At its closest point, Minnesota is 4,000 miles from the UK. But that hasn’t stopped the UK’s legacy broadcast media from force-feeding us nothing but one story about the US state this week.
Listening to LBC, the BBC and Times Radio, you could be forgiven for thinking that immigration enforcement officials had killed a Brit, given the quantity and tone of coverage.
Contributors talked as if gun laws and rules of engagement for armed officers were something that we, British voters or legislators, had a say in. We don’t!
On TV, it was worse. Everywhere, portentous parallels are being drawn with the killing of George Floyd in 2020, also in Minneapolis, the largest city in Minnesota. Right enough.
History was repeating itself - but just not in the way portrayed. Because, in fact, the real story was that, here again, the British MSM had lost the plot. It was the media-fuelled hysterics of Black Lives Matter all over again.
The irony is that the people responsible for this grotesquely disproportionate coverage think that wallowing in the minutiae of Minnesota represents an act of journalistic probity. What balderdash. They are doing the story because it allows them to give Trump a kicking, and that makes them feel good.
It allows liberals to put anyone who doesn’t share their outrage onto the moral naughty step. Show insufficient outrage about events in Minnesota, and, as with the killing of George Floyd, you will have failed a woke purity test.
All this takes the public for fools. But, in truth, viewers and listeners feel - in their bones - that there is something ‘off’ about all this wall-to-wall coverage. It feeds the growing corrosion of trust in MSM. And one that’s reflected in the numbers.
This month, for instance, the BBC was overtaken by YouTube when it comes to audience figures. Long may that trend continue. YouTube has provided a much-needed alternative platform for news.
I talked about why this matters - on YouTube - with the former BBC TV host Andrew Gold only last week. Last time I looked, our chat had racked up nearly 200,000 views. That would be plenty, even on Twitter or TikTok.
But this is long form. Our talk went on for nearly an hour, allowing time to properly chew over complicated questions about what’s happened to our MSM.
When it comes to events in Minnesota, the UK MSM is obsessing about the wrong story - Colin Brazier
|Getty Images
So TV’s loss is YouTube’s gain. But that should not be where the matter rests. Because there’s more at work in the MSM’s coverage of one dead protester in Minnesota than meets the eye.
And this doesn’t require us to believe in conspiracy theories about how a left-wing media is seeking to undermine the whole basis for deportations in the US and wider Western world. It simply requires us to ask one question: what story is not being told?
As I tweeted this week: “As ever, it's not what the BBC reports, so much as what it doesn't. The BBC is obsessed with the shooting of a protester in Minneapolis, a story with limited lessons for Britain, while marginalising a story in that city with far greater resonance for the UK: Somalian corruption.”
Somalian corruption? What kind of non-sequitur is that? What has “Somalian corruption” got to do with Britain? What’s it even got to do with Minneapolis? Well, the answer is: more than you probably know. And that is because the BBC and others don’t want to tell you. Lest it stir uncomfortable feelings (like justified fury) among the natives.
So what is the story about Somalian corruption in the city where ICE is, controversially, now operating? The first thing to note is that this scandal is both massive and only came to light, not because of investigative work by the New York Times or CNN, but because of the citizen journalism of a 23-year-old YouTuber called Nick Shirley (who now has 24-hour-security after facing death threats).
His findings, released in December, were so serious that the Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, announced that he wouldn't be standing for reelection. Walz had been the vice-presidential running mate of Kamala Harris, so this was a big story in America.
And the scandal was enormous. Nick Shirley had discovered a web of fraudulent activity, leaving the US taxpayer on the hook to the tune of $1bn. It centred on welfare and post-covid fraud, involving improper payments to, among other things, childcare centres.
One apparent fraud alone, involving an organisation called ‘Feeding Our Future’, said it had delivered 91m meals to hungry infants, allegedly diverting $250m into the funding of lavish lifestyles, including the purchase of luxury cars. Echoes of the BLM movement here aplenty.
The Somalian community in the city of Minneapolis is at least 100,000-strong and forms a Democrat-friendly voting bloc in this notoriously woke ‘sanctuary’ city, which led calls in 2020 to defund the police.
Nobody is suggesting that the Somalian community is endemically corrupt. But a strong case has been made that a blind eye was turned to the criminal activities of a minority because it was politically expedient for Democrats to do so.
And why does any of this interest us, here in the UK? Because we are beginning to understand that, when it comes to crime, certain types of crime are disproportionally committed by certain nationalities.
The British government does not, for instance, want to acknowledge that - Afghans, for instance - are over-represented in sex assault statistics. But they are.
These crimes are also transnational. By which I mean, certain types of crime are committed by citizens of the same nationality in different countries where they have moved.
All of this has been noted by the think-tank Migration Watch. Earlier this month, it issued a list of welfare fraud committed by Somalian-heritage UK nationals, here in Britain, asserting that there were “clear parallels with the scams operating in Minnesota”.
It cited several cases, costing taxpayers like you and I millions. One welfare fraud, in Manchester, saw two Somalians jailed for eight and five years respectively.
They never went to prison because they had fled - presumably back to Somalia. Their scam involved 21 ‘cleaners’ who claimed to be working to justify their income, but were actually engaging in tax credit and housing benefit fraud.
The judge, Anthony Cross QC, said the number of cleaners would have been more fitting for Manchester town hall, rather than businesses in a 'two up two down' property.
Another fraud, involving £1.7m in housing benefit, saw six men, all former Somali nationals, jailed for a total of 17 years. They exploited a lack of checks by the local authority in Birmingham to win contracts to house asylum seekers. The enormous legal bill was inflated by the cost of translators.
And on it goes.
One Somalian woman, who migrated to Britain illegally, was repeatedly charged with benefit fraud before finally being convicted for one that saw £91,000 illegally taken.
She couldn’t be deported because of her Right to Family Life, under the ECHR and was not required to repay the money she stole.
A lot of this, of course, says much about our broken benefits system. But it also begs another, more sensitive question: is there something at work in parts of the Somalian diaspora which inclines it towards fraud?
This community is certainly over-represented in crime figures more generally, with a study in 2024 showing Somalians five times more likely to be arrested than average.
I would argue that the massive Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota has something to tell us about what may be happening in the UK.
I would also say that benefit fraud is a greater threat to the fabric of social cohesion in Britain than gun crime, which is more of an American than British problem.
And yet our MSM isn’t interested. It wants to focus on the story of one man in one city in America. Ignoring the story that Minneapolis might tell us about what’s really happening in Britain.
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