Every now and then, the Daily Mail manufactured outrage is perfectly justified

From The Daily Mail:

A Pakistani paedophile who claimed he didn't realise it was illegal to have sex with 14-year-olds intends to use his conviction for grooming to help him claim asylum in the UK...

He now claims his conviction means he cannot return to his homeland, as anger over a recent child rape case means it is now unsafe for him.

If he gets away with this..? FFS.
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What is not quite clear, is how and why it is a crime to ask online vigilantes posing as 14-year olds for sex.

You ask a 14-year old you know to be 14 for sex, you're in trouble. You ask a 14-year old you genuinely believe to be 17 for sex (because she told you and she looks it), surely that's a defence or a plea in mitigation.

Let's assume having sex with a 17-year old you know is 17 is OK. What if you have sex with a 17-year old you genuinely believe to be 14 (because she told you and she looks it)? Would it make a difference if you knew she was lying?

They tried to explain inchoate offences on the criminal law unit, stuff like "attempt".
One of the questions was, is it a crime to (attempt to) do something you believe is a crime, but actually isn't?

Or would be impossible, like sinking a ferry by firing an airgun at the hull? IIRC, they can do you for criminal damage to the paintwork, but not for attempted murder.

IMHO, it would be impossible to have under-age sex with online vigilantes posing as a 14-year old, so attempting to do so can't be a crime either. Or perhaps it is. I never understood that bit.

But hey, in the instant case, deportation would seem like a reasonable punishment.

Fun Online Polls: Immigrants, expat's & trade deals.

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Citizens from other EU Member States currently living in the UK should…

… all get permanent residence visas automatically - 13%
… apply for British citizenship if they want to stay - 11%
… be made to reapply for work permits every few years - 13%
… given the same rights as other EU Member States give UK citizens - 58%
… be told to leave the UK soonest - 4%
Other, please specify - 1%

Good, I was with the majority on that one, I've absolutely no grudge against foreigners living here (being half a foreigner myself, married to one etc) and in truth I would not like to see any of them made to leave (apart from the crims and the scroungers), but fair's fair and all that.

A good turnout of 104 votes, thanks to everybody who took part.

The gimmick being, this is not actually an EU competence - while the UK (or any other non-EU country) cannot strike trade deals with individual EU Member States, it can very much agree specific rules on immigration/emigration with each individual MS.
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While we're on the topic, I'm not sure if we've done what kind of post-EU trade deals we'd like to see, so that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote HERE or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Immigrants in Germany in work & competing theories of gravity

The responses to last fortnight's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What percentage of the 1.2 million Arabs who arrived in Germany in the last two years are in gainful employment?

1 percent - 34%
3 percent - 20%
5 percent - 13%
10 percent - 16%
25 percent - 9%
50 percent - 5%
All of them - 2%

The weighted average of those guesses is 10%, the true figure, as admitted by the German government, normally obsessed with downplaying any negatives associated with the recent mass immigration, is only 13%.

So the wisdom of crowds wins yet again! (I previously referred to an article in the Daily Mail that said the figure was only 3%, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.)

The joke is that a couple of years ago, a lot of Germans were saying that immigration will be good for their economy because it helps ameliorate the effects of an ageing population, low birth rate and a shrinking working age population. That's all fine, provided the additional working age people are actually working, which quite clearly (in contrast to the position in the UK), they are not: they are a massive drain, even if we put social and criminal issues to one side.
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There was an interesting piece on BBC Radio 4 this morning about competing theories of gravity.

There's no point me trying to summarise, so please read this article before casting your vote in this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Boris Johnson, Saudi Arabia & Migrants in Germany

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

UK Foreign Secretary criticised Saudi Arabia for starting proxy wars in the Middle East…

This is a terrible breach of diplomatic convention and he is endangering our weapons exports to a valued regional ally - 2%
Well said, that man! - 32%
He should have gone a lot further and mentioned their human rights abuses - 62%
Other, please specify - 4%

Top comment Pensieve: It's about time that someone told the Saudis we know what they're doing (even if we are beholden to them for a lot of our oil). Well done, Boris. PS I ride a bike and use a woodburning boiler for heating, so stuff your oil!

