Albanians in Britain are paying the price in schools and workplaces of being scapegoated by rightwing media and politicians, the Albanian ambassador has said.<\/p>\n
Uran Ferizi also criticised Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, for comments in parliament where she singled out Albanians when discussing problems with immigration.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe obsession with demonising Albanians has reached the parliamentary dispatch box,\u201d the ambassador told the Guardian.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen a minister names a nationality in parliament, rather than a behaviour or a particular type of crime, they do not describe a problem, they create a target.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ferizi, whose first experience of Britain was as teenage stowaway before he went on to read mathematics at Oxford University four years later, used a letter to the Guardian<\/a> to take issue with what he characterised as the misreporting of statistics in the Telegraph and other media in relation to the scale of Albanian involvement in UK crime.<\/p>\n But he also broadened the criticism, implicitly taking issue with comments by politicians of overseas heritage, including Mahmood, Suella Braverman and others.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is particularly dispiriting to see politicians who are themselves second-generation migrants attacking the migrants who have followed them into Britain,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The ambassador said the impact of negative portrayals of Albanians in the media and by politicians had been felt by the community, including workers, families and schoolchildren.<\/p>\n A pattern had been established in the British press in which selective statistics were stripped of context and amplified, the ambassador wrote in his letter.<\/p>\n \u201cOpportunists, self-styled as experts, peddle theories and invented numbers about Albanians \u2013 particularly when elections are looming.\u201d<\/p>\n Ferizi cited analysis in the Daily Telegraph<\/a> in 2024 which claimed that one in 50 Albanians in the UK was in prison, the worst rate of any nationality. However, he said this had been obtained by a process \u201cthat ignores the most elementary procedures for ensuring statistical accuracy\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the number of Albanians in prison is weighted by the actual number of Albanians in the UK, not just by a very small subset of them, and controlled for sex, age and income, you get the result that Albanians are imprisoned at the same rate as native-born Britons. But that doesn\u2019t reinforce the prejudice that Albanians are an exceptionally criminal group, so it isn\u2019t printed.\u201d<\/p>\n The ambassador likened the \u201cscapegoating\u201d of Albanians to the experience of previous groups of immigrants to the UK.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was visited upon the Jews, the Irish, the Poles. Each time the narrative revealed the anxieties of the moment rather than the character of the people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The ambassador\u2019s reference to Mahmood was in relation to her comments in parliament in November, when she set out controversial plans for the biggest shake-up of asylum laws in 40 years.<\/p>\n