Last word on the Brand/Sachs/Ross affair

At least the Daily Mail is doing its best to ensure this sort of thing never happens again. Its asylum coverage is working towards there never being any future Andrew Sachses by making sure they die in a war zone rather than be allowed in the country. Just like it tried in the 30s, when it opposed giving asylum to Jews fleeing the nazis, like Andrew Sachs.

Nice to see consistency there.

That's enough now, surely

A whole week of outrage about a stupid prank that nobody had heard about for a whole week until tabloids began splashing the story over their front pages, as if said prank were a matter of such international importance and magnitude that it deserves prominence over everything else happening in the world. For an entire week. If you were unconvinced that all sense of perspective had been lost, yesterday the Mail reproduced a transcript of what had been taken down from the BBC for being offensive, broadcasting to as wide an audience it can what the paper thinks was so horrible and hurtful to Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter that it should never have been broadcast. The headline? 'Lest we forget: Or what the BBC won't let you hear'. Yeah - a prank phone call by a couple of eejits is exactly equivalent to millions dying two world wars and totally deserves to be referred to using the language normally reserved for remembrance day.

And if that's not a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario, I don't know what is. Broadcast it and you're bastards for doing so. Stop broadcasting it and you're bastards for not letting us hear what you're bastards for broadcasting.

A week after the tabloid outrage that kicked the whole thing off, two people have resigned, one has been suspended without pay for three months and it isn't enough. We need more coverage, even if it is just gloating. 'The BBC wakes up to decency' is the Mail's headline today. Continuing the gloating theme and perfectly exemplifying it is Richard Littlejohn, who manages to produce a column reveals exactly what the Mail's agenda is in the whole farce, while at the same time being so spectacularly wrong, so directly at odds with reality that it really does beggar belief.

'We're mad as hell and we DON'T have to take it any more!' is the headline, which could serve as the Daily Mail's mission statement if only it included the words 'we hate anything remotely different to us' at the beginning of the sentence. The premise of the whole article is summed up a couple of passages:

"If the Tories could but see it, there's a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity here. The BBC is an ideal example of a nationalised industry which has grown bloated and lost sight of its remit.

Here is the scope for Call Me Dave and Boy George to demonstrate exactly how they can cut taxes without cutting public services."

That's the agenda nailed down. Use the incident to attack the BBC - okay, he neglects to mention that the BBC's commercial rivals have paid him quite a lot of money over the years - and he might do better himself financially if the BBC is scaled back - but there's what the Mail has been doing all along in a simple couple of sentences. (It's also worth pointing out that while employed by one of those rivals to present a talk show, which itself can only be described as cack, he managed to treat some guests so offensively that even right-winger Michael Winner was moved to call him an arsehole).

And now for the ridiculously wrong bit:
"We don't have to take it lying down. This has been a stunning victory for common decency over the self-appointed, self-obsessed, metropolitan narcissists who control so much of our public life."

BBC radio's controller has resigned. One performer has resigned and another has been suspended - all over an incident that nobody had heard about until the tabloids started a moral panic over the whole affair. It's not those people who 'control so much of our public life'. Want to hazard a guess at who this whole sorry nonsense exposes as controlling so much of our public life?

Minister for Being a Massive Poisonous Halfwit, Phil Woolas provides a clue:

"If you ignore the Sun reader in this debate [immigration] you are not going to move it forward,"

This is in defence of referring to the new immigration points system as 'Australian style', despite, er, not being very much like the Australian style. Sophie Barrett-Brown, chairman of the Immigration Law Practioners' Association explained:

'In fact, Australia's migration policy was "quite lenient" compared to the new UK regime, she added.'

And, of course, let's not forget that Rebekah Wade and the Digger himself were present at the meetings that have got Osborne and Mandelson in so much trouble, although they were largely ignored in newspaper coverage of the affair. Which is not being talked about anymore now that some people made a prank call to an old man. Strange coincidence that.

Littlejohn's column gets extra points for contradicting what he's said earlier, in 'All we have to fear... is the fear of giving offence'. Of course, it was brown people we had to fear the fear of giving offence to in that column. Expecting the BBC to censor itself so as not to offend tabloid readers is totally different. For some reason.

If you want more evidence that the Mail's agenda here is to attack the BBC rather than display a genuine outpouring of heartfelt hurt over the broadcast, here it is. 'Even as Russell Brand row raged, BBC 'comedians' were insulting the Queen'.

