Ed West: The van was nasty. But immigration control isn’t. A point I make in "The Diversity Illusion".

Ed West is the deputy editor of The Catholic Herald. Follow Ed on Twitter. 

I was slightly disappointed that I never got to see the Home Office's "go back to your own country" van as it toured around London like a reverse Olympic torch. They could have got some jugglers and corporate backing, with people handing out fizzy drinks, as it travelled around the capital.

The van was a mistake, not because of its aim of removing illegal immigrants, but because it was a stunt, and stunts and gimmicks backfire, even more so in sensitive areas such as this – so it just came across as nasty.

Besides which, like those signs that say “thieves operate in this area”, which subconsciously say “police don’t”, the vans also gave the impression that the country wasn’t in control of its borders (which may well be true, but we don’t need to advertise it).

But it should not deter the Government from its stated goal of reducing immigration down to pre-Blair figures. It has reason and public opinion on its side; its critics have only hysteria and hyperbole.

Ed West: Yes, the BBC needs more diversity – of opinion, that is

Ed West is the deputy editor of The Catholic Herald. Follow Ed on Twitter.  

I’m always fearful that one day I’ll end up as one of those angry men who shout at Radio 4 - the wife raising her eyes, thinking to herself “here he goes again”. And I suspect that the early signs of BBC bore syndrome are already showing.

Yet the funny thing is that I love the BBC. It’s something I grew up with and as Bart said to Homer, it’s done more of a job raising me than you have. I love the sound of David Attenborough’s voice and – some Tories may disagree with me on this one – Stephen Fry’s. I like nothing better than evenings in drinking wine in the kitchen with Front Row playing. Part of what I like about being British is our great institutions, and the BBC is central to that, a comforting familiar voice we all love.

So my report into bias, Groupthink: Can We Trust the BBC on Immigration?, recently published by the New Culture Forum, was troubling to put together.

While I’ve long been aware of Tory complaints about BBC bias, having watched and listened to countless hours of BBC footage going back to 1997, I was surprised by just how skewed it often was. What was interesting is that, from about 2006-2008, people started saying “it’s not racist to talk about immigration” and “we can talk about immigration” so much that even I began to think “ok, enough, let’s talk about something else please”. And yet looking back at BBC reporting in 2000 and 2001, it’s clear why people were worried about being called racist – because the BBC effectively treated them as such. The tone of their coverage of William Hague’s warnings about Labour immigrant policy was one such example; in contrast they covered the then immigration minister Barbara Roche’s fairly radical changes with virtually no criticism or scrutiny.