Today’s announcement that police will be allowed to publish the ethnicity and immigration status of suspects in high-profile cases is being sold as “transparency”. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a dog whistle blown straight into the Reform UK press office, an invitation to the far right to weaponise headlines.
You don’t need to be a genius to know where this ends. The facts will barely matter. A suspect’s ethnicity becomes the story, and the story becomes a stick to beat whole communities with. We’ve been here before: Suella Braverman’s “grooming gangs” line, the racist caricature of British-Pakistani men as a collective criminal class, the front-page mobbing. Reform have been banging on for months about “cover-ups” and demanding ethnicity be revealed. Now they’ve been given their win.
The Home Office will pretend it’s neutral, a simple matter of “public confidence”. But whose confidence? The public as a whole, or the mob that stands outside hotels shouting at migrants, the ones who read the Mail and see confirmation of their prejudices in every police press release? This policy is about feeding that mob. It dresses prejudice as accountability.
Due process will be the first casualty. A suspect is not a convict, but once their race or immigration status is in the headlines, the jury pool is poisoned, the trial is already half over in the court of public opinion. And when the case collapses, or the suspect is acquitted, you won’t see the same font size used for the correction. You’ll see the damage done, the hostility hardened.
Britain has been here before, and worse. We know how the state behaves when it decides to use identity as a political tool. This isn’t about law enforcement; it’s about performance. It is spectacle politics, the re-enactment of a medieval stocks in the digital square. The Reform lot will cheer. The Mail will print the mugshots. And the government will stand there, nodding along, telling us this is what transparency looks like.
It isn’t. It’s regression, a retreat to mob justice with an official seal on top. And if you think it will stop at “high-profile cases”, you haven’t been paying attention.
