Deja vu all over again all over again

Back in August, I blogged about some misleading stats from the Mail in 'Why the figures don't matter'. They were about the level of benefits supposedly claimed by Eastern Europeans in the Mail article 'Benefits bill for eastern European migrants hits £125m' and included loads of problems.

A couple of days ago, I posted 'Deja vu all over again', about how some stats that appear every three months get warmed over and chucked out by the Mail as if they're fresh. Today, we have the stats from 'Why the figures don't matter' as they appear three months later in 'Benefit claims by Eastern Europeans double in one year to £145m'. Guess what? Since they measure the total number of benefit claims since accession and don't count the number who come off benefits or leave the country, the figures are higher! I, for one, am shocked.

The Mail's picture for the story. Wonder what part of Eastern Europe the 5 guys on the right come from.

This story's a winner for the hack involved (none other than James Slack), since the total number of Eastern Europeans who have ever claimed benefits since accession will always rise and can never fall. All he has to do every three months is multiply the number of claimants by the amount they would be getting if they all still received the same benefits - even assuming that every Eatern European who ever claimed jobseeker's Allowance never found a job -and hey presto! He can pretend that's the annual cost!

Except it isn't. And not just for the reasons I've already gone through.

Although Slack doesn't include claims that are instantly disallowed (unlike measures for the numbers of Eastern Europeans in the country in which he includes just under 30,000 people whose applications were refused), he includes everyone whose application wasn't instantly dismissed on the grounds of failing Habitual Residence Tests, but were passed on to the next set of tests to see if they were eligible. A number of the people counted will never have received benefits in the first place. They've just lived here long enough to get them if they qualify. The full Accession Monitoring Report is here.

Remember - real money that you can spend in shops. No cricket bats. No justice.

This year's baubles

The Sun has a new save Christmas campaign this year, different from last years moronic 'Kick 'em in the baubles' one.

Here's the 'previously, on LA Law' style flashback montage of last year's campaign in the Sun. You have to imagine the screeching saxophone, big haired women in shoulder pads and that bloke out of 'Clash of the Titans' walking about yourself:

Objection!

Employment law firm Peninsula claimed to have conducted a study that showed that around three quarters of companies admitted to banning Christmas decorations so as not to offend people of other faiths.

This prompted the Sun to start a campaign to decorate workplaces in defiance, looking for examples of firms banning decorations to avoid offence to people of other faiths so the paper could name and shame them.

It didn't find a single firm that had done that, and included examples of companies disallowing decorations on health and safety grounds (Greggs the bakers - fancy some tinsel or Blu-Tack dropping in your pasty? Me neither) and disallowing cotton wool from being glued to the walls because it would ruin the paintwork instead.

The best the paper could manage was a job centre that didn't have decorations so the poor people going in didn't feel bad about not having any themselves. Lame, but not the same.

In the middle of the campaign, the paper was so desperate for support that it took comments from Tony Blair being sceptical of the idea that anyone was banning Christmas decorations and pretended he actually said the opposite by selectively quoting him. Or 'fibbing', if you prefer.

And in this year's episode:

The article fibbing about Tony Blair has disappeared from the site completely.

The original version of the 'Kick 'em in the baubles' launch article 'Tree's a silent nightmare' isn't on the website anymore either. There's a heavily cut version with most of the original taken out - maybe because of complaints about how misleading it was. Who knows?

The Sun has decided to focus on schools rather than workplaces, and on religion rather than decorations. It all kicks off in 'Don't take Christ from Christmas', by Canon David Meara, which ends with this little appeal:

IS your children’s school staging a Nativity or simply an end-of-year “celebration”? Do they learn carols or modern-day substitutes? Email us at features@ the-sun.co.ukor ring us on 0207 782 4344. Don’t worry about the cost – we will call you back.

From the paper's point of view, this is an excellent idea. Now, any example of any school doing something for Christmas that isn't specifically about the Nativity can be used as an example of a Politically Correct Gone Mad attempt to ban Christmas - even if the school does other things that do celebrate the Nativity. Last year, the Mail managed the article 'Christmas play axed in celebration of political correctness' about a school that had classes doing presentations about Christmas and Christingles as well as carol singing in the local shopping mall, a Christmas tree and a traditional Chritmas dinner - all because it also had a presentation about Diwali and one about Hannukah.

The trouble is, the Sun itself usually enthusiastically embraces non-Christian elements of Christmas, with its insistence on Christmas trees and liberal usage of the word 'Yule', which refers to a pagan festival. Still, the paper's never been one to avoid hypocrisy.

The Sun should get at least some examples this year, since schools are educational institutions that have obligations to teach their pupils about other religions and will probably use Christmas as a springboard to do that. You'd probably be hard pushed to find a school that doesn't use Christmas as an opportunity to teach about other religions, since that's their job.

The scale down of the ambitiousness from last year's damp squib is a little disappointing though. It's a bit like finding out that MacKenzie Brackman had moved out of their swanky LA skyscraper in favour of a business park in Manchester, hung up their shoulder pads and started ambulance chasing for business by conducting shoddy polls to scare companies into thinking they need to consult about whether they can have Christmas decorations.

Here's hoping there's more to come with the paper having a big, brash cavalcade of made up nonsense possibly involving thinly-veiled racism. It wouldn't be Christmas without one.

Selective quoting bans Christmas

When I originally posted about the IPPR study "The Power of Belonging: Identity, Citizenship and Community Cohesion" and how the papers decided it argued for banning Christmas, I emailed the IPPR asking if they could point me toward a copy I could access.

Just under two weeks later, the think-tank have come through and emailed me a pdf version. It's a 57 page document covering all sorts of issues about multiculturalism, so naturally, I turned straight to the section about Christmas to see if the papers had been accurate about it.