Except they weren't. The comedian (singular) was doing that years ago - in an episode of Mock the Week that was repeated on Wednesday. I remember the gag because it cracked me up. A number of times, when the show was first broadcast and when it was repeated again and again without much fanfare until it could be used to twist the knife the papers have stuck into the BBC's belly.

Media Studies students should study this for years to come as an example of a Moral Panic - but quite a unique one. Rather than being a story that has been picked up relatively innocently and rolled along as the result of confirmation bias and so on, it is one that has been entirely and deliberately confected by newspapers in order to pillory a commercial rival, and influence the politicians responsible for the rival's funding.

But it's not the tabloids that hold power over our public life.

The tabloids and brand

BAN THIS SICK FILTH!

Another confected outrage hits the headlines of the tabloids. The Mail has put the story of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand leaving apparently offensive comments on Andrew Sachs's answer phone on the front page for four consecutive days. The last couple have seen the paper go beyond merely reporting the story, and moving to call for the two men to be sacked.

As Septicisle points out, in January 2007, the Mail ran a front page ridiculing the fact that the whole Celebrity Big Brother racism debacle was front page news. The Big Brother thing was seen by a far wider audience, involved a group of people openly bullying an individual over a sustained period while they were all in a confined space and there was a whiff of racism in the air. 'Why don't we just switch off?' was the reaction then. This time, things have changed for some reason. Despite the fact that only a handful of people had complained about Brand's show before the paper reported it, these people must be sacked. Ban this sick filth! And so on.

As with many things that find their way into the Mail, this story isn't actually about what it pretends to be about. The paper wouldn't be that concerned with anything like this were it not for the BBC being involved. The Celebrity Big Brother thing is only one example of the paper not giving a toss when another media outlet does something similar to something it has gone spare about the BBC doing. The disproportionate coverage of how the BBC heartlessly defrauded the public by naming a cat differently from the way viewers voted compared to how it covered ITV defrauding audiences of actual money is another. Given what's emerged about Sach's granddaughter being a burlesque dancer who has actually slept with Brand, has been a topless model and is a goth, it's pretty safe to say that she would never have been portrayed in a favourable way by the paper in any other circumstances. The story here is that the BBC is evil. Evil, I tell you. Run by lefties and degenerates. Look, one's even got long hair and a beard!

The Mail's hatred of the BBC is set very deep, and exists for a number of reasons. There's the overtly political - echoing right-wing Americans who moan about the liberal media in the US. While there's a BBC around, there's an antidote to the Mail's misleading distortion. There's the idealogical - why should people pay for something they might not like? I have a little time for this one, but not very much. But there's another, which doesn't get mentioned very often - the commercial.

The BBC is a commercial rival to the Mail, and not just because the BBC produces news and so does the Mail.

The Daily Mail and General Trust owns a 20% stake in ITN - the BBC's direct competitor for terrestrial television news coverage. It owns nearly a third of GCap Media - the independent radio company that owns quite a large number of the BBC's direct competitors in the local radio market. It also owns Northcliffe Media, which owns over 100 local newspapers - and although these don't compete in the same market as the BBC, BBC local news will serve as an alternative news source to these titles. If the public lose confidence and trust in the BBC, DGMT - its direct competitor in a number of markets - stands to gain enormously. The Mail newspaper itself is a rival brand to BBC's news coverage (although it operates in a different market).

And it is very much a brand. One reason the paper does so well commercially is that it identifies its audience and relentlessly panders to it. As I've droned on about here incessantly, it isn't there to report the news to us. It's there to repeat the same overarching stories again and again and again. The reason it does this is because that's what the editor has decided is what his target audience wants to hear. The target Mail reader wants to be told that immigration is out of control, that young people are out of control, that scientists are fickle and tell us one thing one week and another thing the next, that crime is soaring and that evil degenerats who are different to them want to take over and ruin everything and make it horrible and nasty and it all must be stopped. The target Mail reader doesn't want to hear anything that might suggest the contrary is true, so the paper suppresses and distorts anything that does. That way, its readers can rely on the brand.

So anything that knocks the BBC is a win double. It feeds into stories that identify the Mail brand as being against degeneracy and horrible lefties and one legged black lesbians that want to put white people in prison for being white and give them extra punishment if they're married. It also goes some way to denting the market share of a direct commercial rival. Of course, the Sun is along for the ride - but News International owns Sky television. 'Nuff said.