Good, I was with the majority on that one, thanks to everybody who took part, a good turnout with 99 votes.
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This week's Fun Online Poll:

What percentage of the 1.2 million Arabs who arrived in Germany in the last two years are in gainful employment?

Enter your guess HERE or use the widget in the sidebar.

Once you've entered your guess, you can check your answer here. The paragraph starting "On the bright side" is rather ironic, methinks.

Fun Online Polls: "You guys" and who whose responsibility is integration?

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

When somebody addresses you/your group as "You guys", he/she is…


Trying to be friendly - 35%
Educationally sub-normal - 4%
Being deliberately rude, but in a subtle way - 3%
Just a twat generally - 47%
Other, please specify - 10%

Good, so it's not just me then. A good turnout on 90 votes, thanks to everybody who took part.

Top comment: Markc: FWIW I think it's a bit broader and runs across several answers. It means they're a twat who's trying to be friendly but entirely lacks the social skills to carry "friendly" off properly and so might often be construed as rude - depending on circumstances. But they're still a twat.
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From the BBC:

Segregation and social exclusion are at "worrying levels" and are fuelling inequality in some areas of Britain, a report has found.

Women in some communities are denied "even their basic rights as British residents", the Casey Review said. Dame Louise Casey accused public bodies of ignoring or condoning divisive or harmful religious practices for fear of being called racist.

So a surprisingly honest review by modern standards. In the interests of 'balanced reporting', the article tacks on this:

Faeeza Vaid, from the Muslim Women's Network, said migrant communities should not be blamed for failing to integrate.

"We also see segregated white communities," she told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme. "Integration is everyone's responsibility."

Well hang about one cotton pickin' moment.

I have more first hand experience of integration than most people, I'm half German/half English, have lived in both countries and tried to fit in wherever I was, at the very least, I do a normal job/go to a normal school and speak the domestic tongue wherever I choose to be. My wife is from Malaysia and due to self-selection as much as anything else, a lot of our friends are from abroad, aren't 'white', are in 'mixed marriages' or whatever. They, like Mrs W, all do normal jobs, speak English, send their kids to normal schools etc and we all get along just fine.

For sure, a minority of British citizens are downright racist and prefer being among their own i.e. "in segregated white communities". I feel slightly uncomfortable in their presence but that's their personal view and they are perfectly entitled to it (provided it doesn't spill over into actual bullying, violence etc).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Whose responsibility is integration?

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

"Northern ports tempt shippers away from Dover after migrant crisis"

Emailed in by Physiocrat, from the FT:

Ports outside the south-east have benefited from disruption at Dover, helping them to win a greater share of Britain’s growing container and vehicle trade. Northern ports have been selling the benefits of avoiding the congested roads of the south-east and investing in infrastructure just as some hauliers sought alternatives to Dover, hit by the migrant crisis.

The cross-channel route has been declared secure a month after the demolition of the “Jungle” refugee camp and freight traffic is growing again. But government figures for the first half of the year show a drop at Dover as traffic was displaced. Harwich and Felixstowe, the big south-east container ports, also lost traffic to London Gateway, which is expanding fast...

That's only half the story of course. The problem with Dover is not with Dover, but the fact that the traffic there arrives from Calais/France. So this is a golden opportunity for Belgian and Dutch ports as well.

Fun Online Polls - Applying for UK asylum in France, Boyle's Law Gay-Lussac's Law and Greenhouse gases

The results to last fortnight's poll were as follows:

The French want to allow 'refugees' seeking asylum in the UK to lodge their claim while still in France.

Good idea (we can reject them out of hand and they remain France's problem) - 73%
Bad idea - 27%

That is of course on the assumption that their claims are processed by British officials, and not simply rubber stamped by French officials keen to get rid of them.
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So China and the USA signed up to this Paris Agreement on restricting CO2 emissions last week.

