Does the Mail ever tell the truth about reports?

If I've learned anything about the tabloids and their coverage of reports by people other than MigrationWatch and their buddies, it's that they lie about them. There's an example in today's Mail, in its story 'Migrant surge 'led to disorder and crime''. The first lie comes right there in the headline. The Audit Commission report, 'Crossing Borders' doesn't once use the term 'disorder and crime'. Neither does the press release 'Teaching migrant workers English will help ease challenges to councils'. If you don't believe me, just click the links and do a search for the term.

What the report actually says about crime and disorder is:

There is little evidence that the increased numbers of migrant workers have caused significant or systematic problems in respect of community safety or cohesion.

You just don't get more blatant contradictions than that. Plus:

Despite this, community perceptions about migrant workers can be inappropriately negative.

Wonder why that might be.

The word 'crime' is used in the document, as is the word 'disorder'. This is how 'crime' is used:

Migrant workers can be victims of crime, with much reported crime internal to new communities.

Not really the same as the impression created by the headline, eh? And:

Police report isolated examples of hate crimes, but there is no regular or widespread disorder.

Either is that. How about:

Some migrant workers may not trust the police in their home countries and so treat British police with suspicion. Differing assumptions can include expecting the police to require bribes. Such expectations hinder crime reporting and intelligence gathering, making prevention and cohesion activities harder.

Nope. It would appear not. And those are the only uses of the word 'crime'. We've already covered every use of the word 'disorder'. Did you miss it? It's above, where the report says 'there is no regular or widespread disorder'. That's it. The headline is, quite blatantly, a lie.

Of course, there's more than one way to lie about the contents of a document. You don't just have to make shit up from whole cloth. You can change wording to create a false impression. Of course, the Mail is against this when it comes to Alastair Campbell sexing up intelligence reports. When it comes to its own conduct though, it isn't so much against sexing things up as rabidly for, to the extent of doing it several times with a single document.

This is the Mail's preferred way of lying about reports. It doesn't usually go as far as just inventing phrases. It starts here with:

It cited noise and disruption around migrant housing, street drinking, breakdowns in refuse collections, tension over parking spaces and arguments in libraries where migrants "monopolise the Internet".

We already know that there is little evidence of significant problems. Still, the report did sort of cite these things, but the Mail have left one or two teensy details out. The paper seems to have taken this from one paragraph in the Audit Commission report. I'll reproduce it here in full. See if you can guess what they are:

Cohesion cannot be taken for granted and small tensions can develop, which can fuel local resentment. These include noise and disruption when large numbers of migrant workers leave for work early in the morning, noise linked to increases in the numbers living in individual properties, street drinking, failures to understand local refuse and recycling systems, tensions over other residents’ parking spaces if HMOs do not have adequate parking, and migrant workers appearing to monopolise the internet in libraries.

That's right. These are characterised as "small tensions". Makes it seem less apocalyptic when you put it like that, doesn't it? Also check the dropping of the words 'appearing to' before 'monopolise the internet' and 'if HMOs do not have adequate parking' after 'residents' parking spaces'. Plus the addition of the word 'arguments' and the transformation of the phrase 'failures to understand local refuse and recycling systems' into 'breakdowns in refuse collections'. That's not all though. In the report, this paragraph is followed by:

A number of local authorities and their partners have moved quickly to address such minor local frictions as part of wider work to promote locally cohesive communities. [...]

So the tensions are 'small' or 'minor', and some local authorities have addressed them quickly. Not the same as causing 'disorder and crime' is it?

The Mail loves sexing this document so much, it does it again:

The report raised deep concerns about road safety. It said police worries include vehicle and driving standards, unlicenced and uninsured cars, and drink driving.

Yes, the report does mention police worries about those things, but doesn't say anything about those being deep concerns. The paper has added that.

The Mail is like Peter Stringfellow when it comes to sexing things up in a disturbing manner:

The inquiry acknowledged "tension" with low-paid British workers as hundreds of thousands of migrants compete for jobs.

The report doesn't say this anywhere, anyhow. There are several mentions of the word 'tension', and none of them relate to competing for jobs with low-paid British workers. The closest it comes to it is:

While migrant workers are welcomed by employers, questions are often raised about potential competition in local labour markets, especially for job seekers with poor language and other skills.

And:

There are often concerns that new arrivals compete with others at the bottom end of the labour market, especially those with poor English and low skills. Once migrant workers acquire better English they can compete for more skilled employment because of their higher existing skill levels.

Can you see the word 'tension' here? Me neither. See any references to how 'hundreds of thousands of migrants compete for jobs'? Me neither. I can see 'questions' and 'concerns' but not 'tension'. So why does that word get put in quotation marks? It's not a quotation.

Yuck. I've put the horrible image of a mucky old bloke with a mullet feeling up young women in my head with the opening to that last bit. It's not likely to go away, as the Mail rubs its thighs and does a Steptoe face at another section of document:

The Audit Commission report offered a string of recommendations including a major expansion of English teaching and "contingency plans" to deal with any escalation in tension.

As we already know, the report characterises any tension it actually mentions (as opposed to the mentions the Mail pretends it makes) as 'minor'. It only talks about tensions escalating here:

[Local Authorities should ensure that] Emerging tensions are monitored and joint contingency plans maintained in case they escalate.

Emerging tensions should not be allowed to escalate. Not the ones the Mail say already exist. Seriously, the paper makes it sound like there's widespread rioting and its all kicking off.

Another of the report's recommendations about minimising minor tensions includes:

Minimising local tensions by dispelling myths, responding swiftly to emerging problems and maintaining contingency plans.

Myths eh? Now where might people be getting these myths from? I think the Mail should tell us.

I want to stop now. I've had enough of the image of a drooling old mulleted pervert I've put in my own head. But the Mail just keeps fondling its crotch:

Despite authoritative independent warnings, the Home Office estimated at the time that 13,000 Eastern Europeans would come each year.

The commission's report said the fact that 662,000 new national insurance numbers had been handed out in the year to April 2006 - double the rate of 2003 - showed the scale of the foreign influx.

The Audit Commission Report is about overall migration. The 13,000 per year - although ridiculously optimistic - only referred to Eastern European immigration, which will be a fraction of the 662,000 for 2005 mentioned here.

That's it. I can't be arsed with the rest. It's coverage of the report it's already mischaracterised and set up as being far harsher than it in fact is. Suffice it to say that David Davis is a cock. he pops up in all these fake reports saying, 'this is terrible'. Div.

The Sun's less sophisticated take is here.

Eat your greens - or MULTICULTURALISM will get you

Another day, another couple of scare stories about multiculturalism in the Mail and Express. These are covered in 'Multiculturalism 'drives young Muslims to shun British values'' in the Mail and 'Surge in Muslim youth who want Islamic rule' in the Express. As we'd expect from the paper that tries to out-Mail the Mail, the Express one is the less measured, including at least one outright lie. It might even be worth a complaint to the PCC on accuracy grounds.

Both stories are based around the findings of the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange. Who'da thunk it, eh? Right wing think-tank examines Muslim fundamentalism and comes to the conclusion that multiculturalism is to blame. It's the shock conclusion nobody could ever have seen coming.

The Policy Exchange's study is, surprise surprise, deeply flawed. The main reason is that Policy Exchange do not define multiculturalism, and seem to be suggesting that multiculturalism is Tony Blair addressing Muslims as a monolithic block of people. Which it isn't. The report says:

We should allow people to express their identity freely and in a climate of genuine tolerance.

That's pretty much a definition of multiculturalism right there. It's actually a lack of a proper multicultural policy the think-tank are bemoaning. Not the existence of one.

There are more reasons why the report is flawed in its conclusion about multiculturalism being to blame. It says:

One way to tackle this [Islamism] is to bring to an end the institutional attacks on national identity – the counterproductive cancellation of Christmas festivities, the neurotic bans on displays of national symbols, and the sometimes crude anti-Western bias of history lessons – which can create feelings of defensiveness and resentment.

