Bad News

A good reason to support “Brexit” is the sharp rise in antisemitism in Europe. Which is a more worrying prospect, remaining in the EU, or a Corbyn Gov’ment? Difficult one.

I’m thinking of sending an article I’ve been reading to Tim Harford because I think it needs a spot of debunking. It says that antisemitism is rising sharply across Europe. In fact, there are three whole surveys to get your claws into, Tim. 

“The figures confirm the results of three recent Europe-wide surveys showing that Jewish people feel at greater risk, and are experiencing markedly more aggression, amid a generalised increase in racist hate speech and violence in a significantly coarser, more polarised political environment.”

Ruth Alexander might like to remind any French and German readers who might be worried about these findings that many people belong to the Jedi religion and perhaps they answer questions in surveys in a deliberately absurd manner.

Of course the reporter got perilously close to mentioning Muslim immigration, with an oblique reference to “importing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, and later with an brief mention of a “large influx of mostly Muslim refugees and migrants to Germany” but he scuttled back to safety with the reassuring coda “but an overwhelming majority of violence against Jews is perpetrated by far-right supporters” Phew! As you were!.

Paris

I forgot to tell you where I read this report, (and, believe it or not, yet another on the same topic!) which might also explain why Tim Harford and the team are unlikely to try to debunk it.  Did you guess? Things must be getting really really bad; both reports were in the Guardian.

Where credit's due

Tim, of 'More of Less' fame, smiling and sporting a leather jacket

Over the years I've given mixed reviews to Radio 4's statistics show More or Less, especially as regards bias. 

For me though, the latest series is proving (pleasingly) to be much stronger on the pluses than the minuses.

And I'm particularly enjoying the programme's increasing focus on whistle-blowing rubbish BBC reporting.

Episode 1 used Radio 4's Today to illustrate silly "apocalyptic" media headlines and hyped-up 'nanny state' reporting about 'rising' child sugar consumption, suggesting that it was largely fake news.

It then moved on to media misreporting of the rising train fares story, ruling that, in the specific instance of BBC reporting cited, "the fault lies not with the rail industry but with the BBC, which misquoted the industry body The Rail Delivery Group".

Ouch!

Episode 2 then investigated the BBC website for a short documentary on 'intersex surgeries' for saying that that the UN believes as high at 1.7% of the world's population has 'intersex' traits, "roughly the same as people with red hair" [a comparison the programme judged deeply misguided and unhelpful].

The BBC reporter behind it was Megha Mohan, the BBC's BBC Gender & Identity Correspondent.

She cited a UN website, which guestimated that the figure could be as high as 1.7%,

But, as More or Less pointed out, "if you dig a little bit further", that website also says it could be as low as 0.05%.

That's a massive difference. It's the difference between 1 person in 60 [Mogha's version] and 1 person in 2000.

Megha Mohan, leader in global breaking news

And More or Less, on digging further, found that that 1.7% guestimate came from an ideological academic - namely the author of Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality.

More or Less also criticised Megha Mohan's piece for focusing on situations where surgeries are debated, which the programme judged "rare". And, on looking into the surgery figures, More or Less presenter Tim Harford said, "So not 1.7%, but 0.017%". So rare indeed.

Alas, Megha herself had been so proud of this documentary:

Oh dear!

Episode 3, in contrast, showed the BBC News Channel's Carrie Gracie actually doing the right thing and expressing shock at a wild statistic from the charity Refuge's Sandra Horley claiming that domestic violence costs the UK public £66 billion a year, a story the BBC had made a headline story on 21st January. The stats don't add up - as per the BBC's head of statistics - and it's pretty much nonsense..At best Refuge trebled the costs. Carrie - the BBC's most famous wage equality campaigner - clearly knows her stats, even if others in the BBC newsroom don't.

Episode 4 made BBC reporting of the '1/20 UK people are Holocaust deniers' story the starting point for its main story. More or Less cast serious doubt on this figure, for many, many, many reasons - all of which (perhaps hopefully thinking) sounded plausible to me - including a potentially deeply confusing question in the survey. It appears, the programme concluded, as if we're in the still grim but significantly less scary 1-2% territory when it comes to the actual number of Holocaust deniers.

And this week's edition, Episode 5, went a good deal further than I ever expected it too in debunking the BBC's Brexit coverage, specifically the BBC's headline claim (across many platforms) that one-third of the UK's businesses are considering moving operations abroad because of Brexit. Tim Harford described those claims as "bizarre", "not so much Project Fear as Project Wrong", and "not worth taking seriously", and duly outlined why. It's well worth listening to. 