Which made me think, unless they are just doing this for presentational reasons, maybe I'm wrong and there is something in this global warming stuff.

So I re-read a standard explanation, all just about plausible until this bit:

Without this natural greenhouse effect, primarily owing to water vapor and carbon dioxide, Earth’s mean surface temperature would be a freezing -1°F, instead of the habitable 59°F we currently enjoy. Despite their small amounts, then, the greenhouse gases strongly affect Earth’s temperature. Increasing their concentration augments the natural greenhouse effect.

That is, I am afraid, complete bollocks and if that's all they've got as evidence then I am still not buying it.

The real reason why the surface is approx. 30C warmer than it 'should' be, bearing in mind distance from the sun and albedo is because of Boyle's Law.

UPDATE: I conferred with VFTS, the more appropriate gas law is one of Gay-Lussac's Laws:

The pressure of a gas of fixed mass and fixed volume is directly proportional to the gas's absolute temperature… This law holds true because temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a substance; as the kinetic energy of a gas increases, its particles collide with the container walls more rapidly, thereby exerting increased pressure.

So higher pressure = higher temperature and higher temperature = higher pressure and vice versa. The top half of the atmosphere pushes the bottom half down (compresses it) ; and the bottom half pulls the top half down (expands it). The bottom half is warmer than it 'should' be and the top half is colder than it 'should' be. On average, it is the right temperature, the -1F referred to in the first excerpt.

The atmosphere works like a giant heat pump - the upper atmosphere is colder than it should be and the lower atmosphere is warmer than it should be. The actual temperature half way up by volume i.e. 5.6 km is approx. 30C cooler than the surface and is in fact exactly what you would predict, bearing in mind distance from the sun.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Merkel & Midges

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How many more Islamist attacks will it take before Merkel realises it was wrong to let a million of them in?
I'm sure she'll apologise and change tack soon - 2%
A couple more and she'll see sense - 1%
A dozen? - 3%
She'll give it a few more years to see how things pan out - 14%
What? A politician see sense? Never! - 71%
Other, please specify - 10%

Thanks to everybody who took part. I'm in the minority on this one, I reckon she'll do a U-turn fairly soon. Oh, hang on, maybe not.
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These last few weeks I have been bitten by midges more often than in the last twenty years put together and it is bloody itchy.

The warmenists have long been predicting that warmer weather = midges and mosquitos will be able to spread northwards. In my limited experience, it's not any warmer but it is definitely midgier.

So that's the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll, have I just been unlucky or have others noticed this?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Lost in translation?

From the BBC:

The agreement between France and the UK that allows the UK to conduct border controls on the French side of the Channel is a bilateral treaty that is not connected to Britain's EU membership.

It is meant to stop people from travelling across the Channel without their immigration status being checked - but has led to the establishment of the so-called Jungle camp in Calais, where about 4,000 migrants are thought to be waiting to cross...

France could opt to end the border treaty any time - but the country's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said to do so would be "foolhardy" and cause "a humanitarian disaster".

His colleague, economy minister Emmanuel Macron, gave a different view in his FT interview, saying of Britain's EU membership: "The day this relationship unravels, migrants will no longer be in Calais."

Say what?

To summarise: if we vote to leave, on the next day, the French will do something which they themselves describe as 'foolhardy' and which would cause 'a humanitarian disaster'?

Go for it lads, go for it.

It's a bit like Cameron's volte face:

November 2015:

The Prime Minister told an audience at the Confederation of British Industry that the EU referendum debate was not about whether exit from the bloc was possible.

“Some people seem to say that really Britain couldn’t survive, couldn’t do okay outside the European Union. I don’t think that is true. Let’s be frank, Britain is an amazing country. We’ve got the fifth biggest economy in the world. We’re a top ten manufacturer. We’ve got incredibly strong financial services. The world wants to come and do business here.

“Look at the record of inward investment. Look at the leaders beating the path to our door to come and see what’s happening with this great country’s economy. The argument isn’t whether Britain could survive outside the EU. Of course it could.”