What do we know about the banning of Christmas festivities and displays of national symbols? That's right - they're exaggerated or made up in the first place and perpetuated by the right-wing press, even after they're exposed as fake. Winterval, anyone?

The study states that:

We asked them to give their opinion about the actions of authorities in two different scenarios. 75% believe it was wrong for a local council to have banned an advertisement for a Christmas carol service in 2003 for fear it would cause tensions.

But as we know from the brilliant article about banning Christmas in the Guardian from Oliver Burkeman:

Of course, to dismantle the myth of a full-scale War on Christmas, it isn't necessary to prove that no low-level council functionary has ever once misguidedly tried to avoid offence by eliminating references to religion. That's what seems to have happened [...] in High Wycombe, where a member of the library staff refused to display an A4 poster for a carol service in 2003 because of a rule excluding religious or political posters from a noticeboard. (The High Wycombe Carol Service Poster Incident is now regularly wheeled out as an example of how diabolically militant the anti-Christmas forces have become.)

The poster was never banned for fear of causing tensions, but because there's a rule about not displaying religious posters at all, and the staff member was probably being a bit over zealous.

The second scenario is:

64% believed it was wrong for a council to have banned all images of pigs from its offices (on calendars, toys, etc) in 2005, for the reason that they might offend Muslims’ feelings.

This is another distortion of the facts. In 2005, the benefits department of Dudley Council banned images of pigs from its offices (and only that department of the council's offices) after a complaint from a Muslim employee. The ban was lifted very shortly after for being too extreme. The Council didn't order the ban. The Council ordered for it to be lifted.

So it's not actually multiculturalism that's to blame, but a dodgy strawman version of multiculturalism where the actions of overzealous individuals that are later overturned by their superiors are taken for the actions of the superiors themselves, and their being overturned is ignored. Who creates and perpetuates the lame strawman? The right-wing press, and this think-tank itself.

So, onto the press coverage. As we'd expect, there's the familiar implication that sharia law means the same thing to all Muslims, as if they're some kind of monolithic block who interpret the Qur'an in the exact same way. The study actually critiscises the attitude that all Muslims are the same and should be treated as if they all share the same views.

The Express article probably warrants most scrutiny. The second sentence includes an outright lie. It says:

Three-quarters of Muslims aged 16-24 believe women should be forced to wear veils or headscarves [...]

The study does not say that at all. It says:

74% of 16-24 year olds would prefer Muslim women to choose to wear the veil, compared to only 28% of 55+ year olds.

Spot the difference. 'Would prefer someone to choose' is not the same as 'should be forced'. Before I met my girlfriend, I would have preferred the women I fancied to choose to sleep with me. I didn't want them to be forced to. That's the difference between an ordinary bloke and a rapist. Plus, the study specifies 'Muslim women' and the Express does not. I think a complaint to the PCC is definitely in order.

Next:

The survey also found more than one in eight young adult believers “admires” Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

No it doesn't. The study says:

7% “admire organisations like Al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West’. 13% of 16-24 year olds agreed with this statement compared to 3% of 55+ year olds.

The actual question is a leading question. It defines organisations like Al-Qaeda as ones that fight the West. It's impossible to answer this question by saying you support organisations that fight the West without making it look like you support Al-Qaeda too. Even so, the study definitely does not say what the Express says it does. There is no question that asks 'do you support Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups?'

It's odd that the Express would feel the need to exaggerate the negatives, given the shockingly high number who advocate the death penalty for apostasy. Isn't that scary enough? Not for Express readers, who are unlikely to be Muslim in the first place. That's also why the paper drops the reference to 'Muslim women' in the second sentence. The potential threat to its own non-Muslim readers must be maximised.

The rest of the report is not as bad, but includes some quotes that are a little misleading, like:

Today, David Cameron will admit that “uncontrolled immigration” has undermined social harmony in Britain.

“You can’t have proper integration if people are coming into Britain at a faster rate than we can cope with,” he will say in a speech in Birmingham.

Which creates the false connection between Islam and immigration. A large number of Muslims were born in Britain.

The Mail's coverage is less brazen. It at least admits that most younger Muslims are likely to have been born in Britain. It does include a lovely opening sentence/paragraph though:

The doctrine of multi-culturalism has alienated an entire generation of young Muslims and made them increasingly radical, a report has found.

The doctrine of multiculturalism. It's a fantastic phrase that isn't once used in the Policy Exchange study. What is this doctrine, and where can we read it? Nowhere. It's another Daily Mail bogeyman.

The rest of the article just repeats stuff from the flawed study. It makes a lot of the number who'd prefer to send their children to an Islamic school as if this is a Bad, Bad Thing - although it defends the practice if sending children to church schools - and even advocates the teaching of Christianity by non-denominational schools. Like the Express article, it makes much of the admiration of organisations like Al-Qaeda, although it doesn't exaggerate it nearly as much. What both articles neglect to mention is the study's own conclusion that:

What is clear is that this 7% do not constitute a coherent political movement with shared ideas or experiences. More likely is that they are expressing a vague sense of disillusionment with the West.

Or that:

When the same question was asked of the general population, 3% said they “admired organisations like Al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight against the West”.

But for me, the most chilling quote from the Mail is this one:

A series of Labour ministers have broken recently with the idea that different communities should not be forced to integrate but should be allowed to maintain their own culture and identities.

The paper seems to be defining multiculturalism as not forcing people to integrate. It thinks multiculturalism is a bad thing, so what is the implication here? That different communities should be forced to integrate. Not encouraged. Not given reason to. Forced.

Nice, eh?

*UPDATE* Just noticed where the PCC will let off the Express over the paper's lie about Muslims wanting women to be forced to wear the veil. Much later on, the article says:

Of Muslims in the 16-24 age group, the poll found 37 per cent wanted Islamic sharia law in the UK, 31 per cent wanted heretics put to death and 74 per cent wanted Muslim women to wear the full-face niqab veil or the hijab headscarf.

So, the PCC will probably claim that it's okay for the paper to lie early on because it includes the real figure later on. The thing is, the only reason I know that this is the real figure and the earlier claim is false is that I read the report. Most Express readers will have no idea that this is not a separate claim.

Also, notice that great lie, '31 per cent wanted heretics put to death'. This statistic is worrying enough without lying about it. The report does not include the word heretic, but uses the very specific phrase 'if a Muslim converts to another religion they should be punished by death.' Again, this is bad enough, and really shocking. It's not something I'm going to defend. Still, 'heretic' does not mean the same as 'convert'. It could mean people who were never Muslim in the first place. Hence the Express's use of the word instead of the correct one. All the better to frighten its readers with.

Nice again, eh?

Dacre's rant

Paul Dacre has given a rare public speech in this year's High Cudlipp lecture. Obsolete has this well covered in two excellent posts, and Lance Price makes some very good points in the Guardian. I don't want to go over the same ground, but there are a couple of points I wanted to make.

First, Dacre's argument is based on branding other parts of the news media as the 'subsidariat' - that is to say that they aren't completely financed by themselves. But the Mail itself is also effectively subsidised by its advertising revenue. In fact, according to the excellent 'Power without responsibility', the decline of the radical press pre and post World War II is due at least in part to the difficulty of ensuring advertising for radical papers. The minute the Mail starts to displease its advertisers is the minute that it starts to lose money. When Dacre says, 'the Mail titles have more quality readers than most of the “quality” papers put together,' he means the ABC1 readers. The ones the advertisers will pay more money to reach.

But what I'm most concerned with is the odd view Dacre has of the media and his role in it. The BBC, he says, 'only reflects the views of a tiny metropolitan minority,' while the tabloids represent, 'the very embodiment of the views of the great majority of the British people.'

