So they are biased against asylum seekers after all!

Remember this? 'Not biased against asylum seekers? Do me a favour'? Well, the Joint Committee on Human Rights has published its report into the treatment of asylum seekers, and it seems they were nearly as impressed with the Express and the Mail's defences of their coverage as I was. It's not clear whether they laughed hard enough into their mug to send a splat of tea onto their desk as well, but they might have, so I'll pretend they did.

The report 'The Treatment of Asylum Seekers' is available in PDF format on the Parliament website. It's a meaty report that I haven't read all the way through - but there is BBC coverage if you're interested, in the story 'Asylum hardships "are deliberate"'.

What I want to focus on, though, is the section of the report that deals with the press - especially the Express and the Mail. It says:

As the editors who gave evidence to us recognise, the right to free speech and the freedom of the press are not absolute, but must be exercised in accordance with the duties and responsibilities of the media. The evidence we received from the PCC was not reassuring. Its existing system is not sufficiently robust to protect asylum seekers and other vulnerable minorities from the adverse effects of unfair and inflammatory media stories. [Emphasis mine].

The PCC's own defence is interesting, and shows exactly why the whole complaints process is ineffective, and essentially useless. The PCC says:

“The number of complaints (received by the PCC) does not reveal a huge groundswell of concern about them from people against the national press, given that they can complain about issues to do with accuracy, privacy, intrusion, discrimination about individuals and so on.”

Which is the PCC claiming that it's not the quality of complaints it receives about anything, but the quantity. It doesn't matter if the papers produce blatantly false material that gets complained about as long as not too many people complain.

The PCC is also reported as saying:

The PCC believes that the mechanisms in place work effectively. It provided two examples of upheld complaints concerning asylum seekers (issued in 1999 and 2000) which it says “gave an important signal to the whole of the press” and that “it has not been necessary to issue similar rulings for some time”:

“The important thing is that there is a mechanism in place for handling complaints from anybody who is affected by inaccurate or intrusive reporting. Such complaintsin turn help to raise standards generally. In the context of your inquiry, therefore, I believe that the current system fairly and effectively balances the rights of freedom of expression with other rights such as the right to respect for privacy.”

The important thing here is to notice the subtle little insertion of 'complaints from anybody who is affected', as there have been complaints about misleading articles that were wrongly rejected - but they were not from people the PCC deem were 'affected'. Also, the fact that the PCC hasn't issued a ruling for some time is supposed to be evidence of the system working - but this report shows, quite clearly, that it has not been working. And it's probably not working precisely because it has not issued a similar ruling for some time.

Bringing the two together, the Joint Committee Report says:

We are concerned about the negative impact of hostile reporting and in particular the effects that it can have on individual asylum seekers and the potential it has to influence the decision making of officials and Government policy. We are also concerned about the possibility of a link between hostile reporting by the media and physical attacks on asylum seekers. [Emphasis not mine - the Joint Committee wanted to emphasise this paragraph themselves - para 349].

It repeats this without the emphasis in its 'Reccommendations' section, before:

We recommend that the Press Complaints Commission should reconsider its position with a view to providing practical guidance on how the profession of journalism should comply with its duties and responsibilities in reporting matters of legitimate public interest and concern. We emphasise that such guidance must not unduly restrict freedom of speech or freedom of the press any more than similar guidance does in the USA. (Paragraph 366)

So there we go. Newspapers are guilty of hostile reporting about asylum seekers in such a way that has the potential to influence Government policy. It's official. Of course, it's nothing we don't already know.

The Mail, perhaps in reaction, has sort-of-sympathetic coverage of a Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation report into failed asylum seekers living in poor conditions in the 28 March article 'Asylum seekers "living in poverty"'. Of course, it misleadingly calls them asylum seekers after their applications have been refused, and there's a barb in the last word from Joan Ryan (weird dystpoian world again - the Daily Mail have to rely on a Labour minister for a barb about a minority group), but it's sort of a start.

But it's too late. The horse has already bolted. The Mail and Express are bored with asylum seekers now - they're so 2003. The papers moved on to Muslims and the Polish. By the time they've been slapped for that, they'll have moved on to someone else. I reckon it should be the Walloons.*

*Not really. I don't think it should be anyone. I just like the word 'Walloon'.

Magic cloth

The dogs in uniforms thing may have clouded my brain and made me jaded, but I'm finding the the whole propaganda explosion around this story a bit overwhelming at the moment.

There are plenty of places you can go for better coverage of it all than I can provide, but since this fits in with this blog's theme, I'd just like to ask why 'forced to wear the hijab'is on the list of horrific treatment at all, let alone above 'made to praise her Iranian kidnappers'.

