Category Archives: BBC bias

Sweet Nothings

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Sugar

 

Sugar is apparently:

Toxic and detrimental to society…in fact it is worse than tobacco as tobacco isn’t introduced into food.

 

The BBC tells us that:

Nearly two thirds of people in the UK are overweight or obese – leading to other health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

 

Really?  You have to ask firstly is that true?  Not sure I believe the figure….looking around most people look pretty average to me.  Secondly who sets the parameters to make that judgement…how do you define ‘obese’?

Of course there are official guidelines, but you kind of suspect that many people so categorised would not accept the label…and would say if this is ‘fat’ then I’m quite happy being ‘fat’…so get lost!

The BBC have been banging on all day about this ‘major’ news story….a bunch of arrogant, not to say verging on fascist, doctors have yet again decided to dictate what we can and can’t eat ‘for our own good’.

There doesn’t seem much of a challenge to their claims from the BBC….this report is wholly from the doctor’s point of view save for the inset interview clip.

Campaigners vow to cut sugar in food

 

There is no balancing view in the report to put any other side to the argument….unlike the Telegraph which puts both sides:

Dr Victoria Burley, a senior lecturer in Nutrional Epidemiology at Leeds University, said the group’s claims were alarmist and misleading.

She said: “It is nuts to claim that sugar is as dangerous as alcohol. It’s total hyperbole, quite crazy.”

 

Here is some more of that hyperbole from the campaigners:

Action on Sugar says children are a particularly vulnerable group who are targeted by marketers of calorie-dense snacks and sugar-sweetened soft drinks.

Professor Simon Capewell said: ”Sugar is the new tobacco. Everywhere, sugary drinks and junk foods are now pressed on unsuspecting parents and children by a cynical industry focussed on profit not health.

 

That’s just rubbish….fizzy drinks, sweets, biscuits, crisps and whatever were all around in my youth and I wolfed them down as much as anyone when I could…..thing is I was limited in the amount I could eat……and was far from being anywhere near obese….conclusion…it’s not the amount of sugar in the products it’s how much of those products you eat…eat too much lettuce and you will also suffer problems.

As to ‘pressed on unsuspecting parents and children’….well as above..the same foods were available when I was young and yet my parents managed to avoid having cynical industrial types peddle their wares to them ‘unsuspected’ fleecing them for sugarcoated profits.

The doctors seem to think everyone else are stupid and ignorant, and incapable of making their own informed decisions about the food they eat…..and the BBC doesn’t seem to be disabusing the doctors of that opinion.

Listen to the tone when they do bring on an industry spokesman…it’s entirely negative and suspicious of the capitalist exploiters of children.

 

Shame that once again a fanatical pressure group gets given so much credibility and airtime by the BBC without a proper challenge to their claims.

 

 

 

 

 

The Road To Success?

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Mark Mardell is enjoying saying this:

This scandal is hugely damaging – if not yet fatal – for Christie’s ambitions to be the Republican contender for president in 2016”

 

about this:

Chris Christie apologises for bridge-gridlock scandal

On 9 September, two of three traffic lanes to the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey to Manhattan, were shut for several days.

Emails and texts made public on Wednesday appear to link Ms Kelly to the move.

The move caused traffic chaos in the New Jersey borough of Fort Lee, whose Democratic mayor had declined to back Mr Christie in last autumn’s gubernatorial election.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich said the alleged skulduggery was “appalling”….”It’s the example of the pettiest and most venomous side of politics,” he told the Bergen Record newspaper.

 

No such concerns about ‘petty, venomous politics’ when Labour opened the borders and imported millions of immigrants purely to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

Nor indeed any such concerns bout Ken Livingstone’s ‘traffic management schemes’ which deliberately jammed the traffic to give him an excuse to introduce congestion charges:

 

Hundreds of sets of traffic lights at some of London’s busiest junctions are being secretly altered to increase the time motorists have to wait, according to The Independent on Sunday (p5).

The changes affect as many as 300 traffic lights. After months of suspicion, the body in charge of traffic lights, Transport for London, has now admitted that many have had their red phases increased and the green phase reduced.

Motoring groups say London mayor Ken Livingstone has intentionally created traffic chaos now in order to make his congestion charging scheme more popular when it is introduced in nine months time.

