I 've just been a bit sick

Is this the vilest front page headline we've ever seen?


For those wondering - the article isn't actually about Muslims kidnapping anyone, although you won't find it on the Star's website. It's about some Muslims suggesting on the internet that the McCanns were responsible for their daughter's kidnapping. You know, similar to what The Star and Express had to print front page apologies about and pay half a mil in fines for a couple of weeks ago.

More at Leo Burrows and Anorak.

Ugh.

How the Express and Mail include figures released months ago as new

There's a technique hacks use when they want to reheat old stuff and present it as new. It's quite a simple one. It's called 'pretending the old figures are actually new'. Or 'lying'.

Our friend James Slack has provided us with a couple of examples. In February he gave us 'More than 860 immigrants enter Britain EVERY DAY - and two-thirds come from outside EU' that reheated three month old figures, and last summer we got 'A fifth of crimes committed by immigrants', which said:

Foreign nationals are now responsible for more than one in five crimes committed in London, police figures revealed yesterday.

When the paper had reported the exact same figures six weeks earlier.

Today, proving that the Express likes to outdo Slack's distortions, we have 'Knifing and shootings up as murder rates soar', which says:

Shocking statistics released last night show a 14 per cent increase in murder and manslaughter in England and Wales between 1998 and 2007.

So - some statistics were released on a Sunday - that is shocking - especially as:

The figures, supplied in Parliamentary answers by Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker, emerged just days after Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed the Government was winning the battle against violent crime.

They were revealed in a Parliamentary answer that was given on a night when Parliament wasn't sitting? What the...?!

In reality, Vernon Coaker took part in a debate last Thursday about crime in London, and answered a written question about knife carrying. In the written answer, he refers to figures revealed three months ago when the Home Office published 'Homicides, Firearms Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/07'. Eagle eyed readers will spot that these are the exact same figures the Express used to scare its readers about the number of dirty murdering foreigners we have on our shores a couple of weeks ago.

Coaker doesn't contradict Jaqui Smith as the paper implies, saying this in the debate about crime in London:

It was interesting that the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) would not go back to 2002-03, but used 1998-99 as his baseline. The reason is that there was a different way of counting crime in 1998-99. Let me go through the figures, just as the Metropolitan Police Service has, from 2002-03 to this year, which are all counted in exactly the same way, so that the people of London know exactly what is happening. Between 2002-03 and this year, there was a more than 20 per cent. reduction in crime. There has been a reduction in the total number of murders in London since 2002-03 of 17.5 per cent, and a reduction in the total number of knife-enabled offences of more than 30 per cent. during that period. The year-on-year figures from the Metropolitan Police Service also show considerable reductions in crime. We need to ensure that the people of London know about these reductions, not because we want to be complacent or because the job is done, but because we want to move forward on the basis of facts.

More importantly, he doesn't refer to any of the figures the Express does, saying only this in the written answer:

Available data from the Homicide Index relate to offences currently recorded as homicide where the apparent method of killing is ‘sharp instrument'. Between 1997-98 and 2006-07 police in England and Wales recorded 2,333 such homicides, 635 of which were recorded by the City of London or Metropolitan police forces. These data cannot be broken down to a more local level than police force area.

And that's it. The paper has pretended that Coaker has contradicted Jaqui Smith, and pretended he's mentioned figures he actually hasn't, all so it can crowbar in some alarmist statistics.

As for the figures the paper chooses to focus on and imply come from Vernon Coaker - they're not much good. Lots of cases from last year will still be going on, and some of these offences will end up being no longer classified as homicide. There are caveats all over 'Homicides, Firearms Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/07' pointing this fact out. As an example, in 2005/2006, there were 769 cases initially counted as homicide, with 44 of those ending up being counted as something else. A similar number this year would show the lowest number of homicides since 2000/2001.

In 2006/2007, 757 were initially recorded as homicide, compared to 729 in 1997/1998, which is a much smaller gap than the one the Express gives us. That's because there were 121 cases that ended up not being counted as homicide that year. In fact, the number of cases initially recorded as homicide is at its lowest since 1999/2000. We have no idea how many of those from this year will turn out not to be homicide. The paper is going on and counting them all anyway.

And why? Because it's not trying to report the news or tell its readers accurately what is going on in the world. It's trying to create a specific false impression to scare them. Remember, kids. 'News' doesn't mean 'news' when we're talking about newspapers.

Foreigners responsible for 1 in 5 London crimes?

Back last summer, the Daily Mail submitted an FOI request to the Metropolitan Police asking about the number of foreign criminals in the capital. The results were used first in 'Foreigners commit 20 per cent of crime in London, say police', and dredged up and presented as new six weeks later in 'A fifth of crimes committed by immigrants' in an attempt to back up Julie Spence's claims about crime in Cambridgeshire.

Now, Unity points out (via Obsolete) that the Telegraph regurgitated the Mail's figures a day after the second Mail article in a nice bit of churnalism headlined 'Foreigners 'commit fifth of crime in London', and further confuses the figures by claiming they refer to different things.

Originally, I was confused by the Mail's articles as their claims are all over the place and say different things about the figures even in the same article. The paper claims that they were for the number of arrests, the number of people charged, the proportion of them who were foreign nationals and the proportion who were immigrants. Had I read the Telegraph, I would have been even more confused, since it claims these are from solved crimes - a definition I'm finding difficult to find anywhere. That actually hints at something else, but more on that later.

