Oh fuck off. Honest Bob Jenrick's claim that "4 in 5 new jobs were taken by migrants" is misleading. Jenrick's claim rests on a calculation by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), the right-wing think tank founded and chaired by Iain Duncan Smith, which funding-transparency site Who Funds You? gave a D grade, the second-lowest transparency rating, in September 2023. It was then amplified by the Telegraph. While the basic arithmetic roughly holds, at each step the claim drifts further from what the data shows. 1. They are not "new jobs". The figure compares HMRC payroll counts in December 2014 and December 2025. That is a net change, not a count of jobs created. Millions of jobs open and close every year, and most are filled by UK nationals. In fact, people who were non-UK citizens when they registered for National Insurance held 20% of employee jobs in December 2025, up from 12% in 2014. Four in five payroll jobs are still held by UK nationals. 2. The numbers don't relate to individual people. The data counts payrolled employments, so one person with two jobs is counted twice. The Telegraph's own chart says as much. 3. Many of the "migrants" are British. HMRC records nationality once, when someone first registers for National Insurance, and naturalisation is not recorded. Someone who arrived in 2015 and became a British citizen in 2021 is still a "migrant" in this data. HMRC itself says this makes non-UK figures higher than the true counts. 4. "Taken" implies displacement the data cannot show. The CSJ says jobs "went to" non-UK nationals. Jenrick says they were "taken". The figures show who holds jobs, not whether anyone lost out. The Migration Advisory Committee found that, across all immigrants over the full period studied, there was no statistically significant impact of migration on employment. 5. The time frame drives the result. By the Telegraph's own chart, UK nationals accounted for roughly half the payroll growth between 2014 and 2019. The "one in five" figure depends on the 2021 to 2023 visa surge, which happened under the Conservative government in which Jenrick himself was Immigration Minister. 6. Self-employment is excluded. PAYE data leaves out roughly four million self-employed people, so it does not measure all work. In short, a narrow payroll statistic, which counts employments rather than people and permanently labels naturalised Britons as migrants, has become a claim about "new jobs" being "taken". The underlying data supports neither word. This fits a familiar Reform pattern: take a statistic, often from an opaquely funded right-wing think tank, strip away its caveats, and recast it as proof that migrants are taking something from “the British people”. Whatever the intent, the effect is the same: a narrow, heavily qualified finding becomes a story of grievance and resentment. It's wrong, divisive, misleading and pathetic.

Lol. Reform's "Operation Fortress" — Royal Navy intercepting boats and towing them back to France — runs into several practical and legal walls that make it very unlikely to work as described: 1. France's consent is the real blocker, not UK law. As maritime law barrister James Turner KC has explained regarding the "pick up and return" idea, the UK cannot return migrants at sea to France without French consent. France has never agreed to accept boats forced back into its waters, and has no legal obligation to. Reform's plan doesn't actually change that dynamic — it just asserts the Navy will do it anyway, which would mean either French cooperation (currently absent) or a unilateral act likely to breach the maritime boundary and international norms. 2. This has effectively been tried and quietly shelved before. The Royal Navy already ran a similar mission, Operation Isotrope, intended to deter crossings and intercept boats before they reached British shores — but its impact was disputed, seen by critics as counter-productive and a drain on the Navy's limited resources, and efforts to release the Navy from the operation began by mid-2022 before it ended in January 2023. Even government ministers were divided over whether pushback tactics were usable at all. 3. The Border Force's own union says it's operationally reckless. The ISU (representing Border Force staff) has warned that only the Navy has the theoretical capability to safely intercept and return migrant boats, because Border Force cutters lack the capacity — but even then, officials warned migrants could resort to violence at sea once they realised they were being returned, and with boats sometimes carrying up to 40 people, they could overwhelm a crew — vessels aren't designed for incarceration, only rescue. This is exactly what Tom Sharpe was getting at in the Today interview: warships configured for anti-air or anti-submarine warfare are the wrong tool for this job entirely. 4. Scale doesn't match capacity. Recent crossing days have topped 752 migrants reaching Britain in a single day. The Royal Navy has a handful of vessels realistically available for this kind of continuous inshore policing — nowhere near enough to intercept every boat, every day, indefinitely, while also meeting its actual defence commitments. 5. Legal exposure under non-refoulement and safety-of-life-at-sea obligations. Any policy of physically towing overcrowded, often unseaworthy boats back into French waters — rather than to a "place of safety" as maritime law requires — creates serious risk of individual harm, and of legal challenge under both UK and international humanitarian/maritime law. Reform's insistence that the plan is legal under international law, citing the requirement to preserve life at sea is doing a lot of work to paper over that tension — rescue and forced return are legally distinct obligations, not the same act. Put together: the plan requires either a bilateral agreement with France that doesn't exist and gives France no incentive to sign, or a unilateral naval operation that risks violent confrontations at sea, breaches maritime law norms, and repeats an approach (Isotrope) that was already tried and wound down as unworkable.