Alice through the bonkers nut nut glass

I don't know if the tabloids are getting more blatant, or I'm getting too used to their lame tactics, but back with the Express again, we have 'Secret 'amnesty' for 500,000 asylum seekers'. The exaggeration and distortion isn't very well disguised, even for an Express article.

I mean, look at the opening sentence:

BRITAIN may allow nearly half a million failed asylum seekers to stay here under a back-door amnesty scheme.

Withdrawing the headline's claim straight away with a 'may'? What is this paper coming to?

Here's what prompts the claim of a [imagine some creepy music please] secret amnesty:

Yesterday, the Home Office confirmed hundreds of thousands of claims would be looked at on a “case-by-case basis”.

The Home Office told everyone about it, meaning it's not a secret. Oh, and there's no amnesty either.

Here's the whole non-story in a nutshell. There's a backlog of some 450,000 failed asylum claims to be sorted through to assess whether any should be given indefinite leave to remain as naturalised citizens because they've lived here long enough to qualify. In other words, there's a backlog - which is bad - and the government have done exactly what they should be expected to do to clear it - which is good. In the Express, this means a vast conspiracy to give them all amnesty. Based on no evidence whatsoever.

What would the Express rather have? Actually, scratch that. I think we already know.

They don't even seem to be trying anymore. Still works though. There's a petition linked to to sign in the comments, from the woman who called for the compulsory sterilisation of immigrants after the second child. That comment's been deleted for being racist, so it's nice to know that the Express stops short of publishing stuff that comes that close to actual Nazi dogma.

Wonder if any of the people in the comments who worry about this amnesty sending the wrong signals to people who might want to falsely claim amnesty realise that the only people sending them those signals in the first place are the Express and the commenters themselves.

Actually, no I don't.

*UPDATE* I edited the 'whole non-story in a nutshell' paragraph, as the applications don't need to be sorted through to see if any claims are valid, since they're all not. So all that's being looked into is how long the people involved have been here.