Observations

Suggested sound-bite for Boris, for use today

Team Boris, if we may be so bold, here is how your man might use the information above in his hustings and media appearances today.

“My friends, yes, we must speak about immigration. The UK is still the country which people flock to, despite all those doom and gloom merchants trying to tell you otherwise. Are you surprised? I’m not surprised, I have to tell you.

“Did you know for example – and here I’m eternally grateful to those wonderful people at Brexit Facts4EU.Org – that our population is rising a full five times faster than the EU27 average? No? Well the Facts4EU chappies and chapesses dug this out from the latest official statistics released only yesterday by the Office for National Statistics.

“Strangely this didn’t make it onto the BBC yesterday, but, well, there we are. But we can and we will do something about this, if I’m elected leader of the Conservative Party.”

How the BBC reported this important information

For a great many ordinary people, the BBC’s headline would be misinterpreted as “no change here” and they might not read or watch beyond the headline, thinking the population was static. A more interesting headline might have been “UK population rises 5 times faster than EU27 average, mostly due to immigration – official figures”, or “UK immigration rises by 10% compared to previous 12 months – official figures”.

Instead, the BBC referred to the growth rate rather than the actual growth in population. The growth rate is indeed approximately the same as the previous year, but the numbers in the population have kept on growing.

Ordinary people might also interpret the BBC’s headline as being a reflection on Brexit. Since the Referendum, the common narrative from large parts of the media is that people are leaving the UK and that the country is no longer the major draw that it has been for many years. This is not borne out by the facts.

In the article itself, the BBC admitted that “The UK population rose by 400,000 last year”. They went on to say that “Net migration of 275,000 was ‘broadly in line’ with the average of the last five years”. We would suggest that this is a rather different story than their headline suggests.

Needless to say, in their story the BBC failed to report a key observation from the ONS – that the UK’s population growth rate is five times higher than the EU27 average.

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