Yesterday, BBC Radio 5 Live News,

amongst other BBC news productions, reported on Migration Watch UK‘s analysis of the government’s until recently (i.e. until after the election) secret estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the UK. Migration Watch’s analysis carefully argues that the true illegal migrant number in the UK is approaching 750,000.

But don’t worry Beeboids – the reports were as brief as possible (for example, Illegal migrant figure ‘too low’, appeared ever so minimally on BBC News Online’s home page after 1am, disappeared to the UK home page early in the morning, and disappeared completely as soon as possible thereafter – ‘blink and you really do miss it’!), and, in many cases, smeared Migration Watch, who describe themselves as, and who are, by all reasonable accounts, ‘an independent and non-political body’, as “a right-wing think tank” – the usual leftie approach – “we don’t like what they say, however rational and fact based it is, so they must be right-wing, and we all know right-wing is really bad”, so that’s alright then!

Just to make sure that Migration Watch’s figure were given the full BBC spin treatment, a later update to the story added a John Kerry “I voted for it before I voted against it” style quote from Keith Best, ‘Chief Executive’ of the so-called Immigration Advisory Service (part of Britain’s enormous immigration human-rights, except for those who already live here, industry):

Failed asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants. They are people who are subject to removal but have not yet been removed.

Ah, so that’s clear – that’d be them all queued up at the airport ready for the off then Keith. Still, Keith’s no stranger to double-dealing, though unusually for the BBC, in his case, they almost always forget to mention his previous role as an early example of “Tory Sleaze”, even though “Tory Sleaze” usually gets dragged up whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Meanwhile, in a related story about the lamentable shambles of Britain’s passport controls (the ones that permitted the successful flight abroad of one of the most high-profile of wanted crime suspects last week), Hoon ponders new passport checks, BBC News Online manages to omit the ever so minor detail about which governmment it was that scrapped passport exit controls and other immigration checks and balances. Does anyone, outside of the BBC, need a clue?