 

 

Just how many ambulances and police response vehicles were delayed by Ken’s little games?

 

 

 

 

 

AFTER MANDELA, DUGGAN?

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Well then, who would have thought that the BBC would have found a new icon to worship after the death of Mandela, and who would have thought it was a London “gangsta”? BBC coverage has been extensive and very pro Duggan, and the comrades also seem disappointed there has not been a riot! Thoughts?

“Echo Chambers” – An Alternative To The BBC Feature

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Last November, the BBC website created the “Echo Chambers” feature, and assigned one of their experienced editors and journalists, Anthony Zurcher to curate it. The mission statement as he originally stated it is this:

Welcome to Echo Chambers, a new blog about opinion and commentary in the United States and around the world.

The purpose of this blog is to discover and present quality opinion journalism wherever it may be – to find value amid the noise. We’ll unearth interesting material and underreported views from the BBC, on the world’s newspaper opinion pages, and in think tank reports, magazines, blog posts and scholarly journals. The venue isn’t important; the content is.

A condensed version of this is permanently in the upper right corner of the Echo Chambers page.

Unscrambling the noise of the global debate, from social media to scholarly journals, Kansas City to Kathmandu.

As has been pointed out many times, I’m not a professional journalist and so cannot understand the arcane arts, but to me, this means that the blog is meant to make some sense of the chatter on both sides of an issue. After all, we’ve been told countless times by journalists and defenders of the indefensible that this blog is just a Right-wing echo chamber, and we often complain that the BBC functions as a Left-wing echo chamber. We all know the drill about Fox News or the Guardian, each often described as an echo chamber for their own side of the political spectrum, and intellectually lazy people who want to stifle debate simply dismiss any point made or evidence offered from either as invalid, simply due to the source, relieving the accuser of the need to address the actual point itself. Media in both the US and UK have become highly politicized, from local newspapers and obscure blogs all the way up to national papers and network and cable news. There’s far more opinion-mongering going on everywhere these days than actual objective newsgathering and reporting. In fact, even the top outlets like the Washington Post and the BBC are moving more and more towards opinion journalism.

One would think it’s a good idea to try and sort through the noise and attempt to distill it down to some semblance of reality, to point out merits or flaws in arguments coming from each side of an issue. The question for the BBC’s Echo Chambers feature, then, is does it meet its remit?

Zurcher’s opening mission statement was that he intends to “find value amid the noise”, and the permanent mission statement is to “unscramble the noise”. In practice, it seems that, with the exception of a weekly list of links about various topics, the installments are  mostly an exercise in Left-wing editorializing. Much of the time, Zurcher is basically presenting stuff from the mainstream Left-wing echo chamber as value in reaction to an issue which seemed to be momentarily gaining traction from the Right. His choices of who writes quality opinion is revealing. One has to give him credit for being one of the more industrious BBC journalists. He sure cranks out a lot of these in a short space of time. A list of links to my analyses of several of his pieces can be found in the comments section of this post about it by Daniel Pycock. Personally, I’m sick to death of opinion journalism, and I think it’s done far more damage to public discourse than help crystalize any ideas. But again, I’m not a professional journalist, so not qualified to judge the priest caste.

With this in mind, I’m going to try a little experiment. For the next five Echo Chambers installments (not including the next simple list of links), rather than do my usual long-winded parsing and complaining, I’m going to attempt an alternative version of what I think it says on the tin. That is to say, I’ll try to actually present a few opinion pieces on whatever topic catches Zurcher’s fancy. I won’t read his piece, just check the title and the opening lines to see what the issue is. I’ll even use his title. Then I’ll curate my own collection of “value”, adding my own brief (I promise) comments so the reader gets the idea of what I think is going on. Each one will include a link to the BBC Echo Chambers piece, and everyone can view them side-by-side and judge for themselves not so much if I’m doing a great job, but whether or not Zurcher is really doing his properly, and just how much of a Left-wing echo chamber he lives in. I may or may not link to the same things he does. Without reading it in advance, I’ll have no idea. If I do, it’s purely coincidental. This whole thing is nothing more than opinion journalism on that level anyway, and anyone who has read two or three of these things will know in which bubble Zurcher lives.

