16/01/2008

Thank you, Daily Express - it’s good to see that you have finally caught up with the BNP

Carrying on with this blog is becoming increasingly difficult. It's not that the tabloids are getting more honest, if anything they're getting worse. It's not that they're getting any better at hiding their lies either. It's just that everything they produce has become so monotonously familiar and predictable that I'm at a loss for what to write about. As merkur said in a comment on 'Deja vu all over again all over again' I could well end up cutting and pasting old entries under new dates, since the distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies stay basically the same.

"Thank you, Daily Express" - BNP

Take the story from the front page of the Daily Express, 'Britain to build 2 million homes for migrants'. Here's what the BNP has to say about the article, by the way:
Today the Daily Express has published an article vindicating all that the BNP has ever said about the strain being put upon the infrastructure of Britain by continuing to permit unfettered mass immigration. Thank you, Daily Express - it’s good to see that you have finally caught up with us.
I have a policy of not fucking linking to those shovel headed goons so you'll have to Google for it, but it's there on the BNP site, and the entire article is reproduced in full there.

The Enemies of Reason has already given the article the treatment it deserves. Obsolete was right to dismiss it out of hand, since it isn't really anything we've never seen before. I looked at virtually identical figures before, in 'Taking a gamble' and 'No crow for me please Mum!' These are just the same figures applied to the future rather than the last ten years. Still, it is nice to have it confirmed that the figures James Slack claimed were from the House of Commons Library were actually from MigrationWatch.

In a nutshell, here is how MigrationWatch pulls off this set of figures.

Back in March, the DCLG produced a set of projections of the future number of households in England, 'New projections of households for England and the regions to 2029'. It says that 33% of new households will be created as the result of net migration. It also explicitly states:
The household projections are not an assessment of housing need.
So what you should definitely not do is assume that the increase in the number of households is the same as the number of new houses that need to be built.

MigrationWatch then produced the briefing paper 'The impact of immigration on housing in England' based on these figures. It explains in its first paragraph what the DCLG figures are, and ends the paragraph with:
This amounts to a requirement for 200 new homes every day to house the additional immigrant population.
Thus completely ignoring the DCLG's disclaimer. I'm reminded here of James Slack's interpretation of Prof David Coleman's lame estimates of the cost of immigration, in which he ignored the disclaimer saying not to add the figures together as the result would be misleading.

Strangely, this connection is left out of the actual evidence presented to the Lords Economic Affairs Committee - but the Express adds it back in. Now call me cynical, but I can't help wondering if that claim was left out because evidence to the Committee will come under far greater scrutiny than the other stuff MigrationWatch produces that gets mindlessly parroted by papers like the Express.

The number of new households is not the same as the number of new homes that have to be built for a number of reasons. Here are a couple off the top of my head. There are derelict and unoccupied properties that can be refurbished. Some people own more than one property that they may decide to sell. Some properties that house only one household at the moment can be converted to house more than one household. Properties that aren't used as housing can be converted, as they have been in some warehouse districts across the country. You might be able to think of more reasons.

Another problem with MigrationWatch's claim in their original briefing paper and the Express's claim in this story is the part that says new houses need to be built 'to house the additional immigrant population'. It might be possible to argue that zillions of new homes will need to be built as a result of immigration, but the idea that they will need to be built to house immigrants can only be entertained by people with their own crazy moon logic. There's a reason most immigrant 'ghettoes' the tabloids talk about are in the most run down parts of town, and that's because housing in those parts is cheaper than everywhere else. Even if immigration means a stupid number of new houses are built, the immigrants are highly unlikely to be the ones living there.

It's this crazy moon logic that the Express story is based on - the same crazy moon logic that led to the Express headline 'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN'. The fact that a larger number of jobs were filled by migrants than there were new jobs created since 1997 does not mean that all the new jobs were taken by migrants. The fact that there will be a number of new immigrant households between now and the future does not mean that they will live in nice new houses. 'BRITAIN TO BUILD 2 MILLION HOMES FOR MIGRANTS' is just as much a bunch of complete rubbish.

In terms of looking at how the tabloids operate, there's nothing much new here. There's the unquestioning acceptance of MigrationWatch figures. There's the further beefing them up. There's the exaggerated claim in the headline. There's the familiar way they make a claim in the most lurid way possible despite explicit disclaimers that say their interpretation is wrong. There's the careful ignoring of the fact that we're talking about England and not Britain. There's the tired old recycling of the old joke Unity talked about in 'The blacks have got all the houses, the blacks have got all the houses' (when I got to secondary school, these same tired jokes were recycled to apply to Asians).

You might wonder if MigrationWatch's press release about their figures was carefully managed to scupper the IPPR's submission to the Committee from a couple of days before. Especially when you consider that MigrationWatch already made a submission about housing in November that they didn't issue a press release for. But I don't think they're clever enough and I don't think they'd need to. The tabloids wouldn't touch anything that didn't say immigration will make the sky fall on our heads with a bargepole, unless they distort and lie about it first.

The only possible new development is watching the Express moving closer and closer to coming out and supporting the BNP.

12 comments:

septicisle said...

Great post as always. I think the joke has moved even further on now: it's either the illegals/asylum seekers/Poles have got all the houses. The target moves on, the same idiotic sentiment doesn't.

TVLR said...

Why don't you get a fecking life you sad little left wing plank. Can you imagine anyone on the right spending all day everyday doing this on one of your left wing rags ?

Christ look around paper he couldn't even build his own website he's just a twisted nut

Five Chinese Crackers said...

tv licence - thanks for demonstrating the level of debate BNP supporters are capable of.

Got anything to say about the actual post, or are you completely incapable?

TVLR said...

Oh I see anyone who criticises the mighty left wing moron is a BNP supporter now. You see the left has no intelligence just pure arrogance.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

You would have saved time by just typing 'No I don't have anything to say about the actual post'.

Stay on topic or bugger off back to the Express.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

It seems tv licence chose the bugger off back to the Express option. Not really a surprise.

TVLR said...

"Stay on topic or bugger off back to the Express."

Interesting coming from someone who only goes to the Express to say their exaggerating everything like a good left wing troll. I do hope they have you for copyright lol

Five Chinese Crackers said...

You don't get it do you?

If you post a response to an article pointing out that the article is exaggerated, you're staying on topic.

If you say nothing at all about the actual article or blog post, you're not on topic.

That's how it works.

Now say something directly about this or another opst, or bugger off back to the Express.

TVLR said...

Oh I get it and that's all you ever do, TROLL. You are a nothing more than a left wing law breaker. No I'll leave you alone to talk to yourself on this pathetic excuse for a blog

Five Chinese Crackers said...

The 'bugger off' option was always the best.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

For anyone else unlucky enough to be following this exchange - TV Licence thinks I'm a law breaker because I use images of the front pages of newspapers without permission.

I'm not because of the principle of fair dealing from the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. I'm allowed to reproduce sections from a publication for "criticism, review and news reporting".

Thanks for listening.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

It's a comment - FROM THE FUTURE!

Anyone stumbling across this now and being amused by 'TVLR' above should see this post:

Troll Schadenfreude. Thank you for listening. I have to go back to the future now - it's time for my dinner pill so I'm strapping on me jetpack to shoot off home.

Whoosh!