“Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It’s the phrase people reach for when the data makes their worldview wobble. But in a culture soaked in denial and distraction, statistics — the ugly, unvarnished kind — might be the closest thing we have to a truth serum. They strip away sentiment, they puncture euphemism, and they show us the world not as we wish it to be, but as it is.

Nowhere is this principle more vital than when dealing with immigration. Under David Cameron, there was a brief flirtation with transparency — a sort of managerial liberalism that toyed with open data. But it didn’t last. The instinct for secrecy soon reasserted itself. By the end of the Conservatives’ time in office, whole departments had slipped back into the comfort of the bureaucratic black box.

That’s now set to change, though. In a move few saw coming, Labour is forcing open the lid. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has ordered officials to publish detailed crime statistics broken down by nationality: league tables, no less, revealing for the first time which foreign-born groups are most frequently arrested in the UK.

It’s a rare and overdue moment of political clarity. Until now, the only such breakdowns came from think tanks such as the Centre for Migration Control, which had to wrestle the data out of Government via Freedom of Information requests. What did those unofficial statistics show? That foreign nationals were being arrested at twice the rate of UK citizens — with 131,000 arrests between January and October last year alone. The top five nationalities by arrest rate per capita were Albanians, Afghans, Iraqis, Algerians, and Somalis. In total, 48 nationalities had higher arrest rates per 1,000 residents than Brits.

This is not just a British problem. The same patterns play out across Europe — at least, in countries willing to collect and publish the data.

In Scandinavia, administrative records show an eerie consistency. African and Iranian migrants rank high for property crime in both Norway and Finland. Iraqis and Somalis dominate the violent crime statistics. Meanwhile, migrants from the Philippines and China — often earning less than average — commit fewer crimes than locals. So much for the poverty excuse.

In Denmark, the government collates conviction rates by country of origin. Citizens from Japan, Australia, and the United States commit crimes at half the rate of Danes. Meanwhile, nationals of over 40 other countries — including Tunisia, Somalia, Uganda, and Morocco — top the violent crime charts.

And then there’s Sweden. Between 2000 and 2015, nearly half of all sexual assaults against women in the country were committed by foreign-born men. Over a third were from the Middle East and North Africa. Another 19% came from Sub-Saharan Africa.

These numbers don’t tell us everything. But they tell us something that our political class has spent two decades trying not to notice. The truth is that human beings are not all the same. Cultures vary. Norms vary. Crime rates vary. And while individuals matter, group patterns do too. That’s not bigotry: that’s reality.

Why does this matter? Because a government that refuses to measure reality cannot possibly manage it. It should have been obvious that importing large numbers of people from underdeveloped, low-trust societies would have a negative impact. Instead, Westminster spent years pretending that “equality of outcome” was just around the corner, but that moment never came to pass.

The crime league table is at least a start. For once, the facts are being laid bare. And when they are, we’ll all have to decide: notice, or look away.

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Mike Jones is a political scientist, specialising in migration.

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