Or, I would have if there was a section about Christmas. There isn't. The word 'Christmas' appears once in the entire document, in the middle of Chapter 5 - 'Multiculturalism and Citizenship'. This chapter examines whether the state should be made more culturally neutral, and looks at the argument against multiculturalism that says the state should not favour any culture over another or give any special attention to any one. The chapter argues that those things that can be made more neutral should be, but that since some things can't, other minority cultures should be recognised by the state. Christmas is just used as an extreme example of something that is so deeply ingrained into the national culture that it can't be made more neutral - and the inclusion of 'even if we wanted to' in the mention of it is a signal that the report's authors don't actually want to make Christmas more neutral, or 'downgrade' it anyway.

Which brings me to the actual quotes from the papers. The word 'downgrade' doesn't appear once. So its inclusion in quotation marks in the headlines of the Mail and Express versions is misleading from the get go. Of course, the report doesn't argue that Christmas should be scrapped or banned either. Both of those are inventions.

Sticking to the Christmas quotes from the papers for now, the Mail claims that the report says:

"Even-handedness dictates that we provide public recognition to minority cultures and traditions.

"If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too.

"We can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one in any sense.

"The empire is gone, church attendance is at historically low levels, and the Second World War is inexorably slipping from memory."

This quoting is very selective. The first sentence is only partial. It actually begins with the words 'In these circumstances,' because the context is further explained by what leads up to it. The circumstances are ones in which some things can't be done away with or changed. The chapter itself is two pages long, and the Christmas quote appears at the bottom of the first page.

More importantly, the third and fourth sentences don't immediately follow the first two like they do in the quote. They come three pages later, in a completely different chapter about national identity. Mashing the two sets of quotes together creates a new context to the original quotes, making the idea that the report is calling for a downgrading of Christmas seem more likely. Instead of Christmas being an example of part of the national culture that is so deeply ingrained it couldn't be expunged even if we wanted to, it becomes something we should expunge because it's an anachronism.

The Telegraph - as well as saying the report tells us to scrap Christmas - claims the report says:

"If we are going to continue to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other major religious festivals too.

"Even-handedness dictates that we provide public recognition to minority cultures and traditions."

Here, the context that leads up to the Christmas quote is not only removed as in the Mail, but the lead in sentence is switched so it comes after the conclusion to make it look like the conclusion itself. It makes it look as though the report is arguing that we should be even-handed with regard to the treatment we give to other traditions to the extent of making them as celebrated as Christmas. In fact, the Christmas quote is followed by caveats about how it's difficult to recognise different identities without encouraging uncritical submission to them and how we should be critical of those identities where we need to be.

The Sun claims the report says:

“National culture will inevitably represent something of a barrier to most new migrants.

“If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas – and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to – then public organisations should mark other major religious festivals too.”

As with the Mail and Telegraph, there's some farting around here. The first sentence doesn't actually precede the second in the report, it comes a couple of paragraphs later in the chapter. Putting it first makes it look as though the report has specifically targeted Christmas as being a barrier to new migrants when it hasn't.

That's it for the quotes about Christmas in all the newspapers. There are three different versions of the same quote in these three papers. The Express doesn't give the quote any context, but does go on to say the report has made a conclusion it hasn't (see below). What is surprising is that such a throwaway line about something we can't and don't want to change became the main focus for articles telling us the report says we should change it, or worse still, ban or scrap it.

There are other instances of farting around with quotes about other aspects of the report. The Mail includes a quote about the introduction of '"Birth ceremonies", at which state and parents agree to "work in partnership" to bring up children', whereas the report doesn't mention birth ceremonies once. There is a suggestion that the registration of a child should take on qualities like that of a citizenship ceremony, and that parents, their friends, their family and the state should agree to work in partnership in bringing up the child. But 'birth ceremonies' sounds more wishy-washy and less like a Christening - and eliminating references to friends and family makes it look a bit more loony lefty.

The Express repeatedly quotes the phrase “foster a sense of shared values” and gives the idea that this is what the things the report recommends are supposed to do - especially recognising other festivals alongside Christmas. But the quote doesn't appear in the report. It does say that one thing the government can do is 'foster a set of shared values', and it continues to 'argue these values on their own lack the motivational power to bind a community together'. Of course, 'sense' is more wishy-washy and vague than 'set'. Giving the idea that we should be recognising other festivals to foster this sense of values is also more wishy-washy and cartoon lefty sounding than merely saying that one thing the government can do is foster a set of values, and arguing that this on its own is not enough.

None of this is to say that the IPPR report is a fantastically clear and concise document that any fool can understand. It isn't. It's sometimes difficult to know when it's talking about religion and when it's talking about ethnicity. The idea of cultural neutrality is confusing, and it's difficult to work out whether that just means secular in a religious sense, or lacking in any culture at all. What is being 'culturally neutral' anyway? If we're talking about things being more secular then that's what we should say - since doing so would just make them part of a secular culture. I'm not defending the report as a great piece of work here.

But the idea that the document is about how we should ban Christmas is ludicrous. As for whether we should downgrade Christmas - I could understand how someone might wonder if the report's authors are saying the only reason we shouldn't do that is because we can't, but to show that the report really does argue that Christmas should be downgraded, you have to fart about with quotes, like the papers have done here. Looking back over the newspaper articles, it's surprising how few extended quotes from the actual report there are, and how many single words or phrases are taken out and 'explained' by the papers.

Maybe the blame should be spread around a little, but I can understand how the report's authors would be surprised that a single throwaway sentence in the middle of a report that stretches over fifty pages would become the entire focus of a whole bunch of 'ban Christmas' scandal articles.

I could make it up!

Professional peehole Richard Littlejohn has emitted another teaspoonful of indignation from his Florida mansion in 'The vision of Britain: Who would want to live here?'