This is a weird view of media responsibility. Of course, I'd argue that the great majority of the British people do not share the views of the Mail, but that's beside the point. Even if they did, what if they're wrong? Surely, the job of the news media is to inform the public of what is going on in the world - not to reflect the public's views at all times. Because they might not be right.

This is where the Daily Mail is at its nastiest. It doesn't simply report the news with a right-wing slant, but it distorts the news and misinforms its readers not just to reflect their views, but to perpetuate them. Even if they're wrong. There are lots of examples, from its ludicrous distortions about banning Christmas, to its horrible treatment of the Polish, to its fawning coverage of completely incorrect MigrationWatch figues (which, by the way, the 'Marxist' BBC also covered without finding out where the figures came from). It may be difficult, if not impossible, to report the news impartially. But it should be possible to do so without actually lying to the public, be it by pretending that Birmingham City Council have changed Christmas to Winterval, by exaggerating immigration statistics or by reporting that the number of Eastern Eurpoeans sleeping on London's streets as double the highest estimate for the total number.

The other big oddity of the speech or me is Dacre's claim that unless the BBC and the 'subsidariat' reflect a more right-wing set of values, it'll be replaced by a whole slew of US Fox News style outlets. This, Dacre seems to be suggesting, would be a Bad Bad Thing.

This is the same stupid argument the Mail uses for suggesting that the government should adopt right-wing policies. If they don't, people will vote for the BNP. But what makes the BNP nasty are it's policies. If the government adopt them, what's the difference? It's the same here. If the BBC starts producing right-wing polemic, what would be the difference between the BBC and Fox News? It's a stupid threat.

Now you know why the Mail is so weird.

*UPDATE* Fantastic response from Dacre's targets in today's (29 January) Independent. My favourite is, unfortunately, from the Sun:

Mr Dacre's opinions are not of sufficient consequence to warrant a response from us.

Ha ha.

John Edwards: Who the fuck is this nutter?

John Edwards. Don't be fooled by the suit - it's photoshopped in, probably.

Seriously! Howcome I've never read John Edwards before? He's fantastic! Did they recruit him by sending scouts out on buses and tubes to find the craziest sounding drunken nutter? He must have left winners and sinners man well and truly in the dust! I even find it hard to read his column because I keep expecting him to thrust his smelly hand out at me and demand loose change.

His nonsense rambling in 'Speak English? Now it's just a Korea move' (Geddit? Korea - it's a country, but it sounds like career!) is a masterclass in how to write like a ranting madman with a tenuous grip on reality. It's a sight to behold! It starts:

That wasn't Kate Middleton who brought a wave of paparazzi crashing into the top end of Kensington High Street yesterday morning.

It was a tip-off somebody had been heard speaking English. Right out in the open as well, unafraid and to hell with anyone who didn't like it. Just like the old days were coming back.

Laugh? I nearly did! Why am I reminded of being asked if it was 'spot the white man' at my school twenty years ago? Twenty! Can't these silly old sods get a new joke? It carries on:

Only the pavement-blocking swarms of people talking 30 different ways, and most of them sounding as if they had just invented it over a coffee and an onion bhaji.

Nope, it appears not. Stick in a 'hilarious' reference to foreign food and you'll have them rolling in the aisles. Just ask Jade Goody.

From here, we can tell what it's going to be about. That's right - a bunch of lies and exaggerations about people not being able to speak English in London. Never seen that in the Mail before, eh? There are cracking ones like:

Go around central London any time and check out how English is dying as the first language of choice.

Is he a lying bastard, delusional, or suffering the DTs? Difficult to say. I can say for sure that he's talking complete big fat arse, since I've lived in London all my life and can, you know, see and hear. Still:

Even the big banks are going to have branches where English will be number two. They are going to do business in Polish and Russian.

You lying get. The big banks will have branches where Polish and Russian are number two and English is number one. More:

Now there was a cab coming to the kerb in the High Street in answer to a crowd who waved down everything that passed. The address they wanted was printed on the back of a hotel business card.

The hotel name, in Russian, was on the other side. This is how the British and Americans got by in Japan years ago.

Aman had his name and how to pronounce it printed on one side, and his address in English was under that. You never had a conversation with a cab driver. Not even a 'hello'. Show him the card. That was all. It's happening in London right now.

Eh? He's going to say more in a minute, isn't he? Like 'AaahyafuzzawozzawurgahCUNT!' Seriously mate, I haven't got any change.

The cab driver on Ken High Street checked the address. All the people, Russians for sure, settled back in the taxi in a mound of M&S shopping bags, which made this group tourists. Thousands of others are coming to stay.

What people? Oh, the ones in your fantasy story about paparazzi turning up to snap someone speaking in English. This has gone all weird. I'm a bit frightened.

English is a basket case, nobody wants it any more, Steve Brent, director, International House, was told on his doorstep in Piccadilly.

Yeah, by you. Swinging a bottle of White Lightning about while he nervously edged the door gradually closed.

"Why do you say that?" he said.

Well, walk 100 yards in both directions and you'll get 50p for everyone you hear speaking it.

"How much do you think I'll win?"

Not enough for two lagers.

The subs have clearly been at work here. The original was obviously 'Got enough for two lagers?'
A bit later:

Some raspberry growers up there have troupes of blonde Polish girls who are a pleasure to watch working in the sun.

Seriously, this is nuts. I just fired off a comment saying 'Is this man mad?' to the Mail site. I don't think it'll get published.

Its work was with such as this fellow from Brazil - Pedro Moreira was his name - and he was a leading player in the biggest TV soap opera put out in that lovely country.

He said, in a break from learning English, that as an actor he cried when he saw so many famous theatres side by side in the West End.

What fellow from Brazil? Are we still on the doorstep or standing by the imaginary roadside in Kensington or has he rambled off on to something else?

Also in his class was Reza Zakeri from Iran, who was learning English up to British university degree standard and never once gave the impression he would ever see his homeland again. From an airliner maybe, no closer.

"When I have proper English, so many opportunities will become open to me," is what he was thinking about.

How do you know what he was thinking about? What class? You've lost me.

These were the kind of people who were exceptions, though, Steve Brent was told. English would always be a foreign language for the vast majority of people pouring in.

It is fading away in Slough.

Oh, Slough. Of course. Slough. I mean it though, I'm out of change, sorry. Where the fuck did Slough come from?

"Where do you think most people wanting to learn English come from?" was his question.

Your guess was Russia. Not even close. Korea, Steve told you. Numbers two and three were Japan and Italy. Then came Iran, which didn't have a single student ten years ago. After that, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates. Spain, Germany and Brazil were equal next.

English was always going to be safe at a high level.

It wasn't going to help down among the masses. They would never want to learn. There is no category for those people, someone from another busy language school was told.

What, by you, on their doorstep? Did they have enough for two lagers?

Oh, but there was, he said. They were the 'grunt and nods'.

As opposed to you, the drunken sod.

Madness.

Not biased against asylum seekers? Do me a favour

I had to laugh when I read these: 'Tabloids defend asylum coverage' and 'Mail and Express deny asylum coverage'. Laugh and laugh and laugh. There's a great fat lie from Peter Hill in the Guardian article:

"I would never put any of my journalists under pressure to write something that they wouldn't want to write. I would never do that," Mr Hill told the committee.

Oh really? Never? What's this about then? 'Express newspaper faces criticism from its own journalists for anti-Roma stance':

Journalists at the Daily Express say that editors are pressurising them 'to write anti-Gypsy' articles. Last week, the newspaper ran a campaign to prevent Roma (Gypsies) from new EU countries coming to Britain - which led to the government announcing new restrictions.[...]

Journalists at the paper have now called on the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to help protect them from the demands of their own editors and management to write such articles.

