Well I think both sides are protesting rather a lot and that this post handles a pragmatic middle ground: http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/arranging-deckchairs.html

Immigrants contribute to crime, and import local difficulties to the UK, sucking up more police resources, but are not on the whole less law abiding than UK citizens.

Part of the problem with the argument over figures, however, is that the government is explicitly NOT recording or publishing what people want to know: how much crime is being committed by foreign nationals. They don’t record this because they are worried that the figure might not fit the politically correct social construct (it wouldn’t be wholly surprising, many immigrants are coming from countries that are much less law abiding than Brits). So instead, you get newspapers trying to infer the answer via FOI requests into the data that is recorded.

In the end, this is not a problem for the newspapers but a problem created by the political establishment. They don’t want to waste their time having an honest debate (with all the relevant figures) about immigration, particularly its impact on lower income Brits. So they obsfucate and give the right wing newspapers a weakness to exploit. Being newspapers, they aren’t accurate about doing it but as I have argued here before, we should be holding the government to a higher standard when it comes to facts and evidence than newspapers.

As of last night you can add to your list of media who think that the Guardian got this pretty clearly wrong that well known source of anti-immigrant fervour – BBC Newsnight. Look, you can complain that both sides get things wrong from time to time. Everyone makes mistakes.

However, to bluster your way through the fact that the Guardian clearly got things wrong and nothing has been “blown apart” at all is absurd. They got too excited about what they thought was a juicy story and didn’t check it against the document before putting it on their front-page. It happens but it does them no credit and, as they aren’t going to make much of a noise about that, it is right that other papers do. That is what an open debate looks like.

I haven’t looked through all your examples but it looks like – while the Express and Mail might take some things out of context – you haven’t found any examples of them actually being factually wrong on this issue (which the Guardian were by drawing non-existent facts from a report). So your hypocrisy charge might not even stand. However, even if it does that shouldn’t be used to shut down debate. Can the Guardian now not criticise innacurrate reporting in other papers because it would be hypocritical?

Pretty soon we’d all be silenced.

Where did the guardian get things wrong? Migrants bring as much crime as the person already living here…that’s what the report says. As such, any idea by the Mail and Express that they create a crimewave is utter bollocks. What’s to misunderstand here? The guardian never claimed that migration *doesn’t* bring more crime, merely that as with everything the right wing press report, it’s not as extreme or even as abnormal as they think.

What newsnight ultimately came down on was *not* saying that the guardian report was wrong, the woman who went through the report with a “fine tooth comb” never discounted what the guardian reported, she fell in line with either agreeing or disagreeing with what the mail and express said which is pretty sloppy journalism.

In the debate afterwards it was made pretty clear what the situation is here…migrants don’t bring more crime than any greater amount of people, but the resources in this country not rising proportionally to them can mean issues. I don’t know how many times this has to be said but that is not an immigrant problem, that is a system and resource problem. It’s about time we stopped blaming immigration for the problems of this country that would occur simply if we had a period of baby boom 20 years or so previously.

“It’s about time we stopped blaming immigration for the problems of this country that would occur simply if we had a period of baby boom 20 years or so previously.”

Notice that while schools, hospitals and the police have trouble adjusting to demand, Tesco and Sainsbury’s don’t. The invisible hand just ensures that a few Polish favourites appear on the shelves.

So, time for free market reform in other public services? (after all, it doesn’t get much more public service than food provision:))

Sorry, Matt – can you provide an example of the Guardian being factually wrong on this story? Cos I’m buggered if I can find any…

[note: the study's author said, as quoted above: "the evidence does not support theories of a large-scale crime wave generated through migration". Can you get any more categorical than that?]

“So, time for free market reform in other public services? (after all, it doesn’t get much more public service than food provision:))”

See, I’m not so sure I sign up to this argument, though I’m not saying that it doesn’t have it’s merits.

Yes Sainsbury and Tesco cater well with expanding population, though their task is ultimately as simple as ensuring that they have a premise within X miles of each other, and Y amount for every 10,000 people (or whatever, I don’t profess to know truly), and to order more stock as and when it’s needed…would other services have such a simple time of adapting?

