Hello, Tim here.

Thanks for downloading the Longer Radio 4 edition of More or Less

First Broadcast on the 29th of April.

Hello and welcome to More or Less.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news, in life and in music.

Several listeners have asked us when we're going to update our peace on celebrity deaths.

Well at the moment, the more or less team is still too busy crying in the purple rain.

Instead we'll be offering you a famous statistical paradox. A famous mathematical theorem

mathematical theorem and a politician with numbers that are true but misleading.

But first, loyal listeners will remember that last week we left you with a cliffhanger on the question of the EU referendum.

The Treasury had produced a weighty report on the economic impacts of the UK leaving the EU.

In a nutshell, they said it was a very bad idea, but the Treasury report ducked the question of what might happen to migration

if we left the EU and what the economic effects of that might be.

Well, not to worry because we're going to have a go at the question instead and the starting point of course would be how many people are migrating to the UK from the EU and the answer?

Well the answer is a bit of a mystery itself.

We do have official statistics showing that net migration to the UK has typically been between 200,000 and 300,000 a year for the past decade or so. In the 12 months to last September,

it was a bit higher. 320,000 net immigrants and over half of them, 170,000, were from the European Union.

You might think that these numbers come from counting everyone in and counting everyone out again,

but they don't.

Instead, they come from the International

Passenger Survey. This survey is carried out by approaching a random sample of

people arriving at the ports, airports or Eurostar. But that's a tricky task as we discovered back in 2005

...