If Hill would never pressure his journalists to write something they don't want to, why would a group of them complain to the PCC that they'd been pressured to write something they didn't want to write?

There's another cracking quote from Hill - the man whose paper went with the headline 'Bombers are all spongeing asylum seekers' after July 21 2005, when the identity of only two of the bombers were known and neither was an asylum seeker:

"We must be able to be truthful in our headlines what the facts are, palatable or otherwise," he said.

"We can't tailor our headlines to fit news as you would wish it to be."

What?! Has this nutjob ever actually read any of the headlines in his paper? I'm not just talking about the bombers one, but for others I've mentioned here in 'Police killer escapes in veil', 'How much is an Express headline worth?', 'Comparing reactionary articles can be fun!', 'Daily Express in 'Headline is misleading arse' shocker!', 'The world's most bigoted newspaper', 'No wonder their readers are ignorant tossers', and 'Daily Express headlines worth the paper they're written on?' And that's not to mention all the shite about Diana's 'murder' and the rubbish about the weather that's so often wrong.

Paul Dacre didn't give evidence, but the representative from the Mail apparently said:

Mr Esser told the joint committee that said that Daily Mail journalists were given a copy of the Press Complaints Commission code that they kept in their wallets.

If that's the case, why do they keep calling people who aren't seeking asylum 'asylum seekers', which goes against the PCC guidelines? And:

"But the idea that they are running around looking for inflammatory things to say about asylum seekers is wrong."

AH HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHA HAAAAAAAH! I think a bit of wee came out.

Great stat from the Guardian article:

Daily Express readers believed that 21% of the population were immigrants, Daily Mail readers thought that 19% of the population were immigrants and Guardian readers thought that 11% of the population were immigrants.

In reality 7% of the population were immigrants, Mr Travis said.

Says it all really.

And on the subject of immigration, I forwarded my reply from the Treasury about MigrationWatch's figures to MigrationWatch last week, suggesting that a correction or a retraction might be in order. Nothing from them in my inbox. Not even a tumbleweed. Surprised?

The big issue?

I've finally waited for something to die down before posting about it. Hurrah! The Big Brother furore has died down, Jade has been kicked out and has initiated a massive PR push to rehabilitate herself and things will be back to normal soon. A friend of mine said that it was encouraging that the press pretty much agreed that this was racism. Well, most of them did.

The Mail was characteristically reluctant to brand the behaviour of the bullies in the house as racist. Even after the Express had dropped scare quotes from the word 'racist', the Mail persisted with them and then, in a fantastic moment of irony, questioned why the story was receiving so much publicity by devoting an entire front page to it as well as some 21 articles on its online version on the same day. Why don't we just switch off? It asked, forgetting its stance over Jerry Springer, the Opera - which it implied a was as bad as the BNP's claims that Muslims are plotting to take over western countries by raping women.

It must have been difficult for the Mail. On the one hand, here's the perfect opportunity to attack Channel 4 lefties and the working class for being racist, but on the other hand, calling someone racist is an example of Political Correctness Gone Mad for the Mail. It should be said that up until this point, some of the nastiest stuff hadn't been said, but it should be no surprise that the Mail would say that what had happened so far wasn't racist, because what had gone on wasn't far off some of the Mail's own behaviour. It does worse to the Polish every other day. It implies they're murderers at worst, and hamper murder investigations with their very presence at best. It takes the piss out of the way they speak, and draws deliberate parallels between them and Borat. It says they take our jobs and bring down our wages at the same time as being out of work and homeless. It implies they're shit at driving buses. It implies their children are stretching our education system to breaking point with excessive demands for interpreters (neglecting to mention that the rise in the number of interpreters is just ONE percent). It wildly exaggerates the number of Poles migrating to Britain. Polish immigration gets blamed for Polish people being attacked. It implies they spread disease. This is not to even mention the treatment of Muslims and asylum seekers. In short, I'd rather be Shilpa Shetty in front of the three (or four if you count the dim robot) harridans in the Big Brother house than a Pole, a Muslim or an asylum seeker picking up the Mail. At least I'd be able to make some sort of reply myself. A Pole would be forced to complain via the PCC, which would be roughly equivalent to Shilpa being forced to reply to the bullies exclusivlely through the sobbing H from Steps.

After this point, criticism in the Mail seems to have been reduced to merely quoting others, be they Trevor Phillips or its old mate John Sentamu. If the paper at any point started calling the bullying racist itself, I must have missed it. Jade's calling Shilpa 'Shilpa Fuckawalla,' gets reduced to 'Shilpa Fawhiler,' too, but that's the sort of thing we expect from the Mail.

Over at the Sun, the approach was a little bit more robust in attacking bullies. Other blogs have pointed out that The Sun itself was responsible for bullying Jade on her first appearance in the house, but it's not as if Jade is the only person they've bullied over the years. Remember Shabnam Mughal, or Shabnam Mug-hal as the Sun hilariously dubbed her? Since the Sun's against bullying though, maybe it could tackle its News International stablemate at the Sunday Times. Or maybe not.

It was encouraging to see most papers agree that Shilpa's treatment was racist without any massive denials, even from Littlejohn. Okay, he said the real racism was the racism of brown people, but you know. My own take on it is that not every single comment could be taken in isolation and called racist, but the comments weren't all made in a vaccuum. There's a context that is often left out by people who act bewildered at the racism charges. What's racist about doing a funny accent? I might as well ask what's violent about touching someone's temple with my knuckles. It's all about how it's done.

As a parting shot - I don't think many people have seen this little gem as Channel 4 mysteriously left it out of the edited show. It's Jade before her eviction telling Jo not to worry about what has been said in the house as her agent can justify anything she's said. Remember that next time you see Jade in an identikit I'm-sorry-what-about-my-kids-my -windows-have-been-put-in-and-I'm-suicidal interview.

MigrationWatch - REALLY the last post this time!

Or maybe not, I dunno.

In my earlier postings about MigrationWatch, I mentioned that I'd emailed the Treasury and the Home Office. Because I am a plank.

Well, I had a reply on Friday that I've only just seen. It said:

The £4bn figure quoted by Ms Ryan MP during the Westminster Hall debate was an estimate of the direct economic contribution of A8 migrants since their accession in May 2004. It is not an estimate of the total economic contribution of all migrants, which will be significantly greater. The Migration Watch figures are therefore a underestimate of the increase in GDP per head. [My emphasis].

Estimating the economic contribution of migration is difficult. The Treasury has not made any official estimate of the contribution of migration; the £4bn figure is a ballpark estimate of the direct contribution of A8 migration. It is based on an internal estimate of the net inflow of A8 migrants into the country, including temporary migrants, and an estimate of their average earnings from the ONS' Labour Force Survey. The £4bn figure does not include any consideration of the economic gains from increased returns to capital or greater productivity, which are very difficult to measure.

The effect of migration on economic trend growth is discussed in the following report published in December last year: [Pre-budget Report Link]

So, MigrationWatch's whole report is a complete load of old rubbish. It wasn't difficult to get this explanation of the figures, I just had to ask. Had I phoned instead of emailing the general enquiries email address, I'd no doubt have got them much quicker. If MigrationWatch themselves were that bothered, they could have asked at some point in the six weeks or so between their two attempts at getting their nonsense findings in the press, and if the papers had actually done that little-known, arcane journalistic practice known as 'fact checking', they'd have found out too.

What are the chances of this affecting how successful MigrationWatch are at misinforming the press though? Not much, I suppose. Especially when the press like to take the fake figures and exaggerate them even further.

Sod it, I'm watching Terminator 3. Gives me a more cheerful and realistic outlook on the future. And there's a chase scene involving a crane, so it's better than migrationWatch figures in every respect.

MigrationWatch - last post

Okay, last post about MigrationWatch for a while, I promise. Skip this post if you don't fancy going through a bunch of numbers and 'no it isn't' style contrariness. See if I care.

