Hugh Muir seems to be trying to bamboozle Guardian readers

Above:  highly selective use of statistics by Hugh Muir in his Hideously Diverse Britain column in yesterday's Guardian.  You might be able to read the column if you click on the above image, alternatively it is on-line http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/sep/20/black-football-managers  Hugh Muir is writing about the discrimination faced by black (his definition) footballers in the United Kingdom.

Except that the statistics do not seem to add up.

Above:  as you can see, Hugh Muir tells us that out of ninety-two professional clubs only two managers are black - that is 2%.  According to the 2001 census the population of the United Kingdom is 1% Black Caribbean, 0.8% Black African and 0.2% Black Others - a total of 2%.  Therefore the number of black football managers is exactly proportionate to the black population of the United Kingdom.

The other statistic quoted in the piece is that 25% of the players are black.  As we can see from the Census, 25% of the United Kingdom population are not black therefore far from black people being under-represented at the manager level they are in fact ludicrously over-represented at the player level.  Hugh Muir seems to be trying to bamboozle Guardian readers here (perhaps like Johann Hari he thinks it's okay to be a little creative now and again).

You might of course ask why there are so many black players.  Unlikely it is the result of a manic policy of positive discrimination.  Probably it is just easier for clubs to scoop up promising players from the third world, work them to death, then discard them when they are burned out (and is this not in microcosm what is happening throughout the United Kingdom workforce with cheapo Filipino nurses, cheapo Polish plumbers, cheapo Latvian packhouse operatives etc).

Does the Hugh Muir article matter at all?

On its own, probably not.  But it is another example of "the left" telling BME people they are victims so that they vote as a bloc for their "natural protector" the Labour party.  This does no good to the black population of the United Kingdom, the members of which suffer from low self-esteem due to being continually told they are victims.