February 2016:

The Prime Minister said he believes Britain will be "stronger, safer and better off" in a reformed EU.

He also warned of the security challenges facing the West and said it was no time for division.

"The challenges facing the West today are genuinely threatening," Mr Cameron said. "Putin’s aggression in the east, Islamist extremism to the south. In my view this is no time to divide the west."

What a load of alarmist nonsense

Here

If lots of illegal immigrants without adequate papers are allowed on cross channel ferries by lax French border officials and end up at Dover, from what I recall, international law is quite clear they can and will be sent back on the next boat.

Of course the French could mischievously issue said immigrants with French papers, but this would be easy to spot and deal with.

Nope.

Ralph Musgrave  left a new comment on "Nigel Farage fails to get a round in because of immigrants":

Farage has a point in a very indirect way, as follows.

If a country has the optimum supply of infrastructure, and it knows that large numbers of immigrants will arrive in the near future, then EXISTING residents of the country have to pay for more infrastructure in preparation for the new arrivals: else the country will have inadequate infrastructure when the new people arrive.

Then on arrival, the new residents do not have to make any special payment re their share of infrastructure costs. And at a guess that will be several tens of thousands per head. (London spends £2,700 per head per year in infrastructure, never mind the ACCUMULATION of infrastructure capital or assets over the decades).

Nope.

1. Farage was talking specifically about roads (the M4). The total amount spent each year on roads and road building is in the order of £10 billion. The total amount of tax paid by motorists (fuel duty and VAT on fuel; VAT on cars and repairs; Vehicle Excise Duty etc etc) each year is in the order of £40 billion - £50 billion a year.

So all those mythical immigrants clogging up the M4 are - like all motorists - paying for the cost three or four times over.

2. Public transport in London is a slightly different issue; only about half the cost is covered by ticket sales (immigrants pay their fair share of this). The rest of the cost is indeed subsidised. But those who are not paying their fair share are landowners, especially those with rental income. The rental value of a home in London is to a large extent a function of transport spending. Shut down public transport in London and "the city" would cease to exist, it would just be a collection of villages.

Immigrants - like everybody else - have to live somewhere. Those who moved here recently will be largely renting, ergo they are paying in full for the value of public transport, which is far in excess of the cash cost (or else it would not be worth doing). Those who moved here a while ago might be landowners, but so what? They will have paid their share of other taxes.

3. On the level of an individual with a limited lifespan, it sort of makes sense to distinguish between large, one-off acquisitions ("capital") and current spending. But "the government" is to all intents and purposes is immortal, the grey area between "capital" and "current" expenditure is so large that you might as well treat it all as current. To do otherwise is double-counting.

4. "Build it and they will come". Roads are clogged up even in areas where there are very few immigrants. That's just human nature. Build more roads and people drive more. Or more people drive. Commute times have not significantly changed over the centuries; if you can speed up traffic, people just travel longer distances.

"Nigel Farage fails to get a round in because of immigrants"

From the BBC:

Nigel Farage has blamed high levels of immigration for denying him the opportunity of getting a round of drinks in at a meet-the-leader event ahead of UKIP's first Welsh conference.

Ten minutes before closing time, the UKIP leader jotted down everybody's order on the back of a beer mat and made his way towards the bar. About 10 people out of his drinking party had already bought a round, and it was the UKIP leader's turn to put his hand in his pocket, but he returned empty handed just after the final bell on Friday evening.

He laid the blame squarely on "a bunch of thirsty Poles ahead of me in the queue who seemed to want to drink the bar dry" and was thus prevented from doing his bit.

The event at Margam Park was part of his party's conference which was held on Saturday. Labour criticised Mr Farage calling his excuse "absurd", insisting that he had been spotted at the bar knocking back a pint of bitter long before the bell rang.

Barmaid Imie Nazwisko confirmed that she had served him with a pint just after last orders were called. "He nice man but very cheeky! He say he not send me back, and wink at me!"

Speaking to the BBC's Sunday Politics Wales, Mr Farage said: "It took me half an hour to get the barmaid's attention - it should have taken no more than three minutes.

