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Is anti-Semitism widespread in the UK?
00:27:56
Are the majority of hate crimes in the UK directed against Jewish people? Plus: who 1%...
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A
Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC, statistically proven to be the very best numbers program around. Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which is to numeracy what the coffee bean is to cafe culture. In today's program, who are the 1%? Has the house of Commons sold out to the private healthcare industry? And is there a serial killer on the loose?
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B
In Manchester, there were young men going missing and they were being found dead in canals.
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A
Some people think so. But first owl eared listeners cocked their heads at Women's Hour last Friday as the journalist Angela Epstein made this claim during a discussion about anti Semitism.
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C
Yes, I accept that, you know, proportionally,
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D
maybe there are fewer attacks compared to other things that go on, but still,
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95% of hate crimes in this country
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are against Jewish people.
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Can this be true? Asked a number of emails that winged their way into our inbox via more or lessbc.co.uk. and Ruth Alexander's here. Hello, Ruth.
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D
Hello.
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A
You have been hot on the heels of this number.
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D
I have.
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A
95% of hate crimes in the country are against Jewish people.
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D
No, this number's actually from the Mayor of London's office and they in turn got the number from the Metropolitan Police in the capital. So we should be clear right from the start, we, we're talking about London and we don't have that level of detail for the UK anyway.
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A
Understood. So with apologies to the rest of the country, let's talk about London because that's where we have the numbers. Is it true then that 95% of hate crimes in London are against Jewish people?
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D
No. According to the Metropolitan Police, there were nearly 13,000 hate crimes in London last year. 358 of them were anti Semitic.
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A
That's not 95%, actually, that's not even 5%. So how could the number be so totally wrong?
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D
Well, the first thing to understand is that this number refers only to faith hate crimes and the number of faith hate crimes in July following conflict in Gaza in that month. And looking only at faith hate crimes, 95% of them were anti Semitic, the mayor's office said, the police said. But neither of them can provide us with a breakdown of the number. And we just don't think it can add up. Now, another couple of important points I've picked up along the way. Over the entire year, there were nearly twice as many Islamophobic hate crimes as anti Semitic ones. And when we looked at this story last summer, experts told us that spikes in antisemitic behavior triggered by international events like the Gaza conflict tend to be temporary.
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A
And I wonder what's actually meant by a hate crime.
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D
Any crime, a burglary, an assault, criminal damage could be flagged as a hate crime if it appears to have some kind of hateful motivation. Now the Community Security Trust tells me that typical antisemitic hate crimes are verbal or written abuse and threats. So being shouted at in the street, nasty letters and messages on social media. Thankfully, cases of extreme violence are rare, but incidents of assault and property damage account for about a fifth of cases.
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A
And what's the trend on hate crimes in general?
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D
Well, they've all risen over the past year against the background of falling crime. So for example, homophobic hate crimes are up more than a third over the past year to almost 1500. It's hard to know how much of that is a real trend and how much is down to better reporting. But anti Semitic hate crimes do seem to be up very sharply. They've more than doubled over the past year. But again, the Gaza conflict will be a big factor here.
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A
And just to be clear, all those numbers, they're London numbers?
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D
They are. We don't have national figures, although I'm told by people who look into this in great detail that the national trend is similar about a doubling. And there'll be a report out in a couple of weeks time which will show that.
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A
Now that then might explain why some people are getting worried about what they see as a new trend towards antisemitism. And last summer a grassroots movement arose in the UK called the Campaign Against Antisemitism. They're also known as the caa and they think that there's something deeper going on and they've been making headlines.
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Antisemitism makes Jews question their Future.
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In the UK, that was the Channel 4 news website and there were many headlines like it, sparked by two surveys from the CAA. One was conducted by YouGov and asked British people what they thought of Jewish people. The other was run directly by the CAA and it asked Jewish people about anti Semitism. I've been speaking to the chairman of the Campaign Against Anti Semitism, Gideon Falter.
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The results were a bit of a wake up call. The survey of the Jewish people in Britain came back with some pretty astounding results. 45% of British Jews fear that they may not have a long term future here. These are pretty shocking figures. When we looked at the British public, what that found was that 45% of the British public hold at least one antisemitic view. That doesn't mean that 45% of the British public are anti Semites. What it means is that they have learned or picked up an anti Semitic stereotype.