Of all the things you could choose to say to condemn the Iranians, why would you choose that? Why would you choose to say she was forced?

And you'd think the evil baddies would force her to wear the thing properly. Her hair's showing.

Why would you presume someone had to be forced to wear a fucking scarf? Why would you assume it even needed resisting?

The Express has its own, characteristically wierd take. Naturally, it agrees that she's been forced - but in the Express, it's a Muslim scarf. What is a Muslim scarf? How can an inanimate object have a religion? Well, aside from my Wiccan screwdriver.

What kind of crazy science fiction dystopia has this country become if we have to assume people need to be forced to wear a scarf because it's from the wrong religion? I thought it was these arseholes that banged on about 'enlightenment values'.

Plus - what kind of crazy, dystopian world is it where the one of the worst examples of treatment of captives our press can come up with to attack Iran with is that they made someone wear a scarf, when our side's treatment of captives includes buggery with lightsticks, attacking with angry dogs and stabbing with knives and the people responsible get away scot-free?

*UPDATE* Beaten to the punch by Obsolete. As usual, his post is better.

MY EYES! MY EYES!

Oh my god, what have you done to my eyes?!

I think I want to sue the Sun. 'See the real deputy dogs' has burned my retinas with its sheer, unadulterated fucking shitness. Don't get me wrong, a dog in a hat is a sight to behold, but:

• At least go to the trouble of actually putting the dog in a hat to start with.

• Don't call the story 'something something something dogs' when some of the animals are cats. Cats are different to dogs. That's why they have different names.
  

• Don't pretend that a website with badly photoshopped animals in American uniforms is worthy of being put in the news section. It's not. It's rubbish.

• Dogs and cats in uniform will not make any women 'berzerk with joy'. Unless they're in a home.

• "For those who have spent years imagining what their cat might look like in the navy, it's a dream come true." No it isn't. Being given immediate treatment to make them better would be a dream come true.
  

• For the love of god, cats and dogs don't have shoudlers and arms, you bunch of fucking halfwits.

• The above pics don't show what it would look like if pets had jobs. There already are dogs in the army and navy and that have been into space. They don't wear the fucking uniforms, you buffoons. Because they're dogs.
  

• And I'll tell you what it would look like if pets really did have people's jobs. It would look like fucking mayhem. They haven't got opposable thumbs, they can't even speak and they lick their own bums! Alright - not that different from the Sun's imagined audience, but still. Not going to get your trains driven, your post delivered or your call centre enquiries answered, is it?

You: Hello, I need ambulances, fire engines and police - a plane's just crashed because the pilot was a fucking cat!
Emergency services: NUMNUMNUMNUM!
You: It's mayhem here, there are bodies everywhere and a Yorkshire Terrier's trying to direct traffic! HIs hat's over his eyes! We need help right away!
Emergency services: Rowf! NUMNUMNUM!
You: Are you licking your bollocks?

This is just nothing but a great big heap of wrong. It takes the Sun's habit of photoshopping what things would look like if they were different to the most extreme level it ever could, ever. Beyond 'here's a picture of a soldier with a grinning Prince William pasted over his face because you're too much of a halfwit to figure it out yourself' levels by miles. Here's what the story should have said:

Animals would look weird wearing people clothes, because they're not people and they don't normally wear clothes.

If you've ever wondered about this, there might be a website for you, if you are:

Too stupid to imagine it

Easily impressed

A cunt

Seriously, this is the world's biggest selling English language newspaper.

I'm going to top myself.

Can we have some over-reaction please?

This is another Mail classic. The perfect ingredient to make us poo ourselves in our beds. Here's what the paper says:

Thousands of prisoners are being given keys to their cells in the latest farce to hit the criminal justice system.

Oh my god! Thousands of prisoners! Latest farce! Except it isn't really that new. Here's a Prison Inspectorate report on HMP The Wolds from 1998 that mentions privacy keys. So, for the Mail 'the latest' things are those that have been going on for at least nine years.

Plus, the picture the Mail has painted would appear to be far from the truth. It looks as though prisoners can come and go as they please, when before they would have been locked away. But have a closer look at how things are worded. You'll notice that Gerry Sutcliffe mentions people being able to lock their cells for privacy - not being able to leave their cells where they were unable to before.

So maybe there's more to this. Let's look elsewhere. Although it isn't a Yorkshire prison, this inspection report for Hatfield Young Offender Institution says:

Each young prisoner had his own single room with a privacy lock and his own key which he had to hang up in the offices whenever he left the unit and during association. [...] Young prisoners were never locked in their rooms, although there were periods when they had to remain in them unless they asked permission to come out.