It's important before I go on that I think MW's whole premise is based on a strawman argument. As far as I've been able to tell, people generally talk about the growth of GDP contributed by migrants to show how much would not have been contributed if they were not here, not how much more they contribute than anyone else. The argument is usually that immigrants tend to either do low paid jobs nobody else wants or fill skills gaps, so the inclusion of the addition to GDP is normally shown for at least two reasons:

1. To show how much would have been missed had these positions not been filled.

2. To show that migrants are not responsible for a drop in GDP.

Given that a main pillar of the pro-immigration argument is that migrants disproportionally do low paid work, why would anyone interpret that argument as saying that migrants produce far more per head than anyone else? The very argument is based on the assumption that a great number of migrants will produce less on average than everyone else. The benefit is that shit jobs that nobody wants get done, and vacancies that we can't fill get filled. There is a secondary argument to this one, which is that migrants often do jobs that allow members of the host population to make a greater contribution than they otherwise could. The extreme example I've seen is to take an au pair who works for two doctors, allowing them both to work rather than have one stay at home. MW seem to be attacking an argument that nobody has made.

I could probably leave things there, and not dignify the report with any more attention, but it's worth looking at because it's pretty damn shonky - and because enough people just dismiss MigrationWatch without explaining why, which is why I've had to spend time going through this. The report is split into sections and the paragraphs are (mis)numbered, so I'll go through section by section. You lucky people.

Summary
It doesn't begin well. There are problems with the summary. With the very fist sentence, in fact:

Most immigrants add to production but, in the long term, the host population will only benefit if there is a resultant increase in GDP per head.

No. As I said above, the host population will benefit if things get done that wouldn't otherwise get done. People will benefit by the recruitment of new nurses regardless of how little they're paid or what their individual contribution to GDP per head is. This is particularly true if the level of migration is small in comparison to the population. If three nurses are recruited, that represents sod all GDP even before it's divided by 60 million, but there's definitely a benefit. Plus, migration can indirectly increase GDP per head as well as directly from their own production.

Next:

Indeed, the main benefit accrues to the immigrants who are able to send home about £10 million a day.

Notice how MW characterise a benefit to immigrants as a Bad Thing. Every pro-immigration study and argument I've read do not ignore the benefit to immigrants, but actually use it as a positive argument for immigration. It's often referred to as unofficial international aid. The very answer in Hansard that MW get the figure from talks about the remittances to poorer countries as a benefit of migration. But how dare immigrants think they can use their own money in any way they like. The cheek of it! (This indignation, minus the figures, is also in the other release. It says, 'The major benefit goes to immigrants which is why they come,' as if it's a surprise that migrants come here because it benefits them, and as if it's bad that it does).

As I mentioned in my last couple of posts, there is a problem in that the figure they're quoting is of total remittances sent in a year. More people can send remittances than people who have arrived in one single year. Comparing the two is misleading.

Introduction
There's some attempt to address a couple of studies that suggest immigrants contribute more in taxes than they receive. It says:

The government's first effort which showed a net benefit of £2.5bn was based on a year in which the budget was in surplus so everybody was making a positive fiscal contribution.

So these figures are dismissed because the budget was in surplus. MW make it sound like this is unusual, but the budget has been in surplus every year for the past few years so any recent study that produces results MW don't like can be dismissed out of hand. Which is handy. (Thanks very much, I'm here all week). It also says:

This study was superseded by an IPPR study which also showed a positive contribution. However the result was distorted by the inclusion of all children of mixed households (one parent an immigrant, the other not) in the host community. Correcting for this by splitting the cost of these children 50/50 produced a small negative outcome.

Why add the children of mixed households to the immigrant community? They're not immigrants, they were born here. Adding them is not 'correcting' at all. It's doing the opposite. What MW are saying is that if you add people who shouldn't be added to the immigrant community, the results are different. No shit, Sherlock.

This lead in is in itself quite misleading. The summary mentions effect on GDP per head, as do most of the other sections, but this intro gives the impression that MW will be talking about tax contributions, which they're not.

The National Institute report
From paragraph 3:

It concluded that immigrants who have arrived since 1998 have raised GDP by 3.1%. According to the Labour Force Survey figures in the report, of the 58.987m population, 2.249m have come to the UK in the 8 years since 1997. The crude addition to the population (excluding UK-born children) is therefore 3.8%. So the benefit is negative in terms of GDP per head.

No, the addition to the population is not 3.8%. MW have ignored the number of people who have left the country or died in this period. The addition to the population is however many of the 2.249m are above the number of those who have left the country or died in the same period. That works out at 1.349m (follow the links and do the maths). Net migration for this period works out at about 2.3% of the population. So that would be a positive contribution of 0.8% then.

There's a great bit of information buried away in the notes for this section:

However, the 3.1% is just the earnings contribution to GDP. The government normally use this as a proxy for their contribution to GDP as a whole. On this basis the contribution to GDP would be 4.5%.

So, using Government measuring techniques would actually produce a positive even if we use MW's false figure for the rise in population, but it buries this in the notes. (Remember this, it's important in paragraph 4). Also, using the correct number for the rise in population shows that migrant contribution using this measure is actually just under double the population increase. That'd be slightly better than a negative, I'd say. It follows this up with:

On the other hand, UK-born children should have been included with the immigrant community. When these two factors are taken into account the overall impact on GDP is likely to be neutral.

So their actual argument here is that migrant contribution is neutral, not negative as it says in the actual body of the report. I also like the detailed workings MW include to explain how they arrived at this conclusion - oh wait, they didn't include any workings! Maybe that's because to actually say, "by reaching around and pulling the figure out of our arse, we conclude..." might be admitting too much. Again, why should UK-born children of immigrants count as immigrants anyway? They're not bloody immigrants. What MW is basically doing here is saying that if you pretend some people who are not immigrants actually are, and then you decide that there are just enough of these people to cancel out any positive contribution immigrants might make, then they cancel out the contribution if you include them. Jesus! These people are statistical wizards!

From paragraph 4:

[The report makes claims about the contribution made in 2004-2005]. This claim was based on 815,000 migrants arriving in 2004 and 2005. They therefore added 1.4% to the population and 0.9% to earnings GDP. [Emphasis mine]

No they didn't. Net immigration in 2004 and 2005 combined is actually 408,000, meaning that about 0.7% was added to the population. That would create a positive contribution.

Also:

If earnings are taken as a proxy for overall GDP, as is the government’s practice, the addition to GDP would be 1.3% so the impact on GDP per head would be slightly negative.

Remember, this measurement was buried in the notes in the last paragragraph when it would have shown a positive contribution, but it's included in the main body of the report here, where it shows a negative. Must just be a coincidence, eh? But again, this measurement shows a gain to GDP of almost double the actual gain to the population.

The Government calculation
I dealt with this one in my last couple of posts. It's really difficult to address properly without knowing where the £4bn comes from. The truth is that if you make the same assumption about the figures as MW (the second time around, rather than the first) migrants contribute £66.46 GDP to overall GDP per head, which raises GDP per head by the amount MW claims.

The important thing to note here is that MW actually use net immigration in this section, which proves that they do actually know that only net immigration shows how much the population has increased because of migrants.

So why would they not use this measure in the rest of the report? It couldn't be because that would consistently show positive contributions, could it? And why use net immigration here? Because these are the figures MW are really interested in getting into the papers. That's why they're the ones MW have tried to release before, and why they're the ones MW use their simplistic 'Mars bar' analogy with. The other sections are just bluff to make it look as though other studies support MW's findings in this chapter.

The Item Club report
From paragraph 7:

It remarked on their wide dispersal around the country and across a range of industries. The largest number are in administration, business and management which "certainly contradicts, the impression that workers come to the UK to take up low-skilled occupations.” (In fact the Workers Registration Scheme shows that 80% of employed East Europeans are earning less than £6 and 95% are earning less than £8 an hour).

