Zoë Sumra

The front page of the billionaire-owned propaganda comic the Daily Mail promises to reveal the "TRUE COST OF LABOUR MIGRATION DITHERING". It states "at least 200,000 given right to remain since crackdown promise", and a list of what settlement brings with it: benefits, NHS care and social housing. The reader is left to add up the bill themselves. Here's the real figures. In the year to June 2026, 199,628 people were granted settlement, also known as indefinite leave to remain, up 24% on the year before. The Mail doesn't say exactly when its "since" period starts, so readers can't check its 200,000 against the official tables. The headline also hides who these people are. "Settling permanently in Britain" sounds like new arrivals. Settlement adds nobody to the population. To qualify, people must normally have already lived and worked here legally for FIVE YEARS. So many of those settling now will have arrived around 2020–21, under a Tory government. One of that government's Home Office ministers at the time was Chris Philp, who held the immigration compliance and asylum brief. He is now quoted on the Mail's front page attacking Labour over the results. Then there is the "dithering". The crackdown is Labour's own plan: in November 2025, Shabana Mahmood proposed doubling the usual wait for settlement from five years to ten. The plan hasn't yet become law because, she told MPs, the consultation drew more responses than expected and analysing them has taken longer. Until the rules change, people who meet the existing rules are entitled to settle. Granting them settlement is UK law working as written. The bigger wave is still to come. People who arrived in 2022 start qualifying next year, and the Home Office expects 1.6 million settlements between 2026 and 2030, peaking at 450,000 in 2028. That's a real issue for policy, but it grows out of the record migration levels of 2022 and 2023, when the fucking Toroes - not Labour - were in power, rather than anything Labour has done since. The same official release contained two facts the Mail left out. Settlement for refugees fell by 40% to 22,799, and the number of asylum seekers in hotels halved to 16,021, the lowest since the figures began in 2022. I wonder why that wasn't worthy of a front page splash? The page follows a familiar pattern, which the linguist Teun van Dijk calls the ideological square: talk up the other side's failures, and leave out anything that counts in their favour. The Mail's main device is the same one favoured by Reform UK, what van Dijk calls the "number game". Phrases like "thousands every week" turn routine paperwork for people already living here into the language of a flood. Whether settlement costs the public purse, and by how much, is a fair question. A front page that promises the "true cost" should give a figure, instead of misrepresenting reality on order to manipulate to its readers. Fuck the Mail.