Illegal Verbiage

Once upon a time – not so very long ago – the BBC was a public broadcaster in the truest sense: a bastion of impartiality, a check against hysteria, and a bulwark against the creeping Americanisation of public discourse. Now, it’s become something else entirely: a timid mouthpiece, too cowed to challenge power, too eager to appease the red-faced chorus of tabloid Britain.

Case in point: refugees. Or rather, as the BBC now increasingly calls them, “illegal immigrants”. A term spoon-fed by ministers, recycled by pundits, and now delivered deadpan by BBC reporters who should damn well know better.

Let’s be clear: under international law, no one is “illegal” for crossing a border to claim asylum. Not now, not ever. The UK signed that principle into law in 1951, when the world still remembered what happened to people turned away at ports with nowhere else to go. But today, nuance has been jettisoned in favour of government-approved dog-whistling, and the Beeb – that once-proud institution – is right there, nodding along.

When a child from Sudan arrives on a Kent beach, soaked and terrified, he is not “illegal.” When a woman flees Taliban rule and arrives via dinghy because there's no visa route for the desperate, she is not “illegal.” But say it enough – say it on the news, in headlines, in bulletins – and the public stops seeing people. They see criminals.

And that, of course, is the point.

This isn’t reporting. It’s linguistic laundering – taking a term deliberately weaponised by the Home Office and giving it the air of neutrality. The BBC could clarify. It could explain the legal right to asylum, or how the UK has shut down all safe routes, forcing the persecuted into peril. But it doesn’t. Instead, it mouths along with whichever minister is wagging the finger that week. “Illegal immigrants,” they say – and so the BBC follows suit, like a dog trained too well.

What we are witnessing is not a lapse. It’s complicity. The gradual adoption of right-wing framing – on immigration, on protest, on “woke” culture – is no accident. It is the BBC chasing a ghost called “balance” down a rabbit hole of cowardice, fearful of offending the very forces that despise its existence.

And so, the Overton window shifts. Not with a bang, but with a byline. Once, it was the job of journalists to speak truth to power. Now it seems they’re content to copy and paste from press releases and pretend it’s news.

If refugees are now “illegal” by default, it’s not law that changed. It’s language. And the BBC helped rewrite it.