Mail compares apples with oranges, comes up with bananas
Posted by Daily Quail
August 21st, 2009
Journalism and statistics go together like Dog the Bounty Hunter on a dinner date with Tolstoy.
Usually, statistics in the Mail come from some press release sent out by a company with a vested interest (if the story’s science related), from a ‘report’ (by the TaxPayers’ Alliance), or from an NGO, quango, or think-tank (if the figures suggest a rise in crime, for example). The figures are often based on Government figures which have been analysed, edited, skewed, and reinterpreted. Such data are processed and packaged into an easy-to-understand, journalist friendly document by one of the third parties mentioned above, that tells the hack everything they need to know, like this: ‘X has gone up by Y, meaning Z’. The journo, who is thankful that they haven’t had to wade through boring old figures themselves, will then pad their stats based article out with quotes and additional information to establish context – or, in most cases, to completely mislead the reader.
Sometimes, though, an ambitious journalist will tire of rewriting pre-compiled reports and studies and decide to go and look at the statistics for themselves. This is a risky thing to do because the journo is well aware of their lack of training in stats and the potential for time-consuming redrafts if they make a mistake. On the plus side, it makes it look like they’re actually doing some research and deserve to get paid. Luckily, Mail hacks don’t have to worry too much about errors because, should they make an appalling mess of things, nobody will actually notice (or care).
Such is the case with Sue Reid’s ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION’ on migrant workers and unemployment in today’s Mail, headlined ‘Revealed: The areas where there are more migrants chasing jobs than locals‘. Sue seems quite proud of her data-mining, as there’s a little photo of her looking pleased with herself next to the words ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION’. No expense has been spared on art direction either; there’s a picture of a Romanian builder photoshopped into an image of Britain split up into different coloured areas to indicate the number of foreign people looking for jobs in each district. There’s a long column of statistics, and even a pie chart.
The piece begins proudly, ‘The true extent of the huge influx of foreign workers into Britain is revealed in an investigation by the Daily Mail.’ In a line that wouldn’t be out of place in a BNP pamphlet, it adds, ‘The figure[s] expose as a sham the New Labour pledge of ‘British jobs for British workers’.
Sue helpfully explains the methods behind her SPECIAL INVESTIGATION and where she got her numbers from:
[The article] is based on information from each local authority based on two sets of official figures.
The first is the total in each area of National Insurance Numbers given to adult overseas nationals entering the UK during 2008.
The second set of figures is the claimant count for each local authority area in July, compiled from Government statistics released last week.
A claimant is a person on job-seekers’ allowance who is actively trying to find employment. Newly arrived foreigners cannot get this payout.
Unfortunately for Sue, her methodology is catastrophically flawed. She has taken the cumulative total number of National Insurance number (NINo) registrations for the entire financial year 2007-08, and compared it to the number of people claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA) in the single month of July 2009. Unsurprisingly, this has thrown up figures such as Edinburgh where supposedly the 10,022 ‘local jobseekers’ are outnumbered by 12,450 ‘new migrant workers’.
Basically, Sue has found that there were more foreign people looking for jobs in a 12 month period than there were local people looking for jobs in one month, which is hardly surprising is it? And that’s ignoring the fact that using figures from two different financial years, which were experiencing vastly different economic climates, is somewhat questionable.
Her second failure is to compare a cumulative, stable figure with an average, changing figure. She tells us that in 2008 there were 733,090 new NINos given to migrants, the number she uses to compare against the number of JSA claimants in July 2009. This 733,090 includes everyone given an NI number between April 2007 and March 2008, many of whom, obviously, will already have found work and therefore will not be competing with the locals looking for work in July 09 – a whole two years later. While NINo registrants will have been entering into work during that period, thereby removing themselves from the fluctuating pool of people competing for jobs, many of the JSA claimants in any given month will the same people who were claiming the month before, and, chances are, the month afterwards. It is quite clear that comparing the two statistics is completely and utterly redundant; you might as well compare the number of motorbike accidents in 1972 with global temperature increases during 1990-1995. The relationship is meaningless.