Ninja Turtle syndrome has led to other tabloids picking it up, but they haven't gone for it in such a big way, although I wish they had. Here's the front page of today's Star. Where's the outrage about confected panics when you need it?

*RETCH*

That Cameron and Brown are falling over each other to condemn the two shows how much the print media drives politics. Whatever happens in the next election, as if that isn't already a foregone conclusion, the winner will still be Dacre and Murdoch's bitch.

The atheist bus advert thingy

A rare straying from moaning about how papers lie and lie about things (or how the BNP do similar) follows. Skip it if you like.

I'm an atheist. I've mentioned it in passing a couple of times here, but people still sometimes assume I'm a Muslim because I attack the tabloids' rampant Islamophobia. I'm not a Muslim though, and I don't believe any sort of god exists at all. There, I said it.

So I must love this atheist bus advert thingy, right?

Wrong. Wrong wrongitty wrong. I hate the bugger.

I can't help being an atheist. It isn't something I choose to be. It's just that the available evidence leads me to the conclusion that I do not believe that any gods exist. I can't believe in a god any more than I can believe that my feet are made of chipsticks. I don't even like talking about it.

In the grand scheme of things, whether or not I believe in any god is one of the least important things you could tell anyone about me - at least, I hope so. I would hope there was a long list of interesting things that people would think of to say about me before they got to 'doesn't believe in god' - like whether or not I'm a nice person, whether I'm funny or serious, how much I wish I was Spider-Man. And on and on and on.

And frankly, I couldn't give two flying shits whether you or anyone else believes in god. Here is the main thing I care about when it comes to other people:

1. Are they going to be nice to people?

Everything else is gravy. Nice people believe in god and shitbags believe in god. Nice people don't believe in god and shitbags don't believe in god. Who would you rather meet in a dark alley, a nice person or a shitbag?

Frankly, if I got involved in a horrible encounter in a dark alley, it wouldn't help me any if I understood that the guy punching me in the teeth and nicking my wallet had a sound grasp of why Pascal's Wager is a poor piece of logic.

In short, the way people treat each other is far more important than their motivations for doing so, by and large.

If I had the choice to send everyone in London a message on the side of a bus, I wouldn't be mentioning god. 'Be excellent to each other' would be better.

So, why am I bothered? Because now there are fucking bus adverts all over London telling people that the most important thing atheists want to tell the world is that there's probably no god. That's not the most important thing I want to tell the world. It's not even in the top seventeen. It's even behind 'chocolate tastes nice, if you like chocolate'.

One of the things I like about being an atheist is the individualism. Nobody speaks for me. But now, anyone who ever sees the adverts and either knows or learns of my religious views will think otherwise. One of the greatest arguments I had against overtly religious people - namely 'why don't you just bloody leave people alone? You don't see atheists turning up knocking on people's doors telling them there's no god,' - has gone forever.

Thanks, bus advert people. You've now made atheists look like those born again people who can't stop bloody banging on about Jesus all the time. You've sunk us to their level. Give yourselves a lolly.

And what Justin said. Except the bit about dropping the 'probably'. I'd never make a positive claim about god not existing, I'd only talk about my lack of belief in gods' existence. See, we believe different things, but we're not in a club, so it doesn't matter. It's not as if anyone's sticking up posters telling everyone what we think, is it?

Oh, wait.

Pandering to the Mail on immigration will never work

**UPDATED** - see bottom

This week has been a pretty strange one. Getting back into the swing of things with work is one thing - trying to get a grip of what's been happening in the news while I've been away is another. I missed almost all of the credit crunch stuff while I was away in the States - what little news I did see centred entirely around which candidate had won which debate (predictably, Palin looked like a complete and utter arse if you believed MSNBC's take, whereas she wiped the floor with Biden if you watched Fox). So I've been trying to work out what's going on and what the papers might say about it - being informed in part by screaming Evening Standard billboards about rising unemployment.

Great, I thought the other day, how long is it going to be before the tabloids start blaming immigrants? I even thought of starting a countdown to the first immigrant bashing article in the big 3 (or rather big 2 and a half - the Express hardly counts as a whole paper).

Little did I know that Labour would beat them to it.

