• This article explores Nigel Farage’s outrageous claims about foreign nationals.
• It investigates the CMC report.
“An Afghan male has a 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape more than somebody born in this country,” Nigel Farage said during his campaign launch this summer.
Farage also claimed that, “40% of sexual assaults in London over the course of the last five years have been committed by those born overseas”.
Increasingly, we encounter a recurring conviction: that certain immigrant groups (never all, ironically never the Indian Hindus). But select communities, embody profoundly different cultural orientations that “distort their morality.”
That they resist assimilation into British society. This in essence, makes these particular groups of Muslim immigrants, carry with them, values that are fundamentally irreconcilable with British values, the narrative says loudly.
This perception emerges in many ways. Through rhetoric overheard in public and through grossly distorted, manipulative and sensationalised headlines.
But facts don’t care about your feelings as Shapiro once told us.
This article shall examine the statistics referred to by Robert Jenrick and Farage. Together, we shall confront the question in its starkest form: is British culture under siege?
The claim is frequently distilled into a single aphorism: multiculturalism has failed. We are, it is said, living under a pernicious illusion. The fiction that a multicultural society is sustainable. I have heard this line repeated endlessly. The narrative propelled, implicit but clear, is that some cultures are superior than others, namely the British way of life.
To unpick this belief, we must descend into its most sinister stratum. Sexual assault.
Consider a recent example. Let’s dissect Farage’s claim that 40 percent of all sexual assaults in London over the last five years were committed by individuals born overseas. His statement was blunt. Certain cultural groups, he said, endanger society by their very presence. Conservative politician Robert Jenrick echoed the point. He claimed that 40 percent of those charged with sexual crimes in London were foreign nationals. “Immigration,” he proclaimed, “is fuelling crime, particularly sexual crime across our country. We must put a stop to it,” he said.
If those figures were accurate, the conclusion would seem undeniable. If a particular group commits sexual assaults at higher rates, then excluding them from entry might appear both completely rational and completely necessary. However, before accepting such a premise, one must interrogate the provenance of the statistic. Where did it originate?
The claim traces back to the Centre for Migration Control, or CMC. Their report alleged that up to 47 percent of sexual assaults in London were committed by foreign nationals, even though they comprise only a quarter of the city’s population. Media outlets disseminated this figure without scrutiny. At first glance, it appears staggering, almost implausibly so.
How did the CMC produce it? By submitting a Freedom of Information request to the police.
The data they received suggested that British citizens committed 2.2 offences per 10,000 people, while Afghans committed 74.17 per 10,000. The number is extraordinary. But its construction collapses under inspection.
In their blog post, the CMC included the FOI data, but with a crucial omission. A large section had been deleted. The unredacted version, still accessible online, reveals what they excised: explanatory notes. The notes clarify that “the number of custody records does not equal the number of individuals. For example, an individual may be arrested twice within the time period. Some people would have been arrested and not found guilty.”
The implications are profound. If one man were arrested ten times, each incident was tallied as though it were committed by ten distinct offenders. That vital qualification was deliberately stripped away. The CMC ignored it, treating every entry as a unique perpetrator.
Their manipulation did not stop there. To calculate per capita rates, they required the Afghan population of London. Their report claimed it was 12,000. This figure was fabricated. The CMC admitted as much, acknowledging they simply “made it up” because they lacked data.
But reliable figures exist. According to the 2021 census, the UK is home to approximately 85,000 Afghans with 56 percent living in London. That places the capital’s Afghan population at roughly 47,000. With this denominator, the supposed rate plummets from 74 per 10,000 to around two or three per 10,000. Almost identical to the British rate.
Thus the CMC’s report disintegrates. It is pseudoscience, not scholarship. However, it has been endlessly repeated. Farage invoked it. Media outlets parroted it.
And slowly, insidiously, it embeds itself in public consciousness. It becomes part of the scaffolding of belief, reinforcing the suspicion that certain cultures are intrinsically more criminal.
One might imagine that such an egregious error would prompt correction. That the CMC would retract the report, issue an apology, and pledge methodological rigor. Instead, they doubled down. They released further reports, each employing the same alchemy of selective data, baseless assumptions, and outright invention.
