Please start by listening to Gary, who admits that he joined a riot in Middlesbrough based on believing two opposite notions at the same time. His argument was that 95% of all Black and Asian people are unstable trouble makers because ‘he read it on the internet’.
Then there are those, as Danel Lismore identifies, who keep saying migrants are the reason you cannot get a home.
Sit with the numbers for a second.
There are 242,000 people in England facing the worst forms of homelessness. Around 32,000 asylum seekers are in hotels. That is the figure they want you to picture. That is the image they repeat.
Now look at what they leave out.
There are 998,000 empty homes in England. Over 265,000 have been sitting empty long-term. Entire streets. Entire blocks. Locked up while people are told there is no space.
Then there is land. Not green fields. Not the last bits of nature left around towns. Brownfield land. Former industrial sites. Places already built on and abandoned. Reports show almost 1.5 million homes could be built there.
So the truth is uncomfortable for them.
This is not a shortage created by migrants. It is a system that leaves homes empty while people sleep in temporary accommodation. It is a choice to ignore brownfield land while threatening green space. It is a failure of policy, not an invasion of people.
The numbers do not support the story they are selling.
Every person in temporary housing and every asylum seeker in a hotel could be housed without touching a single piece of greenbelt. The capacity already exists. The land already exists. The homes already exist.
Blaming migrants is easier. It is louder. It gets headlines.
Fixing the system would require actually doing the work.
