An Observer portrait of Migrationwatch chair Sir Andrew Green, and his recent Today programme appearance (RealAudio) contains some interesting asides.
‘We probably were reluctant and slow to take him seriously to begin with,’ says one senior executive in BBC News. ‘We probably didn’t like what he had to say. But then we were also slow to pick up on immigration as a story, not least because we are a very middle-class organisation and the impact of mass immigration was being felt more in working-class communities.’ But Sir Andrew plugged away, throwing out statistic after statistic. ‘If he’s proved himself,’ says the BBC executive, ‘it’s because he hasn’t put a foot wrong on the information he’s published.’
An echo there of ex-business editor Jeff Randall’s criticisms.
‘Whenever we had an anti-immigration interviewee, it was a Nazi with a tattoo on his face who looked like he’d just bitten the head off a cat. I pointed out that it’s the white working class who have to make immigration work. Immigrants don’t move to Hampstead, mate’.
You can see this new, less biased approach in the reporting. Migrationwatch used to be “the self-styled Migrationwatch UK pressure group“. Now they’ve been upgraded to “pressure group Migrationwatch UK“.
Favoured pressure groups, for example anti-prison campaigners, are still “the crime reduction charity NACRO” or “the independent Commission“.