26 Aug 2011

How the Daily Star and Migration Watch spins figures

Fullfact.org an independent fact-checking organisation, questions the numbers used by the Daily Star newspaper and think-tank Migration Watch in the later's immigrant housing report.

The article points out that "Government statistics don't actually match up with the 8.4 per cent figure quoted by the think-tank". The newspaper has gone even further by rounding the figures off to “nearly 10 per cent”. The actual figure is actually 6.1 per cent as demonstrated in a briefing by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

Following the article, Migration Watch had agreed to correct this. However, looking at the Migration Watch website, they merely say that "However, they seem to have misunderstood the basis of the Migrationwatch calculation which is not a question of existing percentages but of future projections of migrant households."

Only at the end of the comment do they mention:

"The continuous recording of lettings (CORE) in Table 754 of the Local Authority Housing Statistics gives 6.1% for 2009/10, as Full Fact say. However, the English Housing Survey which takes a 2 year average of 2008/9 and 2009/10 gives 9.5% non-British social renters. The figure of 8.3% in paragraph 3 of the paper referred to the previous year's figures as this part of the paper was completed before the latest English housing Survey was published. "

7 Aug 2011

Some famous British sports stars not born in the UK

Yahoo has this really interesting list of the "Top 10 'non-British-born' sporting Brits". There are several more who did not make the list mentioned in the comments.


  1. John Barnes - Born in Jamaica
  2. Graeme Hick - Born in Zimbabwe 
  3. Luol Deng - Born in Sudan
  4. Zola Budd - Born in South Africa
  5. Greg Rusedski - Born in Canada
  6. Mo Farah - Somalia
  7. Kevin Pietersen - South Africa
  8. Mike Catt - South Africa
  9. Joe Bugner - Hungary
  10. Simon Shaw - Kenya


Some immigrants doing the country proud.