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give a misleading impression of the numbers, and one or two outright lies - only one of which that I can see has been withdrawn with a contradiction later in the story (the paper's usual method for slipping in fibs).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