A nasty little group playing an old, and unwelcome, trick

In an illuminating aside during an interview with The Independent, Dominic Cummings, the Conservative Party's director of strategy, remarked that it would be better all round for the forces of Euroscepticism if the Tories had as little as possible to do with the anti-euro campaign. It is tempting to wonder if the same sort of idea might have been going through the minds of those who set up Migration Watch UK. In the current climate of disillusionment about politicians, it is so much more credible for this group to describe itself as "a newly established, independent think tank that has no links to any political party". Better still to have it headed by Sir Andrew Green, a respectable-sounding ex-diplomat.

Migration Watch is, of course, no think tank, but a pressure group with a distinctly unpleasant agenda. It openly declares: "We start from the belief that the scale of net inward migration is now so great as to be contrary to the interests of all sections of our community." So, to that extent at least, we know where this newly formed outfit is coming from. Yet far from providing a fresh perspective on the issues surrounding immigration, we find instead that it is playing the numbers game, a very old trick. It was exactly this sort of scaremongering tactic that was enthusiastically deployed by the far right in the 1960s and 1970s to make people apprehensive and hostile about immigration from the Commonwealth. Much harm was done as a result of its handiwork.

The technique was the same then as now: tendentious projections and the deliberate citing of the vast populations of countries such as India to frighten people and wreck any rational debate. It is astonishing, however, in this day and age that supposedly responsible sections of the broadcast and print media promote such obvious trickery in an uncritical manner.

Most offensive of all is the choice of name, a grotesque echo of such groups as Human Rights Watch, with the implication that it is keeping a watch on ministers who sneakily disguise the true extent of immigration. Migration Watch UK is a nasty little outfit, and its duplicitous research should be treated with the gravest suspicion. The group deserves to fail; sadly, in the current climate, it will continue to be given the oxygen of publicity.