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- [00:00]
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- [00:45]
Sherrell Dorsey
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- [01:23]
Freddie Sayers
Foreign. Welcome back to UnHerd. So the country is still reeling from the latest violent crime which took place on a train from Peterborough to London. It feels at least like they happen more than ever. There's also now this rather sinister ritual where the social media groups all gather into their gangs and start hoping or fearing that the identity of the suspect will fit into one of their preconceived narratives. It really feels like this question of the levels of violent crime and where it's coming from is one of the key political questions of the day. Well, one very senior journalist who is taking a very unique tack on this issue is Fraser Nelson. He is a columnist and at the Times, former editor of the Spectator, and he joins us in the studio to talk through the stats, the data, and let's basically take the time to have it out on what is the level of violent crime? Is it really going up? And who do we think that trend is coming from? Fraser, welcome to Unherd.
- [02:35]
Fraser Nelson
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- [03:23]
Freddie Sayers
So you published a piece which just lays out a whole bunch of charts and data sets about the levels of violent crime.
- [03:30]
Fraser Nelson
Yeah.
- [03:30]
Freddie Sayers
So I thought we should maybe start by just going through those, establish what the argument is. So, first of all, you've got NHS hospital data which shows basically a line that went up in the very late 90s and early 2000s, peaked around 2006, 2007, around 45, 000 assaults per year were reported into NHS hospitals. And that looks like it's basically been going gently down ever since. Last few years are hovering around 20,000. So by that you would think that violent crime is down by roughly a half since its peak in the early 2000s. Is that what we think the case is?
- [04:11]
Fraser Nelson
That's what we think the case is, yes. And I'll tell you why I went for the NHS data. There was a big debate about violent crime. You might remember during the summer, Nigel Farage did this Lawless Britain campaign where he basically was saying, it's out of control, migration's a factor, et cetera. And this was the big summer campaign. Now, when I saw this, I thought, this is very strange because this is the opposite of the truth. But we're on a strange environment now where on social media and certain other niches of the media, you can go pretty far with a narrative without really running the risk of being corrected or coming in contact with the facts. So I did a blog on my substack, basically saying, nigel Farage says violent crime is going up. In fact, if you look at the crime survey, it's going down. Now, he responded to that by having another press conference saying, Fraser Nelson talks about the crime survey. We don't believe the crime survey is right. So that's quite interesting. So you basically assert your narrative, crime is going up, mass migration is a factor, et cetera. And then you say, but I disbelieve the figure showing the opposite because of flaws in those figures. Now, of course, every data set has got flaws. We know that the crime survey is pretty robust. It's got something like 30,000 households are interviewed every single year. And it's designed to be comparable. It's designed to give us 20, 30 years of data so we can look at overall trends. But of course it's got flaws.
- [05:35]
Freddie Sayers
It was brought in by Margaret Thatcher's government.
- [05:37]
Fraser Nelson
Exactly. It was brought in there for a very important reason, that most crime is unreported. That's always been the case. What she wanted to do was to find out how much crime is there and what is there. So let's conduct the mother of all surveys. Tens of thousands of people asking everybody, have you been the victim of crime recently? And if so, what kind of crime that takes in everything from sexual assault to robbery to bicycle theft, all sorts of crime is recorded on this now. But if you basically say that the survey data is flawed because of flaws and you know, not enough, not the right people are not being consulted, it's a bit of a push, but you can still see the criticism there. So what else do you go to?
- [06:17]
Freddie Sayers
Well, just on that, let's just get a chart up. If you're watching on the YouTube, you can have a look at this, which you also put on this sub stack piece that shows the annual number of crimes compared to the immigrant population. This was one of the pieces of evidence you have to counter that claim you talked about.
- [06:35]
Fraser Nelson
But this is the total number of crimes by the crime survey of England and Wales and then the immigrant population, which by the way, pretty much almost trebles there. Now, when you look at that graph, it's difficult to say that Britain is in the grip of an immigrant driven crime wave.
- [06:51]
Freddie Sayers
I should just say for people listening on the podcast, what we're looking at is a chart with basically two lines that go in opposite directions. The immigrant population goes up from 2000, around about four and a half million, to north of 12 million or thereabouts in the most recent year. And surveyed crime comes down in exactly the opposite trajectory. It's almost eerie. Down from around 12 million a year to more like 4 million.
- [07:13]
Fraser Nelson
It's an X shape and it's really quite striking. Now, correlation is not causation, of course. It's not like the crime went down because the immigration went up. But what this shows is that immigration, or rather this isn't immigration, this is the total number of immigrants in the country that's going to up by probably more than what most people think. And yet the crime has gone down. So that to me puts to bed the idea of a migrant driven crime wave.
- [07:37]
Freddie Sayers
We will definitely come back, of course.
- [07:38]
Fraser Nelson
Absolutely right. But then we come back to the can you trust the crime survey. Is this all nonsense, as Nigel Farage was saying? So that's when I thought of looking up the NHS data. If you come with a stab wound that's recorded as being injured by a sharp object, you don't have to say, I was stabbed. You don't have to report a crime. What the doctors were going to register is we're treating this patient because they've been stabbed by a sharp object or by a blunt object or by assault. So a whole bunch of injuries are recorded year after year by the nhs. Now, this isn't about people reporting crime or not, because we know that most crime goes unrecorded. This isn't about people answering surveys or not. These are people who are treated by the nhs. Now, that is a rather hard metric when it comes to not all violent crime, because of course, a lot of violent crime never goes near a hospital. Most of it doesn't go near a hospital. But that which does. What is the trend that we can see? This isn't me as a journalist going over this. There is something called the Violence Research Unit at Cardiff University, a bunch of scholars who will look at every single metric, they will foi hospital data, they will look at police data, and they conclude in their 2025 report that the trend is violent crime going down significantly. But we don't see this because we don't take notice because of the various high profile like vitrosity we saw in the Huntington train. So the point is that you can search far and wide and you will not really find any scholarly dissent from the idea that violent crime has gone down quite significantly in Britain.