The implication of the bit in brackets is that the report says what it does to suggest something about the wages of Eastern European immigrants. It doesn't. The argument about the wide variety of migrants' skills is usually made to suggest that migrants won't compete for all the same jobs. See, that's why the report points out the dispersal around the country. And the claim about what employment section the largest number are from is actually hinted at by the Accession Monitoring Reoprt (of the Worker Registration Scheme) that MW themselves quote for figures, which includes a table of the top 10 employment sectors with administration, business and management at the top. The hint's very subtle, so it's easy to miss. [Ahem]. The way that MW have worded this paragraph makes it look as though the Item Club report has made a massive blunder in claiming the largest number are in administration, business and management when this is in fact the case.

I'd have to see the Item Club report to comment properly on paragraph 8. Do they really assume that Eastern Europeans registered under the Worker Registration Scheme earn the same average as everyone else, or are they including the self-employed or others not covered by the scheme as well, or something else? Like, for instance, migrants working in more than one job. The Accession Monitoring report MW use to get their 'just over half the UK average' figure for migrant wages says:

The total since May 2004 includes [...] 4,000 multiple registrations (from those
working for more than one employer simultaneously), and 34,000 multiple re-registrations (from those registering for subsequent, additional jobs, or those who have left their employer and are re-registering for more than one job).

As well as assuming that migrants work no overtime, and that those who have been in the UK for over a year and no longer have to register have never been promoted, or moved from a temporary or casual position into a permanent post with better pay.

From paragraph 9:

An extra 300,000 people adds 0.5% to the population.

Does it? Does it really? Even withouth the net immigration rule, MW are using their other favourite trick of ignoring the number of those who return. There are no figures to show how many will stay, but we have an idea from the workers who register their intentions. 59% registered their intended length of stay, and almost half stated less than a year (45% said less than three months), so around 28% say they intend to stay for less than a year. Allowing for the net effect of immigration and the number of those who leave the UK would reduce the total significantly. Also:

This excludes accompanying dependants who add at least 17% to the migrant population.

Why drop the Worker Registration Scheme stats now? MW fucking loved them before. The Accession Monitoring Report of spring 2006 shows that the number of dependants so far amounts to around 8% (374,555 total migrants with 30,080 dependants), and there's a note that says:

Note: it is likely that there is some ‘double counting’ of dependants, in the sense that some of those recorded as dependants (particularly older children and spouses) may also have registered in their own right to work in the UK.

So the number is probably lower than 8% because some people listed as dependants are actually not dependants.

Instead of this figure, MW use one they get from one of their own shonky reports. Less than 8% becomes 17%. Almost double again. Nice that, eh? There's no need to trash the methodology used in that report, as we have some nice direct numbers right here we can use. Sweet. But I will anyway, because it exposes a certain amount of dishonesty here. Hurrah! Their other report 'Economic Contribution of A8 Migrants' says:

We assume that dependants will mainly accompany migrant workers who intend to stay in the UK for some time and that any dependants who have left are balanced by additional dependants who joined migrant workers after they became established in the UK. For the purpose of this analysis we have assumed that half of the 427,000 migrants have remained in the UK and that all their dependants remain in the UK. [The number of migrants they use here is from a later report than the one the Item Club must have used - in this later report, the number of dependants is around 9%].

That's quite a dodgy way to work out the percentage of dependants, isn't it? We don't know how many will return, but we'll assume it's a high number so that when we arbitrarily decide that the number of dependants will reman the same even after we halve the number of adults, we'll get a high percentage. Could you think of anywhere else that MW would assume that the number of workers who have returned is as many as half? Remember that when you see their stats of 600,000 total migration from Eastern Europe quoted. MW themselves actually think the real number is half that. Plus, they completely ignore the note about duplication.

UK-born dependants and dependants who later join migrants already established in the UK are additional to this.

Not sure about the immigration staus of UK-born dependants in this case. But the report carries on with some more numbers with meticulously recorded working:

The total addition to the population is therefore likely to be in the region of 0.6% to 0.7% of the population and the impact of A8 migration on the UK’s GDP per head will be significantly negative.

No it isn't, because MW have exaggerated the initial rise in population as well as the proportion of dependants.

Now, there's a problem in not being able to see the report (Item Club reports only go as far back as June on the site) becuase the 300,000 may well have already been adjusted for net immigration and the number who might have returned. If this is true though, MW's assumption for the percentage of dependants would need adjusting - and they still ignore the note about the number of dependants actually being lower. They just seem to have assumed the level is double the figure actually reported - which is depressingly familiar.

International Experience and Conclusion
Conclusion shmonclusion.

The striking thing about this report is the ability to shift arguments when the numbers don't fit MW's assumption that immigration is a Bad, Bad Thing. Don't like the offhand reference in a parliamentary debate and prefer a full report? Never mind, we'll just shift from using net immigration to make the addition to the population look larger. That still doesn't work? We'll include people who are actually not immigrants into our calculations. Don't know the actual number of these people? We'll just assume it's enough to support our conclusion. None of these things work? We'll just say the whole study is void because of the year it was produced. That'll take care of it.

Lies, damn lies, statistics and MigrationWatch statistics

I'm not a statistician. I spend far less of my time thinking about statistics than I do watching films that involve a high proportion of scenes involving people kicking each other in the head, chasing each other on motorbikes and blowing stuff up. That means I've been a little slow working out what bugged me most about the MigrationWatch figures that appeared in the papers.

Here's the problem. MigrationWatch claim that estmiates of the contribution of migrants to the economy fail to address what this means in terms of GDP per head. Okay, maybe they do. I'd say that to suggest the contribution of such a small number would be loads once it's divided by sixty million is a bit silly in the first place, and I'd like to see where anyone other than MigrationWatch and the wider anti-immigration lobby say it should. But let's go along with MW for a while. We want to examine what the addition of £4bn and 185,000 people in a year does to GDP per head. How do we go about it? Probably not the MW way.

Aside from being a bit convoluted, the MW way fantastically magics away almost all of the £4bn contributed by migrants to leave only the extra bit they produce on top of everyone else, as if the remaining £3.8-odd billion never existed at all. Poof! Would the best way to work out the contribution be to ignore most of the figure? Would it really?

The rest of the £4bn does exist, and it inevitably also has an effect on GDP per head. The way to honestly calculate what that means when adding 185,000 to the population, you'd have to do something like this. Take the number of the population as a whole from 2004 - which we'll assume to be 60,000,000 (MW's assumed number). Then add 185,000 to the population to represent the net migration. There, we've increased population properly. Now divide the £4bn contributed by migrants by 60,185,000. That gives around £66.46 GDP per head (of the entire population) contributed by migrants in 2005. If you want to do the 'per week' thing because you want to make it look smaller or something, it gives you about £1.28 per head, per week. To use the Sun's methodology to express this, that's 32 TIMES the amount claimed by those completely fine, honest blokes who I wouldn't hesitate to buy a second-hand car from at MigrationWatch.

See, while those dishonest shysters fine, upstanding gentlemen claim that the government figures ignore the addition to the population, they themselves are ignoring an enormous great chunk of the contribution those people make. It'd be like having a party where everybody brought a cake, cutting a slice from one person's and throwing the rest in the bin and then shouting, 'Is that all you've brought?! One measly slice of cake?! We've got about fifty cakes here and you bring one slice?! What are you, some sort of fucking scrounger?" and then punching them in the belly. Okay, maybe not the punching in the belly bit. How about plastering articles over the press instead that say 'Person only brings one slice of cake to 'bring an entire cake' party'?

More of the old nonsense from MigrationWatch and the tabloids

It appears that when I get hold of a bone, I can't let it go until I'm finished.* Sometimes that means hundreds of posts about banning Christmas - but other times that means I'll kind of miss the news for a bit while I look at something more closely. Either way, the readers suffer. All three of them.

