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Statistics, lies, and a lazy media out of london

The joke about “lies and statistics” may have been overdone a bit, but there are occasions when the dividing line between the two looks so thin that one is forced to sit up and wonder whether there is really something in that joke after all.

Consider this:

Last week — on December 11 to be precise — we were treated to some sensational figures about the number of British jobs that have gone to foreigners over the past decade. The source was the Statistics Commission, an independent body, which works closely with the Government — one of its aims being to help “ensure that official statistics are trustworthy and responsive to public needs.”

The Commission, which was asked to study the proportion of overseas workers in jobs created since Labour came to power in 1997, came up with the startling claim that more than 80 per cent of these had gone to “foreigners.” The revelation that eight out of every 10 new jobs created over a period of 10 years were taken away by foreigners, presumably at the expense of native Britons, was explosive stuff and, predictably, greeted with screaming headlines (“Study finds foreigners in 80 p.c. of new jobs,” “Foreigners have taken 80 per cent of new jobs”) besides being seized by anti-immigration groups to claim vindication for their allegation that outsiders were “stealing” British jobs.

The fact that the Commission’s figures were way above the official estimate of 50 per cent prompted accusations that the Government had concealed the real scale of the “negative” impact of immigration on jobs and public services.

Critics said the Commission’s dramatic disclosure contradicted Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s pledge about “British jobs for British workers.” Tories ridiculed him saying that, contrary to his promise, he was actually “creating British jobs for foreign workers.” Even Labour MPs were livid, and called for stricter border controls to keep out foreign workers.

But it has since emerged (though not because the media made any attempt to uncover it) that the Commission’s statistics were misleading even though it had not set out to do any such thing. What the clever number-crunchers at the Commission had done was to include a whopping 300,000 British nationals in the category of “foreigners” because they were born abroad and came to Britain as immigrants.

Instead of defining them by their nationality, as it should have done, the Commission classified them by the origin of their birth. The Government’s own estimates, on the other hand, had rightly excluded British citizens from the category of “foreigners.”

In its defence, the Commission said that its intention was not to define British nationals as foreigners or “introduce any new estimates.” All it had done was to “offer some more variants” on the existing estimates by using information already in the public domain. In doing so, it relied on the definition of foreign workers as given by the Office for National Statistics, a government department.

The ONS survey of foreign workers included all those who were born overseas but had since become British citizens.

Sounds confusing? Well, shorn of technicalities, it means that there are different ways of using the same data to assess a given situation. In this case, the Government and the Commission used different methods to determine the composition of Britain’s workforce. Hence the discrepancy.

The question, however, remains why the Commission chose to lump British nationals of foreign origin with foreign workers, instead of presenting them as two separate categories.

By presenting them in the manner it did, the Commission ended up, albeit inadvertently, creating a wholly misleading impression and fuelling anti-immigrant prejudice.

Worse was the role of the media which ran away with the headline-grabbing 80 per cent figure without bothering to explain the Commission’s many caveats. A case, simply, of lazy journalism? Or a deliberate attempt to sex-up the story?

Meanwhile, the Commission has urged government departments to agree on a uniform criterion for computing employment figures to avoid confusion, and discussions are reported to have already started.

There are fears that the Commission’s controversial methodology might become the official norm. If that happens then it will be the first time anywhere in the world that a country would be declaring its own citizens as “foreigners.”

It has serious implications. First, of course, is the legal aspect: whether any country can do such a thing even for statistical purposes. It is one thing to classify foreign-born citizens as “immigrants” or “ethnic minority groups” in order to get a clearer picture of the country’s racial and ethnic make-up, and quite another to categorise them as “foreigners.” Citizenship is not granted lightly and the most important privilege it confers on a new citizen is not to be called a bloody foreigner ever again.

Besides, any such move would fly in the face of the Government’s daily exhortation to immigrants to integrate with British society and regard themselves as British first.

Under Mr. Brown, promoting Britishness has become a national obsession and there are plans for American-style citizenship ceremonies and a British National Day to instil in immigrants a greater sense of Britishness.

But is classifying British nationals as “foreigners” (no matter how many technical caveats are offered to explain the methodology) the best way to go about it?

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