When the Express used similar figures earlier this year that didn't seem to tally with the Mail's, I sent my own FOI request to the Metropolitan police to clarify what the actual figures really represented. This is what I found out.

The figures don't measure the number of immigrants or foreign nationals responsible in one way or another for crimes in the capital. They measure what suspects give as their nationality when they come to the attention of the police. As the Met point out in the notes on the figures they sent:

The MPS crime recording system can not be searched to obtain details of someone's status as a 'foreign national', only the nationality they give when the come to the attention of the Police. As a consequence there is no way to distinguish between residents of the UK (regardless of citizenship) and visitors from other countries

And, in the covering email I was sent, they also point this out:

Please can I draw your attention to the 'Notes' page that will further explain exactly what the information represents. From reading this page you will see that we have never released information regarding foreign nationals as the system that we use to collect the information does not distinguish between foreign nationals, tourists, dual-nationalities, etc. so these figures purely show the number of individuals charged who provided their nationality. Please also be aware that it is not a mandatory field, it is self-defined and as such there is no way of checking that the data is actually accurate, e.g. if someone provides their nationality as Jamaican we have no way of checking whether this is actually the case. The 'Notes' page will explain all these issues in further detail.

The figures measure the number of people accused of a crime. That is, the number of people who have been arrested or had proceedings taken out against them. They don't measure the number of people charged, and they don't measure the number of people convicted. To say they measure the number of people responsible isn't accurate by legal definitions, or in the more common usage of the word, since it might turn out they're not responsible at all.

So, the people aren't foreign nationals, and they're not 'responsible' for the crimes. To be 'responsible' for a crime, as far as I can tell, someone needs to be charged or cautioned, etc. And it definitely hasn't yet been decided whether they have actually committed any crime yet.

Which leads me to the 'solved' crime claim and a very important question.

I can't for the life of me find an official definition of solved crime, but I can find one for 'detection', which seems to be the same thing since the Met seems to be using 'solve' and 'detection' interchangeably in these two press releases.

In order for a crime to be detected, it has to meet certain criteria - someone has to be charged or cautioned, etc. The full list of criteria is here - but a crime that has only had someone accused doesn't count as being detected. So the figures the Telegraph is using aren't actually from solved crimes.

The Telegraph article only includes the claim about the figures being for solved crimes at the end of this sentence:

Romanians, whose country became part of the EU in January, committed more than 1,000 offences — an eightfold rise on the same period in 2006, according to Metropolitan Police figures for solved crimes.

This could mean that the figures for the number of Romanins were accused of for the first half of 2007 are eight times as high as the number of crimes Romanians were charged (or cautioned for, etc) with in the first half of 2006 - two very different things indeed. If the word 'solved' refers to the number of convictions we could be talking about something even more different than that.

The figures I got from the Met also show the number of people charged for crimes in the whole of 2007. The number of Romanians charged with crimes for the first half of 2007 is 469, so it looks as though the rise in crimes Romanians are responsible for has risen by four rather than eight times. It's difficult to say without knowing exactly what the original number actually refers to. Is it arrests, detections or convictions?

Given the loose way the paper has treated the other figures (probably more as a result of churning the Mail'n numbers that anything else), it'd be wise to treat them with caution. Especially as the Express claims in another article that Romanians were connected with 922 crimes in the whole of Britain in the last six months of 2007.

To sum up - these figures are meaningless. They don't measure foreign nationals or immigrants at all. They don't tell us the number of crimes the people measured are responsible for - only the rate they are accused of crimes compared to the number of crimes people who describe themselves as British are accused of. As I've said before, there were 447,628 crimes reported in London in the first half of 2007. People describing themselves as non-British were accused of 22,973 of those - or 1 in 20 - and actually charged with 9,878 of them - or about 1 in 45. Saying 'Foreigners are accused of a twentieth of crime in London' or 'Foreigners are responsible for one in forty crimes in London' would be closer to the truth.

But if you can't even be sure if they're actually foreign or not, what's the point?

The Daily Express - for when a James Slack scare story just isn't misleading enough

I posted about a Daily Express story earlier today, and signed off with a throwaway comment about how the hack involved rivaled James Slack for including made up nonsense in an immigration scare story. No sooner had I hit 'publish' than I looked on the Mail site and saw a version of the same article there, penned by none other than James Slack himself. I've taken down the older post so I can look at both papers' coverage.

The two stories are 'Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal' in the Mail, and 'FOREIGNERS ARE TO BLAME FOR ONE IN FIVE OF UK’S MURDERS' in the Express.

Both are rubbish from top to bottom, but the Express article takes away the prize of being the most misleading. Yay, the Daily Express!

These figures were arrived at in a similar way to ones I looked at earlier this year about general crime figures that were included in both papers. I sumbitted an FOI request to the Met Police to try to work out how the two papers had come up with different figures for the same thing. I covered the results in 'How many foreign criminals were there in London?'

What's happened this time is that someone - probably at the Daily Mail - has submitted an FOI request to all 43 police forces in England and Wales, and counted up the numbers of people accused of homicide who specify their nationality on their arrest form.
There were three main things that were misleading about the two papers' earlier crime figures:

• The figures both papers used didn't actually measure foreign nationals. They're potentially very misleading, which is why the police don't publish them. The Met were explicit about this.
• The Express had taken figures from only half the police forces in the country and extrapolated them across the forces that didn't respond to their request. This is despite the fact that their figures included those from the Met Police, which almost certainly accounted for more than half the figures they had.
• The Mail claimed that its figures measured people charged with offences. They didn't. They measured the number of people accused.

