No, The 'Boriswave' Won't Cost Us Each £20,000

This is just more laundered racism from our favourite right-wing grifter.

The big brains at Reform UK seem to believe they’ve found their lethal attack line ahead of local elections next month. They’re running against the “Boriswave”, what Zia Yusuf calls “a legacy of Tory incompetence and Labour’s open border ideology.”

And they’ve produced a remarkably dodgy report to back it all up, which astoundingly claims that settled migrants who arrived between Jan 2021 and June 2024 will cost the UK a whopping £622bn by 2085, or roughly £20k per household.

The ‘Boriswave,’ for those fortunate enough to be unaware, describes a period of relatively liberal migration policy under Boris Johnson. The term was originally concocted by terminally online trolls in the sordid depths of Elon Musk’s ‘X.’ Naturally, it’s now a part of mainstream public discourse.

Net migration was 254,000 in 2021, 634,000 in 2022, and rose to a peak of 906,000 in 2023. By 2025 that had reduced by nearly 80% to about 204,000. It essentially describes a short-lived, though certainly significant, post-Brexit wave of migrants which were of course less likely to be white Europeans.

Nigel Farage took out an op-ed in the Telegraph on Tuesday to lament our collective doom (unless you vote for him) and the usual suspects like GB News and The Daily Mail ran the shocking figures unchallenged in scary bold letterhead.

So I’ve taken a look at their so-called report, and I’ll tell you this:

• The analysis here is completely unserious - it should have been cordoned off on ‘X’

• This entire thing is premised on a complete rewriting of the actual history of the Boris Johnson era, not to mention the fact that its accusations implicate recent converts to Reform UK.

• I think we all strongly suspect what this is actually about.

Bad Maths

If I promise to give you £1,000 in 50 years’ time, is that worth £1,000 to you today? Anything could happen by then. At the very least, inflation will have taken its toll. That’s why governments and economists say no. They use what’s called a ‘discount rate’ - a formula that reduces future values down to what they think they’re worth today.

Reform UK, however, isn’t going to let a pesky thing like basic financial forecasting get in the way of a useful disinformation campaign. They admit their £622bn figure is not ‘discounted’ - and that applying standard Treasury discounting brings it down to £154bn. Looking more manageable already.

£154bn still seems high, though, right? But that’s because the methodology problems run much deeper. Reform rely completely on their own fantastical assumptions about migrant earnings, rather than real-world data - which leads them to underestimate how much migrants actually contribute in taxes. It renders this whole exercise basically akin to guesswork.

The Government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) recently did similar research with real data from HMRC (which was also surely available to Reform). They produced a much more balanced report showing that skilled workers on visas who entered in 2022 and 23 are estimated to contribute a net £47bn over their lifetimes, and that while others may cost the UK treasury in the long term, there are “positive spillover effects.”

You’ll not get acknowledgement from Reform that a low-income migrant may be performing an essential social care role or working for low pay in our NHS. The point here is to produce a big scary number that makes you feel poorer and then angrier.

History Rewritten

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Why did this “Boriswave” actually happen? Where were the True Patriots™ when this supposed open door policy was randomly enacted?

Britain was reeling from the twin shocks of a no-deal Brexit and a global pandemic in 2021. Headlines were apocalyptic, warning of food shortages and shortfalls in staff in various industries. Who was going to save our Christmas turkey and sprouts? Johnson lowered the threshold for non-EU visa applicants to get supply chains moving again.

Then of course there were the geopolitical shocks - most notably Putin invading Ukraine in 2022. In a broadly popular move, Johnson’s Britain agreed to resettle Ukrainians displaced by the invading Russian army.

Farage and his top brass (several of whom were members of Conservative administrations in power when this all happened) seem to be caught in a feverous amnesia. Have they just plucked the term ‘Boriswave’ from an online troll pit and run with it, any semblance of self-awareness be damned?

Maybe there’s a deeper reason.

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The Laundromat

Let's call this what it is. "Boriswave" is a term minted by Elon’s online Nazis to spread demographic panic. These are people who hold a fundamental belief that different cultures and ethnicities cannot (and should not) co-exist. Enoch Powell would find many of them excessive and uncouth.

And that is where parties like Reform UK come in. Their role is to channel that online vitriol into a relatively polished and politically presentable package. To concoct scary specious scenarios and then jump and shout to make ordinary people afraid.

It’s revealing that Reform politicians are currently being berated on ‘X’ for putting up “Boriswaver”(see: non-white) candidates in the upcoming local elections. And that the term is particularly popular among supporters of Rupert Lowe’s offshoot Restore Britain party, now running a zombie campaign to the right of Reform UK.

So no, this isn't a serious report. It's more of a laundering operation. It takes filthy ideas that even hard-nosed xenophobes are squeamish about expressing and coats them with just enough sugar to make them palatable. We see it for what it is. And we are calling it out. It is a shame that more of our friends in the mainstream media will not do the same.