And going back to the Wolds inspection document:

Single cells were of an average size with a large window and simply furnished. All had privacy keys allowing prisoners to lock them in their absence but locks could be overridden by a master key held by staff.

It looks like reality might be at odds with the Mail's reporting again. It seems that the privacy locks are there to offer inmates a way of locking themselves or their things away, rather than being able to unlock their cells and wander about willy-nilly.

There's more coverage in Yorkshire Today, which is still pretty shrill, but not by Daily Mail standards. It says:

Nine prisons across the region give offenders the means to lock their own "rooms". The terminology is used by some facilities to safeguard personal belongings and allow privacy.

And it mentions something the Mail manages to leave out:

A tenth of prisoner are given "courtesy keys" at HMP/YOI New Hall, although staff admitted "we still have the ability to secure the unit but not individual rooms".

So, because a cell has a privacy lock, which inmates can have a key to, it doesn't mean their rooms can't be secured from outside. That would mean they had a courtesy key, which only one in ten at one Young Offender's Institution have (as far as we know).

There's also this little gem in the Mail:

Although many of them are at open prisons and youth offenders' institutes, others are in standard closed prisons for those who have committed serious crimes such as muggings, burglary and theft.

So what? Seriously. Since the Mail don't mention it, it's unlikely that muggers and burglars get privacy locks. Surely, that's more important than whether prisons that have these criminals in use them.

Storm. Teacup. Pants.

When is Political Correctness Gone Mad not to blame for society's ills?

When the welfare state is, of course! Do keep up. In today's (20 March) edition, the Mail shows 'Why the welfare state is to blame for a generation of lost boys'.

Of course, it doesn't really. You'll not find any explanations here about how having a universal healthcare system leads young men into a life of despondency and violence or anything like that. What you will get is some old, stale, borderline racist nonsense warmed up and made to look fresh. The article doesn't even mention the welfare state until well over halfway through, unless you count the gripe about 80% of teachers in state schools being women.

So here are all the article's arguments about how the welfare state is 'to blame for a generation of lost boys' in full:

The journalist's son started being a little shit about his female teahcers. He then switched to a school with mostly male teachers and was transformed! Apparently, the moral of the story is not that her son needed to learn anything about treating women with respect, but to be taken away from any situation when he might have to do so. 80% of teachers in state schools are female, so the welfare state is clearly to blame for young boys not respecting women in positions of authority. It's not really clear why the welfare state is to blame for so many teachers being women. It just is.

Apparently, some black parents think teachers are too scared to punish black pupils for fear of being accused of racism. This is despite study after study that shows that black kids are punished far more harshly than anyone else. Like the one in today's Independant. Again, it's unclear why the welfare state is to blame for this. Notice the shift though. We're no longer talking about a generation of lost boys. We're talking about black boys. Remember that.

The journalist's son does two hours of sport most days and has a match most weekends so he's too knackered to stab anyone. State schools do one hour a week. Clearly, this is the fault of the welfare state. Being publicly funded means that there's some law of nature that prevents the scheduling of more than one hour of sports.

The benefits system has destroyed the family because young women deliberately get pregnant and chuck the fathers so they can get housing benefit. This stuff was laughed out of town decades ago when Norman Tebbit said it, but it gets another airing here. The spurious reasoning is that a study shows that the UK has higher benefits than France or Germany and a higher level of teenage pregnances. The parlous state of sex education in schools doesn't get a mention. It's curious as to why, because that would provide another stick to bash the welfare state with. But then, a Mail journalist would have to advocate better sex education, which is clearly out, so maybe it's not so curious.

Apparently:

One gang leader even recalled his father letting him play with his gun as a six-year-old.

I'll just leave that one without comment.

It's possible to cheat the system and claim incapacity benefit rather than work.

So that's it. Just think of how nasty and grasping and violent this journalist clearly thinks people are. Especially young men. The image she paints is of angry, cruel monsters, barely able to contain their violent rage. She says this:

As a mother of a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, I know that young men are a different species to the rest of us.

In time of war, we value their aggression, their sense of immortality, their loyalty to each other. But in peace-time, they are at best a nuisance, at worst a threat.

She seems to think that they'll decide to stab people if they have female teachers. She seems to think it's necessary to make them physically exhausted or they'll stab people. She seems to think that if they don't join sporting teams, they'll join gangs and stab people. Stab stab stab. That's all young men think about in her world. Unless of course they're thinking about shooting people and showing their gun to their six year old sons. She also thinks that if you give them any opportunity to get out of work, they'll jump at it. Presumably so they can spend their time stabbing people. It's not a pretty image.

