Overview
The Centre for Migration Control (CMC) is a UK-based anti-immigration pressure group based at 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, operating as a rebrand of Future for Leave — the younger sibling of Leave Means Leave, co-chaired by Reform UK's Richard Tice and John Longworth with Nigel Farage as vice-chair. The group is run by Robert Bates, its sole Research Director, who supplies distorted migration statistics to right-wing media outlets including the Telegraph and GB News as factual evidence. The Good Law Project has challenged CMC's claims including manipulated foreign national arrest rate statistics that ignore age-band comparisons with the native born population. The organisation operates with no transparency about its funding sources despite having direct personnel links to Reform UK.
Aims & Objectives
The Centre for Migration Control states its aim is to advocate for controlling and reducing migration to Britain. The organisation produces research and claims to provide data on immigration-related issues, which it uses to influence public debate and media coverage on migration policy. In practice the CMC produces deliberately distorted statistics that are fed to right-wing media as factual evidence, including manipulated crime data that ignores age-band comparisons between foreign nationals and native born populations of the same demographic.
History
The CMC is a rebrand of Future for Leave, itself the younger sibling of Leave Means Leave — the pro-Brexit pressure group co-chaired by Reform UK's Richard Tice and John Longworth with Nigel Farage as vice-chair. The first Telegraph piece quoting CMC research was published the day it rebranded from Future for Leave, written by Steven Edginton — former chief digital strategist for the Brexit Party, now Reform UK. The CMC operates with limited public information about its founding, membership, or funding sources. Despite this lack of transparency the organisation has succeeded in getting its claims quoted in UK media outlets, leading to scrutiny from the Good Law Project regarding the accuracy and methodology of its published statistics.