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Some examples of the statements that were put to Jews chase money more than other British people. Jews loyalty to Israel makes them less loyal to Britain than other British people. Now, meanwhile, the British Jews who were surveyed by the CAA were clearly very worried about anti Semitism. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was shocked.
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I never thought I would see the
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day when members of the Jewish community in the United Kingdom would say that
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they were fearful of remaining here in the United Kingdom.
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But not everyone is convinced, not least the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Here's its Executive Director, Jonathan Boyd, on why he thinks the CAA and all the journalists who wrote the story up were wrong to say that the survey reflected the views of Britain's Jewish population.
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F
Typically, if you were surveying a population, you'd want to draw from a list of people. One of the challenges with Jews is that there's no comprehensive list of dues, so you can't use random probability sampling in the case of Jews. So you have to approach it in a different way. What they've done is they have distributed the questionnaire using some organizational list and they've used Facebook. So it's really not clear who the survey has reached and into what pockets of the community they've reached. But then the second thing that we typically do in a survey of dues is having got the responses in, we would then cross reference them with census data. Now, they've actually done that, but the only census data they've used is geographical data, and that's insufficient. You know, Jews deviate from British population norms in terms of geography, in terms of age, in terms of socioeconomics, in terms of education. And if you want to try to build something approaching a representative sample, you really have to take into consideration all of those different factors. There's simply no way to know whether this is representative or not. But they haven't done some key and fairly basic parts of the process.
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I put this to Gideon Folter of the caa. Now, he emphasised the wide range of Jewish groups and congregations that they contacted about the survey. But wasn't there a risk that people who responded to a survey from a group called the Campaign Against Antisemitism would be the people who were particularly worried about antisemitism?
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I've already said how. We went out to everybody. Once we sat down to analyze the results, we checked that the results that had come in accurately reflected the geographic distribution of Jewish people all over the uk. The answers that we got through are very much representative of Jewish feeling. And they also.
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Well, sorry to interrupt, but that tells us they're geographically representative. You know, you managed to get the opinion of Jews in Birmingham and Jews in Glasgow and Jews in London and so on. You managed to reflect that.
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Absolutely.
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But it. I'm sorry to bang on about this, but it is important. It doesn't tell us whether the people who responded to the survey were people who were particularly concerned about anti Semitism versus the people who didn't respond to the survey. That's the thing we don't know.
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I don't think you can really say that looking at the data, because the data has a wide variety of opinions expressed.
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But according to Jonathan Boyd, there's another problem with the survey and with the survey of British people that the CAA commissioned from YouGov. Both of them were overly negative in their questioning. He also thinks the way that British attitudes were presented was too negative. For example, the CAA discovered that 10% of British people would be unhappy if a family member married a Jewish person. Well, another way to look at that is that 90% of people would be happy if a family member married a Jewish person. So here's Jonathan Boyd's more positive reading of the results.
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Almost half believe one of seven statements to be true. That means that a considerable proportion, it's 74%, I think, by my calculations, believe that six or seven of the seven statements to be untrue. And 83%, by my calculations, again, believe that five or more of the statements are untrue. And 89% believe that more than half of the statements are untrue. So actually, the real finding here, if you're looking at this objectively, is that the vast majority of British adults, when presented with a series of anti Semitic stereotypes, reject them.
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So 74% of respondents disagreed with all but two of the antisemitic statements. Two of those anti Semitic statements could have been Jews chase money more than other British people and Jews talk too much about the Holocaust in order to get sympathy. I wouldn't be particularly happy that 25% of the people still agreed with that. I don't think there's a positive spin that one can put on on a quarter of British people agreeing with statements like that.
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And whatever the questions about the research, Jonathan Boyd agrees that there's no reason to be complacent.
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There's a real issue out there at the moment. I'm absolutely certain Jews across the Jewish community are rattled by what they've seen happening in Paris, not just a couple of weeks ago, but actually in France and in Belgium over the course of the last few years. There's a real threat from Islamist extremism that's absolutely apparent. And in the context of that situation, it's really critical that accurate data are gathered about the issues around that. The government need accurate data to set policy. The legal profession generally needs accurate data in order to determine what to do about discrimination. The security services need accurate data in order to determine what level of security is required. Jewish community leaders need accurate data in order to advise members of the community what is an appropriate response or not. And frankly, Jews generally need accurate data in order to determine what sort of decisions they need to make for themselves and their families.
