Purported list of MPs who voted against ‘deporting foreign rapists’ is missing context
CLAIM
An image posted to X purported to show a list of MPs who voted against the deportation of “foreign rapists”.
BACKGROUND
A post was shared on X on January 6, 2025, claiming to show a list of MPs who voted against the deportation from the UK of “foreign rapists”.
The post, shared by an account that posts under the name ‘The Yorkshire Lass’, was captioned: “Here is a list of MPs who voted against deporting foreign rapists. These people are evil and need arresting! We are being invaded. TREASON!”
The post included a screenshot of a list of names, many of whom are Labour party politicians in Britain. It had a huge reach on X, where it was viewed over six million times in just a few hours.
The huge view count was thanks in part to a reshare by X platform-owner Elon Musk, who wrote over the post: “Unconscionable.” Musk has been frequently posting about UK politics for several days.
The uploader describes themselves in their bio as a “God Loving Patriot from Yorkshire UK ready to unleash the Truth”. Their profile cover image is a photograph of Donald Trump.
Discourse in Britain around immigrant rapists has been amplified in recent days due to Musk’s highlighting of a child sexual abuse case in the UK that took place over a decade ago.
The story involved gangs of men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, who had groomed and trafficked young girls. Musk took aim at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time of the incidents.
Starmer, for his part, has defended his record as the country’s chief prosecutor, but the story has nonetheless dominated news cycles and UK political commentary in recent days.
METHOD
The first clue that something was wrong with the image was the claim that it showed a list of MPs apparently involved in a parliamentary vote.
A read of the list revealed that not all of those named were MPs at all, with some of the signatories bearing the title ‘baroness’ or ‘lord’ — indicating their membership of the House of Lords, the upper house in the UK’s parliamentary system.
The list of names included in the X post showed, in the top right corner, that it had been sent from the office of Nadia Whittome MP.
We were able to find the source of the original letter by searching for Labour Party letters from Nadia Whittome on Google, where it was the first result.
The full letter, dated February 9, 2020, was addressed to the Prime Minister and began: “We, the undersigned, write to you as a group of cross-party parliamentarians to express our grave concern over Home Office plans to deport 50 people to Jamaica by charter flight on 11th February 2020.”
The letter argued that there was an “unacceptable risk” of wrongful deportations of people who were either British citizens or who had the right to stay in the UK, in the aftermath of the Windrush scandal.
The Windrush scandal was a controversy in 2018 involving people who were either wrongly detained, denied legal rights, or wrongly deported by the Home Office, including people who were born British subjects from Caribbean countries. After World War II, the UK invited people from Caribbean nations to fill labour shortages and help rebuild post-war Britain, and these communities became known as the ‘Windrush generation’.
This article by BBC News explains the Nadia Whittome-organised letter to the Prime Minister. The 2020 letter specifically referred to a flight due to take off two days later, and called on the government to suspend deportation flights until a full report into the Windrush scandal of two years earlier was released. Labour MPs at the time also called for the entire process to be halted until each case was checked, as at least one of those highlighted as due for deportation had a conviction under an old rule that had been deemed unlawful in a more recent interpretation, according to the then-shadow equalities minister.
At the time, civil society groups such as the Joint Council for Welfare of Immigrants also sounded the alarm over the risks of deporting victims of human trafficking or those with health conditions who, it said, had not been adequately assessed for their fitness to fly.
That week, the Home Office said: “The planned charter flight to Jamaica is specifically for removing foreign criminals. Those detained for removal include people convicted of manslaughter, rape, violent crime and dealing Class-A drugs.”
The flight did indeed take off on February 11, but more than half of those due to be on board were removed from the flight list after a court judgment found that they had not been able to exercise their legal right to contact their lawyers while in detention centres.
From this analysis, we can see that the list is actually a signed letter to the Prime Minister calling for a halt to a deportation flight in 2020 citing a range of concerns about the legality of such a move, and not a ‘vote’ as claimed in the X post.
Furthermore, while the passengers scheduled for deportation at the time included those with criminal records, as outlined in news coverage and official statements from 2020, there was no evidence that it was a mass deportation of “foreign rapists”, nor does it have any link to the mainly Pakistani gangs implicated in the child abuse case dominating the news, as it relates to deportations of people with Caribbean roots.
RATING
The X post featuring the names of politicians is missing context and therefore misrepresents the issues raised in the letter. It is also miscaptioned, making it appear that they voted on a deportation of “foreign rapists”.
SOURCES
X (formerly Twitter) / The Yorkshire Lass. (2025). Available at: Here is a list of MPs who voted against deporting foreign rapists [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
Holton, K. (2025). The child rape scandal dominating UK politics after Musk criticism. [online] Reuters. [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
Campbell, A. (2018). Who were the Windrush generation and what is Windrush Day? [online] Bbc.com. [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
BBC News. (2020). Windrush: 170 MPs call on PM to halt Jamaica deportation flight. [online] Bbc.com. [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
Office of Nadia Whittome MP Member of Parliament for Nottingham East House of Commons London SW1A 0AA. (2 Feb. 2020). Available at: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Letter-to-PM-09022020-Nadia-Whittome.pdf [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
BBC News. (2020). Government under pressure over Jamaica deportation flight. [online] Bbc.com. [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
Culbertson, A. (2020). PM under pressure to stop deportation of 50 criminals to Jamaica. [online] Sky News. [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].
Taylor, D. (2020). Appeal court gives 11th-hour reprieve to detainees due to be sent to Jamaica. [online] the Guardian. [Accessed 6 Jan. 2025].