So, below is my first installment. Four more will follow as and when.

*********************

Senator Ted Cruz, still Canadian

One of the most prominent politicians on the Right these days is Ted Cruz, the Republican junior Senator from Texas. He was elected on the strength of Tea Party backing, and in these days of desperation for a fresh face is already being touted as a possible presidential candidate in 2016. Many on the Left see him as a possible threat because he is Hispanic, and identity politics is a very important tool for them. So he’ll most likely get more attention early on than a junior Senator with no experience would otherwise. Sounds familiar, somehow. Cruz is also hated on the Left because of his support for last year’s government shutdown. In other words, there’s a big target on his back.

So it was inevitable that people would start looking for something on Cruz. As it happens, he was born in Canada. His mother was a US citizen at the time of birth, so US law says he’s a citizen at birth, regardless of where he was born, even though his Cuban father was not. Cruz claims he didn’t know because he was told in his youth that he had to make some official affirmation to finalize his Canadian citizenship, and since he never bothered, he forgot all about it. It’s actually automatic, no need for him to do anything. Of course, it’s impossible to prove he’s lying.

The noise first started, really, back in March 2013, after he introduced Sarah Palin as keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). One of her main topics was gun control and the Obama* Administration’s press for more and stricter background checks in the aftermath of the mass murder of children at a school in Newtown, CT. At one point, she made quip about maybe we should have started checking his background first.

You can guess what happened next. Rick Ungar in Forbes saw support for Cruz as “Birther Hypocrisy”.

While Palin’s return to birtherism accomplished the intended laugh from the appreciative crowd, there was someone in the room who was likely not laughing.

That would be Senator Ted Cruz—the man who so glowingly introduced Ms. Palin and a man who clearly views himself as being on a populist track to the White House. He’s not alone in that regard as four percent of the votes registered in the CPAC straw poll were cast in support of Mr. Cruz, the man often referred to as the Republican Barack Obama.

Ironically, there can be little doubt that among those who expressed their support for a Cruz presidency at CPAC were attendees who continue to question the current president’s constitutional right to hold the office.

While there is no legal question about Cruz’s eligibility, it was quickly revealed that he was also a Canadian citizen, which is what happens when one is born there. So there was a call for him to renounce his Canadian citizenship, partially to make a point, and partially because many would consider it a little odd for a President to be a citizen of another country. As Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News explained in August:

What’s a birther to do? After years of haranguing Barack Obama as a non-citizen, what about Ted Cruz, who acknowledges he was born in Canada? He isn’t just a U.S. citizen. He has dual citizenship as both an American and a Canadian. Cruz says he’ll renounce his Canadian citizenship, but it’s not clear whether that’s enough to satisfy the birthers in his party who have long claimed at President Obama was born in Africa and therefore ineligible to be president. Obama was born in Hawaii. But most constitutional scholars agree that even if he had been born in a foreign country, he’s still a natural-born citizen under the terms of the Constitution because he is the child of an American parent.

Slater goes on to say that true Birthers claim – erroneously, of course – that nobody even born in a foreign country can be President. Cruz quickly promised to renounce his Canadian citizenship by the end of the year.

Steven Lubet in the Left-leaning Salon snarkily pointed out that there might be some complications in the process:

Only one of Ted’s parents was a citizen when he was born (his father is a Cuban émigré who did not take U.S. citizenship until 2005), and he therefore falls under a special section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that applies to “Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent.” Under that provision, Cruz only qualifies for American citizenship if his mother was “physically present” in the United States for 10 years prior to his birth, five of which had to be after she reached the age of 14. The only definitive way to prove Eleanor Cruz’s 10 years of physical presence would be with documents such as leases, school registration, utility bills or tax records.

Of course, we don’t know how rigorous the Canadians are about evidence of citizenship, but we do know that they will not be willing simply to take Ted’s word for it. Their form is very specific about requiring documentary proof, and that might be hard for Ted to come by. Could that be the reason for Cruz’s delayed renunciation? It would be pretty embarrassing to have his Application to Renounce Canadian Citizenship denied on a technicality.