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Jonathan Boyd of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and before him, Gideon Folter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism. The more or less Inbox was pinging away this week about Oxfam's claim that soon the richest 1% of the world's pop will own more than everyone else put together. Didn't we debunk that claim last week? Loyal listeners wanted to know, or should I say not entirely loyal listeners? Because last week we actually trashed a rather different claim that the 85 richest people owned more than everyone else put together. And they don't. Not even close. Now. That claim was made by a trailer for a BBC2 programme which had totally mangled an earlier statistic from Oxfam. Confused? Well, you're not the only one. But we wanted to turn to a slightly different question. Who's in this mysterious 1%? The people who collectively own almost half the assets on the planet. I wanted to meet some of the 1%, so I asked my producer Ruth Alexander to book me a jet setting tour of opulent penthouses and private Caribbean islands and even secret lairs deep in the heart of dormant volcanoes. But it turns out that no such tour is necessary. Those people who are in the wealthiest 1% of the world's population, there are 2.9 million of them in the UK alone. That's according to Credit Suisse, which is, after all, the original source of the research that has fuelled Oxfam's headline grabbing claims. The UK's 2.9 million is almost twice as many as in China, which has 1.6 million. It's more than in Germany, which has 2.6 million, and fewer than in France, which has 3.5 million. As a rough rule of thumb, any medium sized rich country has at least a million people in the 1%. The USA has 18 million, and there are 47 million 1 percenters across the world. 1% of the world's adult population, naturally enough. To get into the top 1%, you need $800,000. According to credit Suisse, that's a bit more than half a million pounds, so no trips to a volcanic island are necessary. Anyone who has a family house in Islington and has paid off a chunk of the mortgage is probably in the club. In case you're thinking that half a million pounds doesn't sound like that much money as an entry ticket to the global plutocratic elite. Well, one of the lessons in that is that most people in the world own a lot less than we might wish. You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. The health of the National Health Service itself is sure to be one of the biggest issues in the forthcoming election. We dealt with the A and E crisis a couple of weeks ago, but for many, the big underlying issue is the new NHS structure introduced by the coalition in the 2012 NHS reform bill. This changed the way that services are commissioned in the NHS and opened the way for the increased use of private sector suppliers. Now, although this kind of outsourcing started under the last Labour government, the coalition has gone further. And what's more, the MPs who voted for the bill have been accused of doing so because it would make them more money. Last week, the British Medical Journal published an article by the doctor and writer Max Pemberton. He wrote that the fact that more than 200 of the MPs voting on the 2012 NHS reform had recent or current financial connections to private health care is an embarrassment to democracy. Well, 200 MPs, that's nearly enough to pass a bill all by itself. Our editor, Richard Varden and reporter Keith Moore have been looking at this figure. That's 100 MPs for each of you. Is it true, Keith?
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I got in touch with Max and he told me that the bmj, due to an editing error, had actually changed his text from 200 parliamentarians to 200 MPs.
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Now, that's simpler, of course, but unfortunately, it's wrong. Parliamentarians is a broader category. It includes members of the House of Lords. But even if you include Lords, that's an awful lot of financial connections to private healthcare, which could be worrying if it's true.
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So Max pointed me to a website called Social Investigations. This website describes itself as carrying out in depth investigations on matters of public interest. Although the main Focus is this question of health care and political connections to the private sector.
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OK, so social investigations produce the number 200.
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Exactly. The website lists 228 MPs, or Lords with financial connections to private healthcare, and goes into detail about what those connections
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are, which lets us take a look at all the details. So here's an example. Baroness Virginia Bottomley is a director of bupa, the private healthcare provider. She voted for the bill. It's a clear connection.
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Let's look at Lord Mandelson. He's a senior advisor at Lazard Limited, an international advisory investment bank. Lazard does do business with healthcare providers around the world. So is Peter Mandelson financially connected to the private healthcare industry?
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Um, Sort of. I'm going to say. I'm going to say yes, but very indirectly. It does seem a bit tenuous.
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They get a lot more tenuous than that. Take the mp, Sean Woodward. He is listed as having shares in Sainsbury's, who run pharmacies and provide food for the nhs.
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Then there's Lord Shepherd. He has shares in Diageo. They make my favourite drink, Guinness Bailey's.
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Look, Diageo make booze. It's not exactly healthcare, is it?