Young women don't fare much better. Give them an opportunity for a bit of housing benefit and a flat and they'll get themselves knocked up by the nearest bloke not busy stabbing people and then dump him to get their greedy mitts on that lovely benefit money.

I'm a bit uneasy with the effortless shift from talking about young men in general to talking about young black men in particular, which she does by saying, "Compare his experience to what happens to black boys at a state school in the inner cities", and then emphasising what she thinks is different for black boys before saying, "This absence of discipline has serious implications for all of us." Remember, she's only talking about absence of discipline for black boys. Despite study after study showing that black boys are in fact more harshly punished than anyone else.

She says:

We have managed to find jobs for half a million immigrants that come to this country every year but not for the children of former immigrants in Brixton.

She's explained why this might be by implying that if young men can cheat the benefits system to claim incapacity benefit, they'll jump at the chance. This is all in the context of talking about black people in Brixton. She reminds us that she's really only talking about black people when she goes on to finish up with:

We ignore this situation at our peril. Various radical Muslim groups are already recruiting young black men in their war against the West, supplying them with drugs, weapons, in some cases even somewhere to live and - most importantly - a cause.

Meanwhile, a number of middle-class blacks from Brixton have told me they are seriously concerned about another Brixton riot. A riot where the participants are politicised and armed.

Truly, the black communities in our inner cities face a serious crisis - and it is one which, unless action is taken, could spill over to affect every one of us.

It's not ot an entire generation of young men she's talking about after all, just the poor black ones. They're the ones who need to be strongly disciplined, forced into exhaustion and put into a system of belongning to some kind of school group to avoid armed rioting and stabbings.

Nice article. Hits so many Daily Mail erogenous zones in one go. Young black men are violent animals who are not kept in check by the welfare state that should be providing strong discipline for the poor, helpless monsters who can't be blamed for their situations because their mothers deliberately got pregnant for housing benefit and chucked their dads so grasping at benefits and joining violent gangs and showing their six year old sons their guns and shifting ever closer to violent armed rioting is not their fault.

It could almost be satire.

MigrationWatch: Redux

So here's how the MigrationWatch briefing paper 'The Impact of Immigration on GDP per head' is nothing more than anti-immigrant propaganda. Most of this will have appeared in previous posts, but I've been able to think things through a little better a bit since I'm not working things out as I go along. This one was supposed to be edited out a bit, but it didn't work out that way so you'll have to click the 'Read more!' link to, er, read more. Instead of going through the paper section by section this time, I'll be looking at it problem by problem, giving a comprehensive cut out and keep guide. If you can get the scissors to work on your monitor.

The entire premise of the paper

Of course the extra contribution by migrants to GDP per head of the entire country per week is not going to be incredibly high. MigrationWatch appear to have spent a lot of time addressing a strawman, since none of the reports it mentions actually claim that it would be. MW claim that this is because they have all 'missed' something, but it's far more likely that they haven't worked out the contribution to GDP per head because it would be bloody stupid to expect it to be high in the first place.

This doesn't mean that MW are right though. It just means that the contribution of almost any part of society would look tiny when you do what MW have done for migrants'. Remember, they first calculated how much more immigrants produce per year than the general population. They then took that difference and divided it by sixty million. They then took that figure and divided it again by fifty. Surprise surprise, it ended up being not a very big number. For it to have ended up any other way, these people would have had to have migrated from the planet Krypton!

How much would the extra contribution to GDP by firefighters be if you divided it by sixty million and then again by fifty? Shop assistants? People with green eyes? Oxford Professors of Demographics? Would there even be any extra contribution? If not, does that mean that the general population don't benefit from their presence, or are there in fact more things people can contribute to than GDP per head?

And let's not forget that one major pro-immigration argument is that immigrants disproportionately do low-paid work that nobody else wants. So why would anyone interpret that argument as saying they'd contribute vast amounts more to the economy than anyone else?

Claims that lots of studies show the migrant contribution to GDP is shockingly low

In fact, the paper only tries to calculate the total contribution of GDP per head in two of the five studies it examines. Of the other three, two look at how much more immigrants pay in taxes than claim in benefits, and one looks at the contribution of migrants from the new Eastern European countries. These things are different.

Using different measuring methods to make it look as though studies show similar findings when they don't

This is perhaps the most sneaky tactic in the whole paper. MW claim that official Government figures show the extra contribution to GDP by immigrants is 0.01%, and that another study, the 'National Institute Economic Review' actually shows a slightly negative contribution. The thing is, MW use different methods of measuring both immigration and GDP to make it look as though the two sets of figures are in rough agreement.

