Law and order: missing a problem
RICHARD NORTH
It’s been a bad week for the BBC. First, it got caught out having doctored one of Trump’s speeches and, in so doing had “completely misled” viewers by splicing together a video from two parts of his speech on 6 January 2021, that made him “‘say’ things [he] never actually said”.
Then, the Corporation was accused of pushing Hamas lies around the world and fuelling anti-Semitism at home, with its distorted and error-prone coverage of Gaza, with its BBC Arabic news service acting as a propaganda arm for the terrorist group.
Now, it is on the rack for having been “captured by a small group of [staff] promoting the Stonewall view” of the trans debate, its actions running to the suppression of stories raising difficult questions about trans issues, with a “constant drip-feed” of more celebratory news features that were said to have been published without adequate balance.
In between all that, it has been accused of rewriting history to promote a “woke agenda”, making documentaries on subjects including slavery, colonialism and the Irish famine which distorted the truth about Britain’s past through inaccuracy or the omission of important facts.
Unsurprisingly, one of the Telegraph’s star columnists, Suzanne Moore, has stormed into print expressing her shock at what she calls “institutional mendacity” and declaring that she is no longer prepared to pay the license fee.
One can only ask, though, what took her so long to react. According to Google AI, she joins the 2 million or so viewers in the five years leading up to 2024 who no longer pay for a license, with the number of paid-for TV licences falling by about 314,000 to 22.6 million between March 2024 and March 2025 alone.
The cumulative loss to the BBC from unpaid licence fees (evasion and legal “no licence needed” declarations) is now estimated at over £1.1 billion annually as of late 2025, with the evasion rate (households that should pay but do not) rising to a record high of approximately 12.52 percent in 2024/25, up from 6.95 percent in 2019/20. This represents more than a quarter of the BBC’s total licence fee income of approximately £3.8 billion.
It seems remarkable, therefore, that at this particular juncture, the BBC should decide to produce what might look suspiciously like decent journalism, with the publication of a report of an investigation into the “Criminal network behind UK mini-marts [which] enables migrants to work illegally”.
At first sight, the work looks promising as the intrepid BBC staff tell us that “a Kurdish crime network is enabling migrants to work illegally in mini-marts on High Streets the length of Britain”. Fake company directors are paid to put their names to official paperwork, and have dozens of businesses listed on Companies House, but are not involved in running them.
The team employed two undercover reporters, themselves Kurdish, who posed as asylum seekers. They were told how easy it would be for them to take over and run a shop and make big profits selling illegal vapes and cigarettes.
As a result of all this work, the team has linked more than 100 mini-marts, barbershops and car washes, operating from Dundee to south Devon, to the crime network. But they also inform us that a financial crime investigator believes the problem goes much wider.
Patting themselves on their collective backs – or perhaps indulging in mutual back-slapping – they then proudly inform us that the Home Office has “said it will investigate the BBC’s findings”.
One can certainly congratulate the BBC for adding some detail to an ongoing issue, but it has to be said that Kurdish asylum seekers setting up shop to sell illicit tobacco isn’t the story. Cigarette smuggling, producing counterfeit brands and the retail sale of illicit tobacco products is a long-standing problem that has involved the IRA and Sadam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.
The involvement of Kurds in the trade is so well-known and of such long-standing that it merits an entry in Wikipedia and even last July in this blogpost I remarked that there were a number of networks involved and that in some areas, Iranian Kurds (often asylum seekers) seem to dominate the illicit trade, selling through barber shops and vape outlets.
You can actually go back to pieces written in 2022 and find a report entitled “Criminal Gangs Are Making Billions Selling Illegal Tobacco From Derelict Shops”, which talks of Britain’s high streets, where “cut-price convenience stores are used as fronts for an illegal tobacco industry reliant on the exploitation of asylum seekers and illegal economic immigrants” – “part of a black market dominated by Kurdish gangs”.
Between 2019 and 2020, we are told in this report, the UK’s tax authority HMRC estimated as much as a third of the 12,000 tonnes of rolling tobacco smoked in the UK was bought and sold illegally. Around 2.5 billion illegal cigarettes, 12 percent of the total market, were smoked. Overall, £2.3 billion in lost tax revenue went up in smoke.
However, the point at issue is that not only is this a very well-known criminal activity – making a very substantial impact on tax revenue collection – the government is fully aware of the problem and had HMRC launch its first strategy to tackle illicit tobacco in 2000.
The government produced a revised strategy in 2015 which “drove forward bold new legislation, sanctions, controls and operations to tackle the illicit trade” and then, in January 2024, updated in March 2024, it went “even further”, with a new strategy which aimed to “target loopholes at all stages of the supply chain, keeping us several steps ahead of the criminals”.
The strategy was backed by additional funding of more than £100 million across five years and was devised to support the UK government’s goal to create the first smokefree generation, part of the Sunak administration’s efforts progressively to abolish smoking.
But, if by 2020 the illicit trade accounted for 12 percent of the total market, the net result of the last five years is not a happy one. According to the latest annual survey published by the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association (TMA) in October, market share of illicit products seems to have increased to 20 percent with the highest concentration in London (24 percent), followed by the North East (22 percent).
Unsurprisingly, the biggest driver of the illicit tobacco market is the price gap between illicit and legal tobacco. The typical price of a 20-pack of illicit cigarettes bought by those surveyed was between £3 and £6 – compared to the average price of £16.60 for a 20-pack of legal cigarettes. The typical price for 50g of hand-rolling tobacco bought by those surveyed was between £5-£8 – compared to the average price of £40.09 for 50g of legal tobacco.
For Rupert Lewis, director of the TMA, the most dispiriting facet of the survey was the fact that the Government was “still burying its head in the sand and refusing to listen to the legitimate views and reservations about the impact of illicit tobacco and the impact that it has upon their lives and their local communities”.
There was, he said, “a growing disconnect between illicit tobacco and the negative impact the wider illicit tobacco industry is having across the UK – with 63 percent of those surveyed believing illicit tobacco has links to organised crime gangs (which also trade in drugs and people trafficking) and 69 percent believing that cheap illicit tobacco is making it easier for children to take up smoking.
On the issue of organised crime, this is the point. There is any amount of evidence that the illicit tobacco trade is sustaining multiple, extensive organised crime networks – not just the Kurds, which the BBC highlights, but the Kashmiri Baradari networks – heavily involved with group-based child sexual exploitation (CSEA), the illicit drugs trade, money laundering and much more.
Thus, the real story is the government’s abject and continued failure to deal even with this small corner of a national scourge of organised crime where the government has made provision for fines of up to £10,000 yet the BBC records one trader being given a mere £200.
The one redeeming point for the BBC, though, is that at least it is giving the issue some coverage, which is more than can be said for the rest of the national media – with certain exceptions – leaving the routine reporting to the local press, failing to make the link between local activity and what amounts to a major, national problem.
But the BBC, with the rest of them, is letting the government off the hook, where even MPs are recognising the severity of a problem which is happening right under the government’s nose.
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