Of Spitfires, Heroes, Heroines and Statistics

As part of the blog's '...and any other matters that take our fancy' remit, here's a discussion from this week's More or Less that caught my attention concerning survival rates among World War Two Spitfire pilots, and I thought I'd share (via a classic ITBB transcript):

Tim Harford: Loyal listener Andrew wrote to us to ask:

Andrew: It is often mentioned that the average lifespan of a Spitfire pilots was four weeks. Those pilots were heroes of course, but I've never quite understood how that figure for life expectancy was calculated. Can you explain? Is it correct?

The Battle of Britain took place around this time 78 years ago, in British airspace between the 10th July and the 31st October 1940. On the British side flew nearly 3,000 men, including nearly 600 from allies such as Poland, New Zealand, Canada and Czechoslovakia

Archive clip: In the first year of this war British pilots brought down 1,750 in raids on this country. These are the men that do it...

There were heavy losses on both sides, but was the life expectancy of pilots in the iconic Spitfire really just four weeks? Well, Lizzy McNeill is our tame historian and she's been looking into the stats. Hello Lizzy. Welcome to History Today.

Lizzy McNeill: Thanks. This stat comes up a lot. It seems that every major newspaper has included it in an article at one point or another. For example, the quote appeared in The Independent as: "The average life expectancy of a Spitfire pilot during the battle of Britain was an astonishing four weeks". Now this quote is talking specifically about Spitfire pilots who were in action during the 16 week period in 1940 known as the Battle of Britain.

Tim: But is it true?

Lizzy: Doesn't seem to be. I first went to the Ministry of Defence and spoke to a wing commander who just happened to be by the phone. He was a bit confused about the question, so I then went to the National Archives. I'd heard rumours that the RAF had completed a census during the War to get this figure, but Dr George Hay from the National Archives wasn't convinced by the rumour or the statistic and he told me that it wasn't one he could find properly verified or referenced by any official source. He also pointed out that it would be a bit of an odd exercise for the Air Ministry and certainly would not have helped morale if shared publicly.

Tim: Good point.

Lizzy: Yep. The RAF Archive also told me they had no record of this statistic, either from the War years or later.
Tim: So there is no official data to back up the claim. We can't leave it there though. You're a historian, Lizzy. Do some history on it. Do we know about the life expectancy of pilots?

Lizzy: Well, I actually think it's kind of a strange question. I mean, the battle only lasted 16 weeks, so it really feels more natural to talk about survival rates than life expectancy. Sp that's where I've started. 

Tim: And what did you find out?

Lizzy: Well, I found 781 Spitfire pilots who were awarded the Battle of Britain clasp, which was given to men who flew at least one sortie during the battle. Of those 781 pilots, 151 died during the Battle of Britain which, remember, only lasted 16 weeks.

Tim: So the majority actually survived the Battle of Britain. So the claim can't be true.

Lizzy: Yes. Even if you look only at the men who died, the average survival time was about 7 weeks. But, remember, these are only the 151 men who died.

Tim: So that tells us nothing, except to confirm that the figure of four weeks must be wrong. And, obviously, the people who died during a 16 week battle are on average only going to last few weeks. It would be mathematically impossible for them to live longer than 16 weeks.

Lizzy: Yes, but what we do know is that it was a very dangerous job. About nine pilots died each week out of a total force of 781 pilots. So the mortality risk was more than 1% every week - and perhaps more depending on how many of those 781 pilots were active at any time. Still, as a Spitfire pilot you were more likely to survive the Battle of Britain than die in it.

Tim: What about the entire war?

Lizzy: Well, fewer than half of these pilot survived the War. Almost 20% died during the Battle of Britain and a further 33% died later in the War.
Tim: So the life expectancy of four weeks is one of those statistics that isn't true but isn't challenged because everyone feels, well, it's the kind of thing that ought to be true. But I don't think the heroism of Spitfire pilots needs to be exaggerated with dodgy numbers. 

Lizzy: No.

Mary Ellis

Tim: I did have a question though, Lizzy. Just this week there was a memorial service for Mary Ellis, who flew Spitfires and many other planes during the War but managed to live to the remarkable age of 101. How many women flew in the Battle of Britain and what was their survival rate?

Lizzy: Ah, well, as we often say on More or Less, behind any statistic there is someone counting or measuring something, and in this case, remember, I was counting pilots who were awarded the Battle of Britain clasp and neither Mary nor any other women were given that clasp because Mary and her colleagues didn't fly in operational sorties. They were in the Air Transport Auxiliary

Archive clip: Bombers and fighters in the hands of the ATA, he Air Transport Auxiliary  - the men and women who take the planes from the factories and deliver them to operational stations. An essential service to the RAF, increasingly important as the volume of air production increases.

They had to learn to fly dozens of different kinds of planes and move them around to where they were needed.

Archive clip: ATA pilots must be able to handle every kind of plane, from fastest fighter to the slowest trainer, from the largest air sea rescue amphibian to the heaviest bomber, and every Halifax or Stirling or Lancaster that's delivered by the ATA is used ultimately to deliver bombs on the Axis. 