For the Government figures, MW use net migration to measure how much the population has risen as the result of immigration. This is the right way to do it, since it takes into account how many people have left the country in the same period. But with the National Institute figures, MW uses total migration, claiming that migration has increased the population by 2.249m between 1998 and 2005, when in fact population increased by just 1.349m as the result of immigration in this period. That would make extra migrant contribution average out at about 0.1% per year since 1998. Ten times higher than the Government figures.

It's also the Government's practice to use a different method to calculate GDP. Given that the Government's figure apparently came from the Government, it's reasonable to assume they'd use their own method in their calculations. But MW don't use this method with the National Institute figures. It does show in the footnotes that migrant contribution would have been 4.5% over eight years had they used this method. So using consistent methods to calculate both immigration and GDP would have shown an average positive contribution of about 0.27% per year. That'll be twenty seven times the Government's number then.

Using the completely wrong figure for the official Government estimate

There's a much bigger problem in the inconsistency between the Government and National Institute figures, and that's that the Government don't actually produce figures to show immigrant contribution to GDP at all. MW saw a figure in a Westminster Hall debate and assumed that it was the figure for how much immigrants contribute, when in fact it wasn't. It was just a ballpark estimate for how much had been contributed by migrants from new EU countries since May 2004. It didn't look at the total number of immigrants at all, but just one group.

This is not just a little mistake. The Government numbers were the ones MW were desparate to get in the press. They're the ones everyone remembers, and the ones that made the headlines. And they're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Without this figure, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Making hasty assumptions about figures

Using the wrong Government figure is just the most glaring example of how MW assume their conclusion in their calculations. Here, they took a figure and assumed it was something it wasn't - even though it would have disagreed with the other number they used to support it by being between ten and tweny seven times lower - and tweaked the other number so it looked as though it agreed.

There are more though. Most come in looking at the last study, 'The Item Club Report'. Now, I haven't seen this study properly, so I can't comment on all of it, but there are some very hasty assumptions that MW make that cast some doubt on their findings.

MW assume that everyone on the Workers' Registration Scheme works no overtime, has never been promoted and have not moved to a higher paid job since they registered.

They also assume that fifty percent of new EU migrants will return home. There's no way of knowing how many have returned from the Accession Monitoring Report they'd have been looking at, so that's just a guess.

Then, they assume that everyone who returned will have no dependants, so that the total number of dependants will be exactly the same as it appears in the Accession Monitoring Report they use, even after half the adult migrants have returned to Easten Europe. This ignores a note that warns that there is likely to be double counting here, as some people registered as dependants are themselves registered for work. So MW are counting some people who shouldn't be counted.

Counting people as immigrants who are not actually immigrants

There are other people counted as immigrants who should not be. The most glaring example is in MW's dismissal of an IPPR study that shows that immigrants pay more tax than they recieve in benefits. To do this, MW say that children of one immigrant and one non-immigrant parent should be counted as half an immigrant. They don't tell us which half arrived from another country, which isn't helpful.

In fact, none of these children are immigrants. Not by the dictionary definition, since none actually came here from another country, and not by the legal definition, since the British Nationality Act 1981 states that anyone with one UK Citizen as a parent is a British Citizen by birth.

MW repeat this tactic to explain away the unexpectedly large number for contribution to GDP the National Institute figure shows when they adjust for the Government method of calculating GDP. We have to count the children born in the UK to immigrant parents as immigrants and we have to assume there are just enough of these children to add the right amount to the population to cancel out the contribution. There are two problems with this.

MW have used the wrong figure for the addition to the population. It might be possible to assume that 2.249m people could have 405,415 children in eight years, but using net migration would mean that we'd have to assume that 2.249m people had 1.3m children in the same period. Which is a bit less likely.

But more importantly, it's unlikely that any of these children are immigrants at all since they've not actually migrated anywhere, and according to the British Nationality Act 1981, only one of those parents need to have ben granted Citizenship or legally settled here for their children to be born a UK Citizen. It's highly unlikely that the Office of National Statistics count people not legally settled in the UK in their migration figures - but even if they did, do you really think there would be enough people in the figures who have not been granted Citizenship or leave to remain to have 1.3 million children between them?

Hiding contentious figures in footnotes

The number above, which shows how the National Institute numbers would look if Government calculations are used is buried in a footnote. This is not because MW feel that calculations using the Government's method on National Institute are only worth mentioning in passing, because there is another figure included in the main body of the report where MW do the same thing. The difference? That one shows a low number, while the one in the footnotes is a high number. Must be just a coincidence.