I'm talking about the MigrationWatch report I posted about last Friday. I've gone through it point by point - but more on that later. While mooching around their website, I've found something a bit more interesting (to me anyway) connected to it's representation in the press.

MigrationWatch had released a version of these figures before back in November last year, but nobody was interested - even though that version of the stats show a lower number for the contribution per head of migrants. The contribution in that version is not 4p a day, but less than zero p a day. You'd think that would make a better story for the tabloids, but they obviously didn't agree, and there are a couple of reasons why. Let's have a look, eh?

The original version of the figures, in 'Minister admits that migration is of little benefit to Britons' are calculated using the net migration figure from 2004, which is higher than the one for 2005. It's odd that MW would do this in the first place, since the net migration stats for 2005 were published before this release - and it indicates that they have about as much idea as I have of where the £4bn figure comes from or what it refers to.

Anyway, MW represent the difference in terms of GDP per head as 'roughly zero'. This would cause a problem for the tabloids, as they'd have to explain that this means migrants contribute as much as everyone else. With the revised, higher figure of 4p a week, the papers don't have to mention that at all. The Mail's ''Migrants bring only 4p a week in financial benefit', says report' doesn't mention once that the 4p a week is what is produced over and above the level of everyone else, and although the Sun's 'No wealth from immigration' includes a bit of the working, it explicitly states:

The foreign workers are worth £2.4million a week to the British economy — but send home 29 TIMES that amount, according to a written Parliamentary answer. [Emphasis on completely fake figure all theirs].

This is skirting over the point that the £2.4m is in addition to the same figure produced by everyone else. It would be impossible to skirt over this point so effectively if a zero figure were used, and the papers would be forced to admit that migrants are worth at least as much as everyone else rather than imply that they're worth much, much less. (Not to mention that it's not a written Parliamentary answer, it's a Wetminster Hall debate - and the figure for the amount sent out of the country is from a completely different debate, said by a completely different person about a completely different group of people).

The second important addition to the second report is the inclusion of the £10m a day figure for remittances. As I mentioned before, this gives the dishonest impression that the same 185,000 migrants responsible for the small rise in GDP per head are responsible for the £10m a day, which is nonsense. Far more people than the arrivals of just one year can send money to other countries. But the £10m a day gives a useful hook so that the papers can dishonestly imply (or outright say in the case of the Sun) that immigrants take out 29 times more than they put in. Which is a great, fat lie.

Interestingly, the papers all ignored the other chapters in the second MW report. They're all attempts to make studies that show a greater contribution than MW's figure actually support MW's interpretation of the Government's £4bn figure. They have to go through some dodgy contortions to acheive that too, and the 4p a week figure is utter bullshit, but more on that later.

*I apologise unreservedly for that image. And why does it put me in mind of Whitesnake lyrics?

MigrationWatch - bunch of charlatans

The Mail story of a couple of days ago, ''Migrants bring only 4p a week in financial benefit', says report' has been bugging me.

I'm not an economist or a statistician. If anyone reading this knows better than I do and sees any mistakes or can clarify what I'm about to go on to say, please say so in the comments and I'll make necessary amendments.

I'm a little confused about why MigrationWatch is concerned, or why this should be considered a scandal at all. I'm also a bit suspicious about how MigrationWatch came up with its '4p a week' figure.

To start with - why is it a problem that immigrants are responsible for the same amount of production as everyone else plus an extra £126m per year on top? I just don't get it. Surely, the anti-immigration lobby argue that immigrants are a burden, which this doesn't prove.

Carrying on from that though - I don't like the way MigrationWatch translates the £126m per year to 4p a week per head. Their report, 'The impact of immigration on GDP per head' shows the working. It also deals with other reports, and there are problems with the way it addresses the figures in those - like counting total immigration as raising population by the same amount rather than using net immigration (which gives double the net immigration figure in one instance), or counting UK-born children of immigrants as immigrants, or burying some figures in the notes because they're higher than the ones used - but it doesn't do that with the Government figures.

What it does is take a figure it gets from a Parliamentary debate made by Joan Ryan, which says, "migration has increased output by at least £4 billion," - and expresses that as a percentage of total GDP - which is 0.32%. It then takes the figure for net immigration from 2005, and expresses that as a percentage of the total population, which is 0.31%. The 0.01% is deemed to be the extra production. They then work out GDP per head of the 60m population, which is around £21,000 per head, and work out what 0.01% of that would be and divide it by the number of weeks per year to get the 4p, which is the smallest number possible.

I have a couple of problems with this. Firstly, I'm not sure what showing the overall extra contribution on the entire population actually proves. Why would anyone expect 185,000 people to produce so much more than the rest of the population that dividing their extra contribution by 60 million would produce a massively high number? Has anybody ever argued that it does, or should? In short, this is all sleight of hand which is addressing a bit of a strawman.

Surely, if you wanted to show how much more per head immigrants contribute than the rest of the population, you'd take the extra benefit and divide it by the number of immigrants.

Now, 0.01% of £1250bn is £125m. Dividing that up between the number of immigrants (185,000) gives about £676 per head per year that immigrants produce compared to the rest of the population. Expressing that per week comes to £12.98. Of course, the net immigration figure is a bit of a problem with dividing in this way, and you'd really want to divide it by the total number of immigrants to get an accurate answer - but it's still going to be more than 4p a week. Something MigrationWatch will never admit is that the reason this figure is so low when you divide it by sixty bloody million and then by fifty again is because the number of immigrants compared to the main population is so low to start with.

The second problem I have is that the MigrationWatch figure might be a mistake in the first place. The £4bn figure is taken from a Parliamentary debate, which is not a proper study that shows its working and fully explains how figures are arrived at. It could well be that the Treasury figure it mentions was calculated by starting with the percentage of immigrants in the population, working out what the same percentage of GDP that would be and rounding up to the nearest billion. It wouldn't be a very good way to arrive at an accurate figure, but the Treasury's argument could be that the population has risen by 0.31% and as a proportion of total GDP, they would represent about £4bn that wouldn't otherwise be there. MW's '4p a week' stuff could be just the result of the Treasury already assuming that the output of migrants is equal to everyone else and including a rounding error. MW could well be jumping at shadows. I've emailed the Treasury and the Home Office (Joan Ryan's Department) to find out how the figure is calculated or what report it came from. Because I am a plank.

The other figure quoted by the Mail and MigrationWatch is the figure for the amount in remittances to foreign countries made by migrants. There are problems with this, too. It's taken from a different debate in Parliament, this time from November 2004. The juxtaposition of this figure with the contribution made by one set if immigrants from one single year creates the false impression that the immigrants responsible for contributing £4bn in 2005 are also responsible for sending around £4bn to developing countries in 2004. This is, of course, nonsense.

Remittances are sent by far more people than actually arrive in the country in that same year. In putting the level of remittances next to the amount produced by one set of arrivals from one single year is misleading. MigrationWatch are playing fast and loose with the definition of 'immigrant' here.

Of course, the Mail are all over this story. It looks great to say that immigrants send £10 million a day home but only contribute 4p a day - but it's all a familiar Daily Mail smoke and mirrors show.

It's weird. Before I started this blog I knew that the Daily Mail was dodgy and not to be trusted, but because I hardly ever read it I had no idea exactly how much it distorts, exaggerates and lies. Reading the Mail a lot gave me the impression that MigrationWatch were sort of dodgy too, but looking closely at one report has made me realise exactly how dodgy they are. MigrationWatch UK? BunchOfCharlatans UK more like.