In one sequel, they claimed Afghans and Eritreans in Britain are twenty times more likely to commit sex crimes than British nationals. Once again, Farage repeated it. Jenrick repeated it. The CMC declared that an Afghan male was twenty-two times more likely to be convicted of rape than someone born in Britain.
Their method was identical. They used a fictitious population figure of 13,000 Afghans. If we replace that with the true estimate, 85,000, or even 116,000 by some counts, the multiplier collapses. Not twenty-two times.
So the crucial question lingers in the minds of many upstanding british citizens due to this grossly distorted narrative. Is there any truth to Afghans being more likely to commit sexual assault than British citizens because of their background? Are Muslim men more likely to commit sexual assault because of “their culture” and/or their “misogynistic attitudes towards women,” as claimed by Jenrick. Let’s kick start this segment by taking a closer ook at the issues surrounding sexual harassment in London.
A YouGov survey on harassment in London’s public transport found that 55% of women and 21% of men reported experiencing some form of unwanted sexual behaviour, meaning around 39% of Londoners overall have faced such incidents. It must be noted that 54% of Londoners are Caucasian. The most common forms for women included strangers pressing against them (37%), staring at their breasts (29%), sexual comments (22%), unwanted touching like a hand on the lower back (21%) or buttocks-pinching (19%), with more severe cases involving flashing (12%) and requests for sexual favours (8%). The Tube was the most common setting (64% of cases), followed by buses (38%) and trains (31%).
And then there’s the nightlife scene. Harassment in nightlife settings has been highlighted both through campaigns and academic studies. A well-known awareness project called “The Dress for Respect”(2018) fitted a figure-hugging dress with sensors, which three women then wore; in less than four hours, they were touched 157 times. It cited survey data that 86% of Brazilian women reported harassment in nightclubs. While this was an advertising initiative rather than formal research, peer-reviewed studies confirm the issue: work by Sanchez et al. and Fung et al. shows that unwanted sexual contact, such as groping or forced kissing, is common in São Paulo night clubs, and that the atmosphere of the nightclub such as crowding and music style increase risk. Together, both the campaign and the scientific research point to the widespread and systemic nature of harassment in nightclubs in general.
In 2022, a Sky News documentary revealed how numerous fashion models had been “groomed, raped and sold by their agents” in Europe.
Furthermore, a Guardian article cited a Home Office report in 2020 concluded that most child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men.
The Guardian article reads:
The report, which covers England, Scotland and Wales and summarises a range of studies on the issue of group-based child sexual exploitation (CSE), also known as grooming gangs, said there was not enough evidence to conclude that child sexual abuse gangs were disproportionately made up of Asian offenders.
High-profile cases including in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford have involved groups of men of mainly Pakistani ethnicity, fuelling a perception that it is an “Asian problem”.
As the Office for National Statistics reports, White British people make up 83% of the population but represent 88% of perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Pakistanis, 2% of the population and 2% of offenders.
Ella Cockbain’s investigative report on grooming gangs was published by The Guardian. She writes:
The Times' portrayal of 'grooming' as a distinct and racialised crime threat rests on 'misconceptions, anecdote, opinion and the deliberate manipulation of limited statistics of dubious provenance'. The coverage proved inflammatory and has set the news agenda in the last decade since. The journalist behind the story was correspondent Andrew Norfolk. Norfolk was soon after promoted to Chief Investigative Reporter for 'The Times.'
A defining characteristic of the “Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs” is the lack of religiosity of its members. These individuals engage in deplorable crimes that not only betray the core principles of Islam but are explicitly prohibited under Shariah. For instance, the oppression of another human being is a grave sin. In fact, according to Shari’ah, in the cases of Rotherham for instance, such actions would merit capital punishment. Far from embodying the ideals of Islam or serving as moral exemplars, these individuals are a stark contrast to the values upheld by Islam. They are neither paragons of religious virtue nor upstanding citizens, nor do they belong in the ranks of scholars, clerics or religious leaders. Moreover, in 2013, Imams across the country strongly condemned the actions of these individuals:
Sexual assault is a grave violation that transcend race, background, or status. Accountability must be universal because everyone deserves safety, dignity, and justice. The facts surrounding these issues should never be manipulated to serve a political agenda; the focus must remain on truth and protecting victims.
