division only served the bosses, and that solidarity was the only route to better wages, shorter hours, and safer conditions.

In 1970s Britain, amid economic turmoil and rising unemployment, far-right groups sought to channel public frustration into anti-immigrant violence. They met resistance from multi-racial anti-fascist coalitions like the Rock Against Racism movement and the Anti-Nazi League, which combined cultural power with street-level organising to turn the tide against scapegoating politics.

In post-war Europe, too, reconstruction succeeded where societies rejected ethnic blame games and instead focused on rebuilding infrastructure, investing in public goods, and strengthening democratic institutions.

The lesson is clear: when we are invited to believe that our neighbour is the cause of our hardship, we should ask who benefits from that belief. Division is not a side-effect of scapegoating   it is the point. The more we fight each other, the less we fight the policies and interests that created the crisis in the first place.

We have been here before. And we know how to resist. It requires refusing the easy, false comfort of blaming migrants, and instead demanding accountability from those in power. It requires cross-class, cross-community alliances strong enough to challenge corporate influence, demand fair housing, secure living wages, and restore public services to the standard we all deserve.

Britain is at a crossroads. We can repeat the cycle allowing fear to be weaponised against the wrong targets or we can learn from history, fight together, and refuse to be brainwashed into turning on each other.