I Forgot To Mention ...

That along with the new records for abortion, HIV and injecting drugs, we've got record immigration. It also appears that the 'independent' government Office Of National Statistics has been timing its releases of information to minimise the political fallout - and that the Home Office has set up a rebuttal unit, paid for by the taxpayer, to combat the independent immigration monitoring organisation Migrationwatch. Apparently the BBC, Immigration Advisory Service and the other 20-odd publicly-funded immigration lobby groups just aren't doing a good enough job.

In Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green's Times piece he makes a telling point.

"The Government’s policy has been described as “talk tough and let them all in”. They will deny it of course but, as politicians, they cannot be oblivious of the fact that immigrants vote overwhelmingly Labour. They will deny this, of course, but they must know that, in 1997, 83 per cent of black and Asian votes went to Labour."

Dame Shirley Porter was fined squillions of pounds and fled the country after it was disclosed that she tried to get a few dozen more Tory voters into council houses in some Westminster wards. Naughty girl. Yet it's apparently OK to import a few million extra Labour voters, find them housing, then ask why the Tories can't win in the cities any more.

There are a couple of worrying codas to the record abortion and HIV statistics as well. The first is that, following Joanna Jepson's success in gaining a review of the decision not to prosecute doctors who killed a baby because it had a cleft palate, the Government abortion statistics have dropped the breakdown of late-term abortions by type of foetal disability. This seems to be a purely political move designed to suppress the information which enabled Ms Jepson to take legal action. The second is that HIV figures are rising in the regions as a direct result of the government's dispersal of asylum seekers.

If the Tories, with their manipulation of unemployment statistics in the 1980s, can be said to have started the corruption and politicisation of independent civil servants, Labour have taken the policy to new depths. As whistleblower Steve Moxon said of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate "we were an extension of the government’s efforts to supply spurious information to the Office for National Statistics (to downplay the immigration problem)."

Crime, asylum, immigration, available beds, waiting lists - you name it, they'll fiddle it. The Soviet Union may be dead, but its statistical techniques live on. And at least the Soviets did actually make a few tractors.