They were highly skilled but they did not fly in the Battle of Britain, and that's what the original question focused on.

Tim: And what were their survival rates?

Lizzy: None of the original eight ATA women died during the War. By the end of the War 164 women pilots had served with the ATA and 15 died. So a mortality rate of nearly 10%.

Overheard...

Here's a Twitter conversation this morning which I 'overheard'. Note how the 'complaints from both sides' trope gets taken up by the BBC defender:

Yvonne Johnston: Good to have @BBCMoreOrLess back on the radio. At least for those of us prepared to sort the data wheat from the chaff.

MsJones: True. But it doesn't become him when he defends the BBC against bias. It's his mates at the BBC.

Yvonne Johnston: It's on a BBC radio station but I understand the programme is made under the auspices of the OU.

MsJones: I trust the OU to be objective and neutral. But I don't understand why @TimHarford felt the need to defend the BBC against bias.

Yvonne Johnston: ‏But he does have a point that both the right and the left seem convinced that the BBC is biased against them. Are they both correct?

MsJones: That is surely a sign the BBC fails to achieve balance. If both sides of the argument were put in the same programme then would be unbiased.

Introspective post

Does the BBC read blogs like this? And does it react to what we write?

The company I work for is assiduous in monitoring social media for adverse comment, so it's hardly difficult to imagine that the BBC keeps an eye on sites like this from time to time (even if just for amusement). And lower-lying BBC people especially are bound to Google themselves.

In the early days of this blog programmes like Broadcasting House and Sunday actually used to link to some of our pieces on their official BBC websites (which they must have found by searching for reaction) - at least until we became too critical of them. And an edition of BBC Correspondents Look Ahead alluded to one of our posts. Other than that though it's mainly been hints and suspicions - except for some complaints that have paid off (though that's obviously not a question of them reading us voluntarily). 

Commenters at sites like Biased BBC have often wondered whether BBC News website articles (in particular) have been surreptitiously edited in response to criticism there. Given how 'surreptitious' the BBC can be, it's very hard to know whether such 'stealth-edits' really have come about because of alert BBC eyes monitoring critical blogs, or whether such changes have  merely been coincidental and either (a) self-motivated or (b) prompted by direct complaints. (And they certainly wouldn't tell us if they had 'stealth-edited' such a piece). But, nonetheless, it's certainly a real possibility. And, as I say, why wouldn't they?

*******

Such thoughts also struck me after the BBC bumped up the distressing story of Hannah Bladon mid-morning this morning, a couple of hours after we posted (again) about their failings over the coverage of the story - the BBC having 'buried' the overnight news of Hannah being named and the growing tributes to her deep inside the less-read sections of the BBC website. Why would a story that the BBC had 'buried' overnight (even after Hannah's name was made public shortly after midnight) - and been so reluctant to fully report - suddenly get brought to prominence and the young woman at its heart finally given the proper humanity due to her unless someone - some website maybe? - had shamed someone at the BBC into doing the right thing?

Now, even if this isn't the case (and it very well may not be the case and the BBC could just have been catching up with most other media outlets), it still remains the right thing for blogs like this to do to keep on pointing such shameful BBC behaviour out, just in case someone at the BBC does pass by, reads the criticism, takes it on board and then acts on it.

We can only live in hope.

*******

I also had that strange (paranoid?) sense that we're being read on the sly by the BBC whilst listening to this week's More or Less, which also engaged in a spot of introspection. 

The feature focused on the question of whether fact-checking of the kind More or Less engages in is a pointless exercise because people who don't want to believe the programme's 'facts' not just don't believe their 'facts' but might actually go the other way and become even more resistant to the 'truths' More or Less is telling them about. Such 'fact-checking' might, therefore, 'backfire' on the likes of More or Less. 

What made me think they were talking about this blog was that Tim Harford framed the programme's angst in the context of complaints about BBC bias, implicitly including complaints against his programme - and, as regular readers will know, this site has been particularly intent on nailing More or Less over its biased Brexit coverage. So it's evidently 'people like us', if not explicitly us, that Tim had in mind - though he employed the classic 'Complaints From Both Sites' defence during the programme. 

Even then I wasn't really thinking that he actually meant us until a passing comment about people getting vexed about More or Less's coverage of EU cabbage regulations. That was something we did write about, to the detriment of More or Less. I can't find any evidence that anyone else on the internet wrote about that at More or Less's expense. 

The upshot of More or Less's introspection was that they should try and avoid the 'backfire' effect by refraining from treating those they are debunking as idiots ('Coco the Clowns' you might say) and try instead to ingratiate their 'facts' with us by intriguing us by them...oh, and by using a 'debunking handbook' by Stephan Lewandowsky which Tim recommended. (This turns out, on Googling, surprise, surprise, to be a handbook mainly to debunk 'climate sceptics'). 

