Few issues are as politically explosive as immigration. The arrival of thousands of people in Britain, whether as asylum-seekers, clandestine workers or much needed legal additions to the labour force, provokes deep emotions and atavistic fears. A recent survey showed that after the Iraq war and the generalised terror alert, immigration and asylum have overtaken health and education as the main voter concern. Yet on an issue so vital to the nature and future of British society, rational discussion has been all but abandoned. Partly this is because mainstream politicians are frightened of stirring divisive emotions and giving rein to racist extremism. Partly it is because of widespread ignorance and confusion between asylum and immigration. And partly because no single department in government has a clear picture of the issues or seems able to provide unvarnished statistical data.
This third issue is the most troubling. It has been taken up by a new and vocal lobby group, MigrationWatch UK, which maintains that the Government has lost control of Britain’s borders, has no true idea of how many immigrants are arriving in Britain and is trying to avoid controversy by withholding data and issuing misleading statistics. This weekend it produced files kept by the Home Office on the think-tank in an attempt to back up its claim of an organised government campaign to discredit it and its arguments.
In a particularly disturbing instance, the Home Office appeared to manipulate the timing of figures put out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in order to delay publication of data showing that net immigration had risen to 172,000 in 2001. The Government denied this yesterday and argued that MigrationWatch gave an overinflated picture of migration levels. And the ONS maintained that it had itself delayed publication of the figures because it had discovered an error and needed more time to correct the figures. If that is so, the ONS acted correctly. But any suggestion that it had been manipulated for political advantage is extremely serious. The service was set up to provide the Government and country with the essential data that must be the basis of all decision-making. Spinning official statistics smacks of the kind of mendacious manipulation typical of the former Soviet Union and other undemocratic governments.
MigrationWatch is a vociferous organisation with an agenda that to many on the Left appears blinkered and xenophobic. But it has been punctilious in using only figures supplied by the Government and in highlighting official attempts to gloss and fudge statistics. The Government’s lamentable record of confusion and misinformation over immigration, evidenced by the resignation of Beverley Hughes over the Romanian visa scandal, makes its attempts to calm voters’ anxieties with “helpful” figures not only suspect but also counter-productive. Instead of smoothing race relations, it has given ammunition to extremists in the British National Party and others who are playing on popular grievances and suspicions.
In the light of all this, the leak of statistics expected to show tomorrow that asylum applications have fallen sharply may look to many as further attempts at manipulation. However reliable the figures and probable the downward trend, slight changes in the way they have been collated could be taken as evidence that a comparison with 1997 is spurious. Once an electorate loses faith in the reliability of evidence on which decisions are made, no amount of persuasion can restore faith in the system. This would be the real damage of any Home Office subversion of the ONS. And this is why MigrationWatch is right to raise the alarm.