- [09:14]
Freddie Sayers
And yet if you post down social media, which you have, you will get an almighty pushback. People will think it's almost insulting because there is such a mood, that order has just degenerated, that crime is everywhere. And if you are kind of sounding Pollyanna ish that everything's okay, calm down dears, I've got some charts that show you, you know, the world's never been better. It seems to just piss people off to an extraordinary degree. Have you felt that?
- [09:42]
Fraser Nelson
Of course. I mean, this is one of the most annoying things anybody can say. There's never been a better time to be born, for example. That is an argument I would certainly make. But of course that very quickly gets translated into saying everything is great, there is no problems. What you're really trying to say is that what's going right is outweighing what's going wrong. Now, there is lots of crime going the wrong way. In Britain we can see snatch, theft, surging. Here in London, the theft of expensive watches is a particular problem. We can see shoplifting really skyrocketing. People go into shops and they say, hang on a minute, here's a leg of lamb which has got a security tab on it. This, to me, looks like a country where crime is out of control. And of course you think that that's.
- [10:23]
Freddie Sayers
Actually a really important point to just underline, which is that although violent crime, by your statistics is reliably coming down over the longer term, the kind of casual crime that people will notice and may be more likely to be victim of or at least know people who are victims of, such as phone snatching, witnessing, shoplifting. There's other charts we could look at here. Fair evasion, even dog bites, these kind of low level crimes or acts of public disorder that give you the sense that the country's going to the dogs.
- [10:57]
Fraser Nelson
Yes, and this is really important. We're talking here about the seen and the unseen. Now, you don't see fewer murders, you don't see fewer people getting beaten up. You only see it in the figures. But what you do see, absolutely, is shoplifting. You absolutely do see everyday items being locked up as if they're like watches. And that does. You do see. A friend of mine was telling me that his Sainsbury's order and comes in a security sort of tank box in case anybody steals it. So when you see that, you think, God, crime is out of control.
- [11:26]
Freddie Sayers
It sort of goes against your main narrative, though, that although violent crime may be coming down, crime in the sense of petty crime, disorder, the kinds of things that make you feel unsafe is on the up.
- [11:40]
Fraser Nelson
Look there, I'm saying there are certain crimes, the most conspicuous ones are on the up, but it is not just violent crime. And bicycle theft is going down and burglary is going down a lot. Radio There's a whole bunch of things and when you basically aggregate them all together, you get quite a significant downward trend. That's what we were discussing earlier on. But this wouldn't be seen or believed if they're visible. And by the way, let's take tube dodging. That doesn't really come up because it wouldn't come up in the crime survey. The crime survey just talks about crime against the person. I myself have suffered this crime or that crime. Shoplifting isn't included in that, for example, nor is fair evasion. Now, what we're seeing now is a situation where I think Mary Wakefield summed this up beautifully in one of her Magnificent columns of a Spectator. She wrote a few weeks ago about what it's like in Sadiq Khan's London. There she is living in North London and if you drive 22 miles an hour in a 20 zone, there are these 20 zones all over London. You will get busted, the cameras will catch you, you will be enforced. But she was saying, you get the gangsters driving down the road, behaving as if the law doesn't apply to them and there is no real. They're gone after. Now, this is something. So you're seeing this kind of dichotomy, the kind of hyper policing of, shall we say, the legally compliant, the people who are given a fine are likely to pay it. And this fine goes straight to the local authorities. Well, they make a lot of money out of this. But we've stopped going after certain people who are difficult now. The Fair Evaders, London. I found out recently, I was near work in London Bridge and there's a whole bunch of kids who were going through the fair gate, the gate without paying. And there were like, you didn't do.
- [13:17]
Freddie Sayers
A Robert Jenrick and arrested.
- [13:19]
Fraser Nelson
I was going to do the sort of Jenrick saying, stop there. Why didn't you pay for that ticket?
- [13:24]
Freddie Sayers
You didn't?
- [13:24]
Fraser Nelson
No, I didn't. No. I was just. I talked to the staff and I was saying, look, have you seen this? Have you seen. Are you aware of what's going on now? It turns out they're instructed not to chase the Fare Evaders. They don't like it. It kind of emasculates them in a way, because they don't like people. They can see customers thinking, why aren't you stopping this? But they've basically been told it's too dangerous, don't go after it, it's not their fault. These are orders that they're given.
- [13:48]
Freddie Sayers
So it sounds like you would actually go along with part of the narrative that you get from people like reform or the right of the Tory Party, which is that there is a kind of disorder that needs cracking down on. The police need to do better. And there was something approaching a two tier policing description.
- [14:05]
Fraser Nelson
Exactly what it is, a two tier.
- [14:06]
Freddie Sayers
Described in North London.
- [14:08]
Fraser Nelson
It is what Miri describes. And so the two tier is that the legally responsive are having the full weight of a law brought down upon them for a whole bunch of things. Where I live in Richmond, there is a woman who is busted for pouring coffee down a drain. She had three enforcement officers chasing her, telling her she was polluting what goes down the drain. And she was Prosecuted. And you think this in a. In a city where shoplifting is off the charts. That's because they go after the ones who will respond and they're shying away from the ones who are seeming more problematic. Now. That creates a perception of two tier of grave injustice and.
- [14:42]
Freddie Sayers
Well, it is two tier.
- [14:43]
Fraser Nelson
Well, of course it is two tier, yeah. And the two tier. This isn't anything to do with ethnicity or race. This is against legally responsive versus those who aren't legally responsive.
