While he may have overstated his case, it looks to me like Woolas has a point. From the massed spreadsheets, someone at the ONS chose to extract a measure of immigration that is rising, and highlight that as the first sentence of the press release. Do what 99% of journalists would never do and flip over the page, and you will find the caveats about the headline figure (‘number of peaks and troughs within a time series’, ‘care should be taken when interpreting changes over time’), as well as several other measures that are falling.

I don’t see how spinning the figures that way is not ‘playing politics’.

When politicians spin, you can account for the fact they will be spinning it in predictable ways, and dig down to the real story. When some anonymous bureaucrat does it, it is much more insidious, as you can’t know what their agenda is. Are they an Immigration Watch mole, a free marketeer, a trade unionist, a Guardianista, or what? Are they reluctantly letting facts overcome their prejudgement, or selecting the facts that confirm it? Is the whole thing some inter-agency turf war?

(5) John H – Of course, I wouldn’t bash a piece of private correspondence up on the website. He was responding to my request for a public comment. Its his judgment about what he wants to say.

I wrote to Woolas thanking him for taking part in a Fabian seminar, sending him a copy of my letter to Dacre and wrote “This has had very good play around the blogosphere … Damian Green went so far as to issue a short statement to ConservativeHome last night … Given that, the Fabians and the Liberal Conspiracy website (where I published this) thought we should also offer you the chance to say something about what you think we should take from these confusions about immigration and citizenship”.

(2) Newmania – “Sunder’s name spooked him”. Please rethink such comments. They are offensive. As the MP for Oldham, he has met Asian people. He does not have to infer my views on immigration from my name (and nor should you) because I am perfectly capable of telling him what they are. So, for example, are the IPPR, who also took part in our recent seminar: that isn’t based on the ethnic origin of their staff either.

Some idiot Tory MP gave a nasty comment to the quote, as did those we’re-not-racist-we’re-just-scared-of-brown-people idiots from MigrationWatch. No big deal to be honest. Though, its true that Woolas is being dishonest about this all, its relatively a lesser crime than the amount of twisting and bullshitting the Daily Mail is doing.

I don’t see Jacqui Smith sacking anyone – she has her own issues.

Only in the Viz sense.