English: Enoch Powell (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is an interesting piece of pantomime from the Daily Telegraph, courtesy of Dr. Alf, but to get the full picture we have to go back to the days of the late Enoch Powell and the time preceding his “Rivers of Blood” speech which is the reason given for his sacking by the then Prime Minister Edward Heath, now deceased.

During this period, the Home Office produced its own figures on immigration which Enoch Powell, a fine scholar and intellectually rigorous man, felt were bogus.
Powell set about drilling into the figures with characteristic efficiency and discovered that the Home Office had been deliberately undercounting the number of people from the Commonwealth being allowed into the country by as much as 40,000 people a year, a huge figure for those more innocent times.

Powell tried to raise the matter time and time again but the Home Office was having none of it, using a combination of bland denials, obfuscation, and civil servant speak to deflect Powell’s enquiries.

Powell, who was very right-wing, “Empire Loyalist ” and in modern terms blatantly racist, then sought to make a political statement which the working classes (we had them then),understood and which would give Ted Heath and his brand of Conservatism a punch on the nose. He made the “Rivers of Blood ” speech and was promptly sacked by Ted Heath, whilst the BBC and the press almost to a man gave this notorious speech as the reason for his firing. Ted Heath went further and said that he “Only wanted people of quality in his Government” and dismissed the working class crowds of people who bayed” Enoch” in their marches as bigots and racists until matters calmed down.

Powell never again held political office and was given the kiss of death by the establishment which was to never again be allowed to speak on the radio programme “Any Questions” chaired by then-then apparatchik of the day, the late Freddie Grisewood.

The Home Office which was not “fit for purpose” even then, carried on doing what it had been doing before, so Powell had to go back to studying history and put what he had discovered about the Home Office gerrymandering the immigration figures into a slim book which was given very little publicity which I vaguely remember as “Still to Decide”.

Today, things are done on a much bigger scale and the figures are independently compiled by the Office of National Statistics who in fairness try to do the best with what they are given but are hopelessly out of date.

To begin with, there are 19 million spare NI numbers which can be bought in downmarket pubs from criminals and in certain religious establishments. Illegal migrants use these to claim benefits, create new identities and work all the same time. This is why the ONS can never reconcile the unemployment figures with the number of people in work allowing the Government to be “perplexed”.

By 2014, there were 7 million illegal immigrants based on the amount of food sold in supermarkets which exceed by a wide margin what the official population could possibly eat or consume.

Then we get the figures for notes and coins in circulation and our third reference point is school admissions of undocumented children by undocumented parents who are not and never have been on the voters roll.

2 months ago 693,000 new NI numbers were officially issued (not from the 19 million spare numbers) but from the allocatable numbers, for migrant workers, yet the ONS figures showed that only 260 ,000 migrants had entered the UK. Dr Alf would probably call this a matter of “irregular statistical analysis” and if unleashed on the figures could quickly make sense of them, especially given his insights from his time as CFO at ONS. Sadly, there is little prospect of the Home Office enticing him out of his Cypriot lair to undertake this vital piece of interim management and even less chance of the ONS providing us with accurate migration data ahead of the Referendum.

John Gelmini