Britain’s Manufactured Migrant Crisis: A Visual Politics

Images have become a primary site of contestation in migration politics, weaponised by actors to appeal to what feels true rather than what is factually or empirically true. Anita Howarth begins the book with a paradox. In 2025, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper released unprecedented footage of a deportation flight, hoping visual "evidence" of enforcement would succeed where statutory power alone had failed to reassure a sceptical public.Critics on the left and right reacted with hostility.Rather than a communications failure, Howarth reads this as symptomatic of a deeper condition: a manufactured sensorium that reduces migrants to voiceless political objects across actors with divergent agendas.The book follows four of them competing to define this perceptual field: the state, staging a sanitised spectacle of docile bodies and orderly control; Nigel Farage, appropriating investigative journalism's credibility through mimicry; Britain First, orchestrating a daily dripfeed of memes, miscapt