All I can say to this is that if you are reading this at More or Less, well, hello and thanks for reading us. 

And please don't forget that your cautionary psychological tales apply to you too. You too aren't free from the failings and the cognitive biases you evidently think 'people like us' are prone to. You don't float above the rest of us. You're not disembodied Platonic souls, immune to the kind of things Daniel Kahneman writes about, anymore than we are.

You might think of yourselves as the impartial guardians of truth but don't you need watching too? What if your facts, however true, are skewed by 'groupthink'? What if your chosen 'facts' are highly selective, however unconsciously? What if, say doing the EU referendum, your coverage was overwhelmingly tilted, also however unconsciously, to 'help' one side (the Remain side) - as I think it indeed was? Was that really you just telling the truth, spreading the facts, in a neutral, dispassionate fashion, merely governed by 'a bias towards understanding' (as Nick Robinson put it), or was that you, perhaps despite yourselves, betraying an actual, heavy (pro-Remain) bias? And maybe we 'BBC bias-bashing' types aren't wrong after all?

Less than impartial

As loyal readers will know, our close monitoring of the EU referendum coverage of  BBC Radio 4's statistical flagship More or Less has so far resulted in fairly strong proof of a pronounced pro-Remain/anti-Leave bias. 

(Please read it for yourselves if you doubt it.)

(And please 'listen again' if you still continue to doubt it).

This week's edition marked the final episode of the present series. It pledged to look at the numbers on trade and at the UK's relationship with the EU.

Would it redress the balance and give us a pro-Brexit debunking? Or would it go 'straight down the middle' and (despite its previous anti-Brexit bias) end on an 'impartially equivocal' note?

Jaw-droppingly, it did neither. It simply invited on an 'expert', Chad P. Bown, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, to give an unequivocably pro-Remain/anti-Brexit to every question Tim Harford put to him. The UK would be in a bad position if it left the EU Chad consistently argued.

And Tim (of the FT/BBC) didn't challenge him much either. Chad's word was gospel.

Chad is, of course, fully entitled to his view. BBC Radio 4's More or Less, however, isn't supposed to have a view. 

And yet, with its previous 'debunkings' leaning heavily against the Leave side, this was a BBC programme ending its current run by giving us an unchallenged, anti-Brexit point of view from a 'disinterested academic' on a programme that presents itself as impartial.

If that's genuine impartiality then I'm Jemima Khan. 

The number of Brits abroad

Regular readers will know that ITBB is monitoring More or Less's EU referendum coverage.

The first episode of this series debunked the most debunkable of pro-Leave claims (think cabbages) - a claim made by a pro-Leave chap on Twitter and a pro-Leave columnist in a newspaper.

The second episode began as if it was debunking a pro-Remain claim but ended up making its own pro-Remain case.

This third episode  also began by debunking a pro-Remain claim about the number of British expats living in the EU but was difficult to place in terms of pro-Remain or pro-Leave bias as it didn't discuss the matter in those terms. In other words, it didn't make anything of the numbers one way or the other. The pro-Remain argument behind the debunked claim wasn't made or even really suggested so that wasn't debunked. 

As it was interesting in its own right though, here's another transcript:

Tim Harford: This week there were figures in the news about the numbers of migrants who've been coming to the UK from other parts of Europe. But we've also had a number of listeners getting in touch with us about migration - not just about people coming to the UK but also how many Brits are migrating to live abroad. Immigration is a contentious issue where numbers are often bandied about when they're well passed their sell-by date. One website in favour of staying in the EU, Business for New Europe, suggests there are 2.2 million Brits living in the EU and newspapers and Twitter memes have suggested in the past that this is about the same as the number of EU citizens living over here. We're not so sure. So we asked Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, about the numbers that are available.

Madeleine Sumption: Well, the data that's probably best to look at this question with are from the United Nations and they produce estimates of the number of foreign-born people living in different countries. So in the case of Brits abroad this would actually be British-born people abroad, even if they have subsequently taken the nationality of that country. And those data...the most recent ones are the estimates for 2015 and they suggest that there were around 1.2 million British-born people in other EU countries, or a little closer to 1.3 million if you look at EEA countries (including, for example, Norway and Switzerland).

Tim Harford: 1.2 million. That seems like quite a lot. How does that compare to the number of EU nationals living here? 

Madeleine Sumption: Well, you probably want to compare it to the number of EU-born people living here, so that you have the same definition, and if you do that then the most recent data for last year suggests there are just over 3 million EU-born people living in the UK. 

Tim Harford: Just thinking about these 3 million people who were born elsewhere in the European Union and who now live in the UK, do we have a sense of who these people are? 

Madeleine Sumption: We do have a fair amount of data on the characteristics of these people. If you look just at people born in EU countries then that will include everyone, whether it's a student just coming for a couple of years or someone who has been here since the age of 2 and maybe was born to British parents living abroad. 

