Daily Mail: “Two passports a minute given to foreigners”
“Two passports a minute are given to foreigners as 1.5m issued since Labour elected” read a Daily Mail headline yesterday, before deluging the reader with an article full of lots of scary looking numbers with plenty of zeroes… but no where could I find any further elaboration on that two a minute claim.
Fortunately, No Borders Brighton has saved me the effort of doing the mathematics myself…
For a start, roughly 6,619,680 minutes have elapsed since the Labour government were elected on 1 May 1997 (counting up to 1 January 2010, as the ONS statistics that the article is based upon relate to figures for last year). So, 2 passports a minute would mean 13,239,360 passports in total?!? Something wrong there
Then continues to explore almost every possible meaning that could’ve been squeezed from that statement – none of which make the claim plausible.
The Daily Mail seem to have simply made that up.
How do they get away with it?
