by William Yarwood, media campaign manager
Transparency is the cornerstone of good governance. Without it, the public is left in the dark, unable to fully understand or debate the policies that shape their lives. That’s one of the key reasons why the TaxPayers’ Alliance was founded. If taxpayers have no clue where their money is going or how badly it is being used, then governments can spend it with more or less impunity.
The same applies to other areas of public policy, although few are more consequential to modern Britain than that of migration. Yet when it comes to this critical topic, transparency is nowhere to be found.
Consider this: while the government churns out endless reports on trivialities like the gender pay gaps in Whitehall departments, data on the effects of mass migration remains conspicuously absent. This lack of transparency undermines public trust and stifles informed debate, leaving us all poorer for it. Thankfully, the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) is doing what the government won’t.
Their recent analysis uncovered stark findings. Foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sex offences than British citizens and are arrested at twice the rate of natives for all crimes. Perhaps most damning is their breakdown of arrest rates by nationality. Albanians top the list with over 200 arrests per 1,000 people, while migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq are not far behind, with over 100 and 93 arrests per 1,000 respectively. These figures are as shocking as they are revealing
The CMC deserves applause for their fantastic research and for shedding light on this issue. But there’s a deeper problem at play here. This vital data shouldn’t have had to be unearthed through laborious Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. These stats should have all been published as a matter of transparency, not pieced together by a think tank. The real question is, why didn’t the Home Office already have these statistics readily available and accessible to the public?
This isn’t the first time a lack of transparency has hindered public accountability. When we launched our landmark Town Hall Rich List, our database of council staff earning over £100,000 a year, it was initially compiled painstakingly through FOI requests. It was an exhausting process, but we pushed through because local taxpayers deserved to know where their money was going. Thankfully, the effort paid off. Then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to his credit, introduced mandatory reporting of senior remuneration in the public sector, making this data publicly available for everyone to see. That change was a win for transparency and accountability.
The same principle should apply to migration data. If it’s clear and necessary to report how much council bosses earn, why can’t we have full disclosure on migration and its effects? Robert Bates, founder and research director of the CMC, is right to highlight just how little we know about mass migration’s impact on crime, welfare, and the economy. These are monumental issues, yet they remain obscured from public view.
The state’s selective approach to transparency speaks volumes. They’ve proven they can release detailed statistics when it suits them. The glaring absence of similar data on migration suggests a deliberate choice to keep the public in the dark. Why? Is it because exposing the true impact of mass immigration would challenge the status quo of de facto open borders? Both Labour and the Conservatives have pursued these policies without public consent, and they’d rather not have the debate that hard data about the impacts of such a policy would provoke.
Let’s be clear. This is not just about statistics, it’s about trust. The British public deserves to know the truth about mass immigration. They deserve to have the facts laid bare, not buried in bureaucracy or unearthed only through the tireless efforts of organisations like the CMC.
If we can hold councils to account for how much they pay their top brass, we can and must demand the same level of transparency on migration. The time has come for the state to come clean about migration data, release it in full, and allow the public to see the entire story.