This week: Sir Andrew Green

Assuming that anyone who does not have white skin must be foreign is a downright stupid thing to do in modern Britain. Sadly, that does not stop certain publications leaping to the assumption that any black or Asian-looking schoolchildren must be scary immigrants.

Take the Daily Express, which reported last week that “Labour’s open-door to immigration” was being blamed for driving the number of “ethnic secondary school pupils up by 57 per cent in a decade”.

However, the King’s College London study the article referred to suggested the shift between 1999 and 2009 was not a result of recent immigration, but children born in Britain. For them to have been old enough to attend secondary school during that time, most of them would presumably have been born between 1988 and 1998 - a period when the Conservatives were mainly in power.

That did not stop Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch UK, blaming Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. “This is the inevitable consequence of the mass immigration of over three million permitted by Labour,” he said.

There are other statistics that may show more recent immigration having an impact on primary schools or the numbers of pupils who speak English as an additional language. But because of his unsubstantiated comments, the safest place for Mr Migration Watch is on the naughty step.