The two new articles suffer from similar problems, and more besides. Their figures are from 25 out of 43 police forces and are extrapolated in the same way, although the Mail keeps that fact quiet.

Let's look at the Mail first. It claims:

According to figures revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, the 96 foreign nationals convicted of homicide last year were from 28 different countries.

They were involved in 21 per cent of the total of 461 murder and manslaughter cases. [Taken from the stats from the 25 forces who answered the FOI request, which the paper keeps quiet. There were 755 in total, which is revealed much, much later in the article].

We know it's misleading to count these people as foreign nationals.

It's also misleading to claim they're convicted. Here's how.

'Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/2007' covers the number of homicides in detail. If the Mail is telling the truth, these figures will contain at least 461 convictions for homicide.

But there are only 148.

When the Mail says 'convicted', it means 'accused' - just like it did earlier in the year with the number of foreign criminals in London. The paper's figures are meaningless, since they don't measure foreign nationals and they don't measure convictions.

To add to that, the paper includes this bit of rope for hanging itself with:

The figures show a wide variation between areas. In London, as many as 76 out of 231 identified killers were foreign nationals.

In Manchester, it was eight out of 42, and in Bedfordshire, three out of seven. But in West Yorkshire, it was none out of 47.

So, the force that arrests more foreign nationals than any other is responsible for 79% of the total number of pretend foreigners the paper claims for the 25 forces that answered its request. That means there were only 20 homicides pretend foreigners were arrested for in 24 other forces. 20 out of 230, which makes about one in 11. It's not realistic to assume that the 18 other forces will be the same as the group that includes London.

Here's a quick rundown of all the claims made in the Mail's headline:

Foreigners [lie] carry out [lie] one in every five [fanciful] killings in Britain [lie], police figures reveal [no they don't]

Built on the same soggy house of cards is the Express coverage, which ramps up the hyperbole by pretending we're talking about murder instead of homicide. It does make clear that we're talking about:

Of 461 people convicted of, or charged with... [emphasis mine]

but ruins it by lying, saying they were charged with:

murder in the 12 months before April last year

And it lies about how they're responsible rather than just accused of in the headline. Here's a quick summary of the Express headline and the claims it makes:

FOREIGNERS [lie] ARE RESPONSIBLE [lie] FOR ONE IN FIVE [fanciful] OF UK'S [lie] MURDERS [lie]

There is a reason why this could be worrying. If the Mail is telling the truth about one claim in its story (and there's no reason to think it is, so that's alright), then:

The statistics are so alarming that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will hold a migrant crime summit on Thursday amid worries that police are struggling to cope.

Of course, the truth of this could well be that the summit has been called to explain how these figures are misleading, or could have been called ages ago and have nothing to do with these figures. The second is more likely, which means this is the screamsheets' attempt to influence proceedings there, like they've managed to mislead tory numpty David Davies, and MigrationWatch, both of whom get their gullible quotes inserted into both papers.

They'll have a good chance of misleading New Labour too, if past experience is anything to go by.

Hurrah for the fourth estate! The slags!

Boxfresh urban myth!

Here's a brand spanking new, straight out of the box urban myth for you - courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood churnalists at our national tabloids. I first saw it in the Sun, but it has been picked up by the Mail as well.

Apparently, a Sarf Londoner called directory enquiries and ordered a 'cab innit' and got delivered a cabinet! How hilarious is that?! It cost her a hundred and eighty quid! That's priceless!

Except no.

The girl isn't named and neither is the directory enquiries company, but funnily enough the cabinet company gets two mentions in the Sun and three in the Daily Mail. Blimey, that's handy for the company's marketing director Steve Whittle, who must dream of getting free national coverage in two of the country's best selling tabloids. He even gets quoted in both of them. He must be cock-a-hoop, let me tell you.

Here's what we're expected to believe:

• Someone phoned a directory enquiries number for a cab and was stupid enough not to drop the slang and only asked for a Joe Baxi and then a cab innit, without once ever dropping the 'innit' or using the word 'taxi'.



• She managed to order the cabinet without confusing the operator with references to going to Bristol, or being taken to the airport.



• The nearest firm to her non-specific area of South London home that sells cabinets is in Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire - outside London, to the north of the city. There are no cabinet sellers in the entire capital.



• The cheapest cabinet the company sold is £180. The cheapest cabinet on there is £169 before VAT. It comes to £207.92 including VAT and next day delivery.



• There was no confusion as the salesperson at the other end of the phone talked the woman through the different colours of cabinet she could have.

This is a bit like how an employment law firm managed to score a super marketing goal with a shonky study that said three quarters of companies had banned Christmas decorations because of offending people.

The papers get what they want, the company gets a bit of free publicity. This time the papers get a story about a lower class teenager being stupid and using slang coming a cropper, with a massive pun built in for their readers to laugh at. The cabinet company gets free national coverage.

God, I'm such a sodding killjoy. It's only a bit of fluff.

