Some warm words for TNE from the least likely of sources – the Daily Telegraph. Columnist Kamal Ahmed penned a piece praising Peter Hyman’s recent essay on combating populism and telling Torygraph readers that, while “I would imagine that not many of you are subscribers to The New European… if you want to know what your enemies are thinking – always useful – it is an important read”.
The same, sadly, cannot be said of last week’s Telegraph front page story headlined ‘One in 12 in London is illegal migrant’ and quoting “a study commissioned by Thames Water, obtained by the Telegraph under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
There’s only one flaw in the story: it’s rubbish. For a start, the calculation is entirely based on an incorrect population figure for the capital. The Telegraph’s figure is around seven million, whereas the most recent figures held by the Greater London Authority put it at very nearly nine million – a huge discrepancy.
Then, as the researcher Zoe Gardner has pointed out, estimating the number of a sub-group which is essentially hidden is close to impossible: undocumented migrants cannot access social housing, the welfare state, bank accounts or driving licences and are often not registered for tax purposes or in possession of a national insurance number, making them all but impossible to count with any degree of accuracy. The PEW research centre in 2019 estimated the undocumented population of the entire UK at anywhere between 800,000 and 1.2m.
Thames Water’s own report also had a range of figures, estimating London’s undocumented migrant population at between 390,355 and 585,533. The Telegraph chose the 585,533 as fact, meaning it got its ‘one in 12’ figure by using the highest possible estimate of a largely uncountable subgroup and a population figure for London around two million lower than the actual one.
Edge Analytics, who carried out the study on behalf of Thames Water, has said that, while its contract did not allow it to divulge further details, it had “concerns” about how the information and data in its report was presented by the Telegraph.
The paper is now the subject of a complaint to the press regulator IPSO from the academic Jonathan Portes and while the print headline stated “one in 12” as a fact, the online version now says “up to one in 12”, rendering the figure all but meaningless.
Meanwhile, there are more cutbacks at London’s (No-Longer Evening) Standard, as owner and occasional peer Evgeny Lebedev hacks away at the beleaguered paper.
First the daily evening edition was stopped, replaced by a little-read weekly edition with a hugely reduced circulation. Then, earlier this month, its sister TV station, London Live, was flogged off to David Montgomery’s Local TV network, which immediately replaced its capital-centric content with wall-to-wall repeats of Judge Judy and the like.
Now comes the latest blow to staff – the free sweets which once sat on the reception desk of the Standard’s fifth-floor Liverpool Street headquarters have been axed, presumably in a bid to save a few bob. How will some of the Standard’s plummier staff – many of whom objected to the move from Kensington to Liverpool Street on the basis of “where will we get lunch?” – react?
