First published on the "Monk Debunks" substack, which you can subscribe to here.

As misleading front page headlines go, this one from the Express has to be up there with some of the worst!

Daily Express front page, 22nd September 2026

The first red flag that people should notice is the use of the inverted commas. This indicates that the headline is quoting someone and is not the newspaper telling you something factual.

A newspaper cannot print a headline that is an out-and-out lie, but they appear to get around this by quoting someone who, apparently, can lie…

Not only is this headline appalling, but there is so much harmful misinformation within the article itself, and it is all coming from the Leader of the Opposition.

So let’s take a look at what is said and what the facts show.

The article begins:

Kemi Badenoch issues terrifying Piddington warning as villages fear for their lives.

The Tory leader met more than 40 campaigning women from Piddington yesterday as Labour ploughs on with plans to put 1,200 migrants in the picturesque Oxfordshire village.

I think it’s important to make a couple of points here about the claim that these asylum seekers are being put in “the picturesque village”.

The plans are for them to be housed in a former defence storage & distribution centre on the nearby MoD Bicester Garrison, and they will not be in the village itself.

There are absolutely legitimate questions to be raised about whether there is the infrastructure to support that number of asylum seekers away from urban centres, but it is worth pointing out that when this site was an operational military base, it housed around 2,600 personnel, and there is currently a prison and young offenders institute on part of the disused MoD site already.

So while the site is very close to the village, the military base and prison have been in that location for decades.

Unchecked asylum seekers who could be murderers may end up being given “more freedom” and rights than villagers living next to proposed camps, Kemi Badenoch has warned.

Badenoch makes the claim repeatedly in the article that the asylum seekers will be “unchecked” and twice suggests they could be murderers.

In reality, the asylum seekers arriving at the site will undergo initial screening checks against policing and immigration databases. The government fact sheet accompanying the planning application says:

Mandatory security checks are conducted on all people seeking asylum through linking their biometric data to immigration, security, and criminality databases. This includes criminality checks for, amongst other things, convictions, pending prosecutions, wanted or missing reports, as well as fingerprints and photographs. These checks are critical to the delivery of a safe and secure immigration system.

So yes, it is possible that a person may be a murderer who has not been caught and is not wanted for murder, but isn’t that true of everyone we meet?!

It is simply not true to say these men will be “unchecked”.

And Mrs Badenoch accused Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood of sparking a safety crisis for women.

“The women of Piddington are showing that this is not just an immigration issue; this is a women’s issue, this is a safeguarding issue. People will not be safe.”

Badenoch is very keen to make this about women’s safety, and in doing so is making women feel genuinely scared.

Evidence on the danger to women

But there is simply no evidence to back up the claims that asylum seekers pose any greater risk to women than any other man.

It can seem that way, as social media, and increasingly, right-wing print media, will perpetuate this idea by over-reporting on crimes committed by asylum seekers and failing to cover the same crimes when committed by white British men.

Every time a new scary statistic does the rounds, it is invariably fact-checked and found to be wildly misleading.

Such as the claim that “Dorset Police have announced that 44% of alleged sex offences in Dorset are carried out by asylum seekers living in asylum hotels”, which was spread by former MEP, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, and Telegraph columnist, Allison Pearson, amongst others.

It was debunked by Full Fact, with Dorset Police confirming that only 1% of the 808 reported sexual offences in Bournemouth during a 15-month timeframe were against someone living in an asylum hotel.

A Freedom of Information request to Dorset police asked: “How many sexual offences have been recorded, resulting in charges of males residing in migrant hotels in Dorset” from July 2024 to 2025.

The answer was one.

And that one was widely covered in the national press at the time, which is understandable. But when the same offences are committed by white British men, they get no national coverage at all.

An estimated 739,000 females experienced some form of sexual assault in the year to March 2025. How many of those received national news coverage? Pretty much only the handful perpetrated by asylum seekers or refugees.

So you can see how easily people’s views can be skewed by what they see on the news stands and then vastly amplified online.

ONS data show that 85% of all female rapes are perpetrated by someone they know, with 43% being committed by a partner or ex-partner.

Perpetuating the myth that asylum seekers are a unique danger to women and using that to frame the narrative around where to house them isn’t dealing in facts, and is doing nothing to actually protect women.