Boris and going off on a tangent

Actually, this isn't really much of a tangent from banging on about lying tabloids like a nutter on a bus, which is Five Chinese Crackers' reason for existence. The number of anti-Livingstone messages that scream out at me from Evening Boris Standard kiosks every day kind of drags the issue of who should be Mayor of London into the area of tabloid arsery*, so I can have a look at the issue briefly here. If you don't like it, get off. It's my bloody rant and I'll shout about whatever I like as I stagger into the side of your seat and slosh Kestrel Super out of the top of my can.

I checked out 'This is London' - the Evening Standard website after seeing a kiosk advertising the fact that Boris was booed at hustings this lunchtime. Wouldn't you know it - the actual article about the event manages to say:

But by the end of the two-hour event at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster the jeers had turned to cheers as he won round much of the audience.

Well, knock me down with a feather! It was positive after all!

Apparently, the race is quite close. I fail to see how that could be, since every time I've actually seen the man asked about his policies, he looks like a bumbling halfwit who has no idea what he's on about. Take Newsnight the other night, or his earlier interview with Andrew Marr, or - well anywhere really. He just blusters a bit, says something vaguely popular, blusters a bit more, talks over interviewers and repeats his vaguely populist point, inserting extra bits of ramble instead of answering questions on specifics that he really doesn't know the answer to until he gets to the end. It's like watching an A Level English student who hasn't actually read the book get asked a question by teacher.

It goes like this:

Paxler: What do you think is the most important issue facing Londoners?

Boris: Well I think that people are concerned about transport and crime wurglemumble top priority will be to wurgle sure people are responsible themselves for feeling safe on buses and tubes and ...

Paxler: Isn't that...

Boris: ....Wurrgh allow people to feel responsible for that safety and reallytaketheresponsibilityforthemselves and I'm really concerned - this is my top priority ...

Paxler: ...Just passing the buck to....

Boris: ...Hnnng give every tube and bus passenger - every tube passenger and everyone who goes on a bus a blunderbuss...

Paxler: Blunderbuss?!

Boris: ...Make thugs and vandals think twice about low level graffitti and intimidating...

Paxler: You want to give people a blunderbuss?!

Boris: ...behaviour, uh, what? Yes, really make Londoners feel safe hrrrt hand out blunderbusses top priority for Londoners - 'Blunderbuss on the Clapham omnibus' you could call it, ho ho! Goodonemumblehurr hurr...

Paxler: Surely that'll make things more violent! Not...

Boris: What? No, no, no no you see, ah, no that's where, that's where you have it errr ... you dont have to load it with shot you see...

Paxler: So you want people to be able to shoot other passengers but not...

Boris: You could load it with, and I've checked into this, you don't have to use shot in a blunderbuss, you can...

Paxler: ...with shot? What in God's name...

Boris: Top priority - Londoners - safety is really important to Londoners. And I really don't want to be drawn from this point - it doesn't have to be violent, people can load their blunderbuss with Fairy Liquid for example ...

Paxler: Load blunderbusses with Fairy Liquid?! How much does a blunderbuss even cost? Who provides the Fairy Liquid?

Boris: ...Fairy hnnnt Liquid or Maltesers...

Paxler: How much does a blunderbuss cost?

Boris: ...You could have Fairy Maltesers, top priority for Londoners wurgle feel safe. Really top priority Fairy Liquid and andandand and Maltesers or ororor you could simply - you could simply load it with...

Paxler: How much does a blunderbuss cost?

Boris: ...fat man's poo.

Then I'd be on the way home and see a Standard kiosk shouting 'Boris Blunderbuss Omnibus triumph' instead of 'Clueless oaf rambles on about stuff he hasn't thought through'.

Still, I would actually vote for any candidate who did promise me I could shoot kids who listen to their phones playing tinny music out loud on the bus in the face with fat man's poo.

Maybe that makes me a hypocrite.

*Arsery is like archery, but with more bums.

How the Mail uses numbers to fool you

While the Daily Mail often uses exaggerated or misleading figures in many of its immigration scare stories, most of the time the figures are actually irrelevant. What's important for the paper is to continue to peddle anti-immigration stories. Whether they're based on sound arguments or figures that actually back them up is not important to the paper. As long as there are some numbers to throw around that sound sufficiently high, they'll be chucked into a story to give the illusion that they back the story up. Take the article I blogged about yesterday - an entire outraged rant about how many foreigners have been added to the electoral register that doesn't once tell us how many actually have been added. Because the point of the story isn't to impart news or to give us any useful information, but to tell the paper's readers - who the editor assumes are anti-immigration - what they want to hear.

There's another great example today in 'More than a million immigrants live in homes paid for by the taxpayer', which is also a handy example of how the paper can distort reports that say anything that contradict its anti-immigration stance to make it look as though they actually say the opposite.

The numbers in this story, such as they are, amount to saying that more than a million immigrants live in social housing (the 'paid for by the taxpayer' is a bit of a stretch, since Council tenants do have to pay rent), 'one in nine subsidised homes is now occupied by a migrant family' and 'Housing queues have lengthened by more than half in England since 1997. In London and the South East they have nearly doubled'.

These are given entirely out of context. How many non-immigrants live in social housing? How many subsidised homes are occupied by non-immigrant families? How many immigrants are there in the UK anyway? Is a million immigrants disproportionately high? Has the number of available properties it's possible to allocate dropped?