- [14:52]
Freddie Sayers
Let's talk about ethnicity and race. Because actually where this gets most political and most contested is the intersection of crime data with immigration data. There have been a few kind of studies or FOI requests or new pieces of data over the past year and a half that appear to show that certain ethnic groups, people arriving from particular countries, are much more likely to commit certain types of crimes than others. I believe Albanians came top of the league table in a recent study that took place earlier this year.
- [15:26]
Fraser Nelson
Compiled by.
- [15:27]
Freddie Sayers
This was compiled by, you might well say a politically motivated think tank called the Centre for Migration Control. This is based on FOI data from the Ministry of Justice.
- [15:39]
Fraser Nelson
Right, Interesting that. My point is, does that think tank exist? You described it. A think tank.
- [15:45]
Freddie Sayers
Well, what is it?
- [15:46]
Fraser Nelson
A bloke?
- [15:47]
Freddie Sayers
Many think tanks are basically one bloke.
- [15:49]
Fraser Nelson
No, not really. I think.
- [15:51]
Freddie Sayers
I don't think we can kind of, you know, exclude small outfits from publishing statistics.
- [15:57]
Fraser Nelson
Look, I think it is. Imagine, because this is a very interesting way that the media's done, right, that gets slipped out into Twitter as far as they can work out. And forgive me if I'm doing the center for Immigration, whatever, it is a disservice, but it was one guy who decides to rename himself the center for Immigration Control and put things out that look like a think tank and will be taken as if a proper research and repeated as if they are robust, when in fact it's not. It's just like a guy who might be normally anonymous on Twitter using out stuff.
- [16:26]
Freddie Sayers
We looked into this. It caused a huge amount of interest for obvious reasons, when these data points came out.
- [16:33]
Fraser Nelson
Because it says that certain groups are X times more likely to commit crime.
- [16:37]
Freddie Sayers
That's right. So the most famous claim was that an Afghan male has a 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape than somebody born in this country. That's a quote from Nigel Farage, because he took that statistic and talked from Twitter and that.
- [16:53]
Fraser Nelson
Sorry, from the. From the guy.
- [16:54]
Freddie Sayers
Yeah, from this report. Now, that study has been criticized. You may not even call it A study. It's an. It's a. It's a data dump from the Ministry of Justice that shows the number of convictions by different crimes and allocated to different ethnicities. So the underlying data is sound, it seems to me. Well, go on then. What was wrong with the original data set right there?
- [17:19]
Fraser Nelson
And it's a fascinating example of here. The original data set was Nefoi looking for the number of people, I think it was sexual offenses over the three year period. Now what I think was then done not by the home office or any official organization was to then try to get some population estimates which the error margin of there is absolutely huge when you come up with a ratio. And then you would do this. Now why is it that in the field of criminology this sort of thing isn't done properly? Why is it that criminologists don't talk of people being X times more likely to do this, that or the other? Now if you've been studying this, then you would recognize this is what the AfD used to do back in the day. This was a trope X times more likely to commit crime. But this of course would depend because you would then have to look compared to the right demographic. If you're going to do a ratio, you need to look at those beings found with a weapon as a ratio, not of a total population, but of those likely to be out in the streets of an evening. And when you do that, the difference is nowhere near as dark.
- [18:21]
Freddie Sayers
Now the difference is not as stark, but there is still a statistically difference significant. Well, let's just a little bit better.
- [18:28]
Fraser Nelson
The point is that if you know, Tom Calver at the Times did a similar exercise about immigrants and crime and you're saying that if you adjust for, you know, the criminally active population because you need to age just this thing, if you do that, then according to Tom Calvert calculations, the immigrants are less likely to commit crime than nationals. That was a result of his study.
- [18:47]
Freddie Sayers
Now I mean the criminally active population seems like a very.
- [18:50]
Fraser Nelson
Well, you need to age adjustment.
- [18:52]
Freddie Sayers
Strange comparative.
- [18:53]
Fraser Nelson
Well, not really. If you want to look at, look again and look at the guys who are basically done in the possession of a knife, et cetera. There is such a thing as age adjustment in criminology.
- [19:02]
Freddie Sayers
Age adjustment, yes. So as I understand it, the two main complaints against that I'm calling it a study is first that there was a bit of a discrepancy between the date of the original conviction data and the date of the population estimate. So it's possible there Are more Afghans here? Well, certain there are more Afghans here than there was at the time of the 2021 census and therefore the 22 times may be distorted. The other one is exactly the point you're making, which is age and gender. If you adjust for age and gender and adjust for the fact that many Afghan immigrants are younger and male, the ratio gets smaller still. But for example, Sky News did exactly this exercise and they came up with a ratio of one to three. They believe it's closer to three times as likely that if you are an Afghan immigrant, you will be convicted for a rape conviction compared to, to, by.
- [19:55]
Fraser Nelson
The way, the avoidance of doubt here. Can I say that it's not just my belief, but the official studies show that you get official studies into arrest ratios by ethnicity and you will see there that for ethnic minorities other than whites, there's a significantly bigger ratio and there has been for 15 years. So I'm not for a second saying that Afghans are not going to be overrepresented in these things. I'm pointing out that the methodology matters. And into this. Now we also, I don't necessarily blame this researcher who masqueraded as a think tank because he's, you know, everybody's allowed to bring their point to it. If I was Nige Farage, I would have taken my figures with a bit more credible source. But the real problem is the Home Office hasn't produced such figures and it probably should now. The German government eventually realized, but they didn't like thinking of X times more likely to because they thought that that concept was a bit, was a bit misleading. But nonetheless, eventually they did produce official figures. And if the government doesn't release, because right now, as the Casey report showed, there is a scandalous lack of data of ethnicity and crime and convictions. And a large part of that I suspect is because the authorities didn't want the sort of discussion that we're having now and thought if there wasn't any data there couldn't be that discussion. This has now started to rebound on them and there's a lot more in speculation, a lot of ill informed because the official figures have never been released.
