More moaning - episode 1

A few days ago I had a moan (at reference 1) about the standard of debate about our health service. Today it is the turn of all those migrants making a living out of our benefit system. Episode 1 as the matter is a complicated one to which I ought to return when better informed than I am now.

My first thought is a fairly crude one. Rich people like migrants because cheap migrant labour in their factories makes for good profits. Cheap migrant help around the home is useful too. Poor people don't like migrants because they pull wages down. So where does that leave the politicians who count rich people among their friends but who depend on poor people for their votes?

My second thought is that for all the sound and fury in the press and from Leader David, there is very little in the way of numbers. How much benefit are the migrants and refugees claiming? How much tax do they pay? What proportion of the health and care industry workforce is migrant or refugee? How much benefit is being claimed elsewhere by UK nationals?

So this morning I take a quick look at google, to find, as I should have guessed, that the statistics are tricky and abusable - with there having been quite a row last November about what was perceived as inappropriate use of statistics by Leader David. Part of the trouble seems to be that the statistics about migrant benefit are actually statistics about households claiming benefit which contain at least one person who was not a  national at the time they acquired their National Insurance number, statistics which could well the the subject of many technical notes.

But I did turn up what looked to be solid (if not very penetrable) statistics from the House of Commons, and to these I shall now turn. See reference 2 if you want to have a go yourself. Illustrated above.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/morning-moan.html.

Reference 2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/SN06955.pdf.