Robert Bates
Activist/Research Director
Reform PartyBiography
Robert Bates serves as Research Director of the Centre for Migration Control, an anti-immigration advocacy organisation based at 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, and operates as a senior campaigner for Reform UK. He has regularly appeared as a commentator on GB News, Talk TV and in the Telegraph, but has faced criticism for providing distorted migration statistics to right-wing media outlets, including manipulated foreign national crime data that omits age-band comparisons with native-born populations, thereby producing artificially inflated figures. The Centre for Migration Control is registered at Companies House under a name invoking Alfred the Great's birthplace, reflecting deliberate historical nationalist symbolism, and represents a rebrand of Migration Watch UK's campaign wing with connections to figures including Richard Tice and Nigel Farage. His work exemplifies the activities of the Tufton Street network of advocacy groups that have been scrutinised for presenting partisan campaign material as objective research in mainstream media discussions of asylum and immigration policy.
Convictions & Legal Record
Documented use of manipulated FOI request data to produce distorted migration crime statistics. Statistics challenged by the Good Law Project for ignoring demographic age-band comparisons between foreign nationals and native born populations.
Notable Quotes
"Foreign nationals are arrested at 3.5 times the rate of British citizens" — disputed statistic that deliberately ignores age-band comparisons; "The UK is in a much worse situation with illegal migration than in 2024"; "The British Immigration System Doesn't Stop the Importation of criminals"