Tim Harford: The UN's best estimate is that there are 1.2 million British-born people living around the rest of the EU and just over 3 million EU-born people living here in the UK. Within the EU the top destinations British people head to are: At No.5, Italy; at No.4, Germany; at No.3, France; at No.2, Ireland; and at No. 1, it's Spain. Interestingly, the vast majority of people who emigrate from the UK do not go and live in other EU countries. The same UN data from last year show that of the nearly 5 million British-born people living outside the UK 3.7 million people live in countries outside the EU. There seems to be a preference for places where English is widely spoken: Australia, the USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and, of course, the Costa del Sol. 

Tim Harford's yawn

The next post (tomorrow, as it's late) will update you about More or Less's EU coverage, but first...

Here's More or Less's Tim Harford, on this week's episode, doing that elite, pro-EU thing which so gets up the nostrils of Brexiteers: the belittling yawn about the EU referendum:

Ah, yes. Perhaps you'd thought we'd forgotten the EU referendum this week.Well, don't worry, [putting on in a bored voice] we haven't - even if I sometimes wish we could.

Oh yes, Tim of the FT? Rather we all move on, would you?

Romanian crime, more or less

Because the BBC won't leave the subject alone, well, neither will I. (Well, that's my excuse anyway)...

For the second time this month Radio 4's often-excellent stats show More or Less led with a piece picking apart UKIP's use of stats. This time it was UKIP's use of crime stats vis-à-vis Romanians.

What follows is a transcription of that discussion...with added comments from yours truly. 

Tim Harford: But first, are Romanians responsible for a crime wave? 

In the run-up to the European elections, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), got in some bother over comments he made, repeated here during an interview on LBC Radio.

Nigel Farage: I was asked a question, "If a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned?" and if you lived in London I think you would be.

Mr Farage has back-pedalled somewhat but he and other senior UKIP politicians have tried to make the case that there is a problem with Romanian crime and they've used statistics to do that.

The question is, 'Has UKIP got the facts right?'

UKIP put out a full-page advertisement in the 'Daily Telegraph' and that advert makes three statistical claims.

Now one of them's nearly true, one's a bit weird and the third is just wrong.

...which makes you think that UKIP must, by and large, be wrong here, doesn't it? 

But...

UKIP advert: "28,000 Romanians were arrested in the last five years in the Metropolitan Police area alone."

This statistic is nearly true. It's a couple of years out of date and when More or Less looked at it last year we realised that this was referring to 28,000 arrests not to 28,000 people being arrested, and the difference is we could be talking about a much smaller number of people getting in trouble with the police again and again.

But, basically, the claim is correct, although it's slightly context-free. The advertisement doesn't give us the sense whether 28,000 arrests is an unusually large number.

...but, as we mentioned on Wednesday here at Is the BBC Biased?, FoI requests have set that figure in context, showing that Romanians 'out-crim' Germans, Jamaicans and Somalians - something More or Less didn't mention...

But we'll come back to that.

...as indeed they did, though not by mentioning those FoI figures. 

Note that the programme conceded that UKIP's claim is "basically correct", even though it tried to cage that concession with caveats - and rather speculative caveats at that - and hint at contradictions to come that might undermine it [which didn't actually come]...

Now for the second claim. 

UKIP advert: "92% of all ATM crime in London is committed by Romanians".

Right, now this is the weird one, and Charlotte McDonald is here to help me puzzle it out. Hello Charlotte.

Charlotte McDonald: Hi Tim.

Tim Harford: Charlotte, what is an ATM crime? Is it stealing cash machines with a bulldozer, or is it illegal begging by an ATM, or is it mugging people at a cash machine? Or is it stealing pins? What is it?

Charlotte McDonald: I think you're right to ask because it's easy to misunderstand statistics when you made assumptions about what exactly they mean.

...which seems to be hinting that UKIP misunderstood these statistics because of the "assumptions they made...

Tim Harford: And what do they mean?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, not much really.

...so that seems to be it for this UKIP stat, but...

Charlotte McDonald: There's no criminal offence of 'ATM crime' and so there are no official statistics on the subject.

Tim Harford: So where do the numbers come from?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, UKIP were quite transparent about that...

...meaning they were completely transparent about that!...

It's something a police officer said a couple of years in an ITV documentary. Here's a transcript:

The fact is, 92% of all ATM fraud we see in this country is committed by Romanian nationals - very, very tight communities, very tight gangs.

We went to the police officer's team, the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit in London, who told us that this was "based on police intelligence at that time". 

...so that's the police backing up the police officer claim, which in turns backs up UKIP's use of that claim - not that More or Less put it that way!...

Tim Harford: So what does that mean?

Charlotte McDonald: We asked and weren't told they couldn't explain how they worked it out. The information was too sensitive to release. 

