Fraser Nelson claims 154% of new jobs over the last year went to foreigners. He is massaging new stats to fit an old and discredited argument.
What do Boris Johnson, Kevin Pietersen, and James Caan have in common? They are all British citizens working and paying taxes in the UK who were born abroad. Precisely the problem group that Fraser Nelson is targetting in his latest pernicious and inaccurate analysis of Britain’s labour market.
The Coffee House blog today trails an interview with Iain Duncan Smith with the shock finding that “154 per cent of the employment increase can be accounted for by foreign-born workers”. But Fraser Nelson is using two tricks to inflate his figure which he’s been caught using before.
First, he has excluded pensioners returning to work. He claims that the ONS’ figures are “distorted” by the inclusion of OAPs without giving any justification for this claim. Surely in an ageing society where Government is extending the retirement age, it seems completely reasonable to include over-65s. Perhaps the exclusion took place to help massage the numbers. Including pensioners, the percentage of jobs taken by non-UK born workers falls from 154 per cent to 120 per cent.
But second, Nelson’s statistics only look at foreign-born workers. The list above, which includes his friend and predecessor, Boris Johnson, were all foreign-born yet hold British passports. When we look at nationality rather than country of birth (and include pensioners), the figures change dramatically and the percentage of jobs taken by non-Brits falls to 69 per cent. Indeed, using this more accurate measure, the number of British workers in employment has actually increased by 71,000 over the last year.
| Employment increase (last year) | Total | UK | Non-UK | Percent to non-UK |
| Nelson’s claim (by country of birth) | 181,000 | -99,000 | 278,000 | 154% |
| Including pensioners | 241,000 | -50,000 | 289,000 | 120% |
| By nationality (+ pensioners) | 241,000 | 71,000 | 166,000 | 69% |
Readers may still be concerned that over two-thirds of the employment increases over the last year have gone to workers without British citizenship. But it’s worth considering two further points. First, a foreigner getting a new job does not necessarily take a job away from a domestic worker. This is called the ‘lump of labour fallacy‘ and has been widely debunked. Second, the steps needed to reduce the number even further are pretty tricky given that, of the 166,000 employment increase from non-British workers, 140,000 come from the European Union. Any attempt to restrict their free movement of labour would mean that British citizens would be unable to work in Paris, Madrid or Rome.
The irony is that we’ve been before, when the Spectator originally carried out this exercise in April 2010 looking at Labour’s record, Left Foot Forward issued a response pointing out these self-same flaws in Nelson’s methodology. In a grovelling update to a separate post, Nelson wrote:
“A rival version of this study has been posted by two TUC officials, looking at nationality rather than country of birth. This sharply reduces the percentage – because many immigrants hold UK passports. A perfectly valid exercise by the TUC, buy [sic] immigrants have British passports too.
“Then there’s the Boris factor. He was born in New York. So my study would include little Boris’s. No definition of “immigrant” is perfect. But foreign-born is the best you’ll get, which is why it is used by Eurostat. The number of foreign-born has doubled in Britain – something tells me that’s not due to a rush of mothers flying off to Dublin hospitals and coming back with the baby as hand luggage.
“Finally, my original post had both working-age (99 percent of new jobs to foreign-born) and another version of all ages over 16 (including pensioners). This reduces it to 72 percent as there have been fewer pension-age immigrants.”
Far from updating his methodology, Nelson has repeated his previous error – disappointingly massaging new stats to fit an old and discredited argument.
NB: All the relevant data I’ve used is available in Table 8 of today’s ONS release.
46 Responses to “Fraser Nelson massages new figures to rehash old, discredited argument”
Richard
Naughty @frasernels caught massaging immigration statistics http://t.co/HCdHvgy
Tiffany Chen
Fraser Nelson massages new figures to rehash old, discredited argument http://t.co/toVEDse
Mark Worgan
Fraser Nelson @frasernels massages new figures to rehash old,discredited argument http://t.co/BbJo68o < @wdjstraw stats smackdown classic
John Rentoul
Less than comprehensive rebuttal by Will Straw of Fraser Nelson's interp of ONS jobs figs, but helps clarify the debate http://t.co/juEu4c3
Dave Citizen
While I think you are right to expose this Nelson bloke for distorting the facts to serve his usual right wing agenda, I’m slightly concerned that you may be doing something along similar lines yourself.
My experience convinces me that buisnesses are often only too ready to employ immigrants where it enables them to make more money, regardless of the impact on our communities or wider society.
When a Hotel I know got rid of its local workers and brought in a team of Eastern Europeans who slept in dorms that were paid for by additional hours to get around minimum wage rules, I don’t think the interests of the community were top of the agenda. Or when I walk onto a building site to find only one out of perhaps 15 speaks English is it really because British workers wouldn’t do the work well? No, it’s about some narrow business interests riding rough shod over the interests of the communities they operate in.
Rather than hide behind EU rules why not attack decisions that put narrow short term profit before the national interest – maybe then we will make our own trains and ensure we employ our unemployed first because we know it makes good sense for everyone rather than just a tiny few.