Good Faith = Complete B*ll*cks

The ludicrous thing about the debate here is that all of these numbers bandied around about immigration have to be estimates - very rough estimates. I work in social research and I am certain, absolutely certain, that first of all no-one remotely knows how many immigrants are in the UK right now, and second, that no-one knows how many of them are working. We really won't know these things until the next census in 2011.

You really can't extrapolate from a relatively small and uneven set of responses (as for the Labour Force Survey) and get a meaningful estimate of total numbers of a subgroup such as this which could easily be vastly underrepresented or overrepresented depending on where and how you asked the questions. I'm not saying they are incompetent or anything - but you just can't do it. It is not logically possible. You may be able to get a ball-park figure, perhaps by looking back at how the 2001 data compared with the 2001 census, but it's got to be pretty dubious.

The bottom line is that it can't be anything more than a (very) vague estimate. That it has moved 300,000 this way or that way is likely to be pretty much meaningless.

In general anyone waving around "net" numbers around on immigration and confidently declaring them "the true figures" (until that 2011 census) is either ill-informed or engaging in politically motivated guesswork.

For my nearly worthless opinion, I suspect the government know that no one believes their figures, so by owning up they get a (tiny) bit of credit, Gordo's mate Paul Dacre gets to run triumphalist 'Told You So' headlines and then they do something headline grabbing and inhumane against immigrants, thus shooting another Tory fox.

Presumably this will be spun as another excuse for ID cards.  But European states that have ID Cards have as much difficulty in tracking immigrant numbers as we do. 

The other part of the 'good faith' argument is the 'aren't we a nice government for letting you know about our mistakes' line (which I heard being peddled on R4 this morning).

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Exactly, redpesto - it's a new departure, but if you see Brown's strategy as purely trying to keep the Tories off balance, it makes sense.

They obviously haven't spent enough on them, have they?  We're going to get super-duper magic pixie dust ID cards that track immigrants, entitle us to all sorts of Government goodies, enable us to fly, leap tall buildings at a single bound, cure terrorism, solve world peace and all for 8p each.  Not like those nasty foreign ones!

True enough, if you understand "good faith" to mean "expectation that the stupid peasants wouldn't notice".

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New Labour doublethink reaches new levels of hypocrisy on immigration: Asylum seekers bad - cheap Polish workers good. Let's hope the CBI can cook up an imaginative scheme for coining capital from the misery of non-European refugees.. That way the poor buggers  might stand some chance of a fair hearing...

Cassandra