- [21:18]
Freddie Sayers
Because I think a lot of people feel, I'm certain a lot of people feel firstly that there has been a decades long sort of suppression of this as a topic of discussion up to and including not producing proper data so that people can make accurate claims around it like you just mentioned. And yeah, I mean if, for example, the real number is roughly three times as likely for Afghan immigrants That still is a very worrying data point that people should be able to talk about.
- [21:50]
Sherrell Dorsey
Sure.
- [21:50]
Freddie Sayers
Do you think that, I mean, would you rather have the whole question taken off the table or do you think it is right and proper for people to be raising it?
- [21:58]
Fraser Nelson
No. Well, not only do I think it's right and proper to raise it, but I think that there is an urgent need for the Home Office to come up with the official figures so we can all have an evidence based discussion rather than rely on campaigners doing their own maths. Now, by the way those campaigners are doing it. If the government won't produce figures, I think it was almost a moral duty for other people to have a best stab at this as best the data available shows. And I don't think it's possible now for the government to say that's an illegitimate debate. Your figures are wrong, but we're not going to tell you what the right ones are. You saw a little bit of this, I think with the Huntington train attack, we found out pretty quickly that the nationality of the suspect and also the ethnicity of the suspect, that was told to us straight away in the way that it wasn't at Southport. So I think we can see in that recognition by the authorities that people do want to know this information. There is a public interest in describing it.
- [22:48]
Freddie Sayers
I think what we may well get in the comments under this, which you don't absolutely need to read, are a lot of people saying that phrase in Elson every time there's an atrocity or there's new statistics. He comes up on my social media feed and says, calm down, Des, everything's fine. He seems to have just said that it is possible that Afghan immigrants are three times more likely to be convicted of rape than Britons. What does he make of that? Like, that's whether, frankly, whether it's three times or 22 times. Although it's important to establish it, it's still a very worrying question. And so what should we do about that? Should that be a political question? Should we be thinking we want to be more selective about the kinds of places we take immigrants from? What are the implications of that kind of data?
- [23:37]
Fraser Nelson
First of all, you say we should be more selective on where we take them from. We're not being selective at all. Look at the small boat arrivals. A huge number of them are Afghans. Now if you're by and large going to pay an illegal gang for passage over here, the chances of you being a law abiding citizen are, let's say, less than they would otherwise. Be. So I think that what's happening right now is, yes, we are seeing mass criminality on a daily basis, tens of thousands of people. Now, what I would advocate is that every single one of those boat arrivals is deported and sent somewhere like Rwanda. Everyone can't do it. Them are somewhere in Bosnia, et cetera. So I would argue for that to happen immediately. I thought those conservatives were right to do that. And this is the thing I am arguing for nuance in this debate, which is very difficult to do when times are polarized, because you're quite right, when I come up with nuance and I say, look, Nigel Farage says violent crime is soaring. In fact, it's not. Now, that is not quite the same as me saying there's nothing to worry about. There is no crime in this country. Immigrant driven crime doesn't exist. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that these things are very, very important subjects that we need to discuss carefully and with the data. Now, my own personal view would be for ideally on the day of arrival for the small but arrivals to be deported to some third party place and never have the option of coming to the uk. That might strike some people as too harsh. But then again, I would also say that for every single person we deport, we should take, say two or three vetted people from the camps. We've got many refugee camps right now, many people with a good claim wanting to come to Britain, many people we've sorted out, we've vetted as being appropriate. Now, I would do that because here's another controversial opinion of mine. I believe that we have a moral duty as a rich country to the rest of the world. Now, just how we discharge that is up for debate. But that duty is there. And that duty involves, of course, foreign aid. That duty involves helping displaced people and on occasion it will involve relocating people as well. So I think that there is a new consensus to be struck here. Nobody likes the mass illegality that we're seeing with a small boat arrival. When you look at the Epping Hotel situation, it was just in every single way it showed our system being absolutely broken. And that leads more people to think, of course there is bedlam, et cetera. And then you will get people then taking it to extremes. The country's finished, the country's in a grip of violent crime, the streets aren't safe, London is incredibly, London has fallen, etc. I go along with some of the argument, but not all of it. And I come over this not as a Conservative or a Leftist or anything like that, but simply as a journalist whose job, by and large our journalist's job is to try to inject that perspective, to try and put in the facts that may grate against the overall narrative. Even if we get, as you put it slated in the comments, this idea.
- [26:28]
Freddie Sayers
Of the moral duty to the rest of the world, it feels incredibly unfashionable, I would say almost out of time. It feels like. I haven't heard any politician talk about that since the Cameroon years almost. It's like a sort of decades old.
- [26:39]
Fraser Nelson
It's a great advantage of not being a politician. I completely agree, but normally people. It's one of these things. If you say that everybody will hate you.
- [26:46]
Freddie Sayers
Well, they will. The first thing I think people will say, and I think it's a good counter, is surely the primary moral duty of a government is to its own citizens before it starts helping people from Afghanistan.
- [26:58]
Fraser Nelson
Absolutely.
- [26:58]
Freddie Sayers
Again, we have our own poverty to deal with. We have an economy that isn't working. We have people living in. In very difficult circumstances. Once we've sorted out our own, we can worry about everyone else. What do you say to those people?