  

...which is fair enough, I'd say... 

Tim Harford: But presumably they do have something in mind though when they say 'ATM crime'?

Charlotte McDonald: They say it could mean any criminal activity that takes place at a cash machine, including stealing card details or even distraction theft.

...so when Tim and Charlotte said earlier, 

Tim Harford: And what do they mean?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, not much really. 

what they really mean't was:

Tim Harford: And what do they mean?

Charlotte McDonald: Any criminal activity that takes place at a cash machine, including stealing card details or even distraction theft.

which doesn't seem a preposterous, 'nothingy' answer to me...

Tim Harford: So what we know with certainty is: There's a specialist police unit and they are very worried about Romanians monopolising some kind of cash machine-related crime but they won't tell us more than that.

Right, well actually, that is weird!

...and UKIP's original claim therefore remains standing, backed up by the police themselves - even though More or Less seemed curiously unwilling to admit that fact.

Oddly, given what follows [which we'll come to], a Times article that More or Less later goes on to cite on another aspect of the story, gives a much clearer sense of what 'ATM crime' might mean and I'm at a loss to understand why More or Less ignored that part of the article:

Crime analysts at Europol estimate that Romanian and Bulgarian gangs are responsible for 90 per cent of all card-skimming crimes across Europe. The gangs appear to have divided Europe into two territories, along a rough line between Gdansk in Poland and Lisbon in Portugal with the Romanians taking the North West and the Bulgarians the South East.

So that's two ticks for UKIP's use of stats from the evidence More or Less presented. Next!...

Charlotte McDonald: On to the final statistic:

UKIP advert: "7% of all crime across the 28 EU member states was caused by 240 Romanian gangs".

Tim Harford: Wow! True? 

Charlotte McDonald: No, not true at all. 

...well, that's about as emphatic as emphatic can be: "No, not true at all". Remember that!...

Tim Harford: So where was this one plucked from?

...as if implying that the two previous "basically correct" statistics had also been "plucked" from somewhere, probably out of thin air...

Charlotte McDonald: OK, UKIP cites Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, but UKIP mangled the statistics.

It's not that Romanian gangs commit 7% of all crime, it's that Europol counted out all the criminal networks they could find and they said that just under 7% of them were Romanian, or mostly Romanian.

...which does suggest that UKIP did mangle the stats in this case, though the stats, properly presented, would have served their purpose just as well - a fact that seems to have eluded More or Less for some strange reason! [Just think of it, around 7% of all criminal networks across the EU are 'basically' Romanian. That's a stat UKIP could use!]...

'Mangling' the stats doesn't necessarily mean that they got it 'dead wrong' or 'totally wrong' though. They got it partially wrong...

The Times newspaper in contrast got it right.

...which, of course, is the Times article I mentioned (and linked to) earlier...

Here's what they said:

About 240 organised crime groups from Romania have been identified by Europol, accounting for 6.7 per cent of the total number of criminal networks active in Europe.

And remember again, this is just a head count. We don't actually know whether the Romanian network are big and influential or just quite numerous.

...or, to put it another way [not the More or Less way obviously!], 'Are they a small number of mafia-like gangs causing considerable grief or are they a large number of pretty criminal gangs plaguing our streets and making life a misery for large numbers of people?' 

Now... 

Tim Harford: OK, so we've examined the UKIP claims. One of them is roughly true. 

...indeed...

One of them's totally wrong. 

...no, one of them is partially wrong....

And one of them - the one about ATM crime - points to a real issue...

...well done, UKIP, for pointing to a real issue then!...

...but it's oddly narrow, it's hard to define...

...how about 'Any criminal activity that takes place at a cash machine, including stealing card details or even distraction theft' or 'card-skimming'? They don't seem 'only narrow' or 'hard' definitions to me. Do they to you?....

and it's based on numbers the police won't share with us.

...for understandable reasons that don't necessarily cast doubt of their validity.

So that's actually a two-and-a-half out of three result for UKIP, stats-wise. Can it get any better for them? Here's Tim...

But I suppose the bigger question is, 'Taken as a whole, rather than zooming in on whatever poorly defined crime we choose...

...if it really is a 'poorly defined crime', and note the snide language used here...

...is there a problem with Romanian citizens and criminality? 

Charlotte McDonald: I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Association of Chief Police Officers, which hold national police records, but - this won't surprise you - they couldn't give me the figures that I wanted.

Tim Harford: Why not?

Charlotte McDonald: The data on European foreign nationals is pretty patchy, but there are two things I can tell you. 

First of all, out of EU foreign nationals, Romanians have been convicted of more offences than any other nationality...

...back of the net, Nigel!...

...except Poles.

...er!...

There are seven times as many Poles in the UK than Romanians...

...thank you, Mr Blair!...

...so it's not unreasonable to say there's an issue here.

