Less than a week after Rishi Sunak delivered a speech railing against the threat to democracy, a government department has revealed it no longer publishes significant data relating to immigration, which is easily the most salient topic in British politics.
Robert Bates, the research director at the Centre for Migration Control (CfMC) think tank, told The European Conservative that voters have been lied to about immigration “for years” and that a proper cost-benefit analysis is “urgently” needed to “greatly illuminate the debate.”
HMRC, the government department responsible for collecting taxes, said on Monday that it has stopped publishing data on the amount of tax paid broken down by nationality, as well as data on child benefit claims, among others. It revealed this information in an email to Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, responding to a request sent at the beginning of December.
The government body said publication of the data, which O’Brien described as essential “to have a more sensible conversation about migration,” was “discontinued” following an internal consultation.
O’Brien has also criticised the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over its decision to stop publishing data on welfare claims by nationality, adding:
I have not succeeded in finding out which minister (if any) signed off this data deletion.
Having stripped Britons of the right to consider these statistics for themselves, at a time when immigration issues regularly make it to the front pages of the newspapers, the departments have forced voters to instead take the word of organisations such as the government-established Office for Budget Responsibility. Robert Bates said these “use modelling riddled with errors and regularly overstate the economic benefits of huge migration.”
He told The European Conservative:
It’s been apparent for years that the British public are not being told the truth about mass migration.
The UK government urgently needs to produce a cost-benefit analysis of migration along the lines of that which was recently produced in the Netherlands. This would greatly illuminate the debate and allow for policymakers to make more informed decisions that they presently seems capable of forming.
The contrast between this hiding of data and the prime minister’s bashing of the threat to democracy has not gone unnoticed. Writer and author Mary Harrington described it as “rich of Sunak to complain about ‘extremists’ in the general public ‘undermining democracy,’ when his own government now refuses to publish data that might show the failure of a policy they’re ideologically committed to against the electorate’s repeatedly expressed wishes.”
Just last month, the CfMC produced a report claiming that jobless legal migrants have cost the British taxpayer almost £24 billion (€28 billion) in four years—a strong blow to the argument that mass immigration is good for the economy.
There are as yet no signs that the government will force either HMRC or the DWP to return to former, more open practices.