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Diageo have been awarded money to teach midwives in England and Wales on the dangers of alcohol.
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That's just weird. But I can't quite believe that Lord Sheppard's vote was influenced by the thought of the sweet, sweet maternity tuition cash he was going to rake in.
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Yes, some of these examples are a bit shaky and some aren't. This is a list of 228 parliamentarians and it's using a very broad definition of what a financial connection is. A lot of the parliamentarians have connections to some kind of private business, but whether it's really relevant to healthcare is another question.
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We went through the list and divided the connections into direct, indirect and tenuous. And about 20 to 30 have direct connections, about 110 have indirect connections and just under 80 have tenuous connections. It's a totally subjective judgment, but it does give you a sense.
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Two of the people you mentioned were Peter Mandelson and Sean Woodward. Now, they're Labour politicians, Surely they didn't vote for the bill, Richard?
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Yes, that's the other important point. The implication is that these 228 parliamentarians all voted for the bill. We looked at the final reading and more than half of them did not vote for the bill. 28 of them voted against it.
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OK, so what do social investigations say to these criticisms?
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Well, it was actually quite Hard to track them down. We sent a couple of emails and finally we got a response. But not from Social Investigations, but actually from the public sector union, Unite.
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What, are they behind the research?
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No, the man who did the research, though Andrew Robertson, now works for them. But Unite wouldn't put him up for an interview. They wanted to talk about a brand new list they had. Only Coalition MPs are on it, though, not Lords.
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OK, well, perhaps we'll do another programme sometime about parliamentarians with financial connections to Unite. Keith, Richard, thank you. There's been a chill in the air over Manchester in the past weeks. Startling death counts fill the newspapers. Social media sites are abuzz with rumours of the pusher, the serial killer who stalks the city's canalside paths, waiting for a chance to drown the unwary.
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Maybe there were young men going missing across Manchester and they were being found dead in canals. I mean, this is obviously quite an alarming thing to hear.
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That's Scott Hesketh. He's crime editor of the Star on Sunday newspaper. He'd been reading the online speculation about these death theories, that they couldn't just be accidental, so he decided to investigate.
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I put in a Freedom of Information request to Greater Manchester Police, asking how many bodies had been found within this particular time frame. I think it was 2008 to November 2014 in waterways.
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And what did they. What did they say?
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I mean, the figures were pretty alarming, to be honest. 60 bodies in six years and many of them young men. So these were pretty startling figures when you consider it's quite a small area.
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But are they startling figures? Well, our reporter Hannah Moore's here. Hello, Hannah.
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Hello.
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And you've been looking into this?
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Yes. Scott approached some experts, including Professor Craig Jackson, the head of psychology at Birmingham City University. And it's Professor Jackson's claim that's got everyone talking?
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Yes.
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He said it's extremely unlikely that such an alarming number of bodies found in the canals is the result of accidents or suicides.
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And the fact that a few were found in water on Canal Street, Manchester's gay village, and various other reasons leads him to believe that a murderer may be targeting gay men. Scott's article quotes other experts backing up Professor Jackson's theory, like this one here, research scientist Sukie Dean.
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Yes, I contacted Suki. I was a bit confused, you see, because on her website and Twitter account, she describes herself as a professional photographer.
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There are rather more artful photographs of beautiful models on it than on the typical research scientist website. Suki seems to have just an undergraduate degree in science.
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Anyway, she's not claiming any expertise in this. Her area of research is political psychology. She just wrote about the canal killer on the blogging platform Tumblr, and Scott took her comments from there.
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Well, moving back to Professor Jackson of Birmingham City University, he's quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying that statistically speaking,
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the number of bodies is much, much
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higher than you would expect of one waterway.
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But is that true? How many people would we expect to die in Manchester's waterways if there weren't a serial killer on the loose?
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These numbers are from all of Greater Manchester's waterways, 175 miles of them, and there are 2.6 million people in Greater Manchester.
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Across the country, the National Water Safety Forum collects information on how many people die in the UK's waterways each year.
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Over the past five years, almost 1,500 people have died in either a canal, well harbour, lake or river. Every death is a tragedy, of course, but most of these deaths were not murders. And the share of those deaths that you'd expect in Greater Manchester, given its population, it's 61.
