Immigration is the central — even existential — issue of our time. After decades of political failure and broken promises, it demands serious debate. Yet in 2025, speaking honestly about it feels increasingly risky. A new specialist unit, the National Internet Intelligence and Investigations Team (NIIIT), is being assembled to monitor social media for so-called “anti-migrant” sentiment, the latest frontier in Britain’s war on dissent.

A vague post, an ill-judged meme, a sharp word about asylum numbers: all could now fall under the watchful eye of a state apparatus more interested in suppressing frustration than addressing its cause.

We don’t yet know what powers NIIIT will have, or how it will operate in practice. But we do know this much: it will be staffed by elite detectives, handpicked from forces across the country, and embedded within the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in Westminster. It will be tasked with monitoring social media platforms such as X and Facebook for anything deemed likely to “spark unrest”.

What methodologies it will deploy and how it will interface with other intelligence arms remains to be seen. But from this vantage point, NIIIT bears more than a passing resemblance to Germany’s Zentrale Meldestelle für strafbare Inhalte im Internet (ZMI), or “Central Reporting Office for Criminal Content on the Internet”, a centralised, police-led body launched in 2021. The ZMI combines keyword-triggered algorithms with human analysts to monitor online activity in real time, with particular focus on Right-wing movements such as Alternative für Deutschland or Pegida. NIIIT is beginning to look like Britain’s own version of that model: a digital thought-monitor, cloaked in the language of national security.

This move comes amid rising anxiety inside Whitehall that Britain is heading for a summer of civil unrest. Demonstrations outside asylum hotels are spreading to areas such as Norwich, Leeds, Bournemouth, Epping, and even Canary Wharf. The message, increasingly hard to ignore, is that voters see through the slogans. Yet instead of tackling the legal labyrinth that deliberately keeps the asylum system broken, the Government’s reflex is predictably European: sweep the problem under the rug by criminalising the conversation.

Keir Starmer’s government is already pursuing a raft of measures constraining free speech. Among them is a vague, catch-all definition of “Islamophobia”; an expanded Online Safety Act targeting “misinformation” and “incitement”; aggressive prosecutions for online speech, as seen after the Southport riots; a new Race Equality Act set to hardwire ideological definitions of racism into law; and talk of broader hate crime legislation, modelled on Scotland’s fiasco.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper wants to go further still, by lowering the threshold for recording so-called “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs). Since the College of Policing introduced the concept in 2014, police forces in England and Wales have logged a quarter of a million of these — often with no evidence, no crime, and no victim. That’s 65 a day, triggered by everything from schoolyard spats to political speeches about immigration.

Unfortunately, this cloud has no silver lining. Over the next few years, we will see a deepening chill descend over public debate, often on flimsy or politically motivated grounds. Labour realises that it can’t manage public perception with recycled slogans about “smashing the gangs”; nor can politicians depoliticise this crisis by smearing critics or gatekeeping the discourse.

Labour’s response, predictably, is to use legislation as a deterrent, to make examples of dissenters and encourage silence through fear. This approach will work, to some extent. People will lower their voices; some will step back. But don’t mistake that for submission. The public may be looking over their shoulders — but those shoulders are squared, and sharp.

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Mike Jones is a political scientist, specialising in migration.

technopopulist

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