In other words, in order to renounce Canadian citizenship, Cruz first has to go through a laborious record-collecting  process to prove his US citizenship. This was picked up in the Left-wing blogosphere and other outlets, and the Left thought they smelled ironic birther blood.  It’s now the new year, so naturally those who seek to undermine him are going to check up on it. It turns out he hasn’t officially done it yet, hence the noise this week. Why hasn’t he followed up on his promise? It should be a straightforward process. So are the Left-wing birthers on to something? Kelly McPartland from Canada’s National Post seems to think so.

Some immigration experts are wondering why it’s taken Mr. Cruz so long to complete the paperwork for his renunciation. “It’s not complicated at all,” said Stephen Green, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, according to the Associated Press.

Richard Kurland, a Vancouver-based immigration attorney, agreed: “Unless there’s a security issue that hasn’t been disclosed, unless there’s a mental health issue that hasn’t been disclosed, there’s no reason for anything other than a lickety-split process to occur.”

Hmmm. Well, something must be holding up the works, which is why Mr. Alexander should seize this opportunity to get involved. Ted Cruz is an American caught in the talons of Canadian citizenship. We need to set him free.

Yes, the Left-wing echo chambers like the Daily Kos are getting excited over this, but I’m having a hard time finding actual opinion pieces on it. Rather than seeing a lot of noise in the echo chambers which must be unscrambled, I’m seeing that almost everyone is pretty much reprinting the same Canadian Press/AP piece over and over, or quoting the relevant bits like McPartland has done. Wayne Slater in the Dallas Morning News is doing the same thing in his opinion piece. Is there anything in the Right-wing echo chamber about this? Not that I can find. I haven’t spent hours searching, and at this point it’s pretty clear that anything will be more speculation or a simple dismissal, repeating what’s already been said.

I suppose one way to look at this is that if the Right is silent, that means they’re afraid of the truth. Alternatively, they could simply feel that it’s already been proven that Cruz meets the definition of a natural born US citizen, especially since nobody is doubting that his mother didn’t live in the US for ten years before he was born, and don’t care about this. In other words, it’s exciting for the Left, who have only speculation to go on, and that’s about it. There’s nothing edifying either way other than the one supposition quoted by the AP. We’ll have to wait and see.

* I’m refraining from my usual formulation of “The Obamessiah” and the quasi-religious capital H in “Him”, etc., because I do that to make fun of the BBC’s reflexive worship and near religious devotion, and it’s not appropriate for what I’m trying to do here.

SHUTTING THE GATE…

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Aw, bless ’em. The BBC must have been so upset by the revelations from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicating that Obama did not have faith in the merit of the administration’s strategy, despite his decision to order a “surge” in troops to the region, that it is buried in the main news portal today! See if you can find it; Hint, it’s below a Schumacher story….

Comedians will always have the last laugh, Mr Gove

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Joan Bakewell tells us politicians won’t win against the comics….

Something the BBC knows and employs to great effect on its comedy programmes:

It is an unwise man who picks a quarrel with comics. They may not be right; indeed, you may be. But they have the jokes. And that means laughter and the warm regard of the public.

 

However…

Perhaps politics is now seen by the public as so discredited that it’s time to bring on the clowns. In which case, more than a few will be in for a shock. Running the country is no laughing matter.

 

 

‘Public Opinon Is Very Incendiary On This’…..Immigration

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The census clearly shows that the decade preceding 2011 saw the greatest rise in the population in England and Wales in any 10-year period since census taking began growing by 3.7 million or 7.1 per cent. Some 55 per cent of this growth is due to immigration, immigration that primarily occurred under New Labour’s watch.

 

Interesting that the BBC has filled the airwaves all day with talk of immigration….based on Nick Robinson’s programme ‘The Truth about immigration’. and filled the right wing newspapers with his interviews…..shouldn’t all these debates be after the programme has aired….or is it all just the usual BBC trick of having a ‘news’ item which is actually no more than an extended advert for a TV programme?

Curiously, despite Nicky Campbell admitting this morning that ‘Immigration is of massive consequence to people’...and that nearly 80% of people want it reduced,  the programme is not (yet) on the ‘Featured’ section of the iPlayer, nor is it in the ‘Most Popular’, in fact I had to use the search facility to bring the programme up at all.

