06-05-2025
Churchill legacy put towards Migration Museum
Winston Churchill's financial legacy has been used to help spread immigration messaging across Britain.
The Churchill Fellowship, established with public donations following the wartime leader's death in 1965, has been used to expand the work of the Migration Network, an arts organisation that helps museums and galleries 'put migration centre stage ', it has emerged.
The network, which is partnered with the National Trust and other cultural organisations, recently held an event exploring how the culture sector can support the vision of 'a world where everyone is free to move'.
It is operated by the Migration Museum, an institution founded by Barbara Roche, Tony Blair's immigration minister.
The former Labour MP, who supported increasing the number of economic migrants coming to Britain, set out the museum's mission to put immigration 'at the heart of our national story'.
The Migration Museum has further plans to expand its outreach in schools and to develop training sessions for civil servants on 'migration history learning' and ' diversity, equity and inclusion programmes'.
A sum of £28,000 from the Churchill Fellowship was used to support a leading staff member expand the work of the museum from 2022.
The Fellowship is led by chief executive Julie Weston and aims to be a 'living legacy' honouring Churchill.
It funds individual Fellows to pursue research on a 'clearly stated need or issue in UK society', with the intention that this expertise is then shared.
Research published by Churchill Fellowship in 2024 highlighted the potential of 'strategic communications' as a way of 'building consent for migration'. This included looking at 'narrative approaches that help normalise the idea of mobility'.
The report also recommended that policy-makers 'allow all asylum seekers to work after six months'.
But critics have branded the Migration Museum a 'transparent propaganda outfit' backed by taxpayer cash.
Reform UK MP Lee Anderson said: 'This 'museum' is a transparent propaganda outfit, designed to push a one-sided immigration narrative despite consensus being far from settled.
'Immigration is consistently a top issue for voters. That's because they know it has gone too far. The uncontrolled population explosion, driven by net migration, which is running at almost one million a year, is putting intense strain on everything from housing to health.'
Churchill was wary of immigration, and he is quoted from 1954 warning that immigration would create racial problems and that the 'public opinion in the UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits'. But he introduced no legislation to curb the number of arrivals.
Millions of pounds of charitable and taxpayer funding has been used to fund the work of the museum, which recently staged an exhibition titled Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS.
This claimed that, even prior to the NHS being established, 'much of the healthcare system… was already reliant on healthcare workers from overseas'.
The museum has been based in a Lewisham shopping centre and attracted comparatively few visitors, but it will soon move to a permanent home in the City of London.
The move will be helped by £1.3 million in public funding from the Arts Council.
From its planned new base, the museum will aim to develop a series of 'hubs' across the country to help educate the public on migration.
There are also plans for an education outreach programme, 'national in scope', that will be 'capable of reaching every school child in the country'
The Churchill Fellowship has been contacted with regard to funding this work with an individual grant of at least £14,000.
The Migration Museum has staged an exhibition on the economic value of migrants, called Taking Care of Business: Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Making of Britain.
But the spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, last year found that cheap migrant workers each cost taxpayers £150,000 by the time they hit state pension age.
More than 11,000 Channel migrants have already crossed in 2025. The previous government warned that the cost of housing migrants in British hotels would soon rise to £11 billion a year, almost four times more than the annual cost of maintaining the UK's nuclear deterrent.
