What this Article is About?
This article explains that what many call a migrant crisis is really a sign of deeper economic strain and declining prosperity. It says politicians and media often use migrants as a distraction from bad policy and widening inequality. Rising costs for housing, energy, and basics have hurt everyday people, while the wealthy and powerful stay protected. Blaming migrants diverts attention from structural issues in the economy. The piece calls for focusing on real causes of hardship rather than on people who are also seeking safety and work.
Britain’s prosperity is ending in real time. The collapse is not abstract-it is lived in cold homes, empty fridges, and pay packets that no longer cover the basics. In 2025, 2.8 million English households are fuel poor; across the UK, 12.1 million families spend more than 10% of their income on energy, and five million spend over 20%. Five years ago, in 2020, the number of fuel-poor households was closer to 2.2 million, and deep fuel poverty was a marginal category. The trend is clear: hardship is no longer exceptional, it is structural.
Real wages have risen just 1.4% after inflation in 2025. In 2020, wages were stagnant but not collapsing at this scale; food prices have since risen 20-30% compared with pre-pandemic levels. Two-thirds of renters now struggle to pay their rent, compared with about half in 2020, while interest rate hikes have pushed 320,000 mortgage holders into poverty-a crisis that barely existed five years ago, when rates were historically low. Behind these numbers are millions of personal tragedies: parents skipping meals so their children can eat, pensioners riding buses to stay warm, children fainting in classrooms from hunger.
Yet instead of this collapse dominating the headlines, Britain is transfixed by something else: a wave of anti-immigration protests, the largest in decades. GB News gives them rolling coverage, tabloids plaster them across front pages, and Nigel Farage and Reform UK receive airtime far out of proportion to their support. The message is drilled in relentlessly: Britain is broken because of migrants. This is the great diversion. The pain of hardship is being masked, redirected, and weaponised into ethnic conflict.
The diversion machine is well-oiled. GB News is backed by billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Marshall and the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based fund with political ambitions. The Mail, Sun, and Express bombard readers with stories of “migrant crime” and “cultural threats” while treating Reform UK’s rallies as national events. Together, these outlets manufacture an enemy-immigrants-so that anger never turns towards the true culprits of Britain’s decline.
For the collapse has roots far deeper than migration. Energy was deregulated and handed to profit-driven firms, leaving families hostage to market spikes while the top suppliers pocketed £7.7 billion in profits in 2023. In 2020, energy costs were still high but more contained; since then, bills have surged by more than 50% on average. Housing policy fuelled bubbles, pushing prices to eight times average earnings by 2025, compared with around six times in 2020, while social housing stock fell further behind demand. Real pay has barely grown since 2008, but the last five years have been the weakest in two centuries, cementing the break between work and living standards. And austerity stripped over £30 billion from welfare and 40% from local councils, hollowing out services even further compared to 2020, when many cuts were already biting. These were not the choices of refugees on dinghies but of politicians in Westminster and financiers in the City-pursuing capitalist orthodoxy that rewards capital and punishes labour.
Meanwhile, the rich are not suffering. They are thriving. The 50 wealthiest families now control more wealth than the poorest half of the country combined. The top 350 richest Britons hold £772.8 billion in 2025. Five years ago, in 2020, that figure stood closer to £500 billion-still obscene, but smaller by more than a third. Britain has gone from barely a dozen billionaires in 1990 to over 150 today, and their fortunes have risen by more than 1,000% since then. The Hinduja family sits on £35 billion; the Reuben brothers on £26 billion; James Dyson on £20 billion. As nurses queue at food banks and families ration heat, billionaires multiply.
This is no accident. In 1930s Europe, elites under pressure turned hardship into rage against scapegoats, shielding themselves from blame. Britain in 2025 follows the same script. The call for ethnic conflict is not the voice of the working class but the mask of the ruling class. It is theatre, designed to protect an elite that has grown fat off the very misery it now distracts you from seeing.
And here lies the danger. Once this path is opened, it does not end with chants against refugees. The elite will raise the temperature, stoking ever deeper divisions, pitting worker against worker, neighbour against neighbour, until society itself begins to fracture. Riots on the streets will invite harsher policing, surveillance, and repression. Dissidents will be smeared as “extremists” or “foreign agents.” The same media that cheers on ethnic scapegoating will cheer on crackdowns against anyone who dares point to the real causes of decline.