 

Campbell’s ‘Your Call’ this morning was based upon Robinson’s programme….and wanted your views and experiences of immigration.

The accepted orthodoxy of the programme was that immigration was good….we were constantly told that ‘studies show that immigrants have a beneficial effect upon the economy’….there was no examination of this, it was just taken as fact.

‘As a fact economists tell us that overall immigration makes us richer.’

And yet that just isn’t true…..

Limit immigration, warns House of Lords

The number of immigrants entering Britain should be capped, an influential House of Lords committee has warned.

Its analysis concludes that record levels of immigration are bringing no economic benefit to the country.

The overall conclusion from existing evidence is that immigration has very small impacts on GDP per capita, whether these impacts are positive or negative. This conclusion is in line with findings of studies of the economic impacts of immigration in other countries including the US.”

 

Even those studies that do show a benefit admit that the ‘impact is small…..positive, albeit small’

So no, not ‘all studies show immigration is economically beneficial’

 

The BBC gives the impression by not balancing any such benefit against the downsides, that the benefits are large scale.

Campbell brought on an academic whom Campbell assured us was strictly neutral and unaligned…well, no…he had a very definite bias…pro immigration.

He told us that immigration benefits us by £45 billion per annum….but oddly didn’t mention any costs….so the figure of £45 billion is just pure propaganda.

When a caller suggested that immigrants undercut wages and cost jobs his response was….‘of course it’s difficult but we live in a global economy’.

 

There is a stark contrast between what the academics and the likes of Campbell tell us and what the ‘man on the street’ who has to live day to day with the effects of mass immigration is saying.

Again and again callers told us that they’d lost out, either with very much lower wages or no jobs at all…never mind housing and access to schools and the NHS and the myriad of other problems immigrants bring but which are ignored by the BBC and Co.

The BBC’s line has been a constant mantra on all its programmes and news bulletins today that immigration is economically beneficial and that to limit immigration will therefore damage the ‘already fragile economy’ as Sheila Fogarty claimed…but the flip side, the negative effects of immigration just aren’t mentioned….or indeed whether those ‘benefits’ actually exist.

 

The very minimal, if any, benefits of immigration, are being hyped by the BBC whilst completely ignoring the social impacts and the damage to quality of life….which is in contrast to the BBC’s normal stance in which it denounces capitalism, money making, materialism and consumption and promotes as the better alternative, quality of life and the environment…hug a hoodie and a polar bear.

Campbell’s tone when talking to the different callers was markedly different….the pro-immigration callers had a much warmer reception… Campbell telling one he looked forward to hearing from him again.

 

Campbell had some interesting comments of his own to make which might inform us of his own leanings.

When a caller spoke of the ‘indigenous population’ Campbell asked:

‘What do you mean by indigenous population, we’ve had waves of immigration for years and years now?’

In other words…Campbell thinks there is no such thing as an ‘indigenous population’.

At odds to that po-immigration campaigners always tell us that the ‘indigenous population’ has nothing to worry about….there is no mass immigration…numbers have been exaggerated…it’s only say 13% of the population who are immigrants.

So…that would mean 87% are ‘indigenous’ based on that figure.

 

He went on to say ‘Public opinion is very incendiary on this,’

So the near 80% of people who want immigration controlled and brought down have an ‘incendiary’ view in Campbell’s opinion?

 

 

Sheila Fogarty also based her programme on immigration.

Here once again the BBC repeated the mantra…‘all studies show immigration is economically beneficial’…without quantifying exactly how much…or indeed questioning that at all.

However the two ‘expert’ speakers who were brought on both stated that the economic benefits were ‘small’….but such qualifications never made it to the news bulletins.

Here is the blurb from the programme which gives us a insight into the BC’s own view…which you can always judge by what it highlights:

A BBC survey suggests fewer people than ever think immigration damages the economy.

 

Depends of course who you ask…..ask someone who has a cheap plumber or nanny and they might think it’s great, ask someone with no job or a job on wages forced ever lower by cheap imported labour and the answer may well be different…but again that all ignores the social impact and the quality of life issues.

Fogarty had on Jenny Phillimore, Professor of Migration and Superdiversity from the University of Birmingham, Institute for Research into Superdiversity…supposedly another of these ‘neutral’ academics…but she was far from that…more like a campaigner than a impartial observer.

