In an unusual twist in British politics, a national football hero and the BBC became the unlikely protagonists in an intense political debate on immigration last week. Gary Lineker, a former professional footballer and popular TV presenter, made international headlines for criticizing the government’s rhetoric on immigration. The BBC then got caught up in the issue too, when the state broadcaster suspended Lineker from his perch hosting its iconic Match of the Day weekend highlight show.
The BBC claimed that Lineker had broken its rules on impartiality by posting a tweet comparing the language used by British Home Secretary Suella Braverman to describe migrants and refugees to the rhetoric on display in “1930s Germany.” The move backfired, however, as Lineker’s co-hosts refused to do the show in his absence, leading the BBC to lift his suspension this week.
The controversy was also a major embarrassment for the government of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, calling further attention to its immigration policies that are not only contravening international law, but increasingly out of step with the British public. It began during a recent parliamentary debate, when Braverman used dehumanizing words to describe people who are attempting to arrive in the U.K. through irregular channels, referring to “waves of illegal arrivals breaching our borders” and “criminals breaking into Britain daily.”* Braverman was defending the government’s latest proposed immigration policy, which according to the United Nations refugee agency would amount to “an asylum ban.”
In addition to Lineker, the opposition Labour Party also called out Braverman for her fear-mongering language, as well as her misleading claim that 100 million people could qualify for asylum under the U.K.’s current immigration laws. The U.N. refugee agency has previously estimated that while there are 100 million people forcibly displaced around the world, only 26 million have left their home countries.
If Braverman’s proposed changes to current policy are passed, people arriving in the U.K. through irregular routes would no longer be eligible to seek asylum status and would instead be detained and deported. The government argues the policy is necessary to dissuade people from crossing the British Channel in small boats. Last year, 45,000 people entered the country via the treacherous channel crossing, and 89,000 people applied for asylum in the U.K.; the Home Office estimates that 94 percent of people arriving in small boats go on to claim asylum.
While Braverman’s asylum reform is pushing the limits of international refugee laws and humanitarian norms, it is consistent with the Conservative Party’s long shift to the far right when it comes to immigration policy. Nor is her dehumanizing language an outlier—Braverman used similar language previously, after having been warned by government lawyers in 2020 that “inflammatory immigration rhetoric risked inspiring a far-right terror attack.”* And almost 8 years ago, in 2015, then-Prime Minister David Cameron used similar language when he referred to people seeking to enter the U.K. after having crossed the Mediterranean as a “swarm.” His language was similarly condemned at the time, though it didn’t cause the same national uproar.
The British government’s asylum reform is consistent with the Conservative Party’s long shift to the far right when it comes to immigration policy.
That same year, then-Home Secretary Theresa May gave a speech at the Tory Party conference where she said that a significant number of asylum-seekers were “foreign criminals” and that “millions” of people want to come to the United Kingdom. Observers noted that the speech, less than a year ahead of the Brexit referendum on whether or not to leave the European Union, helped feed into anti-immigration sentiment. May had already laid out her stance on immigration in 2012, when she announced the “hostile environment” policy, which sought to dissuade irregular migration by cutting undocumented migrants off from using fundamental services, such as the National Health Service, and to make it illegal for them to work or rent property.
More recently, in 2022, the government of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson launched the controversial Rwanda deportation scheme, a plan to send migrants already in the U.K. who do not meet the country’s asylum criteria to Rwanda. Once there, they can then either apply for asylum in Rwanda itself or in a safe third country—but not the United Kingdom.
Johnson has used similar language, despite having attempted in the past to distance himself from the rhetoric used by his predecessors as well as members of his government, such as by stating that he was “passionately pro-immigration” during the Vote Leave campaign in 2015-2016. However, he was not averse to so-called dog-whistle politics, for instance by calling for learning English to be mandatory across the U.K. in 2019, at a time when 98 percent of people across England and Wales spoke the language. In doing so, he echoed Nigel Farage, former head of the far-right U.K. Independence Party, who had raised the same concern several years prior. Johnson also notoriously used derogatory language to describe women who wear burkas, revealing his true feelings toward people from other cultures and religions.
The Conservative Party doesn’t have a monopoly on this rhetoric, of course. Other British politicians have similarly used fearmongering to weaponize anti-immigrant sentiment. In 2016, Farage used a highly controversial and misleading photo in a Leave.EU campaign poster ahead of the Brexit referendum to stir fear among potential voters. The image showed a long line of people, presumably migrants and refugees, walking along a road, with a message reading, “Breaking Point.”
The effort to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and strengthen the anti-EU movement’s argument to “take back control” of the country’s borders came against the backdrop of the EU’s 2015 refugee and migrant crisis. That year, an estimated 630,000 people arrived in the U.K.—a record at the time; 32,000 of them applied for asylum, of which 11,000 applications were granted. But the photograph Farage used in his poster was not of people lining up to enter the U.K., but rather of people crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border, over 1,000 miles away.
As journalist Maya Goodfellow has argued, xenophobic exclusion has now become something of “a British tradition.” Over the past 12 years, the government and its allies have been gradually normalizing the indefensible rhetoric Braverman used last week, demonizing people arriving to the U.K. through irregular routes, without offering safe routes by which they might apply for asylum outside the country.
Yet, despite the anti-immigration rhetoric, there are reasons for optimism when it comes to British public opinion. According to a recent report by the think tank U.K. in a Changing Europe, or UKICE, 46 percent of people living in the U.K. believe that migration is a force for good, compared to 29 percent who disagree. And in February 2022, the proportion of people who stated they would like to see immigration reduced was at its lowest since 2015, at 42 percent. In contrast, in April 2016, Ipsos MORI found that 47 percent of people surveyed cited immigration as the top concern facing Britain, double that of people who identified the economy as the biggest issue at the time.
According to a Huffington Post report, UKICE suggests that this shift in attitude may be due to Brexit and the perception that the government has put stricter controls on immigration. But this increasingly positive view of immigration could be due to a number of other factors. The scandals surrounding Braverman in recent months—including reports of child refugees missing from hotels where they have been lodged and unsafe conditions for asylum-seekers in overcrowded detention centers, in addition to her inflammatory rhetoric—could be fueling a backlash against the demonization of migrants.
Whatever the reason, the rhetoric from the government is out of sync with the U.K. public’s feelings toward migration policy and refugees settling in the country, as demonstrated by the outpouring of public support for Gary Lineker last week. It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to torpedo the government’s proposed changes to immigration policy or play a role in elections that will take place before the end of next year. But despite the headlines over the Lineker controversy, it is the British government’s immigration policy—as well as the language used to promote it—that is the real scandal.
*Editor’s note: This article was revised for clarity.
Helen Morgan is an associate editor at World Politics Review. Her work focuses on migration, climate change and human rights.