Backing Manchester United co-owner Jim Ratcliffe for his comments attacking immigrants last week, Reform leader Nigel Farage said that “one million people living in this country don’t speak any English at all”, which seems like a huge figure. But is it true?
No, is the answer to that (or nie, nu or ਨਹੀਂ, if you prefer). Farage cited the most recent census in 2021. But that showed that only 161,000 people – or 0.3 per cent of the population of England and Wales – could not speak English at all, not one million.
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Some 880,000 people, 1.5 per cent of the population, reported that they could not speak English well (it is unclear if this includes Lee Anderson). Adding these two figures together, as Farage appears to have done, does get you to just over one million – but that is not the total number of people who do not speak English at all.
Still, facts appear to matter increasingly little to the hard right. Farage was backing Ratcliffe over his comments that immigrants were “colonising” Britain – comments the businessman justified by claiming that the UK population had increased by an incredible 12 million since 2020. In fact, that figure was just 2.7 million.
Ratcliffe’s rant came shortly after Manchester United started their Premier League game at West Ham with an XI including two Brazilians, two Portuguese, a Belgian, an Argentine, an Ivorian and a French-born Cameroon international.
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