2009 March | Daily Mail Watch

Express – 18/3/09

Posted by Merk

March 18th, 2009

Categories: Express Watch, Front Pages | 10 Comments

Mail – 17/3/09

Posted by Merk

March 17th, 2009

Categories: Front Pages | 51 Comments

Express – 17/3/09

Posted by Merk

March 17th, 2009

Categories: Express Watch, Front Pages | 17 Comments

Population growth and density. Should we be as frightened as the Mail wants us to be?

Posted by 5cc

March 14th, 2009

Since the Mail produces a lot of stories about immigration, it’s another post from me. I’d like to have a look at Thursday’s ‘UK to have Europe’s biggest population: Migration will force us ahead of Germany, says UN‘, because it includes another couple of typical techniques that are a familiar fixture of Mail articles on immigration. I will be looking at yesterdays’ Sangatte story later, but there’s so much anti-immigration stuff that gets umped out by the paper that it’s impossible to keep up.

The headline isn’t strictly true. The UN doesn’t say those things in quite such a definite way. Instead, the UN has updated their population growth predictions, based on data available in 2008. It offers projections based on what will happen depending on whether fertility rates are high, meduim, low or the same as 2005-2010. The UK will be the most populated in Europe in 2050 if our fertility rates are higher or the same as France and Germany.

If the UK’s fertility is lower, it won’t be higher than either and France will have overtaken the UK. Still, I’m being a little pedantic here. It’s not completely unreasonable to say comparing the three countries assuming the same rate of fertility will show the UK being higher than the other two. The UN press release is here, ‘WORLD POPULATION TO EXCEED 9 BILLION BY 2050‘ and the data can be found here ‘World Polulation Prospects: The 2008 Revision – Population database‘. All the figures not from the Mail that I quote here can be reproduced with the data in the second link.

The typical technique I want to talk about is where the article tells us:

The analysis comes at a time when England has already become the most crowded country in Europe, passing Holland as the nation with the most people squeezed into every square mile.

There’s even a nice big table that includes some figures, telling us that the source is the Office of National Statistics. Official looking, eh?

The first thing is that the article has quickly shifted from talking about the UK to talking about England in one quick step. If we were talking about England in the first part of the article, the paper wouldn’t be able to scare us with figures higher than Germany’s by 2050, even if the entire increase in the UK’s population happens in England.*

England accounts for 83% of the UK’s population. That’s most of the UK’s people in one part, so England is bound to have a greater density. When the Mail used England’s population density to frighten us back in January 2008 (the paper does this now and again – get used to it), I used the UN’s database to show that the UK is the fourth most densely populated country in Europe, behind Malta, Belgium and the Netherlands, and had been since 1950 (In ‘Let’s start 2008 with a good immigration scare story!‘). I’ve done a very quick check of all the countries in this table, and the UK will still be fourth by 2050. Not so scary now, eh?

The main problem with the population density figures the paper is frightening us with here, though, is that England is not the most densely populated country in Europe. We can see on the nice table that Malta has been disqualified for being a ’special case’. Those readers who read my last post will probably be familiar with countries being disqualified from comparison if they contradict what the Mail or MigrationWatch want us to think.

Even beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that England is the most densely populated country in Europe right now if we disqualify Malta. The article does say that the source for these figures is the ONS. What it doesn’t say is that only England’s figure is from 2008. Every other country’s figure is taken from the UN estimates of three years earlier, so England is only at the top if the Netherlands’ population density didn’t rise by more than one in three years. Since the UN predicts a rise of 8 between 2005 and 2010, that isn’t likely at all. The paper can get away with this because when the ONS supplied these figures in a Parliamentary Answer last September, they made clear that the European figures were from the UN – so the ONS is the source, but they’re actually not.

One last thing about the main figures this article is about. The paper is leaving at least one important detail out of its coverage here. The UK only ‘overtakes’ Germany’s population because the latter is predicted to be in steady decline, dropping from 82,409,000 in 2005 to 70,504,000 in 2050 (using the medium fertility variant – with ‘high’ it drops to 79,164,000, with ‘low’ it drops to 62,633,000, and with fertility remaining steady from 2008 it drops to 67,233,000). This is probably because of an ageing population and low fertility rates. The UK’s population, even projected with the highest fertility rates, is lower in 2050 than Germany’s current population.

Here’s what’s left out. There are a number of ways Germany can try to stop this decline. I’ll give you a clue as to what one of these might be. It starts with an ‘I’ and ends with ‘migration’.

*I worked this out by taking the UK’s population for 2005 and calculating what 83% of that would be to give England’s population in 2005 (50,016,630). I then worked out the total rise in the UK’s population between 2005 and 2050 (using the medium fertility projection that would be 12,104,000) and added it to England’s 2005 population to give a total of 62,120,630. Germany’s medium fetility population projection for 2050 is 70,504,000. Even with a low projection it is 62,633,000.

Categories: Immigration | 33 Comments