Let’s be fair to Sue, because I can see what she was trying to do, and the Office for National Statistics website is a bit confusing. Let’s say the comparison between NINos and claimants is valid, and let’s assume that not a single new NINo registrant managed to find a job during Apr-Jul 07 (the first quarter of the 2008 financial year). In that period, the national total number of NINos was 166,133. The average national number of JSA claimants over that same quarter was 887,757*, meaning that, actually, there are five times as many ‘local people’ looking for work than there are migrant workers. If we look at the latest period for which data is available (Oct-Dec 08), the ratio of local workers to migrants actually increases to 6:1, and the number of NINos granted to foreign workers decreases to 134,800. Is this the influx mentioned at the beginning?
How about the particular regions in which migrants supposedly outnumber local jobseekers? (I acknowledge that I’m taking a rather liberal attitude to statistics at this point, but, when you’re forced to compare apples with oranges, somethings got to give.) One of the ‘worst’ named areas in the article is Brent, where the Mail tells us that 19,240 migrant workers were given a NINo in 2008. In that same year, there were, on average, 6,647 JSA claimants each month. If we divide that 19,240 total NINo figure by 12 we find the average number of new migrant workers in any one month – 1,603. Looking at an average month in isolation and assuming that the previous months new NINo registrants and jobseekers all found jobs, that means there are actually four times as many local jobseekers than migrants.
Even using her own massively flawed methodology, it’s abundantly clear that there are not more migrant workers looking for jobs than British people doing the same. Sue Reid is the blacksmith of statistics, bashing blindly away at data until it transforms into something else, unrecognisable from the original materials. The question is why, when migrant jobseeker numbers are actually falling, does The Mail want people to think they’re rising?
* ONS data from NOMIS. Let me know if you’d like an .xls copy of the figures (I can’t imagine why you would though)
Categories: Immigration |
“The question is why, when migrant jobseeker numbers are actually falling, does The Mail want people to think they’re rising?”
An excellent point. I’ve spent the last few years wondering what exactly their agenda is.
There’s also a very telling comment in the story, thus: “While a NINO can be used to access social benefits, most newcomers from abroad are not eligible for these payouts” – now for years they’ve been constantly telling us that these foreigners are all coming here to ‘claim benefits’ and finally, FINALLY, they admit they can’t actually claim them and are here to work (i.e make a positive contribution to society)
Excellent stuff. Sue Reid is the same hack who offered cash to Polish people if they’d agree to come to the UK in their Polish registered car and be photographed breaking the law for an article that aimed to prove that Polish people break traffic laws in their Polish registered cars.
Not at all biased from the start, I’m sure.
Mail offers money to Poles to break the law
It’s like lifting a rock in the countryside. It presents as a rock. That’s simple, rocks are simple and easy.
Lift it just a touch and there’s an awful lot of complicated stuff that belies the simplicity of the rock.
I suppose I’m saying that a Mail journalist has rocks in their head whereas the reality is….
…well worms and woodlice or somthing.
Look I’ve taken that analogy too far but the point stands.
Good piece. If the Mail really wanted to know whether allowing some migrants to work hurts British jobseekers they should first read the DWP’s research on the subject: http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/wp52.pdf . But, I too think all the Mail wants to do is push its own anti-immigrant agenda – regardless of the interests of British workers.
Then again, you could look at it another way and ask why, when there are so many unemployed people in this country, myself included, the government has allowed in so many foreigners to compete, on whatever scale. ‘They’re doing jobs that locals won’t touch’ is the standard response. More accurate to say that they sleep ten to a room, work for less than the minimum wage etc etc. And please don’t anybody tell me that cheap foreign labour doesn’t drive down wages. How can it do otherwise? How else to explain the fact that in an economic powerhouse like London there are still so many people on the minimum wage? Okay, so the DM isn’t as scrupulous with figures as it should be. But the fact cannot be denied that there has in the past decade been a huge influx of foreign labour. This has the support of two groups within society…1. employers who want to pay less in wages 2. people on the political left who have an ‘immigration fetish’ and would, if they could, allow in ten times as many foreign workers as have already come.
For a blatantly mendacious massaging of figures, check out this hateful piece of viciousness:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208204/An-overdraft-Thatll-200-Lloyds-TSB-15-youre-Muslim.html
This made my heart hurt so I thought of a simple analogy.
