The United Kingdom’s Labour government has been in power for well over a year, yet still reached for the easy way out of blaming the previous Tory government in the face of more embarrassing immigration figures published Thursday.
The number of migrants claiming asylum in the United Kingdom is at record levels, is up 14 per cent in a year, and has near doubled since the beginning of this decade, new figures released by the Home Office on Thursday reveal. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called the figures a “disaster” for the government and linked soaring numbers of arrivals to public safety concerns.
The asylum claim numbers are just one of dozens of data points in the quarterly release from the state, almost all of which are bad for a government which told the public in the run up to the General Election that swept it to power last year that it would “smash the gangs” to end people smuggling to British shores.
Also in the release is the revelation that the number of Asylum seekers living in hotels at the expense of the taxpayer in June 2025 is up eight per cent from the same period last year. So-called irregular arrivals, what was once called illegal migrants before a politically correct re-brand, are up 27 per cent in a year and small boat arrivals — the largest part of detected irregular arrivals — is up 38 per cent this year.
As previously reported, the number of boat migrants since the Labour Party took power last year is now over 50,000. Remarkably, this means the number of people coming to the UK by boat illegally now is not far different from the annual net migration, legal and illegal, that came to the United Kingdom in total during the mid-1990s.
Despite being roundly condemned from the right, the Labour government and its helpers in the media attempted to spin some good out of the figures. The government noted, for instance, that the number of humanitarian visa arrivals was shown to have fallen considerably. Yet the major part of this scheme has been for refugees from Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan, all events which are now long past, like the beginning of the Ukraine War and the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan, so numbers would naturally reduce with time.
More damning still is the fact that chain migration — the importing of family members of humanitarian migrants already in the UK — has risen to the highest level on record and is now 30 per cent higher than last year, the Home Office figures show.
The BBC also provided covering fire in their reportage, pointing to the number of hotel migrants and migrants in taxpayer-funded rented private homes not having increased as fast as asylum arrivals, noting this means the government policy of “processing claims more quickly” is “working”, even if this merely means migrants are being shunted into society to get them off the books with less time spent on background checks and other verification.
Also presented as a positive is the falling bill for paying for the asylum system, including the cost of migrant hotels and homes but not the operation to bring them ashore with government ships in the English Channel, which is down 12 per cent this past year to £4.76 billion. Yet this is still three times the cost for running the asylum system that UK taxpayers footed at the start of this decade.
But most impressive, perhaps, are figures showing that the total number of all migrants, legal and illegal, is down 30 per cent over the previous 12 months, mostly down to the number of work visas being issued being cut in half. In the past migration figures have sometimes been pretty aggressively revised upwards months and years after initial release, but for now the government could count this as a win.
Responding to the figures today, The Conservatives’ Kemi Badenoch — who de jure leads a party desperately trying to shed the shame of its failures on migration over its past 14 years in government — went big on criticising the new Labour government for blaming the Conservatives for what is happening to the country. She wrote on Thursday: “Labour say the number of asylum hotels has halved. What they aren’t saying is all of that cut happened before the general election last year.
“If Labour had continued on that trajectory, there would be no asylum hotels today. Instead, progress has stopped. The number of asylum hotels has remained constant, the number of small boat arrivals has hit record highs, and they voted against our Deportation Bill that would bring in a proper deterrent and ensure we deported illegal arrivals asap.”
Reform UK leader and Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage, who has been parrying bids by the Conservatives to outflank him on migration for weeks, also spoke out on the migration figures. He wrote: “New figures out today show record numbers claiming asylum under Labour. Our streets are becoming more dangerous yet this disaster only gets worse.
“The public are right to be very angry with this government.”
The new suite of statistics comes as migration concern hits fever-pitch in the United Kingdom, with weeks-long protests taking place in towns across the country over the summer in reaction to the government’s migrant hotels policy. Another tranche of figures released earlier this month revealed unemployed migrants had hit a new record high in the UK, while a recent poll found a plurality of Britons back both ‘zero migration’ and large-scale deportations.
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