Pot, kettle, boot, other foot etc.

Via Alan at HPC, who asks: "Would the DM adopt the same tone for illegal Bulgarians living in Cheltenham?"

From The Daily Mail:

'We're trapped in a ghost town': The 100,000 British expats whose Spanish homes could be bulldozed any day

* Thousands told their homes were built illegally after they bought them
* 'Barmy' planning rules and topsy-turvy laws leave residents in limbo
* Concrete jungles left behind as construction stops mid-development...

Yes, what the Spanish authorities are doing is completely mad, but it is no worse than what the self-same DM readers are trying to impose on the next generation in the UK.

Do these people not realise that from the Spaniards' point of view they are "immigrants putting pressure on local services, concreting over swathes of the Spanish countryside, etc"?

So they've lost money? Tough. That is absolutely no different to forcing first time buyers in the UK vastly overpay for the privilege of having somewhere to live.

"Downing Street says 'go home' van ads are working"

From the BBC:

The use of vans with adverts urging illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest" are working, No 10 says. The PM's official spokesman said David Cameron disagreed with Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable's view that the scheme was "stupid and offensive".

The spokesman said the Home Office was "clear that this is already working". He did not give figures on levels of response but said that the the housing departments in Barnet, Hounslow, Barking and Dagenham, Ealing, Brent and Redbridge, where the pilot scheme featuring the "go home" posters was tested, found over twenty thousand sets of keys to social housing in the letter box when they checked the post this morning and were now hastily renovating these for local people on their housing waiting lists.

Airlines reported that all seats on flights to countries ending in -stan had been fully booked since Saturday morning and extra flights were being laid on to destinations in Africa.

The number of vacancies for low paid work advertised in the windows of the local Job Centre Plus has quadrupled after several thousand employees failed to show up for catering and cleaning jobs over the weekend.

Fifty thousand delighted parents received letters this morning informing them their child had now been offered a place at their first choice local school after all and geologists have observed that the gradual sinking of the south east of Great Britain which began when the last Ice Age ended in Scotland went into reverse at 11 am local time.

Bloody foreign cows, coming over here, attacking our hard-working ramblers...

Emailed in by Mike, who spotted it in The Telegraph:

Aggressive foreign cows brought to Britain from the continent are attacking ramblers who enter their fields.(1) Council chiefs and walkers' groups are now urging people to take care after a number of incidents over recent months.

Clive Grumett, chairman of the Sussex Area Ramblers, said the introduction of more aggressive breeds from Europe had led to the rise in attacks. He said: "Farmers introduced them because they wanted to improve their stock. However, they discovered these breeds were more aggressive after a number of cattle herders were attacked. Dairy cows are used to human interaction because they have to be milked. However, beef cattle are not, so they can be more aggressive."

The warning comes weeks after a 66-year-old man was trampled to death by a herd in Wiltshire...

John Archer (2), from the National Farmers' Union, reminded walkers that the countryside remains a working environment. He added: "Walkers should be mindful of their surroundings and especially vigilant on entering a field where the whole field cannot be seen. Follow the advice above and be sympathetic to animals that are rearing their young - please give them space."

Mr Grumett added: "These incidents usually involve somebody walking their dog. The important thing to remember is not to try to protect your dog - they can run faster than a cow can and will be able to get away easily."

1) And putting our hard-pressed domestic breeds out of work, no doubt.

2) Splendid choice of name there, well done.

"Criminal inanity"

TODAY The Sun reveals the shocking figure that nearly one in five of all rape or murder suspects is a professional footballer.

The sheer scale of crimes committed by footballers is astonishing. Confront politicians with an embarrassing statistic and they try to get off the hook by talking about "context". So here's some context for that crime figure.

A report published today shows that, because of a loophole in the immigration rules, more than 20,000 footballers and their families from outside the EU come to live here every year. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the two figures might be connected.

The more footballers who live here, the more likely it is that crimes will be committed by footballers. The Government is trying to get a grip on immigration. The numbers overall are down. But crime figures like this show just how vital it is that loopholes are closed and sanity is restored to immigration.