She said villagers fear their lives “will be at risk”, with many considering “how we will go about our everyday lives”, including by learning self-defence and refusing to go out at night.

And this is where that rhetoric leads us. Women in local areas are understandably genuinely fearful because they are being told how scary and dangerous these “unchecked” men are not just by their social media and newspapers, but by the leader of the Conservative Party, who should know better.

European Convention on Human Rights

The Conservative leader told the Express: “We can’t detain them unless we leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

Badenoch, alongside Reform and Restore, has this talking point that if only we left the European Convention on Human Rights, then they’d be free to legally treat asylum seekers as appallingly as they appear to want to.

But the ECHR is not the only law governing what happens to asylum seekers.

Britain is also signed up to the 1951 Refugee Convention, alongside much of the rest of the world (142 countries), which sets out legal protections for those claiming asylum. One of those protections is that asylum seekers cannot be imprisoned simply for being asylum seekers.

In the UK, asylum seekers are detained for initial questioning when they arrive and apply for asylum, but then UK law states that “detention can only lawfully be exercised where there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable period.”

So, not detaining asylum seekers is covered by both UK law and the 1951 Refugee Convention, and not just the ECHR.

As an interesting side note, a study by Oxford University found that:

Misleading media coverage is shaping public debate on immigration and human rights.
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is frequently misrepresented in reporting on deportation cases involving foreign national offenders, contributing to misconceptions that risk undermining trust in the legal system.

They looked at one 6-month period in 2025 and found 379 media reports that mentioned the ECHR, of which 75% of them focused on the ECHR’s role in immigration control.

And yet, in the 45 years since 1980, “the ECHR has only found against the UK in 13 removal cases, and just four of those concerned family life. In relation to immigration rules more broadly, the Court has only three times ruled that the UK’s immigration rules violate the ECHR in the past 45 years.”

The same people who said Brexit would ‘solve’ immigration are now telling us that leaving the ECHR will be the answer…

Freedoms

“…they could be murderers, we don’t know—and then they’re just allowed to roam the streets.

“They’re almost, in a certain sense, given more freedom than actual citizens of the country.”

So that’s where the headline comes from.

Badenoch is saying that because they are not physically imprisoned, they are “given more freedom than actual citizens of this country”. She does at least have the good grace to add, “they’re almost, in a certain sense…” because she knows full well that claim is ludicrous.

The Daily Express, however, decides that’s the claim to put on their front cover!

Let’s take a look at what rights asylum seekers do and don’t have, so you can decide for yourself…

The government website sets out the rights of an asylum applicant:

be treated fairly and lawfully regardless of your race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation or any disability

practise your own religion, and you are expected to show respect for people of other faiths

have your application considered fairly and accurately

have access to support and accommodation if you meet the requirements for it

have access to free health care from the National Health Service (NHS)

have legal representation.

And that’s it.

They do not have the right to work or to claim UK benefits, so they have no means to support themselves. If this leaves them destitute, the government will provide accommodation, and either food and £9.95 per week or no food and £49.18 per week while their applications are processed.

They have no say over where they live, and are often moved across the country repeatedly with little to no warning, as this Iraqi family explained:

Kadir and his family have been told they are to be moved on once more - to two hotels in different cities. Kadir and his baby daughter have been offered accommodation in one hotel, and Mira (his wife), Shayan (daughter, 12) and Roman (son, 14) in another, nearly 200 miles away.

As several investigations have shown, asylum accommodation is often dirty, cramped, and rat-infested, and in some cases even dangerous.

I covered what they do and don’t get in detail last year, and looked at homelessness levels earlier this year, highlighting how little support they receive.

So no, they’re not “almost”, or in any “certain sense”, “given more freedom than actual citizens of the country.”

“Allowed to roam the streets”

It is true that these men will not be imprisoned on site and can therefore “roam the streets” (aka go for a walk!), but there is some important context to be aware of.

The government fact sheet says:

Asylum seekers at the site would not be detained, however the site would be self-contained as essential services are provided on site to reduce the impact on local services through reducing the need for asylum seekers to leave the site.

