The editor of the Times, Tony Gallagher, used to edit the Daily Telegraph – and sometimes he makes that fact extremely obvious. This was particularly true of the paper’s front-page splash on Friday, August 1, which read “1 in 8 of all prisoners were born overseas”.
To briefly dispense with what’s good about that headline, it is at least true. But it’s not very interesting, or at least not for the reasons that Reform-curious voters might think. “1 in 8” people is around 12% of the population – but people born overseas make up 16% of the UK.
What that means is that in relative terms, people born overseas are less likely to be in jail than people born in the UK: immigrants are less likely to be criminals than the vaunted native-born population. In reality, the foreign-born population is also significantly younger than the population born here, and most criminal offences are committed by young people – so relative offending by foreign-born people is even lower than the headline number suggests.
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As the writer Adam Schwarz noted on Bluesky, people born overseas make up a much higher share of certain professions than they do of prisoners. One in two builders are born overseas, as is one in three doctors, one in five academics and one in six nurses.
But the Times may wish to be a little cautious about reminding its readership about the criminal behaviour of those born overseas. The newspaper once employed Boris Johnson – born in New York City – until it sacked him for dishonesty, only to go on and endorse him in the 2019 general election. Johnson then went on to admit a criminal offence while prime minister under Covid rules he himself passed.
Similarly, the Times’ beloved proprietor Rupert Murdoch was not born in the UK, and has a difficult history with criminality – not least due to his company’s well-documented failings during the phone hacking scandal, which saw multiple staffers jailed and which cost the company more than £1bn in compensation and legal fees to date.