If Jaguar sold 100 cars in all of 2008, and Ford sold 10 cars in July 2009, then according to the Mail Jaguar have outsold Ford 10:1
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[...] Originally posted at MailWatch, which has a longer version. · About the author: Jamie is a blogger. He spends an unhealthy amount of time reading newspapers he doesn't agree with and runs the satirical Daily Quail blog. · Other posts by Jamie Sport · About this article: | Trackback link | Track comments | send to del.icio.us | function fbs_click() {u=location.href;t=document.title;window.open('http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(u)+'&t='+encodeURIComponent(t),'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436');return false;}to Facebook Filed under: Blog , Economy , Europe , Foreign affairs , Media [...]
Sue Reid’s original SPECIAL INVESTIGATION has now been repackaged as a press release on the BNP’s website. There couldn’t be a better illustration of why shoddy journalism is dangerous.
@bairy That’s a pretty good analogy!
[...] Originally posted at MailWatch, which has a longer version. [...]
I think there is some truth in what you say Neander. Those on the left should be careful not to get themselves into a false alliance with big business. Yes oppose racism, xenophobia, fear mongering and scapegoating but that doesn’t mean that we should then not want immigration controls. People on minimum wage do not have an easy life and I believe they are entitled to feel upset when wages are being kept down. There was a comment on the forum having a go at a guy who was upset that he couldn’t get a job at a warehouse – I don’t think he was asking for the world.
Neander: Sorry, but your thinking is woefully simplistic. Bringing it all down to foreigners = bad is just stupid.
*If* immigrant workers are taking jobs for less than minimum wage, then surely they *are* doing the jobs UK people won’t do, because those jobs are illegal? Or are you suggesting if all immigration were banned then wages would magically rise en masse and there’d be thousands of new, shiny jobs with lovely big wage packets and Mr Moneybags the boss going “it’s a fair cop, guv – I’ll just hire locals now and pay ‘em proper!”. No, what would happen is that ALL the work would bugger off elsewhere to wherever the cheap labour was and then no one here would have anything. And thus locals would also suffer as there’d be less money in the local economy and their businesses would also go to the wall. Illegally low-paid jobs are bad – but getting rid of immigration would neither solve that problem nor generate better paid jobs. It would, in fact, fuck everyone over even more.
Your immigration fetish/10 to a room analogy isn’t “more accurate” either, just bog-standard nonsense you accept as what sounds suspiciously like an excuse because you apparently haven’t got a job yourself (assuming you’re not going for these illegal minimum wage jobs that immigrants apparently love). After all, being willing to work for low wages and not having a vast house aren’t unique CV points and won’t somehow guarantee you a job in the first place, so in theory you must be at least just as well qualified…if you’re willing to compete to do that sort of work. And I think the key word there is “if”.
Besides, the majority of immigrants live in normal housing just like the rest of us, and just like a lot of very poor families of all nationalities sometimes live in more cramped circumstances. I grew up living with 6 people in a 2-bedroom house myself.
As for the London thing…think it through, eh? There are a lot of people in London on minimum wage because there are a lot of jobs in London that are menial because there are a lot of all sorts of jobs in London full stop because London is *very big indeed*. Just because somewhere makes money doesn’t mean that every job there and every resident will automatically be a millionaire. The bloke who cleans windows at HSBC headquarters in Canary Wharf isn’t driving home in a Bentley just because he works within a few feet of the chairman.
Or to put it another way: a lot of immigrants are willing to travel thousands of miles to a country where a significant portion of the population hate them and do nothing but slag them off even though they contribute to the economy (often more than the people slagging them off do – and often paying tax that goes towards the unemployment benefit that those slagging them off claim), and where they do shit jobs for people who treat them like shit and live in shit conditions just to make some cash to support their families back home. Whereas you sit about and whine how it’s all someone else’s fault you haven’t got a lovely well-paid job but ultimately do fuckall about it other than sit and whine some more. So how come you’re not willing to knuckle down and take a really low-paid shit job, or to travel thousands of miles to get a job somewhere else yourself? Is it because you can’t be arsed and you’re a “local who won’t touch certain jobs” by any chance? A job that then gets filled by someone who is willing to make sacrifices to work? Someone who might just be from elsewhere?