Attempting to discredit other studies with irrelevant distractions

In addressing the Item Club Report, MW spend a little bit of time seeming to destroy the Item Club's assertion that the largest number of Eastern European migrants are in the Business and Administration sector by pointing out how many earn low wages. The same report MW address to find out how much the migrants are paid includes a league table to show how many workers are registered in each sector. So which sector is at the top of the table? Business and Administration.

Moving the goalposts

MW have dismissed the findings of a number of studies for different reasons, so no study is good enough.

First is a Government study from 2002 that showed that immigrants paid more in tax that year than they claimed in benefits. This would be a reasonable thing to do, since one of the main anti-immigration arguments is that immigrants are a burden on the welfare system. Once it's pointed out that they're not, the study is deemed useless because the budget was in surplus in 2002, so everybody contributed more. But every year since at least 1998 has had a budget surplus, so every study of this kind can be dismissed out of hand.

Then, an IPPR study attempted to correct this by showing that immigrants contributed more than the general population. But this study is not good enough because it doesn't include children of mixed immigrant and non-immigrant parents are not counted as immigrants. That they're not immigrants isn't relevant, apparently.

Next we have the two studies that measure contribution to GDP and show that immigrants produce a bit more than the general population. Never mind that one set of figures is totally poo, and the other one is shown using dodgy calculation methods - a positive contribution is not good enough because it's not amazingly high after you divide the contribution by sixty million and then again by fifty. One of these would show an unusually high contribution if consistent measurement methods were used, but that's not good enough because it doesn't count UK-born children of immigrants as immigrants, even though they've not migrated anywhere and it's highly unlikely that they would be legally considered immigrants.

It's difficult to know what would be good enough for MigrationWatch. Actually, scratch that, it is possible. Nothing would be good enough because MW assume their conclusion and contort the figures until they support that conclusion. Even the figues mentioned by Professor Coleman wouldn't be good enough, since they've already made some similar ones look smaller by using a dodgy immigration measurement.

The most annoying thing is that the papers will uncritically report the figures without even checking and it's been impossible to get anyone anywhere to take notice of the fact that they're based on a totally nonsense figure. Time to start looking about for stupid PC gone mad stories. Hurrah!

Academic hits back - and misses in migration row

I've been a bit busy recently, what with complaining to the PCC, trying to get somebody somewhere to take some bloody notice of the fact that MigrationWatch's figures that are still being repeated are a load of hogwash and actually having a life, so posting here has been light. Still, there have been some developments. I remindend MigrationWatch of the email I sent before and actually got a reply this time. Apparently they had no record of my last email, but their director of research is looking into the figures now. That's something at least. I've also been looking more closely at their figures and Professor David Coleman's defence of them. That might mean posting another trashing of the figures that's a bit better thought out and less hasty, but it does definitely mean I want to look at what the Professor has been saying in the press recently.

In 'Academic hits back in migration row', which appeared in last Friday's (9 March) Telegraph, Professor Coleman defends his position as an Oxford Professor while being involved with MigrationWatch and the Galton Institute. In doing so, he is very careful to point out:

The briefs on [MigrationWatch's website], however, arise from its own considerable in-house expertise.

And:

However I never speak on behalf of Migrationwatch; I am not its spokesman.

He then goes on to defend the last set of figures MW produced, which makes that statement look a bit curious. Still, it's not that I'm interested in. It's the Professor's actual defence I want to look at. He starts:

But a word might be appropriate about the calculation that the net contribution by immigrants to average national income per head was equivalent to about a Mars bar a week.

And goes on to explain a few things, including:

A number of studies show that the net economic benefit of immigration per head of population is about 0.1% of GDP.

Looks as though he's explaining the 'Mars bar' calculation in the MW paper, right? Except he isn't. A number of studies may well show the contribution to GDP is 0.1%, but the MW paper doesn't make that claim. It examines only two studies for migrant contribution to GDP (one of which is totally wrong and based on a nonsense figure), and claims that both show it to be at least ten times lower than 0.1%, at 0.01% or actually negative. And MW doesn't use the important caveat 'net economic benefit' in either the briefing paper or the press release that accompanies it.

As I mentioned in my earlier posts about this, the study that MW claim shows that migrant contribution is negative only does so if you use the incorrect measure of population growth. If you use the correct one, it would be 0.1% like the Professor says. But the paper itself doesn't show this figure anywhere at all. It claims the figure is more than ten times lower. If the Professor really thinks that a number of studies show migrant contribution is 0.1%, then he doesn't agree with this paper's findings, and shouldn't be defending it.