We're not told any of these things, but the tone of the article leaves us in no doubt that this is to be seen as a bad thing - language like 'one in nine subsidised homes is now occupied' is there to give us the impression that this represents an increase - especially as it follows this gem of a sentence:

It said the number of foreigners in council or housing association accommodation had soared over the past five years.

It is said, is it? By who? Is it justified? We're not told. The 'it is said' is there so the paper doesn't have to make a direct claim that it can't back up. We're given the impression of a rise without any evidence to back it up and without the paper telling us there is in its own words.

The first four fifths of the article - eight sentence/paragraphs of a ten sentence/paragraph story - are there to give us what the paper wants us to think is actually happening before giving this partial withdrawal:

The Equality Commission's report said there was no sign of bias in favour of foreigners but acknowledged that the perception of unfairness was widespread.

By the time the reader has got this far (if they ever do), they've read through a story that is clearly intended to give the impression that the out of context figures it includes are unusually high and represent numbers 'soaring'. In perfect 'Withdrawn!' fashion, the comments of the EHRC are made to look wrong, stupid or lies, by setting the whole thing out to look as though the Commission found all these sorts of high figures and despite it all came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of a bias.

In fact, this is about as far from the truth as we'd expect a Daily Mail immigration scare story to be. The actual interim findings the story is based on (the actual study won't be published until later in the year) is heralded by a press release about it on the Equality Commission website with the title 'New study shows no evidence of bias against UK born families in social housing allocation'. The conclusion is arrived at precisely because of the sort of figures the Mail tries to scare us with, mainly because the percentage of immigrants in social housing - 18% - is roughly the same as that for the British-born population - 17%. Removing the context makes the numbers look more scary.

But not scary enough. The EHRC interim report doesn't actually include the figures as the Mail represents them, and one has been exaggerated. Some poor schlub has had to get his calculator out to fart around with the figures to make them extra frightening.

Here's how the paper has played with each of the three figures it has already cherrypicked from the report to worry its readers:

1. The EHRC figures don't include the total 'more than one million' number. The Mail has had to work it out itself from the percentage people in the UK who are foreign-born (10.8%) and then using the figure of 18% of foreign-born people in subsidised accommodation to work out what the total might be.

2. The figures don't say that one in nine homes is subsidised by a migrant family. They say that one in ten are, with '90 per cent of those in social housing are UK born,' so the paper has bizarrely bumped the figures up.

3. The figures do include the figure for the housing queues lengthening by more than half, but measures from 1996 - not the Mail's hot button 1997 marker which it uses because that's the year Labour came to power. The actual numbers are presented within this bit of context:


[the rise in the waiting list for subsidised accommodation] followed substantial previous reductions caused principally by existing tenants exercising their right to buy. Councils highlight high housing costs as a key driver in increasing demand in the social housing sector.

Of course, the paper removes this to make it look as though it's immigration that led to the housing queues lengthening.

The article is topped off by a great cherrypicked section of a quote from Trevor Phillips that removes another bit of context. The full quote is this:

I welcome these findings as they are an indication the system is, broadly speaking, working fairly for all groups. What’s clear is that there is a gap between supply and demand of social housing of which the presence of immigrants is a relatively small element, but often a highly visible one. With increased pressure on social housing in the future there will be a need to resource the system appropriately and manage it fairly in years ahead. [The bold section is what the Mail leaves out]

Of course, the Mail's version removes the references to the system working fairly and to the presence of immigrants being a 'relatively small element' of the gap between supply and demand to make it look more as though the report says that the 'soaring' number of immigrants in social housing is creating great strain on public housing, when it is saying quite the opposite.

That's it. For now. The article was published today - the same day as the press release on the EHRC website. By tomorrow, ther may be a different version on the site that also appears in the dead tree version (under James Slack's byline, maybe) that further distorts things and beefs up the scaremongering. Don't be surprised if there is.

James Slack adds a million immigrants to the electoral register in just the time it takes to bash out one article

There are certain things the Daily Mail is actually very good at, especially when ‘Home Affairs Editor’ James Slack is in the writer’s chair. One is using figures to mislead its readers into thinking that numbers connected to immigration are higher than they actually are. Another is just giving the reader enough information to come to a conclusion without actually directly stating what it wants its readers to think.

A perfect example of both pops up in today’s ‘Immigration adds a million new voters to the electoral register in just two years as total hits record 46million’. See, immigration doesn’t add a million to the electoral register in two years, something the subs on the dead tree version were clearly aware of, since the paper version’s headline is ‘Migrants help swell electoral roll by 1m’. That’s more accurate, but it’s wonderfully ambiguous. You could still interpret it as meaning that migrants help swell the electoral roll by adding a million to it.

The article itself is actually incredibly vague. The central concrete point of the article is that 1 million new people have been added to the electoral register in the last couple of years and some of them are immigrants.

"Some of the new people added to the electoral register are immigrants, Mister Holmes? I say, I am almost certain that your assertion contains the minimal amount of faecal matter," said Watson.

The whole article is an exercise in throwing different stats around to confuse the reader. We learn that:

Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship or who poured in from Eastern Europe.

How many hundreds of thousands? What’s the split between British citizens and eastern Europeans? Surely the Mail doesn’t have a problem with British citizens voting?

Anyway, this is supposed to lead to the conclusion:

Critics said the increase made the case for changes to the electoral rules allowing non-British citizens full voting rights.