Well done, Phil Woolas - you've managed to out Mail the Mail. Via Justin at Chicken Yoghurt, Jim Jay at the Daily Maybe has some good stuff to say about Woolas, like:

It feels more like desperation. To head off the BNP, by adopting their policies. To distract people from the causes of unemployment. To give people someone to blame who isn't the government. Except I'm not sure it will actually do any of these things.

I've mentioned before how it's stupid for the government to pander to this kind of anti-immigration sentiment, because the anti-immigration tabloids will always portray the government as being soft on immigration regardless of what the government actually does about immigration. Tom makes the same point in the comments on Justin's post:

The funny thing is that Labour is horrendously tough, uncaring and unpleasant on immigration, but the message isn’t getting across because the press know their power and can conjure up entirely imaginary worlds where no one is ever kicked out because of their human rights, particularly if they’re a violent criminal, etc., etc.

My favourite hobby horse when I bang on about the tabloids is that they're not there to report the news to us. They exist to tell the same few stories over and over again, regardless of what has actually happened - and if anything does happen that contradicts any of those stories it's either ignored, lied about or spun until it appears to fit.

One of those overarching stories is that we're being overrun by foriegners who take our jobs, scrounge off our benefits and are destroying this once great nation. A subsection of that story is that it's all the government's fault because Labour loves foreigners and hates the British people. No matter what the government does that suggests the second bit is rubbish, whether we're talking about dawn raids on failed asylum seekers, introducing limits on new potential sources of immigration (like Romania and Bulgaria) or introducing a new points system that will keep out more people with darker skin than white people - the paper must make it fit with their overarching story.

And so, I knew, it would inevitably be with Woolas's latest bit of fearmongering. It doesn't matter that he comes close to parroting MigrationWatch's preferred line - he's a dirty lefty who likes foreigners and hates the British so there must be something wrong with it, right? But what?

We find out on the same day that the Mail reports his comments in 'Minister calls for stricter immigration controls amid fears rising unemployment could lead to racial tension'. Since the paper can't spin what he actually said, given that it was pretty unequivocal, it decides to go with the technique of just implying it's a bunch of lies anyway, with - drumroll please:

'Labour challenged to show details over plans to curb migrants'

If this immigrant bashing is really Labour's strategy to win back the core working class vote that they fear has been deserting for the BNP, it's a very bad one. For the people who are tempted away, Labour are a namby-pamby soft on immigrants bunch of Britain hating socialists. Nothing the party does will convince them otherwise. The government could announce the introduction of registration, internment camps and forced repatriation tomorrow and they would still be portrayed as wishy-washy lefties by the press and the right - and people would still go on believing them.

I was turned off Labour many years ago - not because they are soft-on-immigrants-but
-hard-on-the-British lefties, but because they're all too ready to pander to the crowd that think they are - and I'm pretty sure I'm not on my own. Maybe, if the party focussed on winning us back they'd win back some of the others by actually making a principled stand, sticking to it and arguing forcefully for it.

And, for those the party doesn't win back from the BNP - what Flying Rodent said.

***UPDATE***

The Sun's take: Migrants limit branded 'stunt'

The Express's: Backlash against idea to limit immigrants

What's with all the 'white flight' stuff anyway?

Yesterday's hastily put together 'More white shite' looked at the Mail's most recent foray into scaremongering about the numbers of white people dwindling in this country while we are overrun by - gasp - ethnic minorities. It was a quick and dirty look through the distortions the paper had made to push it's point, but I want to have a separate look at the whys and wherefores of using the main exaggeration technique the paper used - adding Irish people to the 'established white population' of Britain.

Before I go on it would probably be good to get a couple of general points out of the way.

This latest white flight story is an example of the paper taking a pre-existing narrative it had only hinted at with innuendo and clever juxtaposition of pictures a little further in explicitly referring to race. It is not an example of the paper merely discovering interesting new statistics and reporting them, since it had previously published a similar story that promoted the exact same idea before it had access to these figures.

Given that, the story is another example of how the actual figures don't matter. The statistics are subordinate to the narrative the paper's trying to push. Since this is the second story that explicitly refers to white people leaving the country, it suggests that an editorial decision has been made to do that rather than imply, which is what the paper did before. Over and over and over.

In the scheme of things though, a drop of about 70,000 in the white British population in 2005-2006 due to emigration isn't actually very scary compared to the hundreds of thousands the paper had previously implied had left, which is why the paper has to distort a bit to increase it - but adding 5,000 to the total by including white Irish people makes little difference and the actual numbers don't matter anyway - so why do it at all?

