A dry season, newswise, from the Balkans, has been filled a bit over the last week by a series of posts on X exchanged between British far-right leader Nigel Farage and Albanian MP Edi Rama over the level of criminality among Albanians living in the UK.

Farage launched the first salvo by referring to data first reported by the UK Telegraph last October. This shows that, out of a legally resident population of 53,000 Albanians in Britain, some 1,200 of them are currently in jail.

Rama retorted by suggesting that the number of Albanians living in UK is almost certainly far higher than 53,000, suggesting at one point that the real number could be as high as 140,000 and, at another point, 300,000. No definitive figure is available.

Either way, Rama seems to have shredded Farage’s initial claim that 1 in 50 Albanians in Britain is in jail, and even Farage seems now to acknowledge that perhaps it is not so.