POLITICS

The Manufacture of a Crisis

For a century Britain’s immigration panic ran through a biased but VISIBLE press — and an open society kept pushing the fever back down. Then, around 2016, the feed became a black box: the bias went from contestable to hidden, and the ceiling that used to contain the far right disappeared.

BY fake-goya

10 July 2026 · 33 min read

Go looking for Britain’s fear of immigration and you find it where the immigrants aren’t. Of the 270 local authorities with a below-average share of residents born abroad, 229 — 85 per cent — voted to leave the European Union. The fear runs inverse to the contact. And it keeps its own clock: immigration was the most important issue in the country in June 2016, named by nearly half of all voters; four years later, with net migration higher, it had sunk to single figures. Immigration did not change. So something else did.1,2

The fewer immigrants in your area
the more you fear immigration

Each point is a local authority. The Leave vote rises as the share of residents born abroad falls (r = −0.59); colour shows deprivation — the fear tracks hardship, not arrivals. — Source: ONS Census 2021 (TS004 country of birth) · MHCLG English Indices of Deprivation 2019 (File 10) · Electoral Commission EU referendum result (2016)

If a panic isn’t tracking the thing it names, it is tracking something else. To find the something else, follow the oldest machine in British public life.

The bias was always in the open

One megaphone, a century of it — in the open
The first immigration law was “aimed at limiting the number of Jewish people.”
The Aliens Act, 1905
Rothermere blamed a uniform shortage on “the cowardice of East End Jewish tailors.”
the Mail’s proprietor, First World War
The Mail hailed Mosley’s “sound, common sense, Conservative doctrine.”
Daily Mail (Viscount Rothermere), 1934
“Rivers of blood.”
Enoch Powell, 1968
The country “might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”
Margaret Thatcher, World in Action, 1978
“SWAN BAKE” — “asylum seekers steal the Queen’s swans.”
The Sun front page, 2003
“Brutal crimes of the asylum seekers.”
Daily Mail asylum coverage, 2000s
“Go Home” vans: leave, or be arrested.
the Home Office, 2013
The “Breaking Point” poster — a column of refugees.
Nigel Farage, 2016

Britain has run its immigration story through the same apparatus for a century: a press more concentrated in ownership than almost any in the democratic world, pressing the narrative its proprietors chose. And for most of that century the bias was not hidden — it was signed. In the 1930s Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail championed Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, ran ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ over the proprietor’s own name, and offered Hitler the use of its pages. You could see exactly whose agenda the paper carried. White supremacy, out loud.3,4,5,8,9,10,11

That openness was, paradoxically, the safeguard. Because the bias was visible it was contestable — the country could see what it was fighting, and the argument happened in daylight. And contestable bias has a ceiling. The same lineage kept hitting it: Mosley dropped and interned, Powell sacked from the shadow cabinet the day after ‘rivers of blood’, the National Front and the BNP swelling and then collapsing, Tommy Robinson banned from the platforms outright. Each time the fever rose, an open society named it and pushed it back down.12,13

The commercial engine was in the open too, and it has never been complicated. Fear sells papers. Rupert Murdoch did not centre the Sun on Page 3 out of a heartfelt mission to democratise pornography for the British public; he did it because shocking, polarising content pulls eyeballs, and eyeballs are what advertisers pay for. Negative stories about outsiders are simply a profitable editorial strategy — and it is no accident that the most profitable strategy runs with the grain of the oldest prejudice. The hunt for revenue and the fear of the other have always pointed the same way.14,15,16

And the effect is measurable, not rhetorical. In controlled experiments, framing immigration as economic competition demonstrably hardens attitudes and lifts support for restriction; and the panic’s salience tracks the volume of coverage, not the level of migration. The fear is a response that can be elicited — and the machine elicits it because eliciting it pays.17

The operators

Politicians do not build this machine; they harvest it. And the most refined instrument of the harvest is the messenger — a Patel, a Braverman, a Sewell fronting the denial of institutional racism. The writer Ash Sarkar calls it playing against type: the media seek out the minority voice willing to decry its own, so the policy can no longer be named for what it is.18,19,20

In the last decade the political class stopped resisting this current and began competing in it — matching cruelty to cruelty as the issue's salience climbed. What was once a fringe register moved to the centre of gravity; the operators no longer merely follow the fear, they stage it.18,19,20

A mass invasion of migrants.US Vice-President JD Vance, on the murder of British student Henry Nowak