The key is in one phrase, which shows the second part of the narrative in any immigration scare story in the Mail - and one that I haven't really focused on before properly since I'm normally looking at the main one. Here's the relevant phrase:

The figures have been calculated for every year back to 2002 - and this was the biggest decline yet.

The only way the paper can say that the most recent figures represented the 'biggest decline yet' is to include white Irish people in the calculations. And that's the second part of the narrative in any immigration scare story. That the most recent figures are the highest ever and the situation is getting 'out of contrtol'.

The paper adds to this impression in the story by following up with:

In the previous year, there had been a drop of just 42,300.

This makes it look as though there had been a steady fall of around 42,000 every year and things have shot up in 2005-06 - along with another unusually high spike in 2004 that it does actually mention.

In reality, the 42,300 is the unusually low figure. If we look at the actual figures for the number of white British people emigrating (going through the trouble of adding Irish people in the mix would be following the paper's less than honest agenda - plus, I cannot be arsed - but you can see that the 2004 including Irish people is still lower than all the other years for just British people), we can see the following drops due to emigration:

2001-02: -57,000
2002-03: -67,700
2003-04: -71,200
2004-05: -38,500
2005-06: -70,400

These figures would make a much better scare story about the numbers of white British people emigrating in recent years. Look! It's loads! Thing is though, the 'biggest decline yet' is the most important thing the paper is pushing. A more immediate story is likely to have more impact than one that looks in depth at previous trends.

Of course, in most immigration scare stories, some details get left out if they contradict the impression the paper's trying to give. In this one, the paper is scaring us by giving the impression that the white British population is dropping quickly, with this year being the biggest decline yet - while other ethnic groups are growing. Run to the hills!

The important detail, which would give a vastly different impression than the one the paper is trying to give, is the natural change in the white British popoulation - ie, the number of babies born compared to the number of deaths. While the paper does mention that:

Even though there were more births than deaths, the white British and Irish population still fell by almost 15,000 in 2006.

(This is inaccurate, since the paper has confused itself what with all this adding Irish people and not adding Irish people. The 'almost 15,000' only applies to white British. It would be closer to 25,000 had the paper included Irish people). This doesn't let us know how this compares with previous years. Having a look at the white British population, we can see that the overall change in population including natural change and emigration shows a very different trend:

2001-02: -57,800
2002-03: -62,800
2003-04: -48,900
2004-05: -3,600
2005-06: -14,900

While this year isn't the lowest drop yet, it's the second lowest - and less than half the level of the third lowest drop.

Had the paper been honestly interested in the fall in the numbers of white British people in the country, it would have mentioned these figures - but it's more important to push the 'biggest decline yet' idea, so only one year gets a mention - the figure from the same year we've been told is the 'biggest decline yet' in the white British population.

To be honest though, the level of contorting figures in this article is pretty low compared to others. It's not as if it pretends that over 10,000 people came to the country in three months to be circus stars when the real number was 55. But it shows the shift to explicitly worrying about the number of white people leaving the country, and shows pretty clearly how the paper trims stories to fit ongoing narratives rather than making stories shape those narratives. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. Alongside the playing down of reporting murders of brown people if they're not in gangs and playing up the number of black people accused of knife crimes as the paper has been doing recently, it's a worrying one as well.

More white shite

First day back from being away (I had a lovely time, thanks) and it's time to look at another recycled story with extra bits added, just like the last Mail story I looked at before I went away. Hurrah!

Via the MailWatch so-called Forums, I've discovered that the Mail have sort of recycled the story I covered in 'White Shite', including newer, more accurate figures from the National Statistics Office and taking the paper's slow march toward overt racism that little bit further.

The previous article's headline claim of ''White flight' as more than 400,000 Britons head for new life abroad' has been toned down considerably to 'Flight of white Britons from UK leaps to 70,000 per year ... but population still rising as Eastern Europeans come to Britain'. So, is this a celebratory article showing the paper to be cock a hoop over the fact that over 300,000 fewer white Britons than the paper previously tried to imply had left the counttry had actually emigrated? Go on. Guess.

Surprisingly though, for a Daily Mail article, this time the headline is actually more accurate than the article itself.

The figures the article is based on are on the National Statistics site (thanks to Raskolninkov in the MailWatch forum for pointing that out - my workload on this post is now way lower than it could have been).

