Tag: Immigration

Lies, damned lies and statistics

Warning: this is very long. It is a response to a blogger on MyT, who quoted some statistics.

If you are remotely interested in responses thereon, here is the post.

It was intended to explain a little more about the use and misuse of statistics, and how demographic projections are produced and their validity.

Some observations  from the Pew Report.

All the statistics  and quotations, unless otherwise attributed are from this report entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population -Projections for 2010-2030” and from  here “Faith on the Move-The Religious Affiliation of International Migrants”

But before I begin, I would remind you of a particularly misleading video clip which has been doing the rounds for quite some time. This is one of the many examples of how statistics, and these particular numbers are wildly inaccurate, are used in an alarmist way.

Continue reading “Lies, damned lies and statistics”

White Guilt 2

It will be 55 years this December since one of my heroes, a lady, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a man. It’s 40 -odd years since the sufferers of the religion of White Guilt imported a distorted version of the Civil Rights campaign, of which she became an icon, from the United States and began the great shaming of white England as one condition of the founding of a new social equality. The other condition was, of course, the shaming of non-white England into sharing the ridiculous and totally unfounded belief that somehow the colour of their skin made them incapable of competing in society on the same level as the white majority. Frederick Douglass had it about right a century and a half ago: What did he have right?

White Guilt

On a recent post by Araminta, my attention was caught by this:

why we may have more of a problem with assimilation than younger democracies.

and this:

with goodwill and determination on both sides

These quotes raise a number of questions. What is this ‘problem with assimilation? Historically the United Kingdom, more specifically, England, has ‘assimilated’ immigrants from all sorts of cultures. When groups of people have been at need, the UK has opened its doors, if not entirely its arms, and invited them in – the last such (large) group I can think of being the Ugandan Asians chucked out by Idi Amin. That group of people ‘assimilated’ without too much trouble – yes, some of them suffered discrimination in some cases, but they sucked it up and got on with it. What is the problem with assimilation?