Anti-immigrant Protesters Have Been Targeting the Royal National Institute for the Blind

There is something almost surreal about the latest episode in the escalating campaign against charities associated, correctly or otherwise, with the rescue of people crossing the English Channel.

Anti-immigrant protesters have been directing abuse at the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the RNIB, apparently because they have confused it with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the RNLI.

It is difficult to imagine a more basic factual error.

The RNIB is a blindness charity. It campaigns for and supports blind and partially sighted people. It does not operate lifeboats. It does not patrol the English Channel. It does not rescue people from dinghies. It does not transport asylum seekers to Britain.

The RNLI does.

And even the accusations directed at the RNLI have repeatedly contained serious misunderstandings about what the organisation actually does.

The RNLI is a lifesaving charity. Its crews respond when people are in danger at sea, irrespective of nationality, immigration status or political opinion. The charity says that only 1.2% of its launches in 2025 were to small boats in the Channel, while 94.3% of people crossing the Channel in small boats were assisted by other agencies such as Border Force.

Yet protesters have accused RNLI volunteers of being “traitors”, claimed the charity is somehow facilitating illegal immigration and spread baseless claims that it houses asylum seekers or transports them around Britain. The RNLI has described the recent protests as generating “deliberate misinformation and a misunderstanding” about its role.

Now the misunderstanding has apparently reached a new level: attacking the RNIB because its initials look vaguely similar to RNLI.

The RNIB itself has been forced to explain the distinction, telling confused critics: “We’re the Royal National Institute of Blind People, not the lifeboat people.” It has also pointed out, with considerable understatement, that it does not own a single lifeboat.

There is an uncomfortable historical echo here.

In 2000, during the hysteria surrounding campaigns to identify alleged paedophiles, Dr Yvette Cloete, a paediatrician at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, became the victim of vigilante abuse after people apparently confused the word “paediatrician” with “paedophile”.

Her home was daubed with the word “paedo” and she was forced to leave her home. Gwent police explicitly said the attack appeared to have resulted from confusion between the two words and condemned what had happened.

The comparison is not that the two campaigns are identical. It is that both demonstrate the potentially frightening consequences when outrage outruns knowledge.

The RNIB episode provides an almost textbook example of what happens when people decide who the enemy is before establishing what the organisation actually does.

There are, of course, legitimate political disagreements about immigration, asylum policy, border control and the Government’s handling of Channel crossings. People are entitled to argue passionately about all of them.

But political protest does not suspend the requirement to identify your target correctly.

Nor does anger turn a blindness charity into a maritime rescue organisation.

The catalogue of errors is therefore extraordinary: wrong charity; wrong initials; wrong function; wrong allegations; wrong understanding of the RNLI’s legal and operational role; and, in some cases, wrong individuals being identified online.

The latter is particularly serious. BBC Verify reported that an RNLI volunteer targeted after the Portsmouth protests was wrongly identified online, with posts calling for people to “name and shame” crew members receiving millions of views.

This is no longer merely embarrassing.

When people with no connection to an alleged political grievance become targets because someone has failed to check the facts, the consequences can be very real.

The lesson should be painfully simple: before accusing somebody, establish who they are, what they do and whether the allegation is actually true.

It should not be too much to ask.

Even in the heat of a political argument, basic literacy, basic research and basic human decency remain useful.