So, because hundreds of thousands of British citizens have been added to the electoral register and some eastern Europeans have been given limited voting rights, we should change the rules giving non-British citizens from places that aren't eastern Europe unlimited voting rights. That makes sense. Go to the top of the class, Logic Boy.

Since the other group mentioned in the vague 'hundreds of thousands' claim are eastern Europeans and they’re not allowed to vote in General Elections, this begs the question – which electoral register has had a million people added to it in the last two years? Local or general?

Ready for the answer? Neither. Okay, I’m being uncharitable. The article later reveals that 976,000 have been added to the electoral register for local elections in the last two years, which is nearly a million – and that 679,000 have been added to the register for general elections, which is closer to half a million. (Remember, we’re talking about the total number of people added here, not the number of immigrants). Hands up who thought the headline referred to General Elections when you first read it. How many hands can I add to my own? Of course, that's the whole point of the story.

The general election stats are presented in a nicely subtle misleading way, too:

There is a separate register for general elections only, which was boosted by 307,669 last year. It had 223,172 additions in 2005 and 371,770 in 2006.

See how last years stats are presented first, and far apart from the figures from the previous year? That way, you're less likely to notice that the number has dropped, just as the number for local elections has. This is why the article combines the last two years rather than just reporting 2007's rise. If it didn't we'd actually be able to see that the number of additions is dropping rather than dramatically rising.

Earlier, I asked if the Mail had a problem with British Citizens voting. The question wasn’t rhetorical, and here’s the answer:

The growth in the overall register also reflects how immigrants coming to the UK since Labour came to power are now being granted citizenship.

With passports being handed out at the rate of 100,000 every year, all these people can vote.

Oh noes! All ‘these people’ can vote. All these British citizens. Notice how the first sentence there is utter balls? According to the paper, passports are ‘handed out’ at the rate of 100,000 a year – or 200,000 in two years. An addition of a million people to the electoral register in two years somehow reflects this? Only if the mirror you hold up is one of those comedy funfair ones that makes you look five times bigger than you actually are.

The story doesn’t once tell us how many of the 1 million added to the register are immigrants. It doesn’t tell us how many are new British citizens. It doesn’t tell us how many are old Commonwealth citizens. It does say that 150,000 eastern Europeans a year have been added to the register for local elections, so could be that the paper has the missing figures, but doesn’t tell us. Of course, it’s equally likely that the 150,000 is a nonsense figure James Slack made up earlier, like his £9bn cost of immigration figure, but I haven’t the time to check.

To muddy the waters and frighten Mail readers a bit more is this article, ‘Two million Muslims now live in Britain and 10,000 are millionaires, reveals Home Secretary Jacqui Smith during visit to Pakistan’. This is a separate article on the website, but in the dead tree version a somewhat abbreviated version is just added to the electoral register story without its own headline, in bold print.

We’re clearly supposed to associate these figures with one another. That there are now 2 million Muslims in the UK (which Smith never actually said – she just said the figure ‘may be as high as 2 million’ – so it’s clearly not a concrete definite) is supposed to be digested alongside the news that immigrants have added 1 million to the electoral register, so [cue the ominous music please] more Muslims can vote now.

The figures the Mail use in the article about the number of Muslims are classic scaremongering. Look at how percentages are used to inflate the impression of the number of Muslims who pray every day here (in the dead tree version of the article):

There are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, and 25 million baptized Anglicans.

But only 6.3 per cent of Christians in the 2001 census said they went to church weekly compared to 51 per cent of Muslims who prayed daily.

6.3% compared to 51%? Wowsers! That’s loads more Muslims, eh? Except no.
6.3% of 29.2 million is just over 1.8 million. 51% of 2 million is 1,002,000. Notice also how the numbers for Christians are taken only from England and Wales, and the number of Muslims is the vague, upper limit figure for the total in the UK.

As if that weren’t enough, going to church every week is compared to praying every day. The two are different, since one takes more effort. And both lots are way outnumbered by the ones who don’t pray every day, don’t go to church, mosque, synagogue, temple or anything else.

So, what’s all this scaremongering for then? Why include a snippet about the number of Muslims in the UK under the same headline as an article about the number of immigrants added to the electoral roll? This is where the paper shows off its ability to push an idea without explicitly stating it, just giving its readers enough information to come to the conclusion themselves.

There’s a bizarre conspiracy theory that abounds in the comment boxes of the right wing tabloids, one that is espoused by Richard Littlejohn. It goes like this – immigration is high because Labour is importing voters from overseas. Because all immigrants – from the wealthy financier working in the city down to the lowliest office cleaner – are guaranteed to vote Labour. Somehow, this includes eastern Europeans, despite their not being allowed to vote in general elections. In Littlejohn’s version, Labour started importing immigrants ten years before they had the power to do so, in 1987.

This article doesn’t say that Labour is importing voters, but it does include this to give us readers enough to arrive at the conclusion:

Pressure group Migrationwatch UK said one million votes could swing a close electoral campaign.

Why else would the paper take the figure for the number of people added to one electoral register or another and focus straight in on the fact that some of these people will be immigrants without actually knowing how many are immigrants in the first place?

