No. It isn’t.
They play this game every time the figures come out and every time they lie in the same way.
You get this result only if you count every variant spelling/version of Mohammed as one name - and you don’t do the same for every variant of far more common English names - count all the variants of Henry as one. Count all the variants of Edward as one. Count all the variants of John as one. Count all the variants of Charles as one.
I’ve done the analysis in the past on previous years figures and posted them here. I don’t have time to do it again this year right now.
But this is misleading, deliberate, propaganda that doesn’t treat names identically.
To explain what I mean I will repost here one of my past analysis - this one from 2010 based on its figures (it was the quickest one I could find). Like I say, I don’t have time to do it for this years figures right now, but it illustrates the problem:
“OK, let’s look at what they did here.
To make their claim, they combined the numbers for every variant spelling of the name Mohammed they could find - and then compared it to single spellings of other names. They didn’t consider the possibility those other names might have variant spellings as well.
I have - I’ve got the data.
If you total together all the variant spelling of Mohammed (example: Mahamed), you get a total of 7552 baby boys named that in England and Wales. No individual variant has more than 3300.
Now, let’s look at what happens if we count all the variants for some common English names (I just selected a few I thought would be common) (and, yes, I know Ransomed has also pointed this out - he hadn’t posted when I started crunching the numbers).
John - when I count up all the variants of John I can find (examples, Jon), I get 11,598 baby boys with name in England and Wales.
Henry (example variant: Henri), total comes to 8,389.
James: 9689
William: 8589
I also did Charles - it comes in just behind Mohammed, at 7081.
I chose 5 common names and compared them properly with Mohammed - comparing like with like, counting variations - and 4 of them came out ahead of Mohammed.
I’m not going to spend any more time on it, but Edward, Thomas - there’s a few others as well that would probably come out with high numbers.
So what’s the real story here?
In my view, it’s yet another example of how the media can manipulate facts to generate a sensational and not particularly honest story, if it chooses to.
Something I think people here should be aware of.”
If you were a woman, I’d kiss you.