Rail travel is more popular now than when it was publicly owned but anyone will tell you what an expensive farce using the train regularly can be, especially at peak times. And what about internet? We’re still stuck with companies arguing with the BBC over the cost of iPlayer on bandwidth because they’re reluctant to foot the bill of an adapting market where people want to see streamed video media over the net.

So…yes, supermarkets do well and you could use that as an argument as to why free markets on public services would cope better…but to me seeing a privatised rail and communication system only proves that they probably wouldn’t. Whether bogged down by profits being the ruler of all, or by regulatory bodies (as with OFCOM and their scandalous stance in the last few years on rolling out faster broadband), I don’t actually see how such changes would actually create any more benefit than the current systems.

I think you are all being a bit disingenious here. The Guardian, along with the BBC must be guilty of misreporting the figures, as statemenst to the effect that “Migration doesn’t increase crime” are both impossible to substantiate (crime has multiple “causes” that may or may not be connected to migration) as well as logically improbable.
Crimes are comitted by people, that is why there is more crime in London than in Rutland. It follows that the more people there are in any given country or area, the more crime there will be. Ergo, aplying a relative measure (whether the average migrant committs more/less/different crimes as compared to the average indiginous populance) is meaningless and irrelevant, when what the public perceives as crime is either present or absent, in other words, an absolute.
However you measure it, stating that migrants are no more likley to comitt crime than anyone else is not evidence that migrants don’t increase crime. Anyone who doesn’t understand this doesn’t understand basic statistics.

“I don’t know how many times this has to be said but that is not an immigrant problem, that is a system and resource problem.”

Circular argument – if the migrants weren’t here we wouldn’t need additional resources………also if you follow that to it’s extreme (open ended and unlimited migration) eventually public services would collapse unless they had some form of rationing, in which case they cease to be public services and become private ones.

I don’t know how many times it has to be said that you cannot have unmanaged migration AND a welfare state

Lee – I don’t think running a supermarket chain is as easy as you make out, I just think they make it look simple to us. Markets are very good at delivering products effectively through very ornate supply and production chains. For a great example see this: http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Essays/rdPncl1.html

Where I do agree with you, however, is on some services like railways. The problem isn’t complexity but provision that tends towards monopoly (or have had monopolies instituted in the past). It is very difficult to “privatise” a state monopoly without turning it into a private monopoly or oligopoly as I think has happened, to an extent, with rail travel. BT is another example. I think everyone HAS to deal with BT at some point in the process of setting up a new phoneline. As a consequence, with no competitive demand, their customer service tends to be poor and the cost of some of their monopoly services (putting in a new phone line) prohibitive.

Having said that, I think we have a relatively well functioning market in telecommunications simply because the provision for internet access is increasing and the costs seem to have fallen. I am sure there are inefficiencies in the system and I am sure that the successful companies are trying to lobby state structures (like the BBC and the government) for special dispensation and support (notice, they haven’t asked youtube for help!) so that they can entrench their positions. Obviously, that tendency needs to be resisted.

Matt, nothing you’ve said above points towards immigration being the problem, still. Substitute as I said “immigrants” for “sustained increase in indigenous population” and the situation is the same.

Your argument is nothing to do with migration, it is that “you cannot have unmanaged population increase of any manner AND a welfare state”. I am, as yet, undecided on that issue but lets stop putting in migration as a scapegoat when it just happens to be the current way of our population straining the systems we use. You wouldn’t force people to have no more than one child to save the state of our systems so you cannot argue that migration should be curtailed.

“However you measure it, stating that migrants are no more likley to comitt crime than anyone else is not evidence that migrants don’t increase crime. Anyone who doesn’t understand this doesn’t understand basic statistics.”

The Guardian never said, unless I’ve missed a key paragraph, that migrants don’t increase crime, they said they don’t increase crime any more than the increase in population to an area that they cause brings. It seems to be the key spin of the mail and express that they wish their readers to believe that the guardian has claimed that migrants do not increase crime fullstop (i.e. don’t cause crime at all), this was *never* suggested.

Nick, I wasn’t seriously trying to say that running a supermarket was easy. Dealing with an increase in population for them is however much easier than systems relying on infrastructure to do so, simply ordering some more weetabix because there is demand is a little easier to do than order new trains and manage to justify that cost along with ongoing costs. Both should be simple enough, so don’t get me wrong..I don’t know how train companies have managed to screw up so long, just as I don’t know how Ofcom has managed to stifle state intervention in updating our internet infrastructure for so long either.