He goes on to explain:

In the UK, GDP is about £1.3 trillion so 0.1% is about £1300 million. Per head, among 60 million people in the UK that amounts to about £22 each per year or just under 50p each per week.

As anyone who remembers the tabloid frenzy would know, MW does not claim that migrant contribution is 50p per week, but 4p a week. The Professor's calculations are over twelve times higher.

So what's going on? Could be a number of things.

The Professor might have made a mistake. There might be a number of studies that show migrant contribution is something other than 0.1%. That would make his attack on Oxford STAR because they, "clearly have little knowledge of the subject matter and are not familiar with the relevant literature," look a bit silly.

He might actually disagree with the paper's findings. He could be hinting at this when he says:

Such calculations depend a lot on assumptions but seldom come up with any really big net effect on the economy at the level of the individual, positive or negative. [Emphasis mine]

If this is the case, he shouldn't be defending the MW figures at all, let alone praising the authors for having, "considerable in-house expertise." He should be explicitly pointing out that he thinks their findings are flawed.

Finally, he may never have actually read the MW briefing paper and have no idea that its figures are so much lower than his own estimates. In which case he definitely shouldn't be defending it or trying to explain its findings. If this is the case, it looks doubly embarrassing when he attacks his opponents for not being familiar with the literature.

There is one other reason he shouldn't be defending the MW paper though. And that's because it's an ill thought out, poorly researched and misleadingly put together piece of propaganda.

More bullshit from the Express *update*

I got a reply from the PCC about my complaint about the article in 'More bullshit from the Express'. I made a couple of predictions about what the verdict might be in 'Complaining to the PCC'. I thought they'd defend the article by saying the paper has the right to a partisan stance - although I was very careful to avoid that possibility by pointing out that no partisan stance can make 'knee' mean 'neck'. So what was the actual verdict?

There isn't going to be one.

Here's what the PCC say:

[...] it may be worth emphasising at this point that the PCC will normally only consider complaints from people who are directly affected by the matters about which they are concerned. Indeed, only in exceptional circumstances will the Commission consider a complait from someone not directly involved.

We would therefore be grateful if you could confirm that you are formally representing the Muslim Council of Britain. We would appreciate this information within ten days.

There we go. Because I'm not an official representative of the MCB it's okay to say that 'knee' means 'neck', that drawings are three-dimensional and to put quotes around phrases that don't appear in the document an article's talking about. I will post my complaint here shortly.

And as for 'exceptional circumstances' - I wasn't directly involved in the article I complained about before, but the PCC didn't use that defence. The only thing exceptional about those circumstances is that I hadn't been quite so careful with my wording so my argument was easier to take apart.

*Update update*

I haven't given up on this. I have replied to the PCC explaining why it shouldn't matter that I'm not representing the MCB. We'll see if that works.

When does the criticism of Muslims become racism? Ask the Express

The Express has the answer in today's edition (7 March). We all know the defence of the Islamophobic eejit. 'Islam is a religion, not a race, so I can't be being racist' they say. Today's Express shows where the line between legitimate criticism of a set of beliefs ends and demonisation of the people who practice it starts.

The headline is 'Straw: Muslims must learn English'.* The reality (because the reality is always different to an Express headline) is that Jack Straw has asked whether Asian women should learn English before being granted a visa. Asked, not stated, Asian, not Muslim, and women, not all. You don't need me to explain that not all Asians are Muslim and not all Muslims are Asian, or that not all Muslims are female, but I just did anyway.

This article is pretty much a textbook example of the 'Withdrawn!' tactic, so it's possible to work out what the truth is if you read the article, but still, I don't need to do any more with this do I?

*Appropriate that the opening word is 'straw', since the argument that follows it is made of straw. D'you reckon that was deliberate?

Super soaraway PROPAGANDA ARSEPAPER! II

More boneheaded propaganda parading as news for the hard of thinking at the Sun in 'Al-Qaeda target Prince Harry'. There's even one of those lame diagrams to show what might happen, which is - and although I had been thinking about moderating my language as some people clearly do read this blog and others do link here, I can't think of a better way to describe it - fucking shit.*

I mean, yes, Prince Harry might just be sticking up out of a tank, and evil Al-Qaeda operatives might decide not to just shoot him but jump all over it to drag him away where they can wait long enough to kill him for our brave boys to come and rescue him like in a war comic.

Alternatively, they might just blow the fucking tank up like in a war.

Sorry. You look at it without swearing.

*If you've got a better description, please add it to the comments section.