And no, 'here' doesn't mean Florida, bizarrely. This week involves Littlejohn looking through the glossary at the back of 'Life in the UK: A Journey to Citizenship 2007' and moaning about what isn't in it. The glossary, that is. He hasn't bothered to read the thing, of course. One of his big gripes is this:

You might have thought that a publication about Britain which bothered to explain that a baron was a minor member of the aristocracy and that a chieftain was a Scottish clan ruler might have found room for the Queen.

He's right, you know. You might have thought that. Especially if you looked under 'M' for 'Monarch' and bloody saw it there.

I found that out in a thirty second scan of the glossary in Waterstone's. Probably about the same length of time it took Littlejohn to decide to pretend it wasn't there.

Your cricket ball is a poof

It is. It's a big screaming bender. How do I know? Because it's pink. Everyone knows pink is gay.

What am I farting on about? This fantastic piece of journalism in the Sun:

Looks like it's gay-lords!:

CRICKETERS may look like they are batting for the other side — hitting PINK balls.

WUURGH! Pink means GAY! WUURGH! After a bit of stuff about how this is a good piece of equipment, the article closes:

But Sun cricket correspondent John Etheridge hit out, saying: “I can’t imagine how Freddie Flintoff would feel running up with a pink ball in his hand.”

These people get paid to write this crap. Real money, that you can spend in shops. They're allowed to vote. And if you ran up behind them and cracked them over the back of the head with a cricket bat - you're the one who'd end up arrested.

Where's the justice?

Am I the only one

Am I the only one to wonder if it's a coincidence that the only Maddie 'sightings' that have been followed up as far as finding the wrong bloody girl have been in countries with big Muslim populatins? Morocco, Bosnia, where next?

How long before the Express prints an article about how it's possible to fit a little kid under a burkha?

Deja vu all over again

Every quarter, the oNS releases migration statistics. Every quarter, the Mail can report on them as if they're shocking and new as if they haven't said anything similar three months ago. The rascals.

The Mail's stock 'scary brown people' picture. Look as the white girl holds her head in despair.

Three months ago, I posted 'Half a record number leave the country' and 'More on moronic use of stats in the Mail' about the paper scaremongering over immigration figures that could be looked upon as good news in Daily Mail land. Three months later, we have more scaremongering over very similar figures measured three months later. This paper's crap could be spat out by an automatic script. All you'd have to do is enter the actual numbers and an enraged scare story would pop out of the other end, like an Angel Delight that's made of poo and is capable of screaming in your face until you pass out from fear.

Now, we have 'Record numbers of people are leaving the UK as more immigrants arrive'. Why is this news? Three months ago we had '196,000 out, 574,000 in: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars'. Now, to be fair, the last set of figures split these up into foreigners and the British and the new one doesn't. But that's it. The rest is the same figures measured from three months later. The record numbers are still record numbers, including the ones leaving. The full set is here if you can be bothered.

There's also a nice break down of the numbers of immigrants in the Mail, showing that 6,000 were asylum seekers but mysteriously forgetting to mention that 81,000 were British. Or to mention that there's also a record number of foreigners leaving too.

I can't really be arsed with his one, other than to point out the sheer dogged bloody minded boringness of the paper trying to frighten its readers with the same thing all the bloody time. It's like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The first one's alrght and a bit scary, but the rest are wasting your time. Until you get to the last one, where Freddy enters the real world. God, imagine the world actually being like it's depicted in the Mail.

It feels like Groundhog Day. That would be a good thing if it meant I could punch out a Daily Mail hack in the street every day without getting arrested, but I can't so the paper should sodding well stop it. Or grant me permission to punch its hacks at random.

AAAARRRGH!

I just published a holding message here saying I was taking a break from blogging because of real life intervening, which is just a posh way of saying I could not be arsed with it for a while and my last few posts annoyed me. Anyway, I was about to take a break and then I saw this:


For fuck's sake! It's the Sun saying Wayne Rooney is going posh because he's taking two GCSEs. Two sodding GCSEs and that's meant to be posh. What's gone fucking wrong with this country?

Who says toff outside the pages of a 1950s edition of the Dandy? Who? I want to know so I can go round their house and headbutt them in the belly so they go, 'OOF!'

I said this before in 'Super soaraway ARSEPAPER!' Posh people don't even dress like that. This is what posh people dress like:


Got it?

This is what annoys me about this paper. Slag it off and you'll get called a snob, but it's edited by someone who boasts about studying at the Sorbonne and is likely staffed with hacks with journalism degrees that they piss all over every day they go to work, and they decide their readers think having GCSEs makes you posh. Who's the patronising snob here, eh?

It's this attitude that made me stay out of university until I was 28 bloody years old. Well, that or almost terminal laziness. I haven't decided yet. It's that that kept me in an arse achingly boring set of government jobs until I was ready to climb up Big Ben with a sniper rifle. It's this attitude that made me have to go through three years of people going, 'English? What you studying that for? What job you gonna get with that?' Either that or, 'but you already speak it like a native!' Wankers!

Without the Sun, would I have had to go through so many explanations about how I didn't want to sleep with any of the women there because people in their early twenties are almost all uniformly dribblingly dull and up themselves and make you willing to chew your way through metal doors to get away? I kept the bit about how nineteen-twenty year olds think that if you're not married with kids by the time you're 28 then you're a failure - especially if you get all pissed up and make an arse of yourself in front of them all - to myself. But be fair, you would have, too.

The most annoying thing is that the whole, 'what job you gonna get,' attitude is rooted in truth a bit. I have got a better job now.

But you know what? Because I've got a degree, it's fucking boring now. I find myself wondering about Jane Austen in meetings and that. Alright, not Jane Austen, Batman. But the principle's the same.