- [27:10]
Fraser Nelson
That is not either or. Absolutely. The primary duty of a government is to its own citizens. That's so obvious it need not be said. I also think that we're giving away far too much in foreign aid, given our own failure to balance the books and our own failure to meet our demands to our own people. But I don't think that if you think our main priority is number one, that we then cut to zero foreign aid or we cut to zero the number of refugees which we take into the country. It's just a question of balance. But right now more is the question of fairness. Now I think the consensus in Britain, we are always, we've always been a globally minded country, a country that wants to shape the world rather than be shaped by it. A country that does. Look at the response to the Ukrainian crisis. We had family after family opening the house to the refugees as we did most of Western Europe. That's the kind of country that we are. But similarly, when we see the people smuggling gangs, driving a coach and horses through anything that might be seen to be basic laws and protection, that really undermines faith not just in the system, but it will drive people to think that the country's falling apart because this is very visible. It's an incredibly. With the daily drumbeat of small bit arrivals, it suggests a system which is out of control because that particular system is out of control. My point is that it doesn't follow that our streets are also out of control. We don't need to take back control of the streets because we've already got them in control.
- [28:39]
Freddie Sayers
You talk about the consensus position. It does feel, doesn't it, that there has been a very rapid hardening in public opinion on the issue of immigration? I mean, there was a piece just a few days ago looking at how some of our voters are now more hardline on immigration than American Republicans. And you talk quite a lot about what's going on on social networks like Twitter where people are overtly now talking about policies like re migration, about the idea that not only new arrivals but children of immigrants should be treated as somehow not British. I mean, we had most recently Matt Goodwin, who's someone I know you have sparred with on occasion on Twitter, who responded to this train atrocity that you mentioned by putting British in double quote marks around the suspect, who is called Anthony Williams and was born in Britain, but who is black and who is the son of two immigrants. What is your view on that? Is it a hardening or is that just a kind of social media concoction?
- [29:47]
Fraser Nelson
I think, look, it's certainly we've seen the sort of destruction of the Overton window, as it were. And so a whole bunch of things that would be seen to be unstable before are being said now. Now we can also see that this is having interesting results take the route in America right now over Tucker Carlson and his interview guests. So I guess people are thinking, okay, where do we draw the line now when it comes actually here I would, I don't have a problem with Matt Goodwin's definition here. He is basically saying in his blog that he did, he was listing a whole bunch of attacks over people who were the children of immigrants.
- [30:24]
Freddie Sayers
I've got it here. Let me just quote it. This is part of the argument as made by a guy called Garrett Jones in a book called the Culture Transplant, which is that when a nation imports people, it imports the average cultural traits of those people. That's something Matt Goodman is talking about at the moment. The 2025 Manchester Synagogue terrorist, Syrian parents, the 2024 Southport terrorist, Rwandan parents, the 2021 Liverpool terrorist born in Iraq, the 2021 terrorist who murdered Sir David Amis parents From Somalia, the 2020 reading terrorist born in Libya, the 2020 Streatham terrorist parents from Sri Lanka, the 2019 Usman Khan terrorist parents from Afghanistan and so on. The list goes on. Is that.
- [31:09]
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- [31:54]
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- [32:31]
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- [33:00]
Fraser Nelson
We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that define some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Roelof Botha, Crucible Moments Season 3 pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Zipline, Palo Alto Network, supercell and more. Hear about the make or break decisions, early stumbles and leaps of faith that turn scrappy startups into market defining forces. Once you're caught up on season three, check out some of the episodes from seasons one and two with guests like Steven Chen of YouTube, Tony Hsu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit, Brian Chetzky of Airbnb, and more. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to Discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were built. Crucible Moments is available everywhere. You get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com go listen to Crucible Moments today.
- [34:01]
Freddie Sayers
Flawed logic. Is it a reasonable question to ask that are we importing more violent cultures by having so many people come from cultures that are provably more violent than us?
- [34:16]
Fraser Nelson
Well, that was list of Islamic terrorists and I think it's no great surprise that your average Islamist tends not to be sort of sixth generation English. I think. I'm not quite sure how many people think differently. We had Richard Reid, the Shoebomber. Apart from that, not very many. I think there's a more substantive point that Matt Goodwin is trying to make here that you and I, Freddie, we both know Sweden very well. We both know that in Sweden there is a phrase for this foreign background. Foreign background. I mean Sweden is almost uncontroversial to use the word immigrant to apply to the children of immigrants. Rishi Sunak would be described as an immigrant in Swedish dialogue or certainly somebody with a foreign background. And that is a kind of label which they apply to that now to Brits. It's bizarre, even appalling to suggest that Rishi Sunak is anything less than British. Although recently his Englishness has come under question due to the growing number of certain movement who think that you cannot be of non white skin and being English. But that notion of foreign background I think is valid and I don't think it's a racist one. It's just a lens through looking at society. So again I think that Matt Goodwin is perfectly entitled to apply all the analytical tools he wants to a current situation. I think we're all.
- [35:35]
Freddie Sayers
But you mentioned Sweden. This is a country we both know well. It's almost so obvious that it's. It doesn't need any statistics to prove it. Although there are plenty that the mass immigration experiment in Sweden of the past 15 or so years has resulted in massively more violence in that country. It was not an especially violent country before. There are now these enclaves where there is gang violence really to a much higher degree. Would you dispute that as well?
- [36:03]
Fraser Nelson
Yes, and I would say it's worse than that. If you actually look at who is doing the gang violence, the disgusting phenomenon of the so called child soldiers where kids at the age of 12, 13 are being recruited into gangs. These are people who are born in Sweden. This is an integration problem. Sweden have got not an immigration problem. The guys who are being fought and arrested and prosecuted for the Gangland crimes. The bulk of them were born in Sweden. They speak certain, you know, husaby, Svensk sort of patois. I would say the problem of integration is, if anything, worse. But we're not really talking about the recent arrival. So my point is, yes, this raises huge, big questions. But if you could say, yeah, we let in some criminal guys 10 years ago and now they're committing crimes in a way that's not quite as bad as thinking that people who were born in this country, who had every opportunity in this country, are still now turning to gangland crime. That suggests something systemic and a problem of integration. And you can see this right around Europe.
