IF YOU want to see how utterly misleading, biased, and ignorant the elite class has become in this country, over the next few days I’ll show you by looking at three truly shocking examples.
They include London’s Labour Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, former BBC television presenter Emily Maitlis, and several members of the expert class with whom I recently debated at an event in Kensington.
All three show you just how far the left-leaning elite class in politics, media, and the universities will go to try to maintain their failing project of mass immigration and liberal globalisation.
And all three will show you how the very people who talk endlessly about the need for ‘truth’, ‘evidence’, and to counter ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ are now fully invested in spreading this misinformation themselves while deliberately misleading and gaslighting you on some of the most pressing issues of our time.
So if, like me, you live with a sense that the people who rule our politics and the national conversation are more interested in steering us away from, rather than towards, the truth, you’re going to want to read all three.
Let’s start, today, with Sadiq Khan.
Over the weekend, London’s Labour Mayor went viral in a clip from LBC Radio, now viewed four million times, in which Khan introduces the country to a ‘lovely stat’. You can watch the clip here.
‘A skilled migrant,’ Khan said, ‘will contribute on average £16,000 towards our economy and that’s when you include the public services he or she may use.’ This is significantly more, he claims, than the ‘£800’ a skilled British worker contributes.
‘Here’s the lovely stat,’ he went on. ‘A skilled migrant’s family will contribute to the British economy £12,000 a year, even when you take away the public services they use, [but] a British skilled worker’s family takes from the economy £4,400 when you include the public services they use.’
Unsurprisingly, thousands of others have shared the clip because for radical left-wing progressives, like Khan, it appears to confirm their belief that immigration can only ever be a net positive to the UK economy, while also implying that people from outside Britain are superior to the British people themselves.
Only, it’s not true. It’s not true at all.
What Sadiq Khan is doing here is making a completely inaccurate claim and pushing a deeply misleading interpretation of the underlying evidence.
Contrary to what Khan claims, the report he is drawing on, by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), does not compare skilled migrant workers with skilled British workers on a like-for-like basis.
Far from it.
What it compares is skilled migrant workers with the average UK-born adult, with the latter group including people who are unemployed, economically inactive, and retired.
Of course this dodgy comparison is going to put skilled migrant workers in a more positive light – which is no doubt why Khan jumped on it.
But if you look more closely at the report you will find that it also compares skilled migrant workers with British workers, excluding those who are retired or inactive. When it does this it finds something very different.
British workers, it found, make a tax contribution that is £3,300 higherthan the average skilled migrant worker. That’s right. British workers contribute more to the economy overall than even the most skilled migrant workers.
It doesn’t stop there.
Khan is also citing a report which looked only at the fiscal impact of skilled migrant workers in one year, looking at people who arrived in Britain in 2022 or 2023, rather than examining their impact on the economy over the course of their lifetime.
As the report, which I assume Khan read, notes: ‘[This] means it is likely we are estimating at a stage when they are making some of their most positive net contributions to UK government finances over their time in the UK.’
What the report doesnottake any account of at all is what happens when skilled migrant workers get something called ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’.
After a few years of living and working in the country, indefinite leave to remain gives migrants full access to the welfare state, pensions, the right to bring relatives into Britain, and means they no longer even need to have a job or meet a salary threshold.
They can, if they want, now completely rely on the state.
So, it’s highly likely, in other words, as indeed the report itself notes, that the overall contribution of even the most highly skilled migrant workers in Britain reduces over time as they gain access to the welfare state, have more children, bring in relatives, get old themselves and hence become more reliant on the National Health Service.
As even the MAC report notes: ‘It is hard to know exactly how the net contribution of individuals in this cohort will change as they remain in the country for longer.’
None of this, of course, is noted by Sadiq Khan or LBC radio. Nor, for that matter, is it ever mentioned by other members of the pro-immigration expert class who routinely try to gaslight and mislead you by looking at only the initial impact of migration.
Instead, if you step back and look at the overall picture, as we routinely do in this newsletter, you get a radically different view. And it’s not good.
While you won’t get any impression of this at all from that viral clip, BBC Verify, and indeed much of the national debate about the economic impact of migration, what we know is that the skilled migrant workers Sadiq Khan is talking about represent only a very small minority of the millions of people who have been flooding into Britain in recent years, especially as part of the post-2019 ‘Boriswave’.
Last year, for example, the UK handed out 1.1million visas but only 22 per cent of those visas went to people who were applying for work, the rest being low-wage, low-skill workers, the relatives of workers, or students.
Just think about that for a second.
Contrary to what the likes of Boris Johnson promised you and Sadiq Khan talks about, the vast majority of people who are migrating into Britain are not highly skilled at all.
The scientists and engineers Johnson talked endlessly about? They make up only 0.6 per cent of granted visas (six in a thousand). The overseas skilled doctors for the NHS? They represent 0.8 per cent.
And most of the skilled workers who are coming in also tend to earn lessthan the average UK salary. The Centre for Policy Studies looked at how many visas were issued in the year 2022-2023 for jobs on the skilled worker routes and found that nearly three-quarters went to people earning lessthan the average UK salary.
Many of these workers, put simply, are not the highly skilled, highly paid engineers, doctors and wealth creators that the political class likes you to think are here.
In fact, if you want one statistic that completely blows my mind then read this one from researcher Karl Williams, at the Centre for Policy Studies:
Of the 3.6million visas Britain issued in recent years, just 12 per centwent to workers on the skilled worker route and, once you take into account their earnings, just5 per cent went to highly skilled migrant workers who are making a net contribution to the economy.
What Sadiq Khan didn’t mention in that clip is that many of the other visas have gone to fuelling masses of low-skill, low-wage, non-European migration into Britain which is making our country poorer, eroding living standards, creating division, and making many other social problems, such as our acute housing crisis, much worse.
Even the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) recently calculated that, on average, each low-wage migrant worker is now costing the British taxpayer £151,000 by the time that worker retires, closer to £500,000 if they live into their eighties, and closer to £1million if they live longer. Again, just think about that.
As Karl Williams notes, when you look past the viral Twitter clips and the endless posturing of the elite class on fashionable podcasts for London liberals, and look instead at the data, the economic case for the kind of mass migration that Britain’s politicians are now forcing on to their own people quickly falls apart.
Contrary to what Sadiq Khan claims in that clip, skilled migrant workers are not making significantly larger contributions to the UK economy than their British counterparts, while the much larger number of migrant workers who are flooding this country, and who are not mentioned at all in that clip, are very clearly taking more out of the national economy than they are putting in.
You might expect the people who rule us, who shape the national debate, who run our largest and most diverse cities such as London, to be straight with you about this, to give you an accurate view, to be honest, to tell you the truth.
But instead, as that clip symbolises, too many people in the elite class are actively trying to mislead and gaslight you, misinterpret the evidence and present a deeply biased view that confirms their own beliefs but ignores reality. As Aldous Huxley said: ‘Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.’
The fact of the matter, as newsletters like this one have made clear, is that the political project that is being imposed on you from above, ismaking our communities and country poorer, is undermining prosperity and is pushing us apart.
And I for one will never stop challenging the elite consensus because what the hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding majority deserve above all is not fashionable social media clips but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on May 19, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