But yes, obviously must be the foreigner’s fault.
…Ron Piss…Your rant was hugely revealing, about your own true attitudes!
It isn’t just right-wing types who talk about wages being driven down by cheap immigrant labour. Polly Toynbee has made this point in her ‘Guardian’ column on more than one occasion. And Darcus Howe in the ‘New Statesman’ has noted the effect on wages among his own black community in Brixton caused by having to compete with asylum seekers aka economic migrants.
Your latter paragraphs, slagging off the unemployed, would not look out of place in a Richard Littlejohn column. At least a third of what you said in this part of your rant could easily be transplanted to his column without anybody noticing anything amiss. As for me I have applied for all sorts of jobs, without success. True, there are certain barriers in my case hindering my return to work, which I have not time to go into here,but I apply for many jobs nevertheless, as do the great majority of those I see around me on my visits to an increasingly crowded Jobcentre.
Your section on the London economy really gives the game away though about your true attitudes, for what we have here is a blatant defence of economic injustice. I am sure that the chairman of HSBC, if he read your piece, would have been nodding his head enthusiastically: ‘Quite right too! Just imagine it, us having to pay window-cleaners (or any other kind of cleaners) more than the minimum wage? Don’t these chaps understand economics?!’
What I understand Ron Piss, very clearly, is that you despise the millions of indigenous unemployed and that, in the pursuance of your immigration fetish you are quite willing to see them continue to vegetate on the dole, unless they ‘get lucky’ and find some awful job on the minimum wage. The very least that you can do though is to give nearly all of them credit for not voting for the BNP in anger and desperation. Unless of course you are in fact an agent provocateur for that group, trying to drive people into their arms, which the kind of things you come out with in your tirade against the unemployed would quite likely do with many of them.
Then again, you could look at it another way
No, actually, you really can’t look at it any other way if you read the post. The statistics suggest that are far more British workers per job vacancy than migrants. How else can that ‘be looked at’?
Okay, so the DM isn’t as scrupulous with figures as it should be
Understatement of the century.
indigenous unemployed…not voting for the BNP in anger and desperation. Unless of course you are in fact an agent provocateur for that group
That’s some really worrying language, and a rather bizarre, paradoxical accusation to throw at someone.
Actually no, Neander, I get annoyed by people who carp on about their predicament and the predicament of “indigenous” people (whoever the hell they are – though I suspect the line is drawn at whatever stage suits the person making the point. For example in the BNPs case any time after their own ancestors arrived) and go for the easy scapegoat of “it must be all the fault of immigration” without ever seeming to even try and grasp the complexity of the situation, instead assuming that immigrants fill all the jobs they want and therefore if there were no pesky immigrants we’d be in some sort of 100% employment utopia where everyone is rolling in cash.
Sorry if my overly sarcastic tone befuddled you into thinking I’m some sort of unemployment-hating nutter who lurches from right to left like somebody riding a bike with dumb-bells in the saddlebags. Not nice to be slagged off randomly just for who you are and for wanting to work is it? Hey – perhaps immigrants coming here to work feel the same when they’re blamed for just wanting to get by. Especially when they’re actually in a minority and that most jobs in the UK go to non-immigrants, but some seek to label them as job-stealers for their own ends. How’s that for a thought?
Talking of thinking, I’m absolutely clueless as to what you’re on about with regard to London. Are you honestly suggesting a window cleaner should earn the same as the head of HSBC, or that everyone in London should be on the same income? What the nude arse is that all about??? I never once suggested the window cleaner should earn fuckall, and I’d love to see the minimum wage rise and for fatcat bosses to get a LOT less, but you seem to have translated my saying different jobs obviously earn different wages into me demanding he wear a sack and clean the windows with his tongue before going home to live in a ditch after a dinner of cold gravel (and be grateful for it). It’s meaningless to suggest that everyone in London should automatically be well off simply because money is made there.
Good for you applying for jobs, hard luck on not getting one – but blaming that on the fact that someone else got a job you probably had no interest in, and that that someone may have been born elsewhere, just makes you sound bitter. It is your right to go and work elsewhere in Europe – you choose not to. You could take a very low income job – you choose not to. Neither of those things are the fault of people who do choose to, and you won’t be inundated with fabulous, well paid roles if suddenly all the foreign people went home and no more came. Loads of shit jobs disappearing does not = lots of good jobs suddenly appearing. And that’s not even getting round to the obvious point that not all immigrants do shit jobs for low wages anyway.
