Britain’s right has spent years telling workers that danger comes from the neighbour with the wrong surname or the worker with the wrong passport. A new King’s College London and YouGov survey shows how deeply that poison has spread, and how little it has to do with reality.
The survey asked 1,800 people in England and Wales about crime, ethnicity and nationality. Respondents thought 55 percent of convicted killers were from an ethnic minority. The real figure was 35 percent. They put the White share at 45 percent, when it was actually 64 percent.
Reform supporters were furthest from the facts. They believed 70 percent of killers came from ethnic minorities, ten percentage points above the estimate given by supporters of any other party. This isn’t a small error at the edge of the picture. It’s an upside-down view of society.
The same distortion appeared around nationality. People guessed that foreign nationals made up 25 percent of the prison population. Official figures put the proportion at 12 percent. Respondents thought foreign nationals committed 30 percent of sexual offences, twice the real figure of 15 percent. Reform supporters put it at 50 percent, twenty points above the estimate from Conservative supporters.
The panic reaches beyond race and nationality. The public’s median guess was that 27 percent of people had personally experienced crime in 2024–25. The recorded survey figure was 9.7 percent. Crime is real, and its victims deserve protection and justice. But the public picture isn’t being formed by a calm reading of the evidence. It’s being formed through fear.
Professor Bobby Duffy of King’s said: “There are two buckets of explanations for our misperceptions: how we think and what we’re told.”
Both matter, but a class analysis has to go further. Why are people so insecure, and who has the power to tell them what their insecurity means? Fear doesn’t arrive from nowhere. It grows in a society of insecure work, unaffordable housing, damaged public services and declining faith in the future. The capitalist press and the far right then attach that fear to a visible target. They point at the migrant, the Muslim or the Black teenager and tell workers: there is your problem.
The ruling ideas of society don’t float freely above material life. They’re produced and circulated through institutions largely owned, funded or shaped by the ruling class. Newspaper proprietors, wealthy political donors, professional campaigners and social-media platforms decide which crimes become national symbols and which disappear after a day. An offence involving a migrant can be made to stand for millions of people. The routine violence of poverty, dangerous work, landlordism and imperialist war is treated as background noise.
That’s the function of the crime panic. It turns a social crisis produced by capital into a racial threat supposedly produced by outsiders. Reform poses as an anti-establishment party while performing one of the establishment’s oldest services: teaching exploited people to fear one another.
The “two-tier” lie
The survey found that 52 percent of respondents believed ethnic or religious minorities were sentenced differently. Twenty-nine per cent thought they received more lenient sentences; 23 percent thought they were punished more harshly. The far right has turned the first belief into its slogan of “two-tier justice”.
The evidence doesn’t show a general discount for minority defendants. The pattern varies by group and offence, but its clearest findings run against the right’s story.
The Ministry of Justice’s latest ethnicity report found that the average prison sentence for indictable offences in 2024 was 18.4 months for White defendants, 32.2 months for Asian defendants and 28.6 months for Black defendants. These raw averages partly reflect differences in offences, seriousness and guilty pleas, so they don’t prove discrimination on their own.
The adjusted figures for drug offences are harder to brush aside. Across 2020–24, Asian offenders received median prison terms 33 months longer than White offenders. For Black offenders the gap was 45 months, and for Mixed-ethnicity offenders it was 34 months. Those figures account for the factors available to the ministry, though not every detail of every case.
That is the clearest sentence-length result. A peer-reviewed study of 170,000 Crown Court defendants also found higher odds of imprisonment for several Black and Asian groups after accounting for criminal records, offence severity, pleas, remand and other case factors.
The honest conclusion is simple. The pattern isn’t uniform, and the figures don’t prove that every gap comes from direct racial bias by a judge. But they give no support to the fantasy that minority defendants are generally indulged. In important parts of the system, the pressure runs the other way.
It can build at every stage: police attention, charging, remand, access to lawyers, pressure to plead, assessments of risk and sentencing. Capitalist institutions don’t need every official to hold the same prejudice. They reproduce inequality through ordinary procedures that present earlier disadvantages as neutral facts.
There is a class tier in British justice, but it isn’t the one Reform describes. A wealthy defendant with time, status and an expensive legal team doesn’t meet the system on the same terms as a worker who risks losing a job, a home or custody of their children while awaiting trial. Racial oppression sits inside this class system and sharpens it. Black and migrant workers can be punished as workers and targeted as racialised minorities at the same time.
Divide the class, protect the system
Racism isn’t an alternative to class exploitation. It is one of the ways class rule has been organised and defended. Capital benefits when workers are split by colour, religion and passport. Employers can exploit a migrant worker’s insecure status while telling a British-born worker that the migrant caused low pay. Landlords can raise rents while tenants blame one another for the housing shortage. Governments can cut services and then present access to the remains as a racial contest.
Imperialism belongs at the centre of this story. Britain’s ruling class spent centuries conquering territories, extracting wealth and moving labour around an empire built for profit. Modern British finance capital, military alliances and corporate power still operate across an unequal world. War, extraction and underdevelopment help produce the movement of people, while capital itself crosses borders freely in search of returns. The same ruling class then treats human movement as an alien invasion.
Lenin’s analysis of imperialism showed monopoly capital dividing the world for markets, resources and profit. The far right hides that system behind the passport of an individual prisoner. It asks where the accused was born, never which class owns the country, profits from insecurity or commands the machinery that produces public opinion.
The answer can’t be fact-checking alone. Facts matter, but a useful ruling-class lie will be repeated after it has been disproved. The labour movement has to expose the class interest behind the lie and organise workers of every nationality and ethnicity in the same unions, workplaces and communities. Anti-racism must be treated as a condition of working-class unity, not as a polite moral extra.
Communists must fight for equal legal rights, properly funded defence, and an end to discriminatory policing, remand and sentencing. We must oppose deportation theatre and the imperialist policies that uproot people, then organise migrant and British-born workers against the employers who exploit both.
Ultimately, the proletariat needs its own political organisation and its own power. A system built on exploitation, competition and empire will keep manufacturing scapegoats because division helps it survive. Working-class anger has to be directed upward at the class responsible, not sideways at the people made to live with the same crisis.