Fun Online Polls: Cameron's Big Ideas and UK weather

The responses to last week's Fun Online Polls were as follows:

Which of Cameron's three Big Ideas would you consider to be populist right wing crap? Multiple selections allowed.

Blame the immigrants - 65 votes
Blame the welfare claimants - 64 votes
Blame the Human Rights Act - 64 votes
None of the above - 19 votes

Total 93 voters.

Thanks to everybody who took part, it looks like I'm in the majority on this.

Caveat: I agree that our immigration and welfare systems are in need of putting on a more rational basis (i.e. a points system and a flat-rate Citizen's Income scheme respectively) or that the HRA is being completely misinterpreted in some cases. But if you invent stupid laws, then some people (a surprisingly small minority, actually) will abuse them. There's no point throwing out the baby with the bath water, and trying to blame our economic woes on the unemployed is like blaming World War I on people who died in the trenches.
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It's started snizzling again where I am, which is to proper snowing what drizzling is to proper raining. You can see it coming but it doesn't really settle and you can ignore it to all intents and purposes, you don't need an umbrella or anything.

So that's this week's entirely subjective Fun Online Poll, has the weather in the UK changed over the last ten or fifteen years?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Things which happen in every community

Raping young girls

A Muslim community leader has said there is a "problem" of British Pakistani men thinking "white girls are worthless and can be abused". And the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) said it was "investigating why there may be a majority of Asians in these particular kinds of offence".

But police said grooming was "not a racial issue" and MP Keith Vaz also said "no particular race or religion" tended to be involved.

Sex-selective abortions

Dr Tony Falconer, president of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said: "Anecdotally, there are social and cultural reasons for preferring one gender over another and we need to know more about why these occur. The issues are complex. For instance, women may be coerced or threatened with violence into having an abortion. The priority would be to identify who these women are and to provide them with support."

Forced marriages (1)

The charity said it wanted to help overcome "the mistaken assumption that the problem is a cultural one"... Ms Sanghera said: "It is not a cultural problem, it is abuse. The sooner people start to regard forced marriage in the same way they do domestic violence the better it will be for those affected by it."

Forced marriages (2)

"It's uncomfortable for people to think about, but it can't remain this hidden any longer. It's not simply about Muslim families; we also found that it happens among Chinese and African communities too, such as the Somali families. Nor is it something that comes across with new immigrants."

Honour killings

Happen to white girls too, of course.

I'm still trying to track down articles from the BBC or the Guardian in which somebody says that female genital mutilation, marrying your cousin, blowing up Tube trains and postal voting fraud happens "in every community".

Really irritating politically correct crime reporting

From The Metro:

Children in Britain are increasingly at risk of being branded as witches and tortured, police are claiming, following the high-profile case of Kristy Bamu - tortured and murdered by his brother for being a kindoki witch.

The threat comes from the rise of the West African belief, which states children can be possessed by evil spirits, according to a specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft. It is thought to be widespread among some immigrant communities, fuelled by a growing number of small fundamentalist Christian churches.

The belief is not confined to the poor or ill-educated and many cases of children being abused may never be uncovered, the officers fear...

Hang about here, can you see all the buzzwords they use to cloud the issue: "Children in Britain", "at risk", "the threat", "belief", "immigrant communities" etc? Wouldn't it it be more accurate to say something like this:

"Immigrants from central and west Africa, who are followers/members of certain religious sects which are widespread in those countries, have a tendency to torture and murder children in their care"?

Having done their profiling (call it 'racial profiling' if you will), the police can now get on with the job of tracking down the culprits. See also: female genital mutilation; murdering young women (and possibly some young men?) who refuse to enter into forced marriages; gender-related abortions; Roman Catholic priests; etc.

Finally: WTF is a "specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft"?? There's no such thing as witchcraft, and even if there is, it is not illegal as far as I am aware. It's torturing and murdering people (for whatever reason) which is illegal and needs to be investigated.

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.