Is it an imperfect situation? Yes. Are low paid jobs shit? Obviously so. Is that somehow a Polish bloke’s fault if he is willing to travel hundreds of miles to take on a low-paid job? No. He’s trying to get by just like you and the rest of us. He’s taking an opportunity you want to see him denied. So come on then – money/mouth time. The situation is obviously far more complex than simply foreign labour = low wages = british people unemployed at the expense of others (unless you’re the DM, and as we all know and you agree, their figures are all a fiddle). Lay out what YOU would like to see and what you think would happen as a consequence, and what restrictions you would be happy to see applied to UK citizens and companies in return for us restricting others and how you think that would affect the UK business landscape.
And just a quick pointer: “immigrants are to blame” isn’t an acceptable answer.
…Jamie S…the left denounces the DM for exaggerating immigration figures. I don’t doubt that it does sometimes. BUT, if we had the kind of immigration controls favoured by the left, ie virtually none, those DM exaggerations would be gross understatements! You want mass immigration on the one hand while at the same time fulminating against the DM for not always being accurate about the scale of it.
…Ron Piss…oh come on, as if I’ve got time to give a comprehensive social and economic manifesto for British society. I do have a life to get on with, unwaged though I am. A few brief points: 1) large-scale immigration into the UK began in the 1950’s and unemployment has risen steadily since then. Just a coincidence? 2) the immigration controls I would impose would be that the number of UK visas issued each year would be AT MOST half the number of those who emigrated from the UK in the preceding year, so, if 250,000 left in one year then at most 125,000 visas would be issued the following year. Controlled immigration (and a falling population, in line with my environmental agenda, oh yes, compared to me the Green Party are a bunch of environmental pussies) 3) and YES, ‘everyone in London should automatically be well off simply because money is made there’. It comes under the heading of ‘fair distribution of wealth’, something that cosy middle-class socialists pretend to believe in but don’t really. 4) your haughty suggestion that I should move to another country is just a modern version of the eighteenth century policy of transporting people to the colonies, a way of getting rid of the pesky poor, while at the same time you would be happily importing millions of foreign poor.
But of course Ron Piss, you are perfectly entitled to your views. I just hope that you don’t dare to call yourself a socialist of any kind! You are in fact an exponent of globalist capitalism masquerading as a leftie.
Neander: Where did I say I want ‘mass immigration’? What does that even mean – when does it become ‘mass’? And why are you so insistant on turning discussion about grossly distorted statistics into a debate about immigration?
Neander: I didn’t ask for a sodding manifesto, just some actual proof that there’s any sort of thinking behind your “foreigner’s out” mindset. Which unfortunately it looks like there isn’t a lot of.
1) Unemployment hasn’t “risen steadily” since the 1950s. It’s only gone up recently again because of recession, but fell loads from 1992 onwards and was also low in the 60s. Which you seem to have conveniently ignored, possibly because it immediately makes your theory look like a pile of ill thought out bollocks. It was 10% of the workforce in the 1980s thanks to the Tories knackering UK heavy industry, but now even with recession is still below 3%. Despite decades of oh-so awful immigration from those horrible liberal lefties in power – how could that be possible? Unless…unless…immigration *isn’t* the boogeyman you make it out to be. And besides, starting from the 1950s is going to give you an artificially low figure because there was a small matter of a number of world wars meaning an awful lot of dead people and a great deal of vacancies as the post-war economy restarted. To try and suggest rising unemployment since is primarily down to immigration, or even that any “rise” measured from that point in time is indicative of anything apart from a growing population in general, is utterly ridiculous. The number of household TV sets has also risen since the 1950s, as have the number of deaths caused by electric orbital sanders. Coincidence????????!!!11!!!!!!ELEVEN!!?!!!!!!
