Fact-checking Farage’s claim that one million in Britain ‘don’t speak any English at all’published at 11:07 GMT
11:07 GMT
Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist
Image source, X/Nigel_Farage
Following criticism of comments on immigration by billionaire Manchester United co-owner Jim Ratcliffe, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage posted a video on X with the words “Jim Ratcliffe is right”.
In the video, external, Farage claims “one million people living in this country don’t speak any English at all”.
He made a similar claim on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, telling Nick Robinson: “You look at the last census, there’s a million living in Britain don’t speak English.”
The claim that one million people don’t speak any English is incorrect.
Every decade, the Office for National Statistics runs a census of people living in England and Wales which gathers information on a range of topics including languages.
According to the 2021 census, external:
161,000 people in England and Wales “could not speak English at all” – about 0.3% of the population
880,000 people (1.5% of the population) “could not speak English well”
Combining these figures gets you to just over one million – but that’s not the total number of people who don’t speak English “at all”.
Farage did use the correct ONS figures in a Telegraph article yesterday, external.
BBC Verify has fact-checked Jim Ratcliffe’s comments on immigration including the incorrect claim that the UK population had grown by 12 million since 2020.