And I'm still not posh yet. Bastards.

Enoch was right (wing)

One of the good things about having a single issue blog like this one is that I can ignore certain fusses if I want to tht aren't about right wing press nonsense. I decided to steer clear of the Nigel Hastilow stuff because, frankly, I could not be arsed to read another generic nonsense rant of the sort I wade through all the time to come up with material here.

But given my most recent postings about the IPPR study that allegedly called for a downgrade or a ban on Christmas, and my insistence that we look at the words the report actually said, I figured I should read Hastilow's article to see what I thought before making my mind up about it. Was he racist? Should he have got in trouble?

There is another question that it's important to answer first, which is whather or not Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech was racist. Of course it was. Daniel Finklestien nails it right on the head when he points out that Powell said, 'I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me,' before telling a story about how black people take over streets, can't speak English but know the word 'racialist', break people's windows and push shit through letterboxes. He characterises these experiences as happening to hundreds of people. And he explicitly states that the woman telling the story is speaking for him. He is not merely reporting what someone else has said.

Now, one of the things defenders of those accused of racism often do is downplay what has actually been said or done and make it sound as though the accusation is based on something far milder than it actually is. A bit like how my teenage cousin when I was a kid would get in trouble and protest, 'but I only said...' when everyone present knew full well that she had said that and more besides. 'It's not racist to talk about immigration' said the old tory slogan, but who ever said it was? Accusations of racism would normally be said about specific things people say when talking about immigration.

Defenders of Powell often downplay the contents of the speech in the same way. Simon Heffer does this in his defence of Hastilow and Powell, when he says:

Oh, and he foresaw correctly that there would be terrible tensions if immigration were allowed to carry on unchecked in that famous speech - called, by a phrase he never uttered, the "Rivers of Blood" speech - in April 1968. It is for reminding the public that what Powell predicted has come to pass that Mr Hastilow is now an ex-candidate.

which politely skims over the fact that the form Powell's prediction of terrible tensions would take included shit posting and window busting and terrorising poor, racist little old ladies.

Heffer does the same trick earlier in his article, saying:

One Tory MP, Bernard Jenkin, has already been removed from his position in the party simply for warning an Asian candidate that she might encounter racism.

Another, Patrick Mercer, was booted off the front bench for retailing the fact that some NCOs in our Armed Forces have racist attitudes towards black people.

Both are bland mischaracterisations. Jenkin was sacked for telling an Asian candidate that she would not be elected because she wasn't a white middle class male. Patrick Mercer didn't just point out that some NCOs have racist attitudes. He said that black soldiers are often 'idle and useless' but covered that up with accusations of racism and far from just pointing out that some NCOs are racist, he implied that black soldiers shouldn't be offended by that racism because it was part of the normal behaviour in the army.

Iain Dale uses the same tactic over at Pickled Politics, where Sunny has argued that tories like him don't get racism if they don't see anything wrong with saying Powell's racist speech was right. In his comments box protest, this becomes and accusation of racism just for discussing Hastilow's comments.

It's this exact trick that Hastilow uses in the most important passage in his article:

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”.

Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably.

He was right. It has changed dramatically. But his speech was political suicide. Enoch’s successors in Parliament are desperate to avoid ever mentioning the issue.

It’s too controversial and far too dangerous. Nobody wants to be labelled a racist. Immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name in public.

Powell's speech didn't just argue that immigration would change the country irrevocably. He specified how it would change by using examples - supposedly said to him by constituents - of black people pushing shit through letterboxes and saying, "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man," and predicting horrific violence.

I's these elements that are the most famous - or infamous - aspects of Powell's speech. Ask anyone what the 'Rivers of Blood' speech is about and its these things they'll think of. Almost nobody would characterise it as merely warning that immigration would change the country. If you want to argue something as bland and self-evident as the fact that immigration has changed the country, Powell's speech is not the thing to refer to since it includes specific nasty examples of how immigration would change the country. If I wanted to use an example of a story about young people and their adventures in the forest, I wouldn't choose the Evil Dead.

The rest of the article is takn up with references to the speech. The opening is clearly a mirror of Powell's references to constituents, and what follows are Hastilow's summary of the problems of immigration, parroting the useless, self-contradictory crap spewed by the tabloids every other bloody day. None of those comments are in themselves racist or deserve sacking.

But using such a loaded phrase as 'Enoch was right', which he does in his own language, isn't excusable without pretty big qualifiers. The inclusion of the words about immigration changing Britain don't cut it. By saying the speech is about immigration changing Britain without making any qualifiers, Hastilow is accepting everything else in the speech.

That's what was wrong.

The great immigration debate - left wing bias at the BBC

I've just seen Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch upbraid the BBC for overestimating the number of Eastern Eurpoean immigrants in the country by not pointing out that many leave.

That's some left wing bias.

'Tis surely the season!

Hurrah for the Graun's 'Comment is Free' section. Hurrah and praise be!

Since my post from yesterday, CiF has published a post from one of the authors of the IPPR study denying claims that his forthcoming report will say that Christmas should be downgraded, scrapped or banned. It's headlined 'Christmas is here to stay'. Thank you, the liberal elite, you're my hero!

The posting isn't as good as Mr Garapich's letter to James Slack from the Daily Mail, but it's enough for me to be saved from eating crow for dinner this evening. Key quotes:

Nowhere in the report do we argue that Christmas should be "downgraded" nor do we describe it as a cultural barrier for minority groups. It would of course be completely absurd to do so.

and:

Let's be clear: this does not mean equivalent public holidays for all faiths - no one is asking for that.

I would say that that's a relief, but it's not enough of a surprise to be a relief.

It's also not surprising that this little urban legend spread like wildfire. That's what urban legends do. It's no surprise that some people who read the press coverage believed it and regurgitated it. It's easy to underestimate the ability of the tabloids to just make shit up.