- [37:04]
Freddie Sayers
Or does it suggest that they are importing some of the culture that they learned from their parents?
- [37:12]
Fraser Nelson
Well, the view.
- [37:13]
Freddie Sayers
That is what Matt is saying and that's what a lot of people online would say, that there can't be this taboo about talking about. Anyone who was born in Britain suddenly must be, you know, they are British in, in all respects. If you can look at trends that suggest, like you're talking about in Sweden, that they're actually continuing some kind of culture of violence that their parents brought with them. I mean, that's the accusation. Is it outrageous to make?
- [37:39]
Fraser Nelson
No, no, no. To be honest, it's not. I wouldn't really say that's the accusation because the Swedish situation is seen from a distance as being an immigrant relation rather than integration. And I was actually speaking to a policeman in Sweden about this a few months ago. He's a. He himself was Afghan and. And he was saying, look, there are waves of Afghan immigration. My wave settled down pretty well. Other waves have not. To your point, he was saying, it's not as if these guys parents were criminally inclined. They weren't on the rampage. This is what happens if you put people into these estates like Rickaby, Huzabi and Rosenbrand and Malmo, and they're segregated estates, they're not really policed. They're left to be a country within a country that the arm of law struggles to penetrate. That is what you get there by an integration failure. When you look at the immigration patterns that Sweden has had, we can see similar patterns, for example, in Germany, in other countries, and we have nothing like Sweden's child gang problem. Now, if you want to find a Swedish difference, it's probably the fact that there was more. According to my Afghan policeman, he was saying, the problem is that in continental Europe you do have organized gang crimes. You do not allow other gangs to enter into the area and they don't Allow the kind of casual execution which a lot of these child soldiers have been doing in Sweden. And that was why Sweden is now, I think, a second in Europe for gun offences.
- [39:01]
Freddie Sayers
But the argument on the online right and increasingly on the mainstream right is when you look at Sweden, that's what we don't want to become. And actually the error that Sweden made, they will say, is not just that they were inadequately good at integrating people from different backgrounds, is that they should never have let them in in the first place. It's very hard to believe that Sweden would have the highest gun murder rate in the EU, 30 times that of London in Stockholm. You know, 32 gang related bombings in January 2025 alone is very, it's impossible actually to think, is it not, that those kind of statistics would be true if none of that immigration had happened over recent multiple decades.
- [39:46]
Fraser Nelson
Right. But if immigration was the original sin, then why don't we see that in any of the other many European capitals that were in. Is it simply more complicated than that? And also, until fairly recently, Sweden had a pretty good record of absorbing refugees. My own wife's parents were refugees to Sweden. That's how I came to know the country. And so they basically had such good results, but they kept going until they took in more than they could handle. And they did this with a big problem that Sweden has always had a massive employment gap between the natives and between the immigrants. In other words, that was a massive integration problem. And into that they just piled a huge per capita number of immigrants with pretty bad results. Now, Britain has had a different experience. We didn't have the employment gap when it comes to integration. We have more of a success than most of the rest of Europe. And when you actually look overall, see, this is another way if you want to list Fraser's deeply unfashionable opinions. One of my unfashionable opinions here is that Britain has got quite a lot to boast about when it comes to successes. Now I'll tell you when this really hit home for me. I was watching the King's coronation and a friend of mine was over from America and we're just watching it on tv and you know, it's a beautiful service, of course, everybody loves it. And he pointed out something to me that I never really thought that we had a church reading by Rishi Sunak, a Hindu with his Indian wife, with security arranged by a Buddhist Home secretary, Swella Braverman, with a mayor of London, a Muslim Siddiqan, in attendance. The First Minister of Scotland also a Muslim in attendance and the chief Rabbi who'd been there because he'd walked from Buckingham palace as a guest to the King the night before so he wouldn't break the Sabbath. My friend said no other country in the world could such a scene be imaginable. And yet we even think it's remarkable that this is the funny thing. And Rishi Sunak said this quite himself, that Britain is perhaps the most successful multi faith democracy in the world precisely because it isn't controversial. Nobody cared that Sunak worked with a Ganesh idol on his desk, that he and his kids would do Hindu worship at number 10. Nobody cares about that.
- [42:00]
Freddie Sayers
People seem to care a lot more than they did.
- [42:03]
Fraser Nelson
I mean, that was just three years ago though.
- [42:05]
Freddie Sayers
Well, I know, but it feels like things have changed already in those three years.
- [42:08]
Fraser Nelson
I'm not so sure. I think this is. Look, the social media debate has changed.
- [42:12]
Freddie Sayers
Alongside wonderful scenes like the King's coronation, there has been a lot of talk of grooming gangs. That's become a huge, I think, right to focus on that and uncover the truth of it. There have been a number of attacks. There is uncertainty. I mean.
- [42:31]
Fraser Nelson
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- [42:40]
Freddie Sayers
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- [42:46]
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- [43:01]
Sherrell Dorsey
Hi, this is Sherrelle Dorsey from TED Tech and this episode is brought to you by Solidigm. The world runs on data and data relies on storage. But most businesses rarely think about how crucial that storage really is. The truth is it's no longer just a commodity with new demands and constraints, especially from AI. The old ways of managing data are holding innovation back. Solid state storage from solidigm is changing that. It helps reduce energy use, shrink physical footprints and accelerate data at the edge, unlocking more from your AI infrastructure. Learn more at whatsthestateofyourstorage.com.