Deliberate or not – it’s worked. Here are some random comments:

This has been obvious to anyone who cares about England the mass migration has been about votes for Nu-Labour and the English has had to pay with our sovereignty.
- Mike, UK

Small wonder that this discredited Labour Government are so enthusiastic about uncontrolled immigration, they want to force a demographic change to make sure that they stay in power. Could there be a more unscrupulous Government?
- Chris H, Preston, Lancashire

One million immigrant voters who will doubtless be saying a big "thank you" by voting Nu Labour. I see this as a temporary blip, considering the record numbers of Brits who are saying a big "something unprintable" and leaving the country.
- Glyn, Southampton, U.K.

If I tried to reproduce all the similar comments I’d be here all day.

Thinking about it, though – although the idea is David Icke stuff, I can see why it could be attractive to some people. I mean, we’re told over and over that the government lies about immigration, that it knows that nobody benefits except the immigrants and it’s ruining the country for the rest of us. The Mail’s headline last week shouted about Labour’s lies about immigration – not mistakes or things it was incompetently wrong about, but lies.

If you think the government is deliberately lying despite knowing that immigration is ruining the country and that the crazy Muslims are going to take over, you need a motive. This is as good a one as any.

As for the paper pandering to it – that’s its job, according to Paul Dacre. If the public believe crazy nonsense, that paper must reflect it. Except it really is bizarre crazy nonsense, which the paper would much rather pander to than have the 'honest dabate' it pretends to want to have about immigration.

*UPDATED* meant to mention this earlier, but the version of the story on the website seems to be one version tacked on the bottom of another. It begins with:

One million voters have been added to the electoral register in only two years, taking the total to a record 46million.

Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship or who poured in from Eastern Europe.

Critics said the increase made the case for changes to the electoral rules allowing non-British citizens full voting rights.

And then halfway through, starts again with:

One million new voters have been added to the electoral register in only two years – taking the total to a record 46 million, it emerged last night.

Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship, or have poured in from Eastern Europe.

Critics said it made the case for changes to the electoral rules – which allow non-British citizens full voting rights.

The article carries on covering the same ground that led up to the whole thing starting over again halfway through.

There have been 77 comments so far, quite a lot repeating the nonsense about importing voters, but it seems nobody's pointed out that the article starts all over again in the middle. Remember what I've said before about people not reading the whole article?

Urban myths and Muslim bus drivers praying

Here at Five Chinese Crackers, I'm quite big on how Urban Myths can spread, and how witnesses to an event can interpret what's going on in completely the wrong way because of the existence of Urban Myths they might have heard that will affect their judgement. I've mentioned this sort of thing a few times before in connection with eastern Europeans eating swans and Muslims wanting to ban things like piggy banks, but there's a new example that's emerged in the last week.

I thought something might be fishy when I saw 'Get off my bus, I need to pray' in the Sun last week. Having pictures or even video of a Muslim bus driver praying on his bus does not prove that the driver made his passengers get off so he could pray.

Via Islamophobia Watch, we can have a look at this article from the Slough and Windsor Observer, 'Bosses defend Muslim who stopped the 81 bus to pray', which explains:

London United Busways say they have carried out a full investigation after driver Arunas Raulynaitis rolled out his prayer mat to perform his daily prayers, facing Mecca on the number 81 bus in Langley.

Bosses have analysed evidence, including CCTV footage, and say the driver was actually on his 10-minute break when the incident took place at around 1.30pm on Thursday.

They added that the control room had in fact radioed Mr Raulynaitis to terminate the bus outside Langley Fire Station in London Road because it was running late due to road works. Passengers were asked to leave the vehicle while they waited for another bus to pick them up to complete their journey.

Steffan Evans, spokesman for London United Busways, said: “The bus was delayed and by the time it had reached Langley the next bus on the route had caught up.

“At this point the bus service controller decided that in order to maintain the frequency of the buses he would curtail the late bus, and therefore instructed the driver to transfer his passengers in order that they could continue their journey without any further delay.”

But a 21-year-old passenger – who was hoping to join the bus before it terminated – told the Observer: “People were fuming because they said the driver had asked them to leave so he could pray.

“Most people ended up waiting for 15 minutes and weren’t happy. I was late for work so I got a lift with my friend. But it was a hassle I didn’t need.”

So, the driver was told to stop the bus because it was behind schedule, and he decided to pray at that point because it was time for him to take his break. Not really worth reporting in a national newspaper. Unless you make dodgy assumptions about the guy's motives.

It's exactly this sort of story that led the passengers on the bus to believe that the driver had told them to get off so he could pray. If you're primed to think a particular group are arrogant and prone to demanding other people bend to their whims to accommodate their needs, you're far more likely to conclude that anything a member of that group does that you don't like has been done for that reason.

Think about it. It's already unlikely that a bus driver would stop a bus so he could pray, and it's even less likely that he would chuck everybody off his bus while he did it. How likely is it that he would be allowed to stop the bus and terminate the whole journey so he could do it? What would possibly give you the idea that he had that kind of power? Articles like this one in the Sun and the one quoted above - which still gives the impression he stopped the bus to pray in the headline.

The miniscule number of Political Correctness Gone Mad stories that turn out to have a grain of truth in them are almost all influenced by this sort of reporting too. A while ago, a children's book about pigs wasn't shortlisted for an award, in part because Muslims wouldn't like stories about pigs. Of course, that's rubbish, but why would anyone think Muslims would be offended by stories about piggy characters in the first place? Because of stories like this one. And why would anyone think that a bus driver terminating a journey because he's been told to and then praying because it's his break has actually thrown everyone off so he could pray? Because of stories like this one.