The only papers (or bloggers) guilty of actually making shit up here that I've seen are, either or both of the Daily Mail and Daily Express (depending on whether either or both had access to the report) for inserting the word 'downgrade'. The Sun for increasing the nonsense by adding the words 'ban' and 'scrap' and Carol Malone for introducing the idea that the government called for the downgrading. Everyone else just fell for stories that are designed to be convincing in the first place. It really is easy to underestimate the tabloids' capacity for making shit up.

One thing that depresses me, and I have to disagree with, is a comment by Ally Fogg on the Cif article that says:

My argument was basically that by raising this issue in this context, there was only ever going to be one reaction from the right wing press. We all know how they work. The details of the report don't matter, the accuracy of their reporting doesn't matter. The point is you handed a gift-wrapped political-correctness-gone-mad scandal to the tabloids. I fully accept that your intentions are benign, but the effects are incredibly damaging. Either the IPPR did not realise what the press would do with your suggestions, in which case you are foolish, or else you did not care what the press would do with them, in which case you are highly irresponsible. Which is it?

Have we really got to the point where the right wing press has so much power that we have to be careful about saying certain things because we know they'll lie about them?

It probably has, sadly. And that's partly due to the genius of shouting 'PC Gone Mad' at every turn, and partly due to the fact that the PCC really is the press watchdog - meaning it belongs to the press and protects it from the public, rather than the other way around.

But saying left wing think tanks like the IPPR should not say things in a certain way because the tabloids will lie about them is surely blaming the victim. The right wing tabloids should change the way they do things and stop bloody lying, since lying is actually wrong and making an argument isn't. Blaming the IPPR here is like telling off a victim for not staying away from their bully.

It's also a bit premature to blame the IPPR for being irresponsible or stupid for producing this report since it hasn't even been published yet.

Blame the right wing press. They're at fault.

Where's the liberal conspiracy? There it is!

With the liberal elite back, sort of [see above], what could be better than finding a real live liberal conspiracy? Aside from the tabloids making shit up, very little.

So, Sunny of Pickled Politics has launched the Liberal Conspiracy. Excellent stuff that'll definitely be well worth a watch.

Have a look. Have plenty of looks. If the project is only a fraction of how brilliant it has the potential to be, it'll be bloody good indeed.

'Tis the season

It's a month and a half before Christmas and we all know what that means. It's ban Christmas scare story time in the papers - praise the Lord! It's been quietly underway for a little while now, as far as I can tell starting with the Mail first moaning about how towns are putting their Christmas decorations up too early and then moaning that towns are being banned from putting up decorations.

The latest story about evil liefties seems to start in a story in last Wednesday's Daily Mail 'Christmas should be 'downgraded' to help race relations says Labour think tank'. The story is about a yet to be published IPPR report. Curiously none of the quotes from the report in the article actually use the word 'downgrade', and the only place it appears is the headline. As we know from previous tabloid headlines, we know that the quotes here mean nothing. Remember 'Migrant surge led to 'disorder and crime'', and 'Muslims: 'Ban non-Islamic schools'?

The closest the article comes is this:

"Even-handedness dictates that we provide public recognition to minority cultures and traditions.

"If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too."

So, nothing about downgrading, just a call that public organisations should mark other religious festivals. I had bookmarked this to blog about when the IPPR study was published, but via Pickled Politics, it seems that other papers are already picking up on the story, and we can follow how one of these urban legends spread.

The first of the right wing papers to pick up the story after the Mail is the Express, with 'PC plans to 'downgrade' Christmas', which appears the day after the Mail version appeared online. It's basically a rehash of the Mail's version. The word 'downgrade' only appears in the headline. It includes some quotes that don't appear in the Mail article, but nothing about downgrading Christmas. Curiously, it claims the report was published that day. It's nowhere on the IPPR website that I can find.

The Sun weighs in on the same day and, like any good distributor of urban legends, embelleshes things further with 'Bid to ban Christmas cheer' which steps things up to include a ban now. It opens:

BRITAIN should SCRAP official Christmas celebrations to boost race relations, it is being claimed.

There are no direct quotes from the report in the story about Christmas being scrapped or banned. It's the first article to mention Winterval, pretending that:

Some towns have already rebranded Christmas as Winterval to avoid religious offence.

Yeah, right.

It takes a couple of days for the story to reach the Telegraph, and on the 4th, the paper goes with 'Scrap Christmas, says New Labour think tank', which picks up on the capital SCRAP from the Sun's coverage. It includes no direct quotes from the IPPR report that don't appear elsewhere, and no direct quotes mentioning downgrading, scrapping or banning anything. This one is the first Christmas story I've seen this year to mention the very funny report about 74% of businesses banning Christmas decorations that was spread by an employment law firm, who'd profit nicely from businesses who read the reports and contacted it for advice. Expect more references to that this year.

The Times covers it on a couple of days later, but only on an opinion page from Minette Marin. It's the wonderfully headlined 'Let’s stop pretending all faiths are equal'. Of course there aren't any quotes that don't appear elsewhere, and no quotes from the IPPR report saying Christmas should be downgraded, scrapped or banned. It includes a brilliant quote saying:

What I want, passionately, is for the state to keep away from my children and let me decide for my family what to do about Christmas (or indeed Eid or Sukkot or Diwali). I don’t want the state interfering with ancient customs, expunging Christmas or punging something else in its place.

which shows that Marin presumably does want Christmas downgraded, since the state enshrines her right to have time off to celebrate it in law. It mentions Winterval, too.

So, cue the liberal elite, stepping in to point out that the report isn't published yet and that none of the quotes say that Christmas should be downgraded, scrapped or banned, right? Right?