- [43:40]
Fraser Nelson
It'S not all.
- [43:41]
Freddie Sayers
You know, Westminster Cathedral and crowned heads of Europe celebrating and seeing Kumbaya in poorer parts of our country. The integration is less successful and I'm.
- [43:52]
Fraser Nelson
Not denying that for a second. You see this again, if you don't mind me saying, it's part of the problem of a debate. The moment that you point to a success, somebody says, oh, it's not all like that. There's lots of failures. Yes, there are. We hear quite a lot about these failures and they're serious failures and we need to address them. But there are also successes which it seems dare not mention their name now because it interferes with the mono narrative of Britain being a country ruined by mass immigration and going down the casie very fast. Now I think it ought to be possible to mention both things, to mention the successes and the failures to work out where integration succeeds and the ways in which Britain as what I've just described to you there certainly to the eyes of foreigners, is a kind of multi faith success imaginable in no other country in the world. As well as admitting that we've got huge problems. We had, for example in Dundee a few weeks ago, an Albanian grooming gang was brought to justice. Now that is something which is obviously this isn't Asian, but it's many faces of the same evil. But these are huge, absolutely huge problems happening all the time. My point is that these problems don't define our country. And going back to my original point that when you want to find out overall, do individual acts of violence mean that we're getting a more violent country? There are many ways of looking at the facts to try to answer that question and then trying, even though nobody will thank you and everybody will hate you for pointing it out, that overall what we're getting right outweighs what we're getting wrong.
- [45:19]
Freddie Sayers
So in sum, what do you think the political solution to this is? Because it feels like even with all your charts and all the data sets and all of the good news stories that you're carrying with you, I just call them facts. They are not landing with the voters. I guess you're not a politician, you're not asking for any votes. But it does feel like if mainstream politicians were now going to sort of adopt the Fraser Nelson handbook and just start telling everyone how actually we're a success story and everything's much better than you read about on Twitter and you know, and drumming home that argument, it doesn't feel like people would respond very well. Or is that what you think they should do?
- [46:00]
Fraser Nelson
Of course not. It's not politicians job to say how wonderful everything is. They're not commentators. They are put in power to solve problems. They should be talking non stop about what's going wrong and what they can do about it.
- [46:14]
Freddie Sayers
So what should they do about it? Are you someone who thinks immigration needs to come drastically down Would you like to see a period of net zero immigration? Even if just to settle the politics of the country and remove a lot of the claim of some of these elements that you're talking about, what would you like to see happen?
- [46:31]
Fraser Nelson
I would. I'd like to see more than net zero immigration. I'd like to see some net negative immigration for a while. I think when you look at Sam, what happened during the Boris Johnson era, era, that was way out of control. So I think it's quite plausible for Britain to do what Sweden has recently done, which is to not just achieve net zero, but to achieve net negative. I think that for a whole bunch of reasons, but mainly I think to try to restore public confidence in the borders, which the Conservatives completely squandered. They took back power to control the borders, complete power, and then lost that and got booted out as a result.
- [47:07]
Freddie Sayers
How would they get to net zero? And do you think the Labour government can do it before the next.
- [47:11]
Fraser Nelson
Absolutely. I rather hope that Shibana Mahmoud does do this. Well right now, when to get to net zero, to state the obvious, you need fewer coming in than going out. When you look at how many are going out right now, it's about 400,000 a year, the most ever. And that's foreign nationals, by the way. The number of Brits leaving, despite what everybody says about Britain, is really, it's a multi decade low. So all you need to do is to get income less than 400,000 and you will get net zero because the.
- [47:39]
Freddie Sayers
Forecasts for 26, 27 are much down from the highs of nearly a million, but they're in the kind of 250 to 300,000.
- [47:47]
Fraser Nelson
That's what the OBR says right now. Of course, as the OBR has shown the world, it's very difficult to accurately project this. And what Sweden actually showed was that immigration usually unwinds itself after a few years. Only minority people come to a country, stay there forever, most will stay for a few years and go back. So partly because Sweden had so many coming in a few years ago, it's got quite a lot leaving right now. It wouldn't surprise me if Britain's outflow is bigger than we previously expected. But of course the inflow is a tap we can control at any time. You know, the government lost a battle of nerves with people like care homeowners, for example, saying that we demand a right to have immigrants and pay them less than shelf sackers. Now we should have said, no, forget it. You pay people properly. Your business model, which is low Immigration, sorry, high immigration and low wages. That doesn't work anymore. We want you to pay people skilled job wages for a skilled job and that didn't happen. So again, in saying to you that I would like net zero, even net negative migration. I'm probably in a minority.
- [48:51]
Freddie Sayers
You heard it here first. Fraser Nelson, Hardliner, immigration hardliner. I'm used to being called terrifying right winger.
- [48:57]
Fraser Nelson
I'm used to being called all sorts of things. But the funny thing about journalism is that you don't really play to the gallery. If you do, it's not journalism. You've just got to call it how you see it. And even if that means that you're going to get dogs abuse for so doing, then you do it. I mean, that's the, you know, that's.
- [49:15]
Freddie Sayers
The name of the game, ethnonationalism. Do you think that is a real danger? Do you think it has come back because of this collection of circumstances and the kind of narratives around it? Do you worry that we are actually entering a period of genuine ethno nationalism?
