Politics

Prospect online this week

October 31, 2007
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In this week's web-exclusives, the director of Civitas, David G Green, explores the evidence in favour of education vouchers and argues that they offer the government a way of combining its egalitarian ideals with pragmatism. And Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, explains why the cry "back to the caliphate" has gained momentum in the Muslim world—and why organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir are deluded in thinking it is anything other than a wishful exercise in anachronism.

Also, as controversy over immigration statistics continues to resound throughout the national press, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot's special report in Prospect's current issue—which describes how immigration statistics are put together by the ONS—is looking increasingly salient. Did you know that inward migration to Scotland in 2004 was estimated from about 100 contacts? Or that the sample of those questioned in order to calculate UK immigration constitutes only around 0.2 per cent of total border traffic, only around 1 per cent of whom—1 in 50,000—are migrants?

As Blastland and Dilnot point out, problems with the numbers are almost always a matter of difficulty rather than conspiracy. But just trying telling that to politicians with the scent of blood in their nostrils…