Damian Green is shadow immigration minister and responds here to the attempt by Phil Woolas, the minister he shadows, to prevent publication of the Office for National Statistics' immigration figures.
The main focus of interest in the latest immigration figures was the fact that one in nine of those in the UK were not born here. And the response of the Immigration Minister? He is berating the Office for National Statistics for revealing the figure! There are times when you cannot avoid the journalistic cliché, “you couldn’t make it up.”
Ministers are puzzled why the public does not believe any of their rhetoric about the immigration system becoming more efficient.
Let me help them. One big reason why the public does not believe “good news” about immigration is that even before Phil Woolas started bullying the ONS he and his colleagues had an active policy of not allowing difficult questions to be answered.
To illustrate just how bad things are I have been looking at the answers to my own Parliamentary Questions to Ministers over the past few months. Donald Rumsfeld famously distinguished between known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Jacqui Smith and her team have created a whole new category; unknown should-be-knowns.
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