- [49:32]
Fraser Nelson
I think the re racialisation of society has been happening for quite some time. It's strange because I was brought up at a time where there was racism. People with non white skin were told to go home to use phrases that some politicians are now using. And we all knew what that meant. It was racism, it was vile, it was systemic, but it felt as if we were winning the war over that and we were getting to a place where we were finally able to, as Martin Luther King put it, judge people by the content of the character, not the color of their skin. Now I think this changed with the left. First of all, I think the re racialization happened when critical race theory came along and people started to be seen as skin colors first and then persons second. I was very much against that for the same reason that I've always hated racial politics. And now we're basically so that was what you might call the work left and now we're seeing the equivalent of a work right doing the same, saying that Rishi Sunak can't possibly be English because look at the color of his skin. It doesn't matter if the guy's been here for three generations, doesn't matter if he's cricket mad and a Winchester head boy. You couldn't get more English than Rishi Sunak in my view. But nonetheless you do see this as an argument. Now, I am opposed to racial politics. To say you're opposed to racism ought not to be controversial.
- [50:50]
Freddie Sayers
What about cultural, not racial? Because I think what a lot of those people who you appear not to like would say at this point is it's not about skin color. They may be very well disposed to African Christians, for example. It's about they are skeptical about the degrees to which Muslims are properly integrating and they're worried about these cultural imports that one of which may or may not be bearing out in these figures. That's what they would say. It's not the skin color, it's the cultures that we don't want to import into our midst.
- [51:22]
Fraser Nelson
And I would very much agree that multiculturalism is a mistake. We should have one homogenizing British culture open to people of all faiths and all colors. And that, I think is how countries muddle along together. I'm not saying everybody in this country should be the same. Of course you don't. You can be any ethnicity and you have people living your life in different cultural ways. But broadly speaking, there ought to be certain values to which everybody ought to subscribe for a good society.
- [51:49]
Freddie Sayers
So would it be okay, if the data supports it, to be more cautious about immigration from certain cultures around the world that the data suggests integrate less well than others?
- [52:00]
Fraser Nelson
Well, again, I would question how big that data is. I mean, if you take the notion of culturally compatible, for example, and you kind of wonder what that means. And what I was thinking about with Saja, Javid's mum, you know, she came in here illiterate, kind of penniless Muslim woman, and yet what did she bring into this country? A former home Secretary, but also Baz Javid is a commander of Metropolitan Police. Went on to be. Right now he's running the deportation unit.
- [52:28]
Freddie Sayers
That's Saajid Javid's brother.
- [52:29]
Fraser Nelson
Yes, Baz Javid. Yeah. And then you had another high flying accountant. My point is she did a fairly heroic job, this woman, bringing in in abject poverty, bringing up a family, I would say all of whom are positive contributions to this society. And yet you can see if you want to apply a little test like, you know, is somebody culturally compatible? This is where I just get uneasy. I don't think any kind of test can be applied to a human being to work out do you fit or do you not? Britain is a country which cherishes eccentricity, which cherishes difference and allows people to be different. I think we've always been that way. The general public of this country is overwhelmingly tolerant, kind, understanding. I don't think to ask a question, how worried am I? I don't think Britain is ever going to go down A racist route. I think the people who do want to promote race baiting politics have now got digital avenues to pursue that which they didn't used to have. And this is a free country and they're richly entitled to avail themselves of that freedom. But the health of this country I am pretty confident about. And if you want to know if a country is in deep trouble or not, then look at the working age population projections. Italy is going to lose 5 million. That's a projection. I think Germany is something like 3 million. France is 3 million. There's only two countries in Europe that are expected to have an increase in working age population through immigration. Britain and Sweden. No, it depends. Right now, a third of kids born in this country are born to an immigrant mother. So you take away the immigrant mothers, you'll see I'm working on them. But my point is that when you look at the countries who are in the grip of depopulation, like Japan is, for example, they're talking about an existential crisis. They cannot see a way of reversing this. No. People like South Korea, they spent billions of dollars trying to reverse the low birth rates, trying to get the working age population going up. Nothing seems to work. So if you want to bet on a country's success over the next decade, if you're say a teenager working out what country to go to go and study in, to make your life in, I think you would see in Britain a country which has got huge problems. Absolutely. But broadly speaking, is able to handle demographic change better than almost anybody else. And a country which fundamentally is growing and a country which is, as we started off a discussion saying, has got streets that have been safer than any time in my lifetime, perhaps that. And there is so much more to do. Any crime is too much crime. And the other thing is, I do not for a second think people are wrong to point all the time to things that are going wrong. That's how we evolve as a species. We don't congratulate ourselves for the fantastic progress we've made. We look at the next problem to vanquish, we get very upset about it. We don't stop until it's solved. That's the British way. And we're going to keep doing this, keep focusing on the problems. All I'm saying is that now and again it doesn't hurt so much to see the progress we've made, to put things in perspective and to realise that to have energy of reform, you can be fueled by rational optimism because of what we've achieved previously already now, in that knowledge, you should be all the more determined, all the more energetic, and all the more confident about achieving even more in the years to come.
- [55:43]
Freddie Sayers
Fraser, thank you for coming into Unherd.
- [55:45]
Fraser Nelson
Great to be here.
- [55:46]
Freddie Sayers
That was Fraser Nelson. I was going to say friend of the show, but he's actually never been on Unherd before. Former Spectator editor, now star columnist at the Times, talking there very broadly about his views on crime, data and immigration. Whatever you made of it, let us know in the comments. Thanks for tuning in. This was Unherd.
- [56:11]
Sherrell Dorsey
Hi, this is Sherrell Dorsey from TED Tech, and this episode is brought to you by solidigm. The world runs on data, and data relies on storage, but most businesses rarely think about how crucial that storage really is. The truth is, it's no longer just a commodity with new demands and constraints, especially from AI. The old ways of managing data are holding innovation back. Solid state storage from solidigm is changing that. It helps reduce energy use, shrink physical footprints, and accelerate data at the edge, unlocking more from your AI infrastructure. Learn more at whatsthestateofyourstorage.com what are you reaching for?
- [56:48]
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- [57:17]
Fraser Nelson
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