In the body of the story, there is a considerable amount of farting around with figures to give a misleading impression of the numbers, and one or two outright lies - only one of which that I can see has been withdrawn with a contradiction later in the story (the paper's usual method for slipping in fibs).

While the figures do show that 70,400 'White British' people left the UK in the year to mid-2006, the article claims:

But although 75,000 'white British' men and women are moving away, the population is still rising because of an influx of ethnic minority groups.

So, just under 5,000 extra have been slapped on the top. This isn't arbitrary, as the paper later reveals in its contradiction of this claim:

The white British population went down by 70,400 over the year through emigration. And the white Irish population fell by 4,600 because of emigration, bringing the total decline in the existing white population to 75,000.

So, although this contradiction makes it clear that the figure of 75,000 also includes people who are not 'White British', the article still makes the misleading claim that they all are 'White British' close to the beginning of the article.

More on that withdrawal later, since it includes a bit of a whopper of its own. But before we get to that, there's a bizarre extra fib.

The article makes this claim:

According to Government estimates, the established white population of England dropped by nearly 250,000 between 2002 and 2006.

In reality, the figures show that the 'White British' population dropped by 188,000 between 2002 and 2006. Adding the drop in the number of 'White Irish' people takes the total to 235,600 - so this is possibly the figure the paper's getting at by using the weaselly term 'established white population'. There's a new one for you.

Now, back to the withdrawal of the claim about 75,000 'White British' leaving the UK. Looking at it closely, you'll notice that it makes the bold claim at the end that the total of British and Irish leaving the country is:

bringing the total decline in the existing white population to 75,000.

Important word that 'existing'. Because the number of white people in the country is not made up of purely 'White British' and 'White Irish' people. There are quite a number of white people from all sorts of other countries that live in England, from the US and Australia through to Germany, Poland, Russia and so on. They're lumped together as 'Other White'.

The number of 'Other White' people in the UK grew by 76,000* between 2005 and 2006, which means that the 'total decline in the existing white population' due to emigration was just 4,400. Since 2001, the 'white population' actually grew by 93,800 due to net immigration. Using the word 'existing' covers the paper's back in not including the new 'White Other' people, since they didn't exist in England previously. But if the paper were being accurate, it would exclude 'White British' and 'White Irish' births from its 'existing white population' and include deaths. But it doesn't, because the word's only there to make it possible to exclude 'Other White' people from calculations.

The actual article doesn't exactly make it clear that the 75,000 drop only refers to emigration, making it look as though the total drop in the 'existing white population' is 75,000. Even if we only count 'White British' and 'White Irish' as the existing white population, it only fell by 25,600 between 2005 and 2006. If we actually use the 'white population' term a bit more accurately, we can see that it actually grew by 50,300.

It seems that to the Daily Mail, nobody from outside the British Isles should be counted as being white. How, exactly does being from Ireland make someone more established as British than someone who came from another country who arrived at the same time?

Beyond this, there's this fib:

The figures have been calculated for every year back to 2002 - and this was the biggest decline yet.

It's only the biggest decline of British and Irish combined. There was a greater number of 'White British' emigrating between 2003 and 2004, but there were fewer 'White Irish' emigrating in the same year.

This lumping together of 'White British' and 'White Irish' looks quite charitable of the Mail on the surface of it. It seems to say that being Irish is as near as being British to make no difference, which is quite magnanimous of the Mail, given what it thinks about being British. But of course, it's only done to make us think more British people are leaving, and in more than one way. See, the paper doesn't count Ireland as Britain, although it does count Irish as British.

The National Statistics Office has produced a Commentary Paper to go along with the figures, which gives this helpful note about the 'White Irish' population:

This fall is attributable both to net out-migration (in particular to Ireland)

So, most of the 'White Irish' people are actually returning to Ireland. So, 'White Irish' is the same as 'White British', but Ireland is not Britain. My head hurts.

The conclusion is - that 'White Flight' stuff? Complete arse. There were more white people in the UK in 2006 than there were in 2002, but you don't count as white in the Mail if you don't consider yourself as coming from the British Isles. Take that Hitler! Take that, the Ku Klux Klan! Take that American white power lunatics! You're not even white!

Jeez. It comes to something when the Daily Mail is more exclusive than the Ku Klux Klan.

*Originally, I'd listed this as 706,000 in a massive typo, but I've corrected the number here.