OnTheWight always welcomes a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from Ieuan Jehu, Ed
“The Isle of Wight council are doing a dodgy deal to house thousands of migrants!”
Isn’t it funny how baseless rumours like this only crop up around the time that campaigning for local elections is kicking off.
A familiar pattern
Just as the sight of falling leaves in the autumn lets us know that the season has begun for angry people to claim that POPPIES ARE BEING BANNED!!! – a polling card dropping through your letterbox is a clear indication that your local community Facebook page will soon be full of posts about migrants invading a hotel near you.
It’s almost as if it’s some kind of orchestrated campaign.
Reform UK’s limited Island presence
If you search on Facebook for “Reform UK Isle of Wight”, you will find a page with just 39 followers where the most recent post was made in May 2025. Despite their recent rally, where Farage begged for more volunteers to be candidates for the Party, Reform UK has little presence on the Isle of Wight and they have no interest in local issues. Asked about Islanders’ problems with cross-Solent travel, the Party Leader mumbled something about ferries being like trains, advocated for maintaining the current privatised & unregulated ownership model, before suggesting that the Island could improve our current undesirable status by giving property developers more freedom.
The lack of knowledge of the issues which affect Islanders or a local campaigning base should be a hindrance to Reform UK’s chances of success on the Isle of Wight, but they have a strategy to overcome this.
Farage’s unsubstantiated claims
Last month, in a letter sent to the Island electorate, Nigel Farage made a claim that “thousands of illegal immigrants are housed in hotels in your community at your expense”.
When pulled up on this lie by a local journalist, Farage first admitted “I don’t know the numbers here” before going on to invite the reporter to take him up on a bet that there will be asylum hotels on the Isle of Wight ‘within 18 months’.
The reality of asylum accommodation
But the Labour government is phasing out the use of former hotels to accommodate people seeking asylum.
Since winning the general election in July ‘24, Labour has massively ramped up the processing of asylum claims – bringing down the backlog from a peak of 134,000 under the Tories, to less than half of that (64,000) at the beginning of this year. Removals have also scaled up to nearly 60,000 since July 2024 – a 31% increase compared to the 19-month period ending June 2024.
Contrary to Farage’s insinuation that the Government is looking to open more asylum hotels, the number in use has been slashed dramatically from over 400 in 2023 to around 200 today.
A pattern that predates this election
I’m old enough to remember the false claims about the repurposing of Atherfield Bay Holiday Camp which were spread on local community Facebook groups last summer, in the run up to the Lake North by-election.
I also remember similar posts preceding three other council by-elections in May last year. All of these posts seemingly originated from Facebook profiles which self identify as “digital content creators” based in London.
What the strategy actually looks like
That is the Reform UK campaign strategy. They do not know or care about local issues. They do not have a team of Islanders ready to campaign for them.
And so they spread fake news via local community Facebook groups, so that when campaigners, drafted in from the mainland, knock on your door and say “are you worried about immigration?” you are likely to think about the posts you have seen and the rumours you have heard, and you may be more likely to ignore the issues which genuinely affect you, to vote for the “strong man” who promises to protect you from the phantom they have created.