There will be a high level of security on site too:

There will be a specialist and experienced provider of security services permanently on site 24/7, as well as security systems including CCTV monitoring and recording.

The Home Office regularly works in collaboration with local authorities and other partners including police to ensure that accommodation sites are successfully managed and the impact upon the local community is minimised. This includes a comprehensive and ongoing approach to identifying and managing any public protection or safeguarding risks associated with individuals.

The site will be a strict “no alcohol zone”. If criminal activity occurs on site, the site’s service provider will have robust processes in place to report incidents of criminality to the police.

Everyone entering or leaving site would be required to sign in and out at the front gate. This process will be managed by the service provider’s security team and overseen by the Home Office Assurance team, who are also based on site.

So, they will provide as much as possible directly on site, but if they choose to leave, they will have to sign out and in again and will be monitored by constant CCTV.

Again, does that sound like they have “more freedom” than British citizens?

The Conservative leader told the meeting in Piddington Village Hall she was particularly concerned no one “is watching and monitoring” asylum seekers. She said migrants should only be housed “near where there are police”, with thousands set to be held in former military bases allowed to leave whenever they like.

As we’ve seen, they will be watched and monitored by 24-hour security on site, who are in direct contact with local police forces.

She warned that Labour’s asylum crisis is now bigger than an “immigration issue”, because it is now about women’s safety.

Immigration in general is down since Badenoch was in power. Yearly small boat arrivals hit their lowest number since 2021 this month, and hotel use has fallen from over 56,000 in 2023 to just under 21,000 in March this year, which means the Right have to find a way to keep the “immigration issue” going.

So now it is apparently all about women’s safety, based on no solid evidence at all…

Military support

After many more references to “unsupervised” men and how scared women should be, the article ends with:

The women leading the fight against Labour’s plans received a boost when a veteran wrote to them declaring that a “very able force” of former personnel could rally around towns and villages to “give a little consoling factor to our women and children”.

A letter seen by the Express from Malcolm Vickers, a veteran of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, stated: “Ladies, I would like to humbly suggest to you that a very able force of our veterans is more than ready and able to form a means to help out in our towns and villages of England, even if only a visible presence to give a little consoling factor to our women and children.”

The idea of ex-military men forming what appear to be vigilante forces around villages and towns is a terrifying prospect.

A Loughborough University study last year into sexual harassment within the armed forces found that two-thirds of women in the forces had experienced unwanted sexualised behaviour, with 8% reporting non-consensual sexual activity.

This follows on from a report in 2015 highlighting that “there had been more than 400 cases of rape or sexual assault in the military in the previous five years” and that “these did not represent the full scale of the problem, as they did not include cases investigated by civilian police forces.”

How many of these were reported as front-page national news?

That report led to an anti-rape campaign within the military with the slogan “Don’t kid yourself! Without consent it’s RAPE”, showing various scenarios of men justifying rape.

We have also seen a new trend in balaclava-clad men “protecting women and girls” by attacking asylum hotels, RNLI lifeboats, and buses carrying asylum seekers.

And yet, most of the men arrested at the Henry Novak protests had been reported for domestic abuse, and 21% of the people arrested in the 2024 Southport riots had also been reported for domestic abuse.

The founder of Raise the Colours (the people behind the campaign to put England flags all over our lamp posts) has been charged with 14 offences, including racially aggravated assault; another member has been charged with murder; and another faces child abuse image charges.

I’d suggest that these are not the men to be “protecting” our women and children…

As I said earlier, there is legitimate debate to be had over the best place to house asylum seekers, around infrastructure, their welfare, as well as the impact on local communities.

Effectively shutting away groups of young men, banning them from working and giving them nothing to do all day is always going to be a recipe for disaster - regardless of their immigration status or ethnicity.

And there will always be a few men in any community who will hurt others. I’m not denying that.

But the narrative and coverage around asylum seekers in this respect bear no resemblance to the reality of the risks posed.

And this narrative is leaving real women genuinely scared, making unnecessary lifestyle changes off the back of it, and creating further division and fear within communities.

As for the Daily Express headline, that is just complete misinformation. Always look out for the quotation marks to give a heads-up that the headline may be misleading you.

First published on the "Monk Debunks" substack, which you can subscribe to here.