The Daily Gummidge

One of the tabloid's greatest weapons is the straw man argument. The Mail loves it, and fearlessly battles an entire army made of straw every day. Today's edition (3 March) has a brilliant example of an entire article built around a strawman 'Hounding of the don who dared to speak out on migrants'.

See, he's not being hounded for speaking out on migrants. He's being hounded because MigrationWatch play around with figures to produce a distorted image of immigration as a Bad, Bad Thing. I've blogged about this in the past, but the posts are a bit jumbled and confused because I was working out what was happening as I went along, so I'll reproduce a short summary of what was wrong with their last set of figures the tabloids went nuts for.

The MigrationWatch paper 'The Impact of Immigration on GDP per head' claimed that studies on how immigration contributes to GDP all forget to take into account how much the population has risen as a result of immigration, and that when this is taken into account, the amount contributed by immigrants is negligible, and roughly the same as the amount sent home in remittances. It focused mainly on Government figures, and those are the one the tabloids went nuts for.

MigrationWatch had tried to get their claims about the Government figures in the papers before, unsuccessfully. When they tried (and succeeded) the second time, they'd used different population growth statistics to arrive at their conclusion, which indicated to me that they didn't actually know what the Government figure for the contribution to GDP by immigrants referred to. They'd taken the figure from a comment in a Westminster Hall debate of October 2006, which didn't offer any explanation of where the number came from. I suspected that the figure had been arrived at by assuming immigrants produce the same as everyone else in the first place and that MW had been arguing over a simple difference in rounding. I emailed the Treasury to find out if I was right.

What I found out was a bit of a surprise. The £4bn didn't refer to the total contribution by immigrants at all. It was just a ballpark estimation of the amount contributed to GDP only by those from the new EU states since accession in May 2004. I thought MW might want to know they'd made such a big mistake, so I emailed them, quoting the email from the Treasury to point that out, but I never heard back and the report is still unchanged on the MigrationWatch website. I also added the information and a link to my blog post about it in the MigrationWatch Wikipedia entry, but it was edited out.

Aside from being based on an entirely wrong figure in the first place, there were other problems with MigrationWatch's report. The first is that the figure they quote for remittances of money to other countries was a total that would have been sent by anyone - not just the immigrants who had arrived on one year - and then compared that to the contribution made by the number of immigrants who had arrived in one year, which will necessarily be a much smaller group.

The second is the variety of shady tactics MigrationWatch used to make it look as though the other reports they examined also supported their conclusions. The main one was to use net immigration for the Government figures, which shows accurately how much the population has been raised by immigration, but total immigration for the others, which gives a misleadingly high figure for population increase. The others include counting children of immigrants as immigrants, counting the children of mixed parents - one immigrant and one not - as half an immigrant, assuming new EU migrants work one job, never do overtime and never get promoted, burying findings it doesn't like in footnotes and making wild guesses about the number of new EU migrants have returned to their home country.

I wasn't surprised when I didn't hear back from them and saw no change to their site.

Stories like the one in today's Mail get published all the time in the tabloids. I covered another example in 'The answer is none more black', where the Mail reported criticism of an MP for suggesting that most criminals are black without pointing out that without using qualifiers, that statement is actually false. What tends to happen is that someone will get criticised for saying something false, but the paper will suggest that they're being criticised for pointing out uncomfortable truths.

There's another interesting fact about the professor in the Mail article:

The petition also condemns his work for the Galton Institute, a charity which conducts research into eugenics, usually defined as the study of methods of improving the human race.

So, he's involved with an organisation that produces misleading and exaggerated statistics about immigration and he's into eugenics. While it might be a bit hasty to condemn the entire Eugenics movement just because (from Wikipedia):

Historically, eugenics has been used as a justification for coercive state-sponsored discrimination and human rights violations, such as forced sterilization of persons with genetic defects, the killing of the institutionalized and, in some cases, genocide of races perceived as inferior.

you have to admit that loud alarm bells start to ring about the motives of someone who is a founding member of an organisation that produces distorted and misleading statistics about the negative consequences of immigration and is into it. I'll just leave you with this quote from the Galton Institute website:

The fact that the eugenicists might couch their criticism of immigrant populations in the ‘coded language’ of national degeneration and refrain from referring to ‘aliens’ explicitly (although more than a few extremists were unrestrained in the expression of their prejudice) does not detract from the compelling evidence in favour of the fact that race had a considerable influence on the British eugenics movement, as an expression of cultural identity and, for a small but not insignificant number of extremists, as a biological category, had a considerable influence on the movement.

Sounds like a lovely bloke.