In The Critic, Chris Bayliss explains how the once-great Economist can still have uses in its much decayed pro-managerialist guise:
Despite what people say, The Economist is still worth reading. This is true for two reasons — firstly whilst the depth of its analysis is not what it once was, it still covers the domestic affairs of a range of developing countries that would be too obscure for other news outlets. Secondly, it is because its editorial line can give fascinating hints about the tectonic movements of managerial elite opinion. Gauging a group of people whose view of the world is driven entirely by consensus is generally a very predictable game — until the moment it isn’t. And it is The Economist we can sometimes look to for the early signs of a change of course.
For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.
It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.
On social media, it was the graphic which prompted the most voluble response; particularly the use of the log scale which, visually, seemed to minimise the scale of the sevenfold disparity between the Afghan rate of sex crime conviction, and the British average. This seemed to hark back to arguments that took place during the Covid pandemic in which the use of log scales for graphs showing the number of new infections or deaths flattened the lines on the graphs and, critics claimed, made the scale of the pandemic seem less severe than it was. But whereas the use of log scales for naturally exponential processes such as viral transmission is in line with standard scientific practice, it is usually considered less appropriate — or even misleading — when the point of narrative interest is the additive difference between two figures, rather than multiplicative growth. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the decision to use a log scale was made in good faith, in the interests of conserving page space.
Arguments about the x-axis notwithstanding, it is still a big deal that The Economist would print this. The fact that certain groups of migrants — especially illegal arrivals and asylum seekers from highly unstable countries — are disproportionately likely to commit rape or sexual assault has been one of the most powerful anti-immigration arguments in recent years. It is a point that defenders of the status quo have often been highly sensitive about. In polite and liberal circles, the idea of even looking for a link between national and ethnic origins and sex crimes has hitherto been considered inherently racist and demagogic. In September 2025, an open letter titled “Women against the Far Right” — which was signed by a long list of prominent leftish politicians and celebrities — included the statement that “there is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence”. This was an easily verifiable or falsifiable objective claim, which they clearly took no effort to verify or falsify, on the reasonable-enough grounds that such data ought to be extremely hard to come by in Britain.
