The
Guardian took up the story. ‘Figures reveal Brexit threat as 11,000 EU academics leave UK’, headlined the
New European. The Lib Dems’
national Twitter account – with over 300,000 followers – amplified the coverage, declaring ‘11,000 EU academics have left the UK since 2016, driven out by Johnson’s reckless pursuit of Brexit.’ The Lib Dem
press office, frontbenchers like
Tom Brake, and even left-wing celebrities like
David Schneider shared the news.
All told, a fairly decent hit: data-based research, national press coverage, social media amplification… nothing new.
Except for one inconvenient fact: the story is not true.
My reason for asserting this is founded in an incontrovertible source: the Lib Dems’ own data tables, which they linked to in their press release, and which I’ve posted online
here.
Here’s the issue. What are the Lib Dems claiming? “Almost 11,000 EU academics have quit the UK in the three years since the Brexit vote”. What is their proof? “Freedom of Information responses from 81 universities”.
What exactly did those FOI requests ask for? I’ve checked this in the Lib Dem data, and with one of the universities they gathered data from, and it’s simple: how many non-UK EU academics left posts at each university in each of the years 2014/15 to 2018/19, and how many non-UK EU staff did each university employ in each of those years.
Hang on a second.
So these numbers are for people leaving their university jobs. There’s
no data at all on where they went when they did so. Indeed, the Lib Dems do not seem to have asked for any destination data. This means these figures
do not show how many ‘EU academics have quit the UK’ at all. They show how many EU academics
have left jobs at UK universities – including those who, for example, left one UK university job to go to another UK university job.
Let me repeat that. Somebody who resigned a lecturer job at Oxford Brookes University to take up a new lecturer job at Oxford University would be counted by the Lib Dems as having left the country, when in fact they hadn’t even left their city.
The headline figure is a total falsehood, with no foundation in fact or research whatsoever.
. I do not support his decision to avoid the BBC and think he should have the guts to be interviewed as I like Andrew Neil is the best UK interviewer by a country mile. But I guess his team have calculated there is a greater downside than upside to the interview.
) and put a cross next to the Conservative candidate.