Not really.

The Guardian kicks things off on 1 November in 'Come all ye faithful'. This one does only mention celebrating other religious festivals and doesn't mention downgrading, scrapping or banning anything, but it doesn't challenge the idea that anyone's called to ban anything.

Ally Fogg follows up on the 4th, with 'A gift for the tabloids', which does include caveats about waiting for the report to be published, but does seem to take the suggestion that the report says that Christmas should be downgraded at face value, and concludes:

So how depressing to discover that a supposedly liberal thinktank has shunted us right back to square one. And how ironic that it has done so in pursuit of tolerance.

Suffice to say the IPPR is well and truly struck off my Winterval card list.

Fogg does include links to last years two superb Oliver Burkeman articles about banning Christmas, but seems not to have learned the lesson from it of taking anything in the papers about banning Christmas at face value.

One of Fogg's sources is 'Think-tank: 'Mark all religious festivals'', which is the best of the lot. It includes nothing about downgrading, scrapping or banning anything, and does only mention that the report says public institutions should mark other religious festivals. It doesn't say that the marking of them should be on the same level as Christmas. It doesn't contradict the other stories directly, but it was one of the earliest to appear, on the 1st.

It's a pity that Carol Malone hadn't read the Independent before writing 'Out of their Xmas tree', which is the sort of quality we'd expect from Malone. Here, the story takes a different tack with its hyperbole, blaming the pretend idea that Christmas should be downgraded on the government this time. Top notch.

So, in a few short steps, think tank says public organisations should mark other religious celebrations becomes Christmas should be downgraded, banned or scrapped and the diktat is coming from the government. Sweet.

I'll revisit this when the IPPR report does get published. Here's a prediction: it won't say anything should be downgraded, scrapped or banned. I doubt it'll even say that other festivals should be marked with the same prominence as Christmas.

And even if it does say that other festivals should be celebrated as prominently as Christmas, there's something nasty about interpreting that to mean Christmas is being downgraded. About saying that other religions are inferior to Christianity, as the Times article clearly suggests.

Another one for the mythology, I think. Of course, big crow is on the menu for me if it isn't, but I'm dead confident that the report doesn't say Christmas should be downgraded, scrapped or banned. I've seen too many other reports covered by the Mail to believe that.

How exactly does the left control debate on immigration?

As I've mentioned in my last couple of posts, the coverage of immigration in the media over the last week or so has effectively exposed the nonsense of the idea that we have a left-wing biased media, or that the left stifles any debate about the subject for the idiotic myths that they are.

Balls

Things started on Monday, with coverage of David Cameron's speech mentioning immigration. By amazing coincidence, the very next day, Chris Grayling revealed that Peter Hain had apologised for making a mistake in an answer he gave in a Parliamentary debate earlier this month - and the media were all over the apology. By another amazing coincidence, almost everybody, including the lefty BBC who you'd imagine to be at the forefront of the liberal elite's stifling any mention of immigration, managed to perpetuate the false impression that Hain's mistake meant that there were more foreigners in the country than the Government thought. The summary of the BBC's coverage says:

The home secretary says sorry after it emerges 300,000 more immigrants work in the UK than previously stated.

which is not true. 300,000 more immigrants got their jobs after 1997 than previously stated. The coverage on the BBC site compounds the impression with this:

The number of foreign workers in the UK since 1997 is now thought to be 1.1m, not the 800,000 officially recorded.

which is also incorrect. The number in the country since 1997 is the same. The number who got their jobs after 1997 has risen. The problem is only one of categorisation.

The godawful BBC coverage continues in its broadcast 'Background to the revised figures', which repeats a number of times the nonsense claim that the government had revised the number of migrant workers present in the country. It adds the extra .4 million that includes British citizens born overseas to British parents as foreign workers. The whole thing is about how the government are confused about how many immigrants are in the country - when that isn't what Hain's apology was about.

This report also includes one of the stupidest simplifications I've ever seen - that because the government claims to have created 2.7 million jobs since 2007 and 1.1 million migrants are in the workforce who got their jobs after 1997, then nearly half the new jobs went to migrants. That is quite clearly stupid. Most people get their jobs by taking over from someone else. Most of the migrants here will have done exactly the same. And since a lot of migrant work is seasonal, it's even more likely that migrants will not be filling brand new posts.

It's putting up with this kind of crap that allows the Express to include its plainly false headline 'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN'. The logic is faulty, and the claim is just not true, but since everyone else has already made the stupid simplification with earlier figures, the paper can get away with it.

But nobody is exposing it for what it is, and our supposedly liberal media are actively colluding in spreading specious nonsense about immigration rather than silencing debate on it. As lots of people have said before, the BBC's coverage goes from New Labour to the Tories and back again. It just so happens that at the moment, New Labour are pushing fantastically right wing rhetoric on immigration, with its 'British jobs for British workers' cobblers, insisting on viewing immigration as a problem and not even bothering to explain that the counting mistake is only one of categorisation when apologising for it. Only ever mentioning economic arguments for immigration plays a big part, giving opposition the present of only having to fart about with figures to try to show that immigration is a Bad Bad Thing.

So we come to the end of the week of Cameron's speech and we have his agenda parroted by New Labour, the right wing press, the BBC and the apparently left wing press. None of them bothered to explain that the 300,000 additions to figures aren't actually people nobody knew were present in the country.

This means the tabloids, given their penchant for making shit up, can tell even more extreme lies than they would normally be able. The Express can get away with just lying about how every new job has gone to a migrant. The evil goblin Hazel Blears, instead of pointing out that the figures aren't about the number of foreigners present in the country decided to blame the Office of National Statistics, which means the Mail can wonderfully contradict itself in 'Number of Britons in work falls by 270,000 - because migrants get most new jobs' by saying:

Yesterday, Communities Secretary Hazel Blears tried to shift blame for the earlier, faulty employment figures on to the Office for National Statistics.