And the operator, once committed, is forced into cruelty as performance. Water cannon authorised against asylum seekers on the Channel under a £660m deal; the small-boats spectacle staged for the cameras. As policy it deters almost no one; as image it is the entire point — the visible performance of a border under control. The Rwanda scheme was the purest specimen: on the Home Secretary's own account it cost the taxpayer some £700m and succeeded in sending exactly four people — all of them volunteers — before it was scrapped. Roughly £175m a head. As deportation it was a failure; as performance it worked perfectly, which was always the point.22,23,24,25

The public, in all this, are the victims of a confluence — the engine and the operators meeting over their heads — not its authors. Deprivation is what makes a place receptive to the fear, not what demands it: the anxiety is real, but the target is handed to it. Fed, not foolish; not to be absolved of the vote, but not to be blamed for the machine.26

2016: the lights go out

Then, around 2016, the thing that had always made the bias survivable disappeared. The press baron’s agenda was at least legible — you knew who owned the Mail and what it wanted. The algorithmic feed is a black box. The bias did not end; it went from contestable to hidden, dressed as a neutral machine that merely shows you ‘what you engage with’. This is the hinge, and the heart of it: the point at which Britain lost the ability to see, and so to argue with, the thing shaping what it feared.27

Each dot is a platform's shift to an engagement-ranked feed. The 2016 cluster (Instagram, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook reactions) is the crest; TikTok's all-algorithmic ‘For You’ (2018) is the deepest change. — Source: Kyle Chayka, ‘Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture’ (2024)

It is worth being concrete about what an algorithmic feed does, because it is treated as a neutral pipe and it is nothing of the kind. On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X the mechanism is the same.

How the feed actually works
  1. It watches what you stop scrolling for — what you linger on, react to, share, argue with.
  2. It builds a model of what holds your attention, and of what holds people like you.
  3. It serves you more of that, and less of everything else, ranked by predicted engagement.
  4. Nothing in the loop measures whether a thing is true, or fair, or good for you — only whether you keep watching.
  5. The material that most reliably stops the thumb is the material that provokes: outrage, fear, contempt.

The feed optimises for engagement, and radicalisation is what engagement looks like once the most engaging material is the most extreme. No one at the company chooses it. The profit function does.

And the press baron returned, in a new form. Some platforms became accidental barons, optimising for engagement with no editor in the loop. One was taken on purpose: Elon Musk bought the platform, reinstated some twelve thousand banned accounts, and personally restored Tommy Robinson. The man an open society had pushed out walked back through a door the new owner held open.6,28

And the machine does not amplify evenly. On Twitter’s own data — its internal audit, published in PNAS — the algorithmic feed amplified the mainstream political right more than the left in six of the seven countries studied, by as much as two hundred per cent. The mechanism has no politics; it has a profit function, and the content that maximises engagement is fear, which is the right’s native register. A neutral machine, a directional result — the hidden bias, made measurable.29,30,31

Twitter's own randomized experiment: in six of the seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoyed higher algorithmic amplification than the left. Exact figures published for two: UK Conservatives +176% vs Labour +112%; Canada Conservatives +167% vs Liberals +43%. — Source: Huszár et al. 2022, PNAS — Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter
In six of the seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.Huszár et al., Twitter’s own internal audit · PNAS, 2022

The ceiling is gone

Which is why the prediction writes itself. Every previous figure in this lineage hit a ceiling because the bias was contestable — the open society could see them coming and close ranks. The black box removed the openness, and with it the ceiling. Tommy Robinson, once banned, was viewed five hundred and eighty million times during the Southport riots and now earns the platform millions a year. The far right that used to swell and collapse may not collapse this time. There is no longer a mechanism that makes it.7,28,33

Population-weighted far-right vote share across 31 countries. A genuine break at 2016: the climb steepens ~6× (+0.18 → +1.02 pp/year). — Source: The PopuList 4.0 (far-right party classification) · ParlGov (election vote shares)

This is the democratic deficit, and it is worse than a biased press, because a biased press could be answered. An electorate that forms its fears inside a black box — decoupled from reality, tilted toward one pole — is being managed. The country can no longer see what it is fighting. That, not the boats, is the emergency.

The threshold has collapsed. A political party, or a cause, no longer needs to build one big channel and drag it to critical mass. It can spin up a hundred small ones — each cheap, each disposable — and let the feed do the sorting, pushing each fragment to precisely the people most receptive to it, in a way that is opaque almost by design.

