THEY HAVE A STRONGER STOMACH THAN I. I QUIT READING IT ALMOST TWO DECADES AGO:  Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist.

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.