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…

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.

“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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[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?]

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:))

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.

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.

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.