This is why “I heard it on social media” has become one of the most common sentences in the country: not a source anyone can name, a diffuse pressure with no address. And it is not a problem confined to immigration, or to the hard right countering demonstrably false narratives. The same machinery carries climate denial, anti-vaccine claims, every manufactured doubt. What propagates now is worse than a lie: it is an UNCONTESTABLE one — a claim delivered to each person privately, tuned to what they already fear, in a feed no one else can see, with no shared public square in which it can be answered. A lie you can all see can be argued down. A lie tailored to a million private audiences cannot. That is the democratic deficit, stated exactly.

A current case in point

The panic traced above is so old it reads like weather. A newer one is being seeded right now, on a subject most of Britain has never thought to worry about — and because it is young, the wiring is still exposed.

In the summer of 2026, Rupert Lowe — the MP who broke from Reform to found Restore Britain — went on Joe Rogan's show and told one of the largest audiences on earth that the British state had disarmed its citizens and frightened them into submission: that an ordinary person could no longer defend his own home. That single appearance made him, in the judgement of seasoned political journalists, one of the most globally influential British politicians alive.34,35

That clip is only the seed. What spreads it is a second tier: smaller channels that re-cut the appearance into bite-sized outrage and repost it under their own mastheads. Between them, the channels carrying this frame reach a combined audience of roughly 1.4 million subscribers — the number of people they can put it in front of within a day, entirely separately from Rogan's own reach. It is the same machine, working in miniature and in real time.

Views on YouTube clips re-cutting Rupert Lowe's self-defence / castle-doctrine proposals (legal pepper spray, a right to defend your home, a 'British 2nd amendment') and his own firearms confiscation. The frame originates with his Joe Rogan appearance (#2524, ~1.5M views for the full episode, of which self-defence is one segment). Snapshot, 7 July 2026. — Source: YouTube view counts (podscribe /search/youtube, yt-dlp)
They love conflict, they love divisiveness, they love saying things which are just instantly shared.The News Agents, 9 July 2026

The manufacture works on a single fact. On Rogan, Lowe explained the handgun ban as the state's answer to ‘a murder’ at Dunblane — a lone crime met with a sweeping ban. What happened at Dunblane in 1996 was that a man walked into a primary school and shot dead sixteen five- and six-year-old children and their teacher before turning the gun on himself. The ban that followed was, across every party, profoundly popular, and it has not been seriously contested since. Nothing here was invented; a fact was shrunk — a massacre of children reduced to ‘a murder’, so that a settled law no one is fighting could be dressed up as tyranny.34,37,38

The question the frame dodges is who it is for. Not a British public that closed this argument a generation ago and has not asked to reopen it. It is aimed outward — at the audience Joe Rogan reaches, Americans primed by their own gun politics to hear ‘a disarmed people’ as proof of tyranny, in a country that pays for the alternative with fifty to sixty thousand gun deaths a year. Here Britain is the subject, not the market: a nation held up to enrage foreigners, in the hope the anger washes back as a movement at home. It is the same machine these pages have traced, pointed the other way — and the version that runs in our own direction, a foreign subject manufactured to enrage us here, is what this whole piece has documented. The frame is still young enough that the wiring shows. Most seeded frames die; if this one takes, in five years it will feel as though the country always worried about it. Consider it the before-photograph we are rarely lucky enough to get.35,39

The editor with no name

There is a name for an outlet that decides which voices are heard and which are buried. It is a publisher. The bargain that gave platforms their immunity rested on the opposite claim — that they were mere conduits, carrying speech with no editorial hand on the scale. The audit breaks that claim. A system that consistently lifts one side over the other is exercising editorial judgement, whatever its engineers intended.32

There is precedent for grappling with exactly this, and it cuts both ways across the Atlantic. In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act grants platforms immunity from liability for what their users post — the legal fiction that they are mere conduits rather than publishers is the foundation the whole industry rests on, and it is now under sustained attack from both parties, with senators moving to sunset it outright. Britain took a different route: the Online Safety Act 2023 makes Ofcom the regulator and requires it to convene an advisory committee on mis- and disinformation, and Downing Street now routinely points to Ofcom when pressed on incitement online. Neither settlement has resolved the question underneath — whether an algorithm that ranks and boosts is a publisher exercising editorial judgement — but both concede it is a question the state can no longer duck.40,41

We cannot prove intent, and for this argument we do not need to. Intent is a question for a courtroom; the pattern is a question for a democracy, and the pattern is plain. When the ranking favours the same pole in six of seven countries, the platform is editing. If it is editing, the conduit defence falls away — and with it the case for treating these companies as neutral pipes.