...back of the net, Nigel!...

I've also been able to work out the types of crimes for which Romanians are convicted.

Tim Harford: And what are they?

Charlotte McDonald: Theft. And by a large margin.

About three quarters of the offences for which Romanians were convicted related to theft and a smaller proportion for burglary...

...which is pretty much what most of feared anyhow...

 - and that's in the most recent year of data that I have available.

Tim Harford: So what are the trends? Is the situation getting worse or better?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, Romania's ambassador to the UK, Dr Ion Jinga, says crimes committed by Romanians is going down.

...well, he would say that, wouldn't he?...

He says police statistics show, in the first three months of 2014, the number of Romanians convicted in the UK was about 1500, compared to 1800 in the same period in 2013, which is a reduction of about 15%.

...but, remarkably, More or Less missed the obvious question here: Will the expected increase in the number of Romanians living here in the next few years (perhaps adding many tens - and possibly hundreds - of thousands of extra Romanians to our population) reverse that apparent trend?...

Tim Harford: And are the crimes in question serious?

...a return to the 'Are they a small number of mafia-like gangs causing considerable grief or are they a large number of pretty criminal gangs plaguing our streets and making life a misery for large numbers of people?' question...

Charlotte McDonald: You get an idea of that by looking at the numbers of Romanians in prison. 

We know that Romanians were convicted of an offence in London alone over 10,000 times over five years...

...crikey!!!...

 but there are only 588 in prison on the 31st of March this year. 

That suggests most of the convictions didn't result in long prison sentences. 

...i.e. that the answer to the question is, "a large number of pretty criminal gangs plaguing our streets and making life a misery for large numbers of people?" - just what those with concerns about mass Romanian immigration fear...

 Tim Harford: Thank you very much, Charlotte.

...and that you Tim. Thank you for proving that UKIP was pretty much right. 

“70% of national legislation comes from European legislation”. Who said that?

One of my favourite BBC Radio 4 programmes, More or Less, returned this week and began by tackling the Lib Dems over Nick Clegg's deeply dubious assertion (during his first debate with Nigel Farage) that a mere 7% of our laws derive from the EU legislation. 

This example of statistical dodginess from the second most powerful politician in the land, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Nick Clegg MP no less, leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, must have struck them as something that needed challenging - and rightly so. 

A clip from an old edition of More or Less where Tim Harford of the FT berated the-then Lib Dem party chairman was followed by an interview with the present Lib Dem chairman, Tim Farron, where Mr Farron was berated by Tim over his leader's use of that 7% statistic.

And to think that some people accuse the BBC (and the FT) of being pro-EU!

Meanwhile back in the real world...

Of course that didn't really happen. 

Hard as it may be to believe, the statistical dodginess of the second most powerful politician in the land, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Nick Clegg MP no less, leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, wasn't the target of Tim Harford's scrutiny. 

No, it was UKIP's claim that 75% of UK law comes from Europe that was under fire, and it was UKIP party members who were being grilled over their use of stats.

And to think that some people accuse the BBC (and the FT) of being pro-EU!

Taken inside the 'More or Less' studio - a selfie from Tim & Co.

It was inconvenient for More or Less that EU commissioner Viviane Reding said - literally said, and said in English - that "70% of the laws in this country [the UK] are made, co-decided by the European Parliament". More or Less suggested that she'd got her words wrong, and her press office (who they contacted) agreed with More or Less's interpretation of events. (Hmm, I think I'd like to hear her say that though.) 

More or Less didn't, however, contact the press office of Martin Schultz, president of the European parliament - or even mention Herr Schultz. He too has stated that “70% of national legislation comes from European legislation.”

This much-sought-after statistic, as More or Less says, is certainly clouded in uncertainty though and they were right to look at it. 

The House of Lords found that the figure is impossible to calculate accurately, but probably lies somewhere between 15% and 50% - depending on how you calculate it. 

So both pro-EU Martin Schultz and anti-EU UKIP are probably overstating that stat from one side, and pro-EU Nick Clegg and his Lib Dems are just as likely to be overstating it from the other side.

Still, even if pinning down a specific number by totting up individual laws is very hard (if not impossible), it's surely easier - and much more important - to measure the real impact of EU laws and regulations on the UK economy and on British people on an everyday basis. 

That's where the real argument lies, and it would be interesting to hear More or Less's findings about that. The results may not be to their taste though.

*******

Update 8/5: And, jumping Jehoshaphat, look who EU Referendum's Richard North has discovered claiming that "probably half of all new legislation now enacted in the UK begins in Brussels"! - yes, back in 2003 (in the Guardian), it's one Nick Clegg. 

A Thousand Years of Blagging Politicians

Talking of Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems and plastic bags...

The plastic bag was first invented in 1957, as a sandwich bag. By the 1970's it had already replaced the paper bag as our favourite way of carrying shopping.

