Young Men of Fighting Age

Every now and then a political argument collapses under the weight of its own arithmetic. Nigel Farage’s outrage about Labour supposedly paying asylum seekers “£40,000 to go home” is one of those cases where the numbers themselves quietly undermine the story being told.

The figure being waved around is not £40,000 per person. It never was. The proposal being discussed allows up to £10,000 per individual, with a maximum of £40,000 per family unit. The larger number only appears if several people in the same household qualify for the payment. Partners, children, dependants. In other words, the only way the headline figure appears is when you are dealing with families rather than individuals.

Which creates a small but rather awkward difficulty for a line Farage and others have been repeating for years about the small boats being filled with “young men of fighting age”. If that description were broadly accurate then the arithmetic is very straightforward. One person arrives, one payment is offered if their claim fails, and the maximum amount involved is £10,000. That is the number that would normally appear in the discussion.

You only reach the dramatic £40,000 figure if you are talking about several people in a household. The larger headline therefore quietly assumes the presence of partners and children. Yet the rhetorical frame that usually accompanies these debates insists the crossings consist largely of solitary young men. The two claims sit rather uneasily together. Either we are mostly dealing with individuals, in which case the relevant figure is £10,000, or we are dealing with families, in which case the familiar trope about lone men begins to look rather overstated.

None of this, incidentally, proves that Labour’s policy is sensible. One can perfectly reasonably question whether paying failed applicants to leave will actually increase voluntary returns, whether it creates a precedent that could be exploited, or whether the real solution lies in speeding up the asylum process and removals. European voluntary return schemes have had mixed results. Governments try them because deportations are expensive and legally complicated, not because the optics are attractive.

But that is not the argument Farage is making. The argument being made is essentially theatrical. Take the largest possible theoretical number, repeat it loudly, and allow the audience to assume that is the typical payment. Once the arithmetic is unpacked, however, the drama fades rather quickly. The scheme does not offer £40,000 to a migrant. It offers up to £10,000 to an individual, with a cap for families.

The curious part is that maintaining the outrage requires two mutually uncomfortable pictures of migration to exist at the same time. The migrants must be solitary “men of fighting age” when discussing border control, but they must also become multi-member households when a larger number is required for a headline. The story shifts shape depending on which version produces the most alarming figure that day.

Political messaging can stretch reality a fair distance. Arithmetic, unfortunately for the message, tends to be less flexible. Farage attacks a £10k voluntary return payment while simultaneously proposing £2,500 payments plus a deportation machine costing about twice as much per migrant. That contrast is quite potent when laid out numerically.