2) Unfair, unworkable and so short-sighted it makes Mr Magoo look like the Hubble telescope. If we don’t let people in, why should brits be allowed out? What if other countries choose not to let us in because we act like shits to immigrants? And that’s even before we get to the deleterious effects of a dwindling workforce on the economy, the mass shift of work abroad for cheaper (note “cheaper”, not “sub-minimum wage”) labour and the fantasy world of no immigrants doing jobs = all the “indigenous” unemployed suddenly fitting the bill of all available jobs. People want to come here and work and that means jobs and businesses – all levels of jobs and businesses – stay in the country and contribute to the economy. You can’t remove a major part of how that economy works and expect everything else to stay the same.
3) Now you’re just being fucking stupid. What you propose is *unfair* distribution of wealth – people getting rich simply by being somewhere rather than by merit or skill. How on earth does that work? Oh yes of course, it doesn’t. If it did, we’d *all* live in London and ride round on golden swans regardless of whether we did 10 mins work a day or 23 hours.
4) It wasn’t a suggestion, just an observation that you seem enormously keen to slag off people who are willing to make huge sacrifices and blame them for your own problems, while even admitting you *agree* that statistics are regularly skewed to give immigration issues a bad press! You may as well say “I know this isn’t true, but I like thinking it’s true so it is true. And anyway, they talk funny and stuff”.
I was hoping there’d be more to your arguments than the usual dimwitted bigotry wrapped up as politics. Alas, no.
“so short-sighted it makes Mr Magoo look like the Hubble telescope”…..
that beats any hedgehog joke. Thanks….a great start to my morning.
“Unsurprisingly, this has thrown up figures such as Edinburgh where supposedly the 10,022 ‘local jobseekers’ are outnumbered by 12,450 ‘new migrant workers’.”
Hmmm … these figures were taken in July? During one of the biggest international festivals? Of course there’s a surge in ‘new migrant workers’ – the number of temporary jobs in the city that’s attributed to the festival is huge! The number and variety of people in the city over the festival period is amazing and makes it a great place to be. Was this even touched on in the article?
Typical Mail, though. As long as they can make it out that ‘them are stealing us jobs’ then they’ve done they’re bit! Grr
Another point …. what the hell is the “indigenous population?”
Neander, is your blood pure as the driven snow? There is no “British race” or “English race”… we are a mongrel country! Trace your family tree as far back as far can go. Where does it lead? Are you an immigrant of Vikings? Or Romans? Yes, believe it or not, you’re more than probably an immigrant. Maybe it’s illegal, lower-than-minimum wage time, eh?
Brilliant website. Thanks so much for this, it helps me remember the world isn’t full of idiots after all.
The thing that gets me about the BNP and people like Neander is that they’ve taken on some of the language of the left – like redistribution of wealth or democracy – to make it all sound appealing. The left really needs to start talking about these things again and showing that poverty and unemployment has nothing to do with immigration at all. Foreign workers being paid a pittance is a problem with employment law, not with immigration.
Thank god for this blog. In a world where everyone spouts the crap they read in the mail as if it is fact, this is has given me hope that I’m not the last sane person left in britain.
Cracking analysis – great work!
Neader: I was actually quite interested in your perspective on this, until I read “asylum seekers aka economic migrants”. The two are categorically different. You’ve obviously got something to say, so please try and avoid trolling if you don’t want to be written off as a crank.
This is just the icing on the cake:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8224520.stm
In a nutshell: immigration DOWN 44%, natural birth rate/death rate up. So, Neander, as it seems immigrants aren’t taking your jobs after all who’s fault do you think it is now?
Hahahahaha!
Silence…
[...] Clearly the story that takes the prize seems to combine all that is Mail journalism at its very worst, ‘Revealed: The areas of Britain where there are more migrants chasing jobs than locals‘ [21/09/09]. In this we get a ‘those bloody foreigners over here stealing our jobs’ story together with the most stupid use of statistics that you are ever likely to come across, all neatly tied up with a ribbon in the guise of yet another bloody MigrationSquint-and-you-might-just-see-a-reasoned-argument quote in something that claims that “The true extent of the huge influx of foreign workers into Britain is revealed in an investigation by the Daily Mail.” This tawdry piece of an insult to ‘investigative’ journalism has more holes in it than the proverbial string vest and, if you are interested in finding out why, we highly recommend the aptly titled ‘Mail Compares Apples With Oranges Comes Up With Bananas‘*** [...]