Bloody foreigners, coming over here taking our jobs and claiming our benefits. And giving us loads of statistics to manipulate.

The basic rule of lying with statistics is to do 'diagonal' rather than like-for-like comparisons, you can 'prove' just about anything that way. But if you look at the figures used to support the claim and do a bit of maths, you usually find that the headline claim is totally misleading, if not a compete lie.

From my archives, on the topic of immigration/racism, we end up with this:

Claim: Critics claim that searches are used disproportionately, with government figures showing that black people are 4.5 times more likely to be searched in London than white people.
Truth: Young blacks are twelve times more likely to commit (or end up being charged with offences) than whites.

Claim: A black person is four times as likely to become a victim of a racist crime than a white person
Truth: A black person is thirty times as likely to be a perpetrator of a racist crime than a white person

Claim: There is no evidence that new arrivals in the UK are able to jump council housing queues.
Truth: One-in-ten units of social housing which become vacant are given to "recent arrivals" (primarily successful asylum seekers).
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There were two juxtaposed articles on page 2 of today's Evening Standard.

The Mayor [of London] claimed some young people in the capital lacked the "energy" to go out and get jobs which were instead going to immigrants.He highlighted what has become known as the "Pret A Manger phenomenon" which has seen many of the posts at sandwich shops going to newcomers to the city.

"London is a fantastic creator of jobs but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country," Mr Johnson added in an interview in The Sun. "They are hard-working, good people and we need to learn from them and understand what it is that they have got that makes them able to get those jobs that young Londoners don't have."

He's a clever chap is Johnson - he keeps Johnny Foreigner happy by saying something nice about foreign-born people (a huge chunk of the London electorate); he panders to the authoritarians who think the unemployed are just lazy and only have themselves to blame; as well as tapping into the racist sub-text "Bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking our jobs" (which, assuming you subscribe to the lump-of-labour fallacy is perfectly true, as it turns out).

The next article is headed: "A quarter of London migrants claim benefits" which is a complete lie - as the first sentence states, "One in four Londoners claiming benefits was born abroad, new figures reveal today", which is something completely different. Then comes a plethora of statistics on immigrants claiming benefits, illegally or otherwise, culminating with this:

In total, 371,000 individuals born abroad are believed to be on benefits, with nearly half of them in the capital. This high figure is partly explained by the fact that a third of Londoners are non UK-born.

Yes, that's *part* of the explanation.

To pin down the *rest of* the explanation for the apparent discrepancy between "a quarter", "nearly half" and "a third" (which are all totally 'diagonal' comparisons), you just need to know that there are 38 million working age adults in the UK, about 13% of the Uk population is in Greater London, and a tenth of UK residents were born abroad and bung on all the figures into a table (see Google doc here).

Surprisingly enough, the *rest of* the explanation is that foreign-born residents are only two-thirds as likely to be claiming benefits as UK-born residents (9.8% as against 15%). But the Evening Standard can't help reverting to its racist bias and making it look as if London was swamped with unemployed foreigners, when actually it's only 3.5% of the London population.

You might consider that to be 3.5% too many (and to a large extent I do), that's a separate topic.