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Greater Manchester Police have recorded 60 canal deaths in six and a half years. So that, at first glance, is less than you'd expect. But actually, the police figures have tried to exclude deaths in rivers and lakes, so. Well, maybe Greater Manchester really is suffering from a suspiciously high number of canal deaths, but maybe not. After all, people do get drunk and accidents can happen. I went back to Scott Hesketh. My answer to your question, could they all be accidents?
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Is.
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Well, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think they can't be.
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But for 60 bodies to be found in canals alone, I mean, you know,
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I mean, sadly, people do fall into waterways, people do get into trouble, they go swimming, and presumably some of them are young men, because young men like to do dangerous things. So I'm not saying that, you know, that we can rule out foul play. I'm just saying purely on the basis of the numbers.
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Yeah, no, I hear what you're saying, and there does have to be different theories and it does have to be two sides to every story, but you cannot ignore. Well, if you want to ignore the statistics, what this has thrown up is there are a lot of families out there who are still not happy with the way their particular cases were investigated.
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Greater Manchester police say there's no evidence to suggest that these deaths are linked where a cause of death has been established and it hasn't. In all cases, it's thought these people either killed themselves or died in accidents.
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Detectives say they'll keep an open mind, and they've met Professor Jackson this week to discuss his findings, although he's since admitted to me there's insufficient evidence to draw conclusions and he won't be doing any more interviews on this. And the police say there's no evidence at the moment to suggest they should reopen these cases you're listening to, more or less.
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Let's stay with the subject of murders, and this time we're pretty sure that they really are murders.
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I've personally searched for my children all over the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca, and so far we found nothing but rumors and gossip, nothing concrete.
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That was Elvira Gomez, the mother of two of the 43 students who vanished in Mexico last September. And it was while loyal listener Trent Houghton was reading about the disappearance of these trainee teachers in the Huffington Post that he stumbled across another striking number that he wanted us to check out. It was that roughly 98% of murders in Mexico were unsolved, a very high proportion. Can it be true? Well, Mexico has a high murder rate. There are about 20 murders per 100,000 people per year, higher than the rate in the US and Europe. And when a murder suspect ends up in court, the chance that they will go to jail is actually high. According to Carlos Velalta from the center for U.S. mexican Studies in the University of California in San Diego, from 1997
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to 2011, we have about a 90% conviction rate. So if you get arrested for a homicide crime, there's a chance of 9 in 10 to actually be convicted.
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The problem here is how many of them get arrested. So it could still be true that 98% of murders in Mexico go unsolved. And Carlos Valalta says it is true. To work this out, Mexico's National Institute of Statistics combine two sets of judicial statistics for the number of people who've been convicted of murder and health statistics for the number of people who've died a violent death, which has then been confirmed by a doctor as a homicide. It is really rare to find a
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murderer being arrested in the end. And being in jail for a homicide crime is just 2% chance, which is statistically significant. And what you have is basically a statistical anomaly. When you look historically at the trend, you see that these variations around 98% are pretty much constant historical pattern of state failure.
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So why are so few homicides in Mexico solved? Stephen Dudley, the co director of Insight Crime, an investigative think tank based in the US And Colombia, has been thinking about this question.
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The number one factor is these judicial Institutions simply don't work. They have this incredible way of either bungling up investigations, not actually doing investigations, being influenced by those who are being investigated, either, you know, threatened or co opted in some way, or perhaps even paid off in some way. So there's an incredibly high inefficiency. But of course that then bleeds into other types of reasons that would be obvious offshoots from this, which is that people don't trust these institutions. People will not go to the authorities with the crime at all.
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Stephen Dudley says there were failures in several different layers of the judicial system that led to the low rate of prosecutions for homicides. Both he and Carlos Velalalta talk about the failure of the police. Stephen also raised the role of forensic scientists.
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They're often too afraid to do their work. They do their work too quickly. They do their work sloppily. Just a complete lack of understanding of how to develop a crime scene. I've been to crime scenes where you've got little kids playing, you know, with a stick in blood of a victim, things like that. That just shows you that already you are going to have problems.
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Stephen Dudley. And that's all we have time for this week. A reminder please to keep your nominations coming in for your favourite statistic or statistical series. We are, as always, at more or lessbc.co.uk and our website is BBC.co.uk more or less. This programme was brought to you by the aptly named More or Less team members, Hannah Moore, Keith Moore and Ruthless. Until next week, goodbye. This is the extended edition of More or Less, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and produced in association with the Open University.