‘The left needs to present the facts about our economy’s need for inward migration without patronising people or dismissing outright the fears that people have as racism’

I couldn’t agree more and I too would like to look at the raw data for systematic bias.The problem with both the study and the quote above are they are both abstractions of reality and as such can lead to the misapplication of action /observations.

What you are trying to suggest in your quote is to match rationality ie ‘ the left needs to presents facts’ with irrationally ‘fears people have’.

Ever tried rationalising with irrational people.Add to that the herd mentality.
IMO you might as well try to stop a rampaging herd of elephants. Fear like anger has to be left to burn itself out and like anger there will be baseless objectification of groups and individuals co-opted by way of support.

We used to be in Bedlam but now I fear we are in Salem.

When the ‘Ape Confused by Language’ tries to deny animal imperatives (differencism) with perverse cerebral overlay, you get a confused mess. Governance requires extreme wisdom in its practitioners, we have extreme cleverness of a Machiavellian bent. The current ethos is unsustainable.
SPOIL PARTY GAMES.

The headline reads to me like ”Spin the spin”.
This issue is just another where a country is just split down the middle on what they think about something. Maybe like in Egypt where the population is divided about how they want to be governed. More religious or more secular and liberal.

The protests about the racist van have been a bit pathetic and manufactured IMO. But the van posters were pretty crass and stupid too. It sounds like the people opposed to this would resent anything the government did that actually clamped down on illegal immigration.
Protests against detention centres are proof of this.
Ilegal immigrants can hide openly in the wider community with little chance of being caught going about their day to day business. Maybe that’s one of the draws of this country. People are sitting in Calais trying to smuggle themselves from France becuse they know they are not asked for their ID here like in other EU countries.
As for stop and question: it’s not very British, but I can’t say I’m completely against it. I have to admit to sometimes feeling just the tiniest bit of annoyance at some of the unpoliced ”bedsitland” – where who knows what goes on. The kinds of street life you can see in the most transient of urban areas. Like all the little booths that have sprung up outside shops with Afghans selling phone cards – and a parallel world going on right under your nose that you will be completely ignorant of if you are not in the know. The world into which those young men in Calais slip into if they manage to get across the Channel.
The system for dealing with this broke down several years ago. A corrective measure will unfortunately have to be more raids and demands that people prove their identity.
Unless you couldn’t care less and think that anyone can just come and live here.
That is a legitimate point of view as well of course.

“It’s really quite another to be on your way to work and for a burly bloke to stop you and demand you prove your right to remain in the country. It’s all a bit Big Brother; it’s really not very British.”

Note that, one minute, our liberals will insist that it’s because immigrants are so “diverse”–i.e., not British–that immigration is a good almost without qualification.

Next minute, when someone claims that the government should enforce its own laws against illegal immigrants, they state with straight faces that such a course of action “wouldn’t be very British”.

“The left needs to present the facts about our economy’s need for inward migration without patronising people or dismissing outright the fears that people have as racism. The fears are real, even if they’re based on information that’s inaccurate or just plain wrong.”

So thousands of Romanians coming to the UK is now ‘inward investment’?

Anyway, these studies have been done. Please see 2007 House of Lords Report: Economic Impact of Immigration.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1583500/Limit-immigration-warns-House-of-Lords.html

The left are still trying to keep Tony Blairs immigration dream of creating a multicultural nation alive when the whole experiment has completely & utterly failed.

The British nation also knows that Labours immigration “mistake” wasn’t a mistake at all, it was a deliberate, nasty attempt by Tony Blair to erase English identity & rub the rights nose in diversity.

Blair is lucky I don’t run this country, because he’d be hanging from a tree for what he has done to us English with his despicable behavior.

BUT STILL the left want all the dregs from around the world to come to this once great country as to continue to eradicate those terrible English people & their racist ways.

Shame really, because with a good,decent,fair immigration policy people like me wouldn’t be made at immigrants but thankful for their help, but it’s too late for that now & it’s a fight to the death with the left to get my country back.

Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a “truly multicultural” country, a former Government adviser has revealed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html

6. Terry B

nice try but all the important bits are in quotes which reading between the lines invalidates the article.These journalists eh, don’t they just love to fill their column inches with baloney.

You should be nicer to trees btw ,they are a dying breed unlike some crooks.

vimothy -

Note that, one minute, our liberals will insist that it’s because immigrants are so “diverse”–i.e., not British–that immigration is a good almost without qualification.

I suspect the argument is more liable to be that diversity is British. (Which is true, to some extent, but that is an extremely meaningful “to some extent”.)

Mr Six,

I suspect the argument is more liable to be that diversity is British

That’s one of a pair of mutually contradictory liberal ideas about what being British means, which I described in the comment above.

The other is that British-ness is associated with everything that is too Christian, too white, too Western, too old, too boring, too imperialist, too oppressive and too hideous about this country to be allowed to remain; consequently it must all be overcome, wherein we get a new Britain that is more diverse, multicultural, secular, vibrant, new, “urban”, “cool”, etc, etc.

Note that, one minute, our liberals will insist that it’s because immigrants are so “diverse”–i.e., not British–that immigration is a good almost without qualification.

Next minute, when someone claims that the government should enforce its own laws against illegal immigrants, they state with straight faces that such a course of action “wouldn’t be very British”.

Stop and question on the basis of skin colour – if that is what happened – is in fact against the law.

AFAIK few object to intelligence-led ‘raids’ and stops based on reasonable suspicion. It is the perception that the stops were based on skin colour that many people found objectionable, and not very British.