And this editor is worse than any press baron, for one reason: you cannot see him. Rothermere put his name on the masthead, and his readers could discount him accordingly. This hand is invisible — no byline, no front page, no way to audit the choice as it is being made. Ofcom cannot check a feed tuned in real time to hundreds of millions of people, one timeline at a time; nor can any government, nor the reader scrolling it. A biased press can be answered. A black box that quietly reinstates twelve thousand banned accounts and boosts the loudest agitators answers to no one.6

That is the democratic case for regulation, and it is a narrow one. It does not ask the state to decide what may be said. It asks only for sight: that the editorial hand be made visible, that we be allowed to see how it weighs the scales, and that it answer to the same account any other publisher has always faced. The alternative is the arrangement we already live inside — an unaccountable editor, shaping what a country fears, with no one able to check the work.

Notes

  1. UK Public Opinion toward Immigration: Overall Attitudes and Level of Concern — migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk ↗
  2. Hard Evidence: how areas with low immigration voted mainly for Brexit — theconversation.com ↗
  3. Revealed: The Extent of the Daily Mail’s Support for the British Union of Fascists — thelondoneconomic.com ↗
  4. Seeking Scapegoats - Greenslade 2005
  5. Seeking Scapegoats - Greenslade 2005
  6. X ran ads on five accounts pushing lies and hate during UK riots — counterhate.com ↗
  7. UK: X’s design and policy choices created fertile ground for inflammatory, racist narratives targeting Muslims and migrants following Southport attack — amnesty.org ↗
  8. 2023 report: Who Owns the UK Media? — mediareform.org.uk ↗
  9. Revealed: The Extent of the Daily Mail’s Support for the British Union of Fascists — thelondoneconomic.com ↗
  10. Revealed: The Extent of the Daily Mail’s Support for the British Union of Fascists — thelondoneconomic.com ↗
  11. Revealed: The Extent of the Daily Mail’s Support for the British Union of Fascists — thelondoneconomic.com ↗
  12. Seeking Scapegoats - Greenslade 2005
  13. Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right
  14. Social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms — publications.parliament.uk ↗
  15. Social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms — publications.parliament.uk ↗
  16. Negativity drives online news consumption — nature.com ↗
  17. European media discourse on immigration - Eberl et al 2018
  18. Minority Rule
  19. Minority Rule
  20. Minority Rule
  21. David Lammy says he told JD Vance his Henry Nowak comments were 'wrong' — BBC News ↗
  22. French police authorised to use water cannon on asylum seekers in £660m deal with UK — The Guardian ↗
  23. French police authorised to use water cannon on asylum seekers in £660m deal with UK — The Guardian ↗
  24. Child Poverty and Homelessness: Asylum and Settlement Policies
  25. Rwanda scheme has already cost taxpayers £700 million, Cooper reveals — barkinganddagenhampost.co.uk ↗
  26. Hard Evidence: how areas with low immigration voted mainly for Brexit — theconversation.com ↗
  27. Hostile Environment
  28. UK: X’s design and policy choices created fertile ground for inflammatory, racist narratives targeting Muslims and migrants following Southport attack — amnesty.org ↗
  29. pnas_epmc
  30. pnas_epmc
  31. pnas_epmc
  32. huszar2022
  33. Musk’s X helps Tommy Robinson rack up 434 million views during UK riots — Center for Countering Digital Hate — counterhate.com ↗
  34. The News Agents — Is Nigel Farage's career unravelling before our eyes (2026-07-09) — YouTube ↗
  35. The News Agents — Is Nigel Farage's career unravelling before our eyes (2026-07-09) — YouTube ↗
  36. The News Agents — Is Nigel Farage's career unravelling before our eyes (2026-07-09) — YouTube ↗
  37. The News Agents — Is Nigel Farage's career unravelling before our eyes (2026-07-09) — YouTube ↗
  38. The News Agents — Is Nigel Farage's career unravelling before our eyes (2026-07-09) — YouTube ↗
  39. The News Agents — Is Nigel Farage's career unravelling before our eyes (2026-07-09) — YouTube ↗
  40. Online Safety Act: explainer — gov.uk ↗
  41. Make platforms that promote violent content pay towards riot costs, Streeting says — The Guardian ↗

Sources

Books

  • Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right
  • Child Poverty and Homelessness: Asylum and Settlement Policies
  • European media discourse on immigration - Eberl et al 2018
  • Hostile Environment
  • Minority Rule
  • Seeking Scapegoats - Greenslade 2005
  • huszar2022
  • pnas_epmc

Reporting & data