And on and on and on...

Labour's lies about immigration

So, the Lords Economic Affairs Committee published 'The Economic Impact of Immigration' last week. I had promised to look at it alongside the Mail's coverage, and I wish I could say that the only reason I couldn't is because life got in the way, but I can't. The earth-shattering report so deftly speared the lies Labour have been telling us about immigration and included so much new information that it's taken me a week to realise how accurate the Mail's coverage has been all this time.

Not really! One-nil!


Now, while the Lords report is actually way more negative than most of the things we're used to seeing distorted by the Daily Mail (the paper that managed to take a document that said there 'was no evidence of widespread disorder' as a result of immigration and report it with the headline 'Migrant surge led to 'disorder and crime'), it's obvious from the get-go why the paper decided to replace 'Now the Lords is forced to admit that each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK' with the new article rather than publish a separate new one.

That would be because the Lords doesn't 'admit that each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK', nor does it mention the paper's 'almost £9bn' cost figure, which the paper arrived at by distorting the figures of Professor David Coleman, adding together a list of figures he explicitly warns not to because the results will be misleading; not to mention rounding up a figure of £3.08bn to £4bn, adding almost a billion pounds to the already misleading total. In fact, the 'each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK' claim is itself a serious distortion of the calculations that have been made to arrive at the figures for how much migrants are worth to GDP per head, but that's by the by.

The article that has replaced it has gone through a number of changes itself, with the original including James Slack's byline at first, but dropping it when a lot of extra information was clumsily weaved in - presumably to insert 'balance'. The new version is now 'Lords' report exposes Labour's lies on the 'benefits' of mass immigration' on the paper's website - shouted triumphantly as 'IMMIGRATION: THE GREAT LIES' (beneath a smaller 'Labour's case for mass migration demolished') on the front of last Tuesday's dead tree version.

As I said, the Lords report is more negative than most of the things we see the Mail farting around with, but it has of course been exaggerated by the paper. Nowhere does it say that the Government has lied about immigration. It does say that the £6bn total contribution the government uses to show the contribution of immigrants to the economy is 'irrelevant and misleading', which is pretty harsh, but it doesn't say the £6bn is made up or isn't true - just that it shouldn't be used to argue the benefits of immigration.

One of the claims in Slack's original article is this:

Dismiss Ministers' "preposterous" assertion that migrants boost the economy by £6billion a year;

See that word "preposterous" in quotes to show that it's a direct quote from the report? It isn't. The word "preposterous" doesn't appear once in the whole report.

To be fair to the Mail, the Lords report does argue against some of the governments arguments for immigration, but it doesn't say the government has lied.

So, while the report does say that using figures for GDP per head are more accurate than overall GDP figures, it also neatly illustrates how those figures can be distorted to give a misleading impression about the lack of benefits of immigration. In 'Labour finally admits minuscule benefit each migrant brings to Britain - just 58p a week', the paper argues:

Migrants benefit the UK population by only 58p each week, the Government has finally admitted.

And goes on to say:

Ministers have been focusing on the so-called £6billion boost delivered to the economy each year by immigrants.

But a landmark report by the authoritative Lords Economic Affairs Committee yesterday dismissed the argument as "irrelevant and misleading".

Now, what does that suggest to you? To me, it suggests that the Lords report said that immigrants are not actually worth £6bn a year to the economy, but are in fact only worth 58p a week - a paltry thirty quid a year rather than £6 billion. Which is rubbish.

Nowhere does the article explain how the 58p a week figure is arrived at or even what it represents. It doesn't explain that this is 58p per week for each of the sixty million people in the country. It does say:

Now it has emerged that Home Office officials did compile a figure of the annual benefit of migration to the native population, which is also known as Gross Domestic Product Per Capita.

A memo quietly passed to peers says the total is only £30 a year, or a paltry 58p a week in 2006.

Which doesn't exactly clarify things. And, presumably, the 'memo quietly passed to peers' was publicly available on the Oral & Written Evidence pages for the Lords Committee (which has disappeared now the report's been published), in the same way that Professor Coleman's paper for costs was. Except the Mail didn't say Coleman's figures weren't quietly passed to peers.

The paper carefully leaves out the way the 58p a week figure was calculated. If it was calculated in the same way as other attempts to do this, it takes the number of people immigration added to the population in a year, the amount immigration contributed to GDP, took the difference between those figures and divides it by sixty million and again by fifty two. Professor Coleman explains here, in an article where he says the benefit is close to 50p a week where he's supposed to be defending MigrationWatch's 4p a week figure. Doh! This article makes it look as though we're talking about the total figure migrants contribute to the economy. Which if we're talking about GDP per head and the xtra contributed by migrants would total about £1.8bn.

And, of course, it leaves out that MigrationWatch's original figure for migrants contribution to GDP per head, trumpeted loudly by James Slack in the Daily Mail was over fourteen times too low, at 4p a week.

Of course, being a James Slack article, it includes his misleading '£ 8.8billion' figure for the costs of immigration. Unlike the government figures, we have actual evidence of Slack deliberately manipulating those figures to arrive at that total.

So, it's as I've said before. Don't take what Ministers say about immigration at face value - but that goes double, triple and quadruple for the Mail and MigrationWatch. The government might take a total figure of around £1.8bn and make it sound like £6bn, but the mail will make the same sound like thirty quid.