They come over here, nick our jobs and trash our economy. All three of them

There's a fanstastic story in today's Mail. The lead up to today's story included yesterday's '2.5m workers only speak English as a second choice... and today we open the door to 30m more' which linked to 'Warning for UK as Romania and Bulgaria celebrate joining the EU'. So, with the first day of Romanians being allowed in the country, you'd expect to see a vicious expose of the hundreds and thousands of, non-English speaking, potentially murderous bastards who are probably shit at driving buses arriving in the country. But instead we get 'Just three Romanians arrive after EU accession'. And all three have jobs, and are interviewed. In English.

I want to make one serious point. Here it is: ha ha.

That said, how long before MigrationWatch converts this figure into 37,000?

Some of the comments display some fantastic examples of Mail readers clumsily trying to manufacture outrage. My favourite is:

I know that the government is "restricting" the number of immigrants who can work, but what if people come over intending not to work? Do they get to live on benefits?

- Ella, UK

No, you plank. They do not.

These are good too:

This Government doesn't know what time it is so how are they ever going to know how many are in the country?

- John, Surrey

When could we ever believe Nu Labour? I predict we will hear about a "black hole" in their so-called "strict quotas" shortly after the local elections in May.

- Peter Pan, Great Britain

The denial and obsession with making Labour responsible for everything are fantastic in these. It's not Labour giving you this figure, you twat. It's the Daily Mail! And I predict the same as Peter Pan. Because the 'black hole; will probably have been made up, or rely on shonky techniques like counting arrivals but ignoring departures. MigrationWatch would probably have counted this entire plane as immigrants.

Finally, one that has to be a wind-up:

The rest had arrived before the New Year!!

- Howard, Potters Bar

Nobody's that stupid.

Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

The Mail has a funny relationship with the BNP. I mentioned a while ago that I wrote quite a lot about that before, and I want to polish it up. I've not done that yet, but there's an article in Saturday's edition (30 December) that illustrates the paper's attitude nicely.

What the paper does is call the BNP nasty names, while actually supporting some of the party's policies with its editorial stance, sometimes in the very same articles. In short, the paper's attitude is like someone who says, "I'm not racist, but..." before launching into some crazy tirade about how black people are all muggers and are genetically inferior anyway. The important part of their argument is the quite obviously racist bit that follows the, "I'm not racist, but..." opening. The most important part of the Mail's approach to the BNP is not the names it calls the party, but the actual arguments it makes that follow the names. It's not a coincidence that the BNP's own site says:

I don’t know which establishment newspapers are the most popular amongst readers of the BNP’s website, but it would be interesting to find out. My guess is that the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday will figure strongly, and that columnists Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips are the ones whose opinions people feel most closely match their own.
(From 'Seeing the trees but not the wood' in the 'Joe's Journal' section of the BNP website, which I'm not fucking linking to).

This Saturday's article is 'The BNP ballerina', and is about how ballerina Simone Clarke is a BNP member. Now, as the Mail is apparently a paper that abhors the BNP, you'd expect this to be a massive hatchet job attacking Clarke for being an atrocious small minded racist, perhaps calling for their readers to boycott productions she stars in. But it isn't.

Of course, it starts by chucking out some of the names it calls the party, saying:

The BNP is certainly repellent, with its knee-jerk hatred of foreigners and history of organised thuggery, and there is something in the juxtaposition of dance pumps and bovver boots that many will find impossible to comprehend, particularly in the liberal world of the arts.

But this is followed very shortly by a 'but'. Straght away in fact. The very next sentence/paragraph says:

But Simone's explanation for why she decided to join the party last year - given here for the first time - cannot be simply brushed aside as a foolish error, let alone ignored.

This is how Mail articles about the BNP generally go. There'll be some namecalling followed by a defence which completely misses the point. The BNP are nasty largely because they have horrible, nasty views and policies. You can't say, "The BNP are nasty and vile and odious, but they have a point," because their points are what make them nasty and vile and odious. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law - the paper is doing the equivalent of saying, "Putting people in death camps is vile and nasty because the nazis did it," which is bollocks. The nazis were vile and nasty party because they put people in concentration camps. See, the BNP are wankers because they exaggerate the negative effects of immigration and use immiggrants as a scapegoat to blame everything they don't like on. They're wankers because they claim that they are the only people to take a stand on the problems connected with immiggration that they themselves have invented. That kind of defines the BNP and what they do.

The 'but' sentence ends with the claim that you cannot brush aside her explanation as foolish error - and we find out why in the next one:

The reason is summed up in one word: Immigration. It has, she told the undercover journalist who exposed her, "really got out of hand' - and today she maintains the BNP" are the only ones to take a stand' on the issue that she believes troubles the majority of voters, even though such views have led to her being branded a racist and a fascist. "Using the word immigration is now a greater crime than cold-blooded murder," she claims.

That's a whole bunch of complete bullshit that can indeed be brushed aside as a foolish error. For fuck's sake. Using the word "immigration" is not a greater crime than cold-blooded murder. That's ridiculous hyperbole that is. I can brush that aside quite easily. But more importantly, the paper has just claiimed that you can't brush aside Simone's views because she said some things the BNP says. Which is fucking odd.

Next:

But her story has wider implications. When one of the country's principal ballerinas, a 36-year-old woman who spent much of her recent working life as the Sugar Plum Fairy, decides to join the British neo-fascists, there is an argument that something has gone badly wrong with democratic British politics.

Why does her story have wider implications for anything at all? She's a fucking dancer. It's almost as bad as saying we should listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger's political views because he can lift up heavy things. How does dancing make her any more knowledgeable about politics than anyone else? The key is that this is a ballet dancer. This woman is posh - and therefore right.

The rest of the article is taken up mostly with a sympathetic reproduction of her views, but it includes this little gem that shows precisely why we should sweep aside this stupid bint's views as foolish error:

"We went on to the computer and we looked them up and I read their manifesto. I'm not too proud to say that a lot of it went over my head but some of the things they mentioned were the things I think about all the time, mainly mass immigration, crime and increased taxes. Those three issues were enough to make me join so I paid my £25 there and then." [My emphasis].

She's so stupid that the BNP's manifesto went over her head. It doesn't get much lower than that. By saying this, she's clearly admitting that she doesn't understand what she's talkling about. I couldn't think of a better example of an instance in which it's desirable to brush someone's argument aside.

There's a nice juxtaposition of language in the next couple of sentences/paragraphs:

"I think the BNP are honest. They're not trying to dress up what they want, which is change on these issues."

Simone is certainly honest. More to the point, she is increasingly typical of the albeit tiny band of seemingly respectable, middle-class voters that the reshaped, carefully 'branded' BNP is anxious to woo.

Simone says the BNP are honest, and 'Simone is certainly honest'. Therefore, we are to assume that the BNP are honest.

There are any number of examples of the BNP lying that the paper could mention now to show that the BNP aren't actually honest. And if it really did think the party was nasty and vile and whatever you'd expect it to do just that. But it doesn't. There is, in fact, very little that opposes the views of the BNP among the little justifications the paper offers for her. There's a little bit of incredulity that the ballerina doesn't see any conflict in being a BNP member at the same time as being involved in a mixed relationship, but that's about it.

The article ends with:

So when the curtain comes down at the Coliseum next week and the departing members of the audience hurry out into the cold night air, they should perhaps remember this: that if the marvellous Giselle they applauded to the roof is in any way typical of the thousands in the auditorium, and that if the fear of crime and immigration continues to follow its predicted course, it will be a rather bright 2007 for Nick Griffin and his cohorts.

And for the rest of us, that is a very grim prospect indeed.

Although the article hasn't said very much at all about why this would be a gri prospect. In fact, it's been mostly about defending Simone and making her views - which are represented by the BNP - seem quite normal and acceptable. This closing is the final example of the paper missing the point, while elsewhere on the site is today's story '2.5m workers only speak English as a second choice...and today we open the door to 30m more'. And let's not forget this.

Happy New Year everybody!