"These are not Government figures - the independent figures from the Office for National Statistics. It's independent as I say, it's not Government figures," she told BBC Radio Four's Today Programme.

The ONS is, however, under the direct control of the Treasury until April.

which is just bizarre, since the Mail had previously said government statistics hadn't included the extra 300,000 in their figures when they were in the Labour Force Survey all along. If we're saying ONS figures are the official government figures, why is anyone saying these people hadn't been counted?

The Guardian, Independent and Daily Mirror - our supposedly left wing press, are all silent on the fact that these figures don't show that the government didn't know how many foreign workers were in the country, and that they were in the official figures all along. That's how Hain realised his mistake - by looking at the government bloody statistics.

The right have been so successful with their nonsense bleating about how the left refuses to talk about immigration and controls the debate that those nominally on the left actively collude in a viciously far right debate and don't even bother to point out the stupidity of claims like 'half of all new jobs have gone to migrants'. The left even - and I include myself in this bit - joins in with the shifting of the terms of debate from talking about immigrants to talking about migrants, thus allowing the right to include more people than they would have been able in the past in the discussion. The Mail can now scaremonger about immigration with figures that include tourists because the left fails to differentiate between migrants and immigrants. All the right wing tabloids can create a greater impression of government incompetence by comparing figures that count different things - like the rubbish earlier this year when official figures for immigration were lower than the number of people on the Worker Registration Scheme. Of course the Worker Registration Scheme will include more people. A lot of them go home before one year. But deliberately conflating 'immigrant' and 'migrant' can make it look as though the two sets of numbers contradict each other.

If there's a left wing media elite that controls debate on immigration, where was it this week? What were our self described left wing papers doing not challnging this nonsense?

Of course, I might feel very silly after this rant if I'm wrong about what the figures signified. I haven't found anythig to contradict what I found at epolitix, but if anyone has links to any other explanation, please put it in the comments and I'll eat big crow and change everything here.

Liberal elite, where are you?

Following on from Peter Hain's apology for miscategorising a set of foreign workers and the exaggerations and lack of clarity that appeared in our left wing liberal elitist media over the last few days, we have further exaggerations and clear nonsense about the same subject in the press today - the most blatant being, as ever, the Express (which I've been avoiding recently for sanity's sake).

Get them while they're hot. Two lying arse comments in one headline/subheading combo

'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN' screams the headline - which is utter, utter balls. I personally know several people hired in new positions this year who are not migrants. I sit opposite one for eight hours a day.

This story (and the recent storm in a teacup about foreign workers) is a fantastic example of how the right successfully controls the debate on immigration and exposes just how rubbish the idea of a liberal elite closing down discussion on the subject is.

The story goes on to say:

Foreign workers have taken every new job in Britain for the past four years, astonishing figures show. The total of migrant employees since 2003 has soared by 740,000, while the number of Britons in work has gone into reverse and dropped by 120,000. This means that foreign workers filled all the extra 620,000 jobs which were created during those four years.

The figures quite plainly do not show that foreign workers have taken every new job in the last four years. At all. They show that more foreign workers have got jobs in the last four years than were created in the same period. Since the number of foreign workers is higher than the number of jobs, it's blatantly flipping obvious that some of the jobs they have filled will be old ones. Since many migrants come and go, filling new jobs and then leaving at the end of the season, and since probably everyone in the country knows someone who wasn't foreign getting a new job in a newly created post in the last four years, the headline and the conclusion the paper makes about the figures is quite obviously bollocks.

If there really was a liberal elite who shut down debate on immigration, you wouldn't get shitty stories like this one. You wouldn't get stories like the Mail's take on the figures - 'Number of Britons in work falls by 270,000 - because migrants get most new jobs', which says:

The disclosure is a fresh embarrassment to ministers who have had to dramatically revise upwards the official figures on migrant workers.

Which is also bollocks. Nobody's had to revise official figures for anything. Peter Hain's had to apologise for not including a section of people already counted in the official figures in a category when he gave an answer to Parliament. Jesus wept.

Back to the Express, and we get this subheading - 'And they go to the front of the housing queue', which is followed up in the article with this:

The Prime Minister’s discomfort deepened when an investigation was launched into how white Britons are being left behind in the housing queue.

Rubbish.

An investigation has been launched into whether all British people, including the ones who aren't white, are being left behind in the housing queue. Not how specifically white people are. Remember - while filth rags like the Express talk about migration, they're really talking about race, and deliberately blurring the two.

The inevitable withdrawal of the shite claims in the headline and the opening of the Express story comes right at the very end:

But a spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions claimed the figures did not mean that all new jobs have been taken by foreigners as the level of unemployment claim-ants among British workers did not match. He added that a recent fall in the number of Britons employed has coincided with a decline in the working age population.

Employment Minister Caroline Flint said: “There are opportunities for British workers with nearly 660,000 vacancies waiting to be filled.”

Notice how the withdrawal doesn't actually include the real reason didn't mean that all new jobs have been taken by migrants. Which is that people who aren't migrants have occupied new posts. In other words - because it's a cheap lie.

Also, notice the spokesman only 'claimed'. David Davis 'said', Damian Green 'said', Sir Andrew Green 'said'. Claims can be false. And we've already been given what the Express has said is really true. If there really were a liberal elite controlling the immigration debate, the Express article would never have seen the light of day - and not because it dares to be critical of immigration, but because it's lying nonsense made up to deliberately scare white people.

More on the subject over at Lenin's Tomb.

