You might have been told that...

Opinion once again being presented as fact?

Loyalty itself has different meanings in different parts of Britain. Asians in Scotland, particularly those born in Scotland, describe themselves as Scots and tend to be more loyal to Scotland than Britain. The bulk of the Muslims in Scotland now support the SNP and back the demand for an independent Scotland. Asians in Wales also describe themselves as Welsh Asians and appear comfortable with their Welsh identity. In contrast, Asians in England tend to describe themselves as British Asians; and see Englishness as an exclusive identity that is closed to them. Their local loyalty belongs to Britain as a whole and many regard the demands of their Scottish Asian brothers and sisters across the border for an independent Scotland as treason.Ziauddin Sardar

Yes, I know one or two, shall we say high-profile, Muslim members of the SNP have been in the news recently, but leaving that aside, does any statistical evidence exist for those two sentences I've marked in bold?

And moving onto "dodgy stats being presented in dodgy way to confirm dodgy prejudices of readership", how about this:

According to a recent survey of 2,000 British youth carried out by the British Council:

Three- quarters said immigrants do not pose a threat to British workers' jobs and 88% said they thought the *influx* of people from abroad was no risk whatsoever to security and public order.

Possibly the Daily Mail may have put a different interpretation on those two headline “facts”, but it was these next couple of nuggets of *information* which most intrigued me:

In spite of greater European integration since the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992, just 7% of Britons surveyed said they felt like a European citizen, while 40% considered themselves to be British.

So, does that mean that 40% feel themselves British, 7% European and the remaining 53% English, Irish, Scottish, Ulsterish, Welsh, Cornish, African, Asian, West Indian…Martian or what exactly?
We don’t know, because true to form (and I’ve had the dubious pleasure several times of working with them, so I know how shambolic, despite all the cash thrown at them, the British Council’s organisation and administration can really be), the British Council has, to date, omitted to publish the full survey; it has instead decided to leak the more alarmist interpretations of the poll to those bastions of fairness, the Daily Mail and Express (and given Migration-Watch a much needed boost, now that all those Poles are inconveniently deciding to head home).

It’s on these kind of cack-handed surveys that half-truths and downright lies are pedaled by racists and xenophobes and this being the case, the British Council has the responsibility to all the UK’s citizens to make sure, at the very least, the full information can be accessed by those wanting to consider in a little bit further how attitudes may be changing in our society.