Sky’s Farage ‘Fact Check’ Blown Apart As Met Admits Supplying “Incorrect” Guidance – Guido Fawkes

Revealed: Sky’s Farage ‘Fact Check’ Blown Apart As Met Admits Supplying “Incorrect” Guidance

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Sky News’s ‘fact-check’ of Nigel Farage’s claims on Afghan sexual offence conviction rates has just been blown apart by the Metropolitan Police, who have admitted to offering “incorrect” guidance on the data used in Sky’s article. They say it was a “simple human error”…

Last week Sky said Afghans were three times more likely than UK-born individuals to be convicted of a sexual crime, disputing Farage’s “22 times” claim. In their fact check, they compared police conviction data with 2021 census ‘country of birth’ figures, arguing this was the recommendation of both the Home Office and the Met. Unfortunately the Met has now fessed up:

“This data was extracted from NPSIS, a national system which records custody information, and Connect, a Met system which records information about crimes, cases and individuals.

A media outlet asked how nationality is defined by police. Our media team advised we couldn’t assist with definitions on NPSIS, but for Connect we guided there was a dropdown for country of birth so likely the source of the FOIA data and the most appropriate to use, while we continued enquiries to provide a fuller definition to the reporter. This also followed information from the reporter that they had obtained guidance from the Office for National Statistics that census ‘country of birth’ data would be the most appropriate to use.

We are now aware that the data for the FOIA request was taken from a ‘nationality’ drop down menu on Connect and therefore the guidance was incorrect.”

Sky attacked Reform’s figures for comparing nationality-based crime data with country-of-birth population estimates… yet their own calculation did exactly that. Guido is happy to fact check the fact checkers…