The real migration scandal in the UK are the people forced to live without any recourse to public funds. Migrant women who leave violent husbands, and women who have been trafficked into the UK to work in the sex industry, face the additional trauma of destitution, says Jenny Phillimore

 

Should an academic also be a campaigner? Can you then trust their research?

There are plenty of social scientists, says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, who never produce research results at odds with their own worldview.

“You’re just supposed to tell your peers what you found,” says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “I don’t expect academics to fret about these matters.”

 

Phillimore though does ‘fret‘ about her findings…and works to provide a solution to the problems as she perceives them to be.

She is fairly arrogant and patronising.

Phillimore thinks the problem is not the immigrants, diversity is just something you need to get used to.

The problem is people in areas which haven’t experienced mass immigration before and where there isn’t much diversity now

They are clearly stuck in their ways with their old prejudices…they are far too used to a stable society….unlike those say in Brimingham where they all happily mix together and happily welcome new immigrants because they are such a diverse society already….allegedly…funny how it is always the inner cities that ‘burn’ when racial tensions kick off.

 

Even Phillimore admits herself that previous immigrant populations don’t like immigration:

 

In other words her claim that societies with lots of immigrants are more welcoming to yet more immigration is false…a lie in fact.

 

And what of a ‘stable society‘?…isn’t that a telling remark?…immigration brings instability then…the ‘superdiversity’ means no one has any identity, no one trusts anyone, no one knows anybody…and society breaks up…as studies show.

 

The downside of diversity

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

 

 

Phillimore goes on…the main problem is the ongoing negative rhetoric about immigration…..there are not anywhere near as many immigrants in this country as people think she claims.

In other words…shut up..you’re not allowed to talk about immigration.

 

Who then pops up on Fogarty’s show but one ‘Phil Mackie’ (around 13:10)…the BBC’s very pro-immigration journo…yes, another one to add to the long list.

Curiously his analysis was exactly the same as Jenny Phillimore’s…curious indeed…yes, it’s those ignorant rural hillbillies who are the racists….what they need is a few more black faces around to make them realise that they have nothing to fear and that a massive wave of immigrants is just the thing to improve their lives.

 

Here Phillimore admits there are problems…just that the solution is not to limit immigration but to ‘deal with it’…..keep the borders open but build more houses, schools hospitals, prisons, cough up more welfare payments, build more roads, concrete over the green and pleasant land….it’s not the number of immigrants that is the problem it’s the lack of help they receive from government and the attitudes of the ‘indigenous population’…should such a thing exist….

Time for change

In this era of superdiversity in the UK it is time for a housing and migration change of plan, says Jenny Phillimore

The census clearly shows that the decade preceding 2011 saw the greatest rise in the population in England and Wales in any 10-year period since census taking began growing by 3.7 million or 7.1 per cent. Some 55 per cent of this growth is due to immigration, immigration that primarily occurred under New Labour’s watch.

There is evidence that in some areas heavy concentrations of new migrants have restricted the availability of entry level housing, led to the development of unregulated HMOs, and pushed rents and house prices up. It is also clear that some landlords have been quick to cash-in on migrant housing demand by inflating rents, overcrowding properties, and neglecting fire safety and routine maintenance.

Some rural areas have also seen extensive changes. Rural Lincolnshire has seen some of the largest rises in the numbers of migrants of all of the UK with increases outstripping those in London and other cities. Again these increases do impact on house prices while lack of housing availability contributes to an explosion in the use of non-standard accommodation with migrants sometimes living and working in sheds and greenhouses or crammed into caravans and mobile homes. Migrants are often the victims of these problems rather than the cause but the net result is increased population density and a deteriorating environment and housing stock.

Much of the emphasis [from politicians] is upon greater controls and limits, strong action against ‘illegal’ migration and short and long-term action on intra-EU migration – the latter a clear attempt to pander to UKIP voters.Cooper fails to acknowledge that not only has the UK already become a country of immigration but, like the rest of the EU, we have entered an era of superdiversity where we have already witnessed unprecedented global movement and increase in diversity.

Movement and change are the new norms.  While we might want to slow these movements down by strengthening our borders we cannot turn back the clock.