Radio 4's More or Less quoted Mr Clegg saying, "We all use plastic bags. I do. Everyone does. I think everybody feels that maybe we use too many plastic bags. You might use them for twenty minutes walking back from the shops, but they take a thousand years to degrade."

Do they really? And what's the source of this 'thousand years' claim?

To find out, Tim Harford talked to Ming Tien, Professor of Biochemistry at Pennsylvania State University. 

Prof Tien had no idea where the claim came from, saying that he himself would never make a statement of that kind "as you could never prove it". ("Who's going to do an experiment for a thousand years?", he asked rhetorically.)

The programme then asked Nick Clegg's office for a source for the 'thousand years' figure. The reply came: 

"Scientists agree that it takes a long time for plastic bags to degrade fully. The exact time will depend on the environmental conditions. Typical estimates range from several decades to centuries." 

As More or Less didn't find that a satisfactory answer, they asked again and got this reply:

"There is extensive peer-reviewed literature on the persistence of plastic materials in the environment. Below is a link. Plastic Degradation and its Environmental Implications, with Special Reference to Poly(ethylene terephthalate), Polymers Journal, Volume 5, Issue 1, pp18 available at http {fade out}....[actually, as I've found it for you, should you want to read it, it's also available at www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/5/1/1/pdf] 

"Gosh, lots and lots and lots of referenciness!", said Tim. 

Still, More or Less didn't give up. They decided to read the paper, and guess what? They found no mention of the figure of a thousand years. 

So they contacted one of its authors, Dr Hayden Webb. He pointed out (in Tim's words):

"First, there's no fixed definition of what it means for plastic to degrade. Second, that different environments will have different effects on plastics. And third, that..well..the study wasn't looking at the plastic that goes into bags. It was looking at the stuff in soft drink bottles, which is a totally different compound. 

"So zero support for Mr Clegg's 'thousand year' plastic bag." 

Fancy that then, a politician spouting nonsense, and a government department trying to bluff its way out when challenged!

I do like More or Less.

This Sceptred Island

A blog is a blog is a blog (a 'web log', a personal take, a collection of ramblings), so please forgive me for straying (yet again) far from the strict path of BBC bias hunting to pass on the words, from this week's More or Less (BBC Radio 4), of Professor Godfrey Baldacchino, Professor of Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and editor of the Island Studies Journal, in response to the snub allegedly made against our very own island kingdom by an aide to President Putin - that we are "a small island no one listens to."

Britain is a fairly large island, as far as islands go. Of course, it's always going to be problematic to define how large an island is in order to define itself as an island. There are usually cut-off points at the very top end and the lower end. At the top end we usually define the very largest islands as 'continents', for example, and from a geographical point of view there are four huge continents in the world - Eurasia-Africa being the largest, of course, then America, Antarctica and Australia, in that order. So, if we include those as mega-islands, large islands, Britain would actually be the lucky 13 - the 13th island on that list in terms of land size. [If you take the continents out of the equation, we stand in 9th place.]

If we switch our parameters and go for population instead of land, then Britain would score even higher up the list. It would be the fourth largest island by population in the world - I'm talking exclusively about island nations, the largest being Indonesia, followed by Japan and the Philippines.

So by no stretch of the imagination is Britain a small island.

And then there's nothing wrong about small islands having a stature, a clout, a footprint much larger than they would suggest. I'll just mention the island of Manhattan, which is much, much smaller than Britain and, of course, it's an island that one could call at the very centre of the world.

There are differing definitions of what an island is. Where does an island start off? Is a rock an island? Is a coral atoll...you know, a few feet across or a few miles across...an island?

So it's very difficult to come up with these hard-and-fast scientific definitions.

As far as populated islands go, Britain is definitely one of the largest. It is not just an island. It is an archipeligo. It is surrounded by other islands.

It has also, of course, been the centre of an Empire. Britain shares a historical position with very few other civilisations, including Tonga in the Pacific, including Crete in the Mediterranean, including Venice in the Mediterranean, as having been - in the case of Britain, of course, for many centuries -  the centre of a sprawling global empire. 

Alas, the good professor went a wee bit astray at this point.

One other distinction is that Britain is one of the few islands that officially calls itself 'Great'. Now I'm not sure whether that's a gesture of pomposity or presumptuousness, but it could merely be a factual indication of its relevance on the world's stage.

There are many others [that call themselves 'Great'] but they are usually much smaller.

Now, I don't know about you, but even I could field that question - the question of why Britain calls itself 'Great' (something Tim Harford didn't seem to know, surprisingly). It's something I learned at school. 

Britain was called 'Great Britain' (Grand Bretagne) to distinguish it from 'Little Britain' (Bretagne, ie. Brittany), both lands being inhabited (in Celtic days) by Britons (Bretons). 

Here endeth the geography lesson.