Albanians in UK scapegoated by rightwing media and politicians, says ambassador

Albanians in Britain are paying the price in schools and workplaces of being scapegoated by rightwing media and politicians, the Albanian ambassador has said.

Uran Ferizi also criticised Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, for comments in parliament where she singled out Albanians when discussing problems with immigration.

“The obsession with demonising Albanians has reached the parliamentary dispatch box,” the ambassador told the Guardian.

“When 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.”

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 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.

But he also broadened the criticism, implicitly taking issue with comments by politicians of overseas heritage, including Mahmood, Suella Braverman and others.

“It is particularly dispiriting to see politicians who are themselves second-generation migrants attacking the migrants who have followed them into Britain,” he said.

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.

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.

“Opportunists, self-styled as experts, peddle theories and invented numbers about Albanians – particularly when elections are looming.”

Ferizi cited analysis in the Daily Telegraph 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 “that ignores the most elementary procedures for ensuring statistical accuracy”.

“If 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’t reinforce the prejudice that Albanians are an exceptionally criminal group, so it isn’t printed.”

The ambassador likened the “scapegoating” of Albanians to the experience of previous groups of immigrants to the UK.

“It 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,” he said.