The real crisis of our age is one the media won’t talk about

Not a day goes by without the BBC, Sky News or ITV News covering a story about what they insist on calling the “migrant crisis”. In this they are following the agenda of the right wing print media, which is obsessed with immigration and which covers the topic in an ever louder shriek of lurid and alarmist terms, falsely informing its readership that “illegals” are given a life of luxury at the expense of the British taxpayer and stoking up anger and resentment amongst a readership which often struggles to pay their bills and to make ends meet. That is of course the intention.

By aping the agenda of the right wing press, the broadcast media are legitimising and normalising the talking points of the far right, and telling the public that there is a real and urgent emergency around immigration. The truth is very different. There is no migrant crisis, there is only migrant hysteria. This anti-immigration hysteria is a modern witch hunt which is being turbo-charged by social media, on Facebook, and above all in the toxic sewer that is Elon Musk’s Twitter where anti-immigration accounts no longer bother to disguise their racism but rather openly flaunt it. However instead of trying to provide a counter to this hysteria, the British print and broadcast media are reinforcing it and platforming it.

In doing this, the traditional media is abjectly failing in its duty to hold power to account and is helping to hand the UK over to the seig hieling arms of the far right. Nowhere in all this wall to wall coverage of immigration in the media is any space for discussion of the positive aspects and many economic benefits of immigration. Immigration is uniformly presented as a bad thing. However as migrants tend to be of working age andmany are highly skilled, they are less likely than the native born population to rely on benefits or expensive healthcare. They generate taxable income and spend that income on goods and services which benefit the economy. They also provide a pool of younger workers which is invaluable in a country with an ageing population.

Equally there is little attention given to debunking the myths about migrants which are pushed by the right. The right habitually claims thatr there are many more illegal migrants than there actually are. For example, earlier this year a front page report in the increasingly unhinged Telegraph newspaper claimed that as many as one in twelve people in London is an illegal migrant. The claim was based on estimates from Thames Water of the number of people in London who use water but are not in official statistics. However the estimate includes tourists, visitors, second home owners and others. Additionally the Telegraph wrongly divided the upper estimate of 585,533 by the 7 million people in in specific “water resource zones” rather than the 9.85 million population of Greater London. It is estimated that there are about 675,000 unauthorised migrants in the UK as a whole, 810,000 when their children, most of whom were born in the UK, are included. That’s less than 1% of the 69.23 million opulation of the UK. 1.17% when their British born children are included.

There are very real crises besetting the UK and the rest of the world, but a media which is owned and controlled by billionaires allied to Donald Trump and the US Republicans has a vested interest in manufacturing an artificial crisis about immigration in order to distract from these real emergencies.

The resentment and anger about immigration which is being manufactured by the far right and legitimised by the media finds fertile ground in a population which finds itself increasingly shut out from affordable housing, secure employment, and which faces a monthly struggle to put food on the table and to pay heating and lighting bills, all while dealing with struggling public services and crumbling public infrastructure.

However it’s not migrants who are responsible for these problems. These issues are a consequence of governments which have failed to invest in the public sector over decades, all while the richest in society help themselves to ever-increasing shares of the wealth generated by the economy – generated that is by ordinary working people. In 2024, the median pay for FTSE 100 chief executives is £4.22m, which is 113 times the median full-time worker’s pay of £37,430. The gap between the highest paid and the average salary has increased by 12.9% since 2019 according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

In the United States , the wealth gap is even more extreme. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank, found that the chief executives of the 350 largest US companies were paid an average $21.3m (£16.9m) in 2019. This puts the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at 320 to 1 – more than five times the level in 1989. Yet the rich still want even more.

According to the Office for National Statistics., the UK’s wealth inequality is much more severe than income inequality, with the top fifth taking 36% of the country’s income and 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth have only 8% of the income and only 0.5% of the wealth. Inequality in wealth and income generally declined during the 20th century, but began to rise again in the 1980s when right wing politicians, Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA began to push the lie of trickle down economics, which even at its most generous was merely an argument that if the rich were allowed to get even richer, there would be more crumbs for the poor falling from the rich man’s table. In fact what happened, and what continues to happen, is that the rich man moved his table to an offshore tax haven and the poor got nothing except the devastation of public services.

When ever increasing amounts of money end up being squirreled away in the bank accounts of the rich, less is available for everyone else. There are now individuals with truly obscene wealth. Elon Musk has a fortune which is estimated at over $488 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook and Instagram has a fortune worth over $254 billion. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is worth $233 billion. Larry Ellison the owner and founder of Oracle, who has recently bought Tik Tok, is worth $344 billion. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Sky TV, the Times and Sun newspapers and the far right Fox News in the USA, is a relative pauper, with a fortune of ‘just’ $24 billion. Between them, these five men are worth over $1.35 trillion and control a huge chunk of the media we all consume and rely on to make informed decisions.

What all these individuals have in common, aside from their extreme wealth, is their support for right wing, and often far-right politics. All of them are supporters of Donald Trump and both Musk and Murdoch have been heavily involved in poisoning the media, with Musk in particular promoting increasingly far right and extremist ideas and Zuckerberg allowing hate speech and conspiracy theories to proliferate on his platforms.

It’s very easy to understand why billionaires would rather we talk about immigrants instead of the increasing wealth of the rich while the public sector is impoverished. You will look in vain on a media which is obsessed with a mythical “migrant crisis” for any mention at all of the greedy rich crisis, yet that’s the real crisis which is threatening living standards, public services, and now democracy itself. The super-rich fund an entire ecosystem of right wing media outlets, think tanks, and political funders, effectively buying both our media and the political class. This ensures both that the media pushes narratives which do not threaten the wealth of the super-rich, and that politicians do not identify the greed of the rich as a political issue. Instead we get news reports such as one we got last week in Scotland telling us that immigration is an important issue for Scottish voters. Of course they see it as an important issue, the media has been banging on about it incessantly for months.

The other real crisis to afflict our age is of course the climate crisis. Tackling this crisis represents another threat to the greed of the wealthy, and poses a direct threat to the profits of the rich and powerful fossil fuel companies. Yet when it is discussed in our media, it’s usually called climate change, not the climate crisis or the climate emergency. Compare and contrast to the amount of airtime and publicity given to the likes of Nigel Farage, whose greedy rich-friendly party is given an inordinate amount of coverage, even as it increasingly moves to more and more conspiracy theorist anti-scientific positions on the climate crisis.

Democracy itself and decent standards of living for the many are threatened by the greed of the super-rich. That’s the real crisis of our age, but it’s a crisis that neither our media or politicians, both of whom are creatures of the wealthy, want to talk about.

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