Fury at foreign storms in British teacups - and guess who's paying

Since I talk here about the way the tabloids exaggerate and distort immigration figures, it would be remiss of me not to mention the recent shenanigans over how the government had miscounted the number of migrant workers in the country. It's a big old balls up that's annoying as hell, especially when you're somebody who uses government figures as a guide on the number of migrants to come to conclusions about immigration's effects.

Still, it's very difficult to tell from the media coverage - including that of the dirty Marxists at the BBC - exactly what it means or what the figures refer to, hence the couple of days' wait before I posted anything.

After much trawling through different versions of the story and not finding anything explaining exactly what the new numbers mean or why they had to be changed, I came across this version at epolitix - 'New admission on migrant jobs'. It includes the following explanation of the revised number:

The DWP insisted ministers used the earlier estimate "in good faith" and attributed the rise to more detailed analysis by officials of the Labour Force Survey - which is compiled by the Office for National Statistics.

This includes "a more rigorous definition" of foreign national workers to include those in the country before 1997 who have subsequently taken up jobs.

Now, I don't know about you, but before I came across this piece of information I'd been under the impression that the government had underestimated the number of foreign nationals actually present in the country - not just the number of foreign nationals who got their job after 1997. Even with an extra 300,000 (or 700,000 depending on what you read - but more on that later) added to these figures, not a single person has been added to the population, and not a single person has been added to the number of foreign nationals in this country.

Given media coverage of the apology, it's no wonder I thought that. The dirty lefties at the BBC cover the story in 'Half of new jobs go to migrants' and 'Smith 'sorry' for migrants error'. In the first, it includes a quote from David Davis saying:

"Immigration policy has been out of control for a decade and, if you can't count migration, you certainly can't control it."

which is uncontradicted even though it's wrong, since it's not migration that was being counted but the number of new jobs that had been taken up by people from overseas.

In the second, it includes a dirty great quote from Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch infamy, banging on about how we can't cope with millions of extra people even though the bungled figures were not about the number of people arriving, but the number already here taking jobs after 1997. Green pops up in the horribly communist Guardian's coverage in 'Smith apologises for foreign workers error' too, which doesn't explain that the additions to the numbers are not people who hadn't been counted as present in the country, and neither does any of the other Graun coverage I've seen, including 'Brown treating public like fools over immigration, says Cameron', 'Numbers: Improving population statistics', 'Brown promises migration rule revamp amid statistical spat' or 'The numbers game'. Neither do the Independent's 'Government red-faced over immigration figures' or 'Ministers accused of underestimating number of foreign workers by 400,000'. (As for the right wing papers - are you joking)? Liberal elite, where are you?

Now, here's why I think the underestimate of the figures is just a balls up rather than deliberate duplicity. If the government had actually wanted to cover anything up, they could easily have brazened it out, since what Hain said in Parliament was almost technically correct. Seriously. He said:

"with 2.7 million extra jobs in the last ten years, around .8 million of those from outside the country have come to work in Britain"

The extra .3 million haven't come from outside the country in the last ten years. They were already here. If Hain had wanted to cover anything up, he didn't have to admit to his mistake in the way he did. He just had to say he meant to add 'in the last 10 years' to the end of his sentence. The fact that he did apologise is a strong indicator that it was just that - a mistake. Add to that how bloody easy it would have been to put a positive spin on a larger number of migrants actually in work than was previously thought, and you've got another indicator that the mistake wasn't deliberate.

Once Hain admits a mistake, of course he gets further jumped all over, an example being the Mail's 'Migrant jobs fiasco: Official estimate goes from 800,000 to 1.5m in 24 hours' saying:

And yet another official figure, this time from the Government's own Office for National Statistics, put the total of migrant workers at 1.5million.

This beautifully exposes the genius of the right substituting the word 'migration' with 'immigration' (I'd love to know where this started, so if any of you clever people know where & when - I'm thinking its either stolen from US Republicans or has been imported from Australia - please say so in the comments). Some of the new .4 million are British citizens who were born abroad to British citizens. Not foreigners. Technically, they're migrants, since they've moved from somewhere else - but how many people would spot that (especially as the paper doesn't bother to explain)? You'll also notice from the coverage of the figures that came from the ONS statistician earlier in the year (the 1.5 million ones) that they were actually in answer to a different sodding question.

It's easy to see how someone would try to calculate how many jobs in the last ten years had gone to foreigners by counting the number of people who arrived and are in work without thinking to count those who were already here and didn't get their job until after 1997. As for the further extra 400,000 who are mainly British citizens - eff off. They shouldn't be counted anyway. Hain's biggest mistake - and the official who undoubtedly supplied him with his figures - was to forget that when people ask about migrant numbers, the right wants the maximum numbers possible - including migrants' kids, half the kids born to one migrant and one non-migrant, tourists, British people coming back, ducks, geese, swallows, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

Yes, an embarrassing gaffe. But what does it say about the government's counting of immigrants? Precisely sod-all, since if the epolitix story is right, all these people had been counted and included in the Labour Force Survey anyway. Hain just categorised them badly.

Storm, meet teacup.

This is not to say that immigration figures couldn't be dealt with better and in a clearer way. They should. For a start, the sluggishness with which they change only means Local Authorities don't get enough funding in time to deal with increasing numbers, which has served as grist to the mill of the Tories and their tabloids for ages now - not to mention the BNP.

Professor David Coleman (of MigrationWatch infamy) highlighted the problem of poor governent figures on immigration when he said:

No recent and extensive critical review of statistics on immigration and ethnicity is available, although official publilcations clarify some of the incompatibilities between different data sources.

Except you know when he said that? 1982.*

This is not a new problem, people. Stop pretending it is. And stop pretending its the deliberate invention of the current administration. There's a lot that is, but inaccurate immigration stats aren't one of them.

*In 'Demography of immigrants and minority groups in the United Kingdom' advertised on the Galton Institute website.