Remainers have blindly turned cherry-picked statistics into gods

Contrary to the wilder corners of the internet, there is no conspiracy to downplay the true scale of immigration to Britain. But net migration statistics – the difference between immigration and emigration – might be seen as a bit of a trick on the public. If the entire population decided to leave Britain one year and the same number of new people arrived, net migration would be recorded as zero. Obviously this is an extreme example, and most of us can grasp what is meant by “net”, but in general it is useful for politicians to be able to imply that the number of newcomers each year is lower rather than higher.

That is if the figure is accurate. Last week, the Office for National Statistics admitted it had been getting its sums wrong, overestimating net non-EU migration while underestimating the EU kind. It is working on an alternative calculation, but the migration debate has been fixated on a number that was, frankly, incorrect.

I have a great deal of respect for statisticians, but I despair at the role statistics have come to play in politics. There is a tendency to attribute to them godlike powers, the ability to determine definitively that one point of view is right while another is an ignorant falsehood. Scepticism about their accuracy, or relevance, is disappearing amid a pseudoscientific belief that political questions can be answered like mathematical equations. Plucked from databases in order to

buttress an individual’s prejudices, the devotion to data is almost religious, particularly among liberal Remainers.

Even when the statistics are not unreliable or later revised (like another recent big statistical change: the ONS finding that the economy is £26 billion bigger than previously thought), this is a problem. How often do fans of “killer stats” consider that there might be an alternative interpretation to factoids they have unearthed? One of my favourite recent examples was a study showing that 81 per cent of the mackerel we fish is exported but 83 per cent of the cod we eat is imported. This was taken by ultra-Remainers as a neat illustration of how ludicrous it would be to leave the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Did they think that an equally valid interpretation was that we should just eat less cod and more mackerel? Were they humble enough to admit they didn’t know whether the CFP might encourage unbalanced production? Of course not.

Then there is the way that numbers can give an excuse for one side of an argument not to bother understanding the other. Philip Hammond likes to blather that “nobody voted to be poorer”, while waving about some analysis of the impact of a no-deal Brexit, as if he has destroyed the case for a clean break. Yet some people wouldn’t mind being poorer, so long as they could regain their country’s independence. And which number should we pay attention to anyway? Cutting taxes could increase both inequality and economic growth. Your judgment on the rightness of doing so is, therefore, a principled one.

And that is as it should be. We would be worse off without statistics, but they should be put in their proper place, informing debate not leading it.

How often do fans of ‘killer stats’ consider that there might be an alternative way to interpret the factoids they have unearthed?