The Cause of England’s auto-immune disease: The Public Order Act (1986)

Entering Britain, and never leaving, is at an all-time high. The Home Office grants refugee status and (failing that) humanitarian protection under Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) all too liberally, with 67,978 applications granted in 2024. One way to achieve this is to enter the country illegally, suggest that you have lost your passport and claim to hail from a nation which will torture, or execute you for a crime if returned; a favourite pick for this is Iraq. You might also have tried the Ukraine Family Scheme, which, as ruled by Judge Norton-Taylor, did not require you to be a Ukrainian family. The magic-8-ball of the ECHR will always generate a reason for your permanent stay.

If you would prefer to enter by a more legitimate route, at time of writing, the UK’s "Skilled Worker" visa salary threshold is set at less than the UK average wage. Alternatively, The Health and Care visas, expanded in 2021, included unskilled care worker at an entry level, and allowed unlimited dependants. The Home Office does not proactively seek out those whose visas have expired, and, has no idea where 40% of them are. According to the National Audit Office, they do not appear know how such visas even work.

If you chose the refugee route, rest assured, two-thirds of refugees go on to obtain settlement within 7 years, with the vast majority (93%) having obtained some form of indefinite leave to remain (ILR) after 10 years bygovernment admission. If you are going for the visa route, provided you can stomach 5 years of unskilled care work without being dismissed, you will be granted ILR.

Between 742,000 and 1,224,000 migrants from the post 2020 wave will gain access to Indefinite Leave To Remain (ILR) very soon; that means access to benefits, social housing and the NHS – tantamount to citizenship– costing an estimated £234 billion, equal to 6 years defence spending.

Essentially, the economic argument for immigration has collapsed. To put this into perspective, only 5% of visas issued between 2022–2023 went to immigrants likely to be net tax contributors. The OBR estimates a low-skilled migrant will cost taxpayers £465,000 by age 81. Even high earners contribute only £1 in tax for every £1.60 taken by dependents. Since 2019, 3.3 million foreign nationals have qualified for state benefits, with 50,000 gaining eligibility for Universal Credit each month.

ILR is costly, as Sam Bidwell highlighted, but the root cause—mass migration from the Global South—remains unaddressed. The 2021 Census shows high economic inactivity among Arabs (48%), Bangladeshis (42.1%), and Pakistanis (40.8%) in Britain. White British people are now a minority in London (36.8%), and 47.6% of London social housing residents there were born abroad. Yet, the media rarely addresses these realities, even routinely obscuring details relating to ethnicity in the reporting of crime, as here. JD Vance put it well: “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat” – and – “there is nothing more urgent than mass migration”, which in Britain has reached numbers close to 1 million per year. Our inability to discuss the ethnic origin of entrants is not a conspiracy, it is a function of identifiable laws leading to identifiable outcomes.

To understand our aversion to discussing mass migration in detail, one needs to understand that The Public Order Act 1986 (“The POA”) threatens to make discussing ethnic origin in any way that is not wholly positive a criminal offence. This applies to Individuals, our press, all public bodies and all sizeable private bodies of scale alike.

For your speech to become an offence under The POA, it is required that an imagined person might be “stirred” to hatred by your statement. Whether that statement is intended for, seen by another person, or has any impact, is immaterial. The POA invites police to take part in the imaginative exercise of creating criminals, with overuse in the realm of digital communications, as I argued here. One such case involved Lee Dunn, who posted three images of what were clearly supposed to be illegal Islamic migrants with variants of the caption “coming to a town near you”. Mr Dunn was handed a 12 week custodial sentence, despite describing the government’s guidance (since 2021) on refugee resettlement, found here at page 8. For those charged under the POA, their crime is failing to express views in a middle-class way. When sentencing such guilty pleas, Judges appear delighted to lay-thick allegations of bigotry, as though it were a criminal offence. Falling short of satisfying the criteria for criminality, your speech may still be recorded on your police record as a non-crime hate incident – as Telegraph Journalist Allison Pearson discovered in 2024.

A cursory look at the bodies which regulate the press shows us why it painstakingly avoids frank discussions of reality. Britain’s broadcasting regulator (Ofcom) introduced its Broadcasting Code in 2005 and strengthened it further in 2016. This code bakes The POA, and avoidance of liability under it, directly into broadcast media in Section Three. The (voluntary) Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), created in 2014, takes the same approach in relation to print media, specifically in Clause 12. Both regulators threaten criminal liability and urge that you do not mention ethnicity where possible.

Similarly, our police have gradually stopped recording ethnicity for criminal offences over the passing 15 years of six-figure net migration. Supposedly, in fear of being called racist. Just recently, the Metropolitan Police suspended the elected Chairman of the Met Police Federation, PC Rick Prior, for discussing the difficult job of policing newly-imported minority communities. Mr Prior raised this in the very federation established to handle such policing concerns, as the FSU reported here.

The Home Office prefers the term “Irregular Migration” to describe illegal crossings of the channel and MPs who request information from government departments on the ethnicity of universal credit recipients, early prison release and illegal-re-entry following deportation are stonewalled by government departments, or, informed this data is not held. In the case of Rupert Lowe MP – they are relieved of the whip by their party and vexatiously reported to police.

The Sentencing Council’s plans to implement David Lammy’s recommendations that minority status ought to be considered as a mitigating factor, reducing criminal sentences, is perhaps the most shocking example of our constant out-group preference, backed in law, but not by the public. These changes were due to be implemented on April 1^st 2025, fittingly.

To any observer, England’s institutions appear to be having an auto-immune response against the Englishman while routinely refusing to acknowledge our legal & illegal migration crisis. The alarm bells are ringing out, yet we are told that it is merely a drill – anyone who suggests otherwise is denied their place in public life is threatened with criminal action or dismissal.

When one considers the combined duties placed on organisations by the POA, Equality Act (2010) and Human Rights Act (1998) we can see why nobody is answering the alarm. Institutions are obliged not to, their ignorance is compelled by law. To save England from this auto-immune disease, laws such as these must be repealed en masse.