As I said, I’m not sold either way on the arguments you provide or the counter-arguments too it, I think simply naming supermarkets as proof is a little naive in the grander scale of things. In theory, to say as Matt does that more population (paying taxes) puts strain on resources confuses me as more money from more people should result in appropriate proportionate scaling of our state run systems. I know this isn’t how it works but that is a government problem, and not a population increase one.

I think James Slack’s article sets out the mistake pretty clearly, really.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=560180&in_page_id=1770

A decisions decisions Matthew… do we believe that it is spin by the author because he wanted a “good news story” as the Mail says, despite quoting nothing and no-one that suggests that is the case? Or do we perhaps believe that the report isn’t popular with the police because they wanted something that ensures that the Home Office gives the police more money. Ah the politics of police funding!

I am going to repeat…what mistake was made, because I still sure as hell can’t find one. Unless of course you’re talking about guardian referencing the *mood* the mail set regarding what immigration brings in terms of crime, not a paragraph in the report, when it talks about immigrant crime waves being a myth?

Come on Matthew Sinclair: explain to me how migrants contribute to crime if there has been above trend immigration, but a fall in crime of 30pc plus in ten years according to the British Crime Survey?

The fact is the xenophobic Rightwing loudmouth anti-immigration machine has been shown up, yet again. The Mail and its cohort have been attempting to link crime to immigration for years, despite little evidence to support their case.

Along comes a contradictory report from the people in the know and guess what the Right atempts to do? They seek to undermine the report! Just like they seek to undermine the BCS when it explodes their assumption that “crime is always rising” (it only seems to rise under the Tories).

Quelle surprise.

Nick: I quite agree with everything in your first post. It’s not just the government however; the police themselves aren’t keeping the sort of records which would help clear the whole mess up, although they can hardly be faulted for that. As Five Chinese Crackers writes in the last link in the post, who carried out his own FOI request after the Mail’s one which they used to claim 1 in 5 crimes in London was committed either by a migrant or a foreigner:

“To sum up – these figures are meaningless. They don’t measure foreign nationals or immigrants at all. They don’t tell us the number of crimes the people measured are responsible for – only the rate they are accused of crimes compared to the number of crimes people who describe themselves as British are accused of. As I’ve said before, there were 447,628 crimes reported in London in the first half of 2007. People describing themselves as non-British were accused of 22,973 of those – or 1 in 20 – and actually charged with 9,878 of them – or about 1 in 45. Saying ‘Foreigners are accused of a twentieth of crime in London’ or ‘Foreigners are responsible for one in forty crimes in London’ would be closer to the truth.”

As I wrote, it comes down to who do you trust more – the Mail and Express, or the BBC and the broads – and I emphatically chose the latter.

“Come on Matthew Sinclair: explain to me how migrants contribute to crime if there has been above trend immigration, but a fall in crime of 30pc plus in ten years according to the British Crime Survey?”

That’s a fairly simplistic view to take unfortunately. The argument response to this is quite clearly “Well it might be 30pc fall, but without immigration it could have been 35pc” (or insert another figure, whatever). The arguments over rise and fall are irrelevant if looked at in any other context than trends in crime per population and whether or not the population in areas that has increased in ten years has the appropriate level of crime for such a population AND for the general decrease/increase of crime in that area per population. It’s not a simple matter to get a definite answer on.

“I think James Slack’s article sets out the mistake pretty clearly, really.”

Hardly.

1) James Slack has repeatedly lied in the Daily Mail that there is a migrant crime wave.

2) The police report confirms that there is not a migrant crime wave – as Slack admits halfway down his piece, migrants do as much crime per head as anyone else, but are slightly more expensive to process because they don’t speak English

3) The Guardian report made the important point, that there is not a migrant crime wave

4) James Slack lies in his current Daily Mail article that nobody has ever said there was a migrant crime wave, even though that’s precisely what he’s been saying forever.

It’s exactly analogous to the “benefits of immigration per capita” story – the bigots lie that immigration has a negative impact on the overall population; then when a study shows that the impact is positive, the bigots lie that they never claimed it was negative in the first place. And then talk nonsense about “the price of a Mars bar”, by working out the benefits on a per-capita-per-day basis…