Rylan is a symptom of poison infecting our broadcast narrative - and our society - the antidote is facts, not social media fighting

Yes, we must continue to push back on Rylan Clark’s dangerous comments on This Morning.

But it is ITV and the magazine show on the hook as much as the stand-in presenter, if not more.

Rylan is a symptom of the poisonous rhetoric infecting the broadcast narrative around asylum seekers and refugees.

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This Morning has questions to answer for green-lighting and amplifying an ill-informed perspective for which a Premier League footballer would have been vilified.

ITV is the channel that normalised Nigel Farage on its flagship reality TV show, I’m A Celebrity. Now this, an outburst seized upon and clipped up on social media by Far Right racists as a badge of honour.

Even when Rylan sought to clarify his comments and fend off the heavy fire he’d been taking, long after This Morning had ended on Wednesday, he made another mis-step.

“You can be pro-immigration and against illegal routes” he tweeted as part of a longer defence.

No Rylan, there are no legal routes.

The Tory party closed them off to everyone bar Ukrainians three years ago with the Nationality and Borders Act, in a deliberate move to unfairly frame every man, woman and child arriving here in need as an illegal.

Nor is there any crime whatsoever, thanks to the 1951 Refugee Convention, in risking your life to claim asylum here or anywhere else.

If This Morning really wanted to help Rylan to explore an issue being allowed to split our society by Big Tech, our worst crop of post-war politicians, sections of our media and a bloke with just four MPs in his lobbying group, it could have done so responsibly. The show could have furnished him with actual facts.

He absolutely has the right to his opinion. A fascination of mine is with people who believe that just because you might work outside politics, you can't have a view on the way the country is run.

So I would no more seek to delegitimise Rylan’s voice than I would my own, as someone who also writes about sport.

But what he, I - all of us on big platforms - have to do, is get it right.

Because it pains me to say that the escalating, vilifying rhetoric around migrants is in danger of getting someone killed.

Rylan prefaced his words with an attempt at “taking politics out of this” - but you can’t. Not while the actual politicians are scapegoating migrants and foreigners to try and turn us against each other. So some facts.

The number of hotels accommodating asylum seekers has fallen from 400 in 2023 to just over 200 in 2025.

In the first half of this year alone, the number of asylum seekers living in hotels fell by 6,000.

Out of the 69million people in this country, asylum seekers represent just a fraction.

But the Conservative and Reform politicians want to continue targeting them to produce anxieties just like Rylan’s and the people who don’t read the detail.

Correctly citing the fact that this country was built on immigration, did not negate the incendiary nature of Rylan’s claim that it is “insane” to show empathy towards migrants.

The xenophobes and extremists thirsty to tear us apart don’t care about the history, just the beef. The bit that served as the confirmation bias.

The bit that sounded as though Rylan had been put to air after reading a few unsubstantiated comments on Twitter.

And that’s not on him. That’s on the people behind the scenes at This Morning with a responsibility to ensure - particularly after the indiscriminate assaults on Black and Brown people last summer - that the commentary around this was responsible and accurate.

They and those above them will doubtless now hide as Rylan and the other people parroting his claims in, for example, the pub, face the backlash.

But, thankfully there were people on social media offering the east London-born presenter a cup of tea and a chat to discuss the facts and his on-screen misrepresentations.

Let’s go through some of them here.

Asylum seekers are not handed brand new iPhones when they rock up on the beach in Dover.

Basic phones - not smartphones - were temporarily given to some during the Covid pandemic because immigration staff were unable to interview them face to face due to lockdown restrictions.

The idea that arrivals are - or have ever been - showered with their choice of mobiles and iPads is utter garbage.

Yes, some charities do offer previously-used phones - as they would do to the underprivileged in this country. But the framing of Dover beach as an offshoot of Curry’s or Carphone Warehouse is another gross misrepresentation.

As is the idea that asylum seekers are handed a wad of cash to paint the town red. Those in catered accommodation where meals are provided receive £9.95 a week. Pregnant mothers with children aged between one and three get an extra £5.25 a week.

Jealous of that? Really?

As for the compassion shown to asylum seekers over UK citizens, your home isn’t cold because of arrivals in Dover. Nor are your bills high or your wages low.

That’s on the politicians who are failing us all.

In terms of crime, Home Office figures confirm there is no evidence linking migration levels to rising lawlessness, despite attempts by the Far Right to skew statistics.

Suggesting every migrant man is a threat is the kind of thing racists and xenophobes would say about Black men in the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Lies. Allowed to go halfway around the country before the truth has its trousers on.

When there is no pushback on national TV in real time it normalises racist framing.

Rylan’s ‘I’m only saying with people are thinking’ defence doesn’t help non-white families, currently living in a climate of fear.

It helps the likes of Farage, his henchman Richard Tice and the corporate lobbying group that is Reform.

Their tried and trusted move is to scare people by dehumanising asylum seekers as the enemy.

Painting them as animals, savages with no boundaries, makes it easier for ordinary people to accept plans to treat them with a brutal lack of compassion.

Amid it all, the perpetrators want us to attack each other. They want unfair hit pieces to antagonise, vilify and try to cancel people like Rylan. To drive them over to the dark side.

The puppet masters revel in ‘them and us’ stand-offs because they mean you won’t bother to examine the nuance or pick holes in their tissue of lies.

So let’s confound them. Let’s explore the truth together. Maybe, going forward, Rylan and the This Morning team could do a regular segment separating the fact from the fiction.

Perhaps it could have media commentary from journalists on both sides instead of just one.

We can do our bit by challenging myths day to day, researching the evidence and pushing back even when it feels uncomfortable.

The failure of our politicians and the willingness of so many mainstream media outlets to platform xenophobia means we have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.

Otherwise, history has shown us where it ends.