Do We Really Spend £1 Billion a Week on Benefits for Foreigners? No.
Last weekend, The Telegraph ran an eye-catching headline:
Cue a flurry of shares from Reform UK supporters and the usual angry right-wingers on social media. Unsurprisingly, most hadn’t read the article—just the headline. The piece itself was behind a paywall, which didn’t stop people confidently parroting its claims.
Let’s look at how they reached that £1 billion figure. According to the article:
“Households with at least one claimant who is a foreign national received £941 million in March this year, up from £461 million in March 2022, representing nearly a sixth of the month’s Universal Credit payments.”
In other words, their definition of “foreigner” includes anyone living in a household where one person was born abroad. That’s it. You could be born and raised in Britain, never left the country, served in the armed forces, pay your taxes—but if your partner was born in Warsaw or Lagos, congratulations, you’re now part of the “foreign benefit scrounger” class.
By that logic, Nigel Farage is a foreigner. So was Queen Elizabeth II. In fact, pretty much every British monarch since Harold Godwinson fails The Telegraph’s purity test.
This is nonsense. A totally rigged methodology designed to produce a viral headline: divisive, dishonest, and dripping with bad faith.
And it gets worse. The “research” comes from a column by Neil O’Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough and shadow education minister. So, not exactly an independent analyst. In fact, the Telegraph article simply rehashed a Telegraph op-ed. They’ve become their own source—an echo chamber dressed up as journalism.
I’ve said before that the UK media is in rapid decline, and The Telegraph is leading the charge downhill. But this isn’t just shoddy reporting—it’s an editorial line masquerading as fact. A deliberate attempt to feed xenophobic narratives under the guise of data journalism.
At this point, we shouldn’t pretend there’s a meaningful difference between the likes of The Telegraph and the worst corners of online disinformation. It’s all part of the same media ecosystem—lavishly funded by foreign billionaires—intent on undermining not just the British government, but Britain itself.
I wonder how much the claim of “foreigners taking up London-era council housing” is similarly based on old Windrush-era immigrants (who of course arrived when council housing was far more plentiful), rather than recent immigrants who still don’t have British citizenship?
Both I think. Lots of white Londoners bought their council houses under Thatcher. Sold up when prices went up and the city became more diverse (white flight). Immigrants bought or rented their former houses. London became more diverse and under the London schools challenge educational attainment went up. The white flighters moved out to Counties like Essex which still have the 11+. The established middle class families all knew how to get their kids into the grammer, the incomers from London didn’t know or didn’t care, and their kids ended up at poor secondary moderns. Pretty much all of the educational attainment gap for white working class boys is in the counties around London with selective education
What do you mean by “the educational attainment gap for white working class boys”? Do you mean relative to white middle class boys, relative to non-white working class boys, or relative to white working class girls?
And (as I already mentioned on the other thread where you brought up the grammar school issue) I suspect the housing windfall profits that London’s white flighters enjoyed will also have made their kids less interested in learning, because it enabled them to have living standards considerably in excess of what their labour income would pay for.
Wouldn’t “lots of white Londoners bought their council houses under Thatcher” be irrelevant to the question of “foreigners taking up London-era council housing”, as such housing is by definition no longer “council”, regardless of who is living there now?
Nationally white working class boys do worse at school than other classes and ethnic groups. But most of that attainment gap occurs in Counties which still have the 11+. There is no difference between white working class male attainment in Gateshead for example.
It could be that they are locked out of the best schools, that they don’t value education, or as you say they accumulated unearned wealth through the housing market.
There is a cultural aspect that some working class famalies don’t want their kids to get on at school, go to university, move away, get middle class tastes and progressive values.
Where I grew up “getting ideas above your station” “putting on airs and graces” or “getting too big for your boots” were serious offences. People had to be “taken down a peg or 2”
Those sentiments still apply, possibly even more strongly in communities where the best and the brightest leave for Uni and never come back