Fagin's gangs?

Probably not, apparently.

Just spotted this excellent post by Ally Fogg (got it right this time!) on CiF This Tuesday, 'Press-ganged':

The news reports of dawn raids in Slough last week painted a dark, depressing picture of the underbelly of mass immigration. Depending which evening news bulletin you saw or which newspaper you were reading, the emphasis might have been on child slavery - with horrific images conjured of children snatched from their families and taken abroad for nefarious purposes. Other outlets drew upon Dickensian references - the phrase "Fagin's gang" being the cliche of choice for the bulk of the 73 news reports brought up by a Google news search.

The reports confirmed many of the darkest stereotypes of eastern European - and in particular Roma - populations. There's only one problem: The stories were almost completely false.

I would have thought they were sensationalised and exaggerated, but not this bloody much.

*UPDATE* It would seem that in this case, the papers are not to blame for the exaggeration so much as the police and the council involved. This one is a good example of how nonsense can appear on a front page even when the paper is acting in good faith.

Why I don't start my own tabloid

Here's why I don't start my own tabloid newspaper or buy an existing one, in one easy to access post.

I'm not stinking filthy rich.

The end. Thanks for reading.

Not really.

Of course, I could have been filthy rich if I'd inherited an existing media empire from my father to build on, like Viscount Rothermere (Daily Mail) and Rupert Murdoch (who now owns The Sun, The Times and many more), but I didn't, so that route's not open to me.

I'm not sure I have the instincts and lack of principles necessary to become filthy stinking rich, as I might have to do something like become a pornographer, selling magazines like Penthouse, Big Ones and Asian Babes and owning satellite channels like Television X that promise pervy viewers hardcore action but offer nothing of the sort because that's illegal. That clearly didn't bother Richard Desmond (Daily Express, The Star) who did just that before buying his papers, and still owns Television X and Red Hot TV. I wouldn't have the same lack of principles to allow me to donate £100,000 to the Labour Party like Desmond either. Whether I was going to produce a paper that takes every opportunity to slam the Labour party or not.

If I were filthy stinking rich, that might change the way I look at the world and make me tempted to produce a newspaper that protects the interests of the filthy, stinking rich by - oh, I don't know - publishing articles that attack people on benefits as scroungers while completely ignoring the amount of money lost to the economy by very rich people indeed owning very large companies indeed registering their tax details overseas to rob the economy of far more very year than cheated from the exchequer by benefit cheats.

I might get the idea that the main aim of owning a newspaper is to sell as many copies as possible to attract as much money as possible from advertisers, because no paper could keep afloat without advertising revenue. This might make me and my editor reluctant to print news that attacks large corporations that provide a large chunk of revenue.

I might then hire only editors with a similar worldview as mine, favouring maintaining a system that benefits the stinking filthy rich like me. Those editors might deliberately produce articles they know to be untrue, even if the paper they're editing is supposed to be left-wing. Like Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Daily Mirror who has since apologised for producing inflammatory and untrue stories about Arthur Scargill during the miner's strike.

They might decide to 'crusade' for the abolition of the inheritance tax - a tax that applies to the richer people in society - in favour of cutting benefit payments to the poorest, for example. This would be especially ironic if I'd inherited the beginnings of my media empire from my father.

Since my editors shared my view of the purpose of publishing a newspaper, we might decide that we should sell as many copies as possible regardless of whether what's in it is newsworthy or even true, especially if we got it into our heads that everyone thinks a certain way and wants to hear certain things.

My editor might prioritise reflecting the view of the paper's readership over everything else. Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, in last year's Cudlipp Lecture, said:

At their best, popular papers – that are far more sensitive than politicians and opinion polls to national moods - articulate the anxieties, apprehensions and aspirations of their readers. Genuinely democratic – I mean, you try persuading people to fork out 45p for a paper on a rainy day - they give voice to millions of ordinary people who don’t have a voice.

But what if evidence emerged that suggested public opinion on a subject was wrong? If my editor was anything like Paul Dacre, they would decide to ignore that evidence, or pretend it said the opposite to what it actually did since it's more important to him to reflect his readers' opinions than tell them the truth.

Not to be outdone, Peter Hill, editor of the Daily Express, in an interview with the Independent, said:

My job is to sell the Daily Express. My job isn't anything else. My job is to produce newspapers that people want to read and I can tell you that people want to read about the Diana conspiracy because the figures tell me that they do, seriously tell me that they do.

If my editor were like that, he might decide to go with headlines that will be likely to sell rather than be newsworthy, or even true. If he thought the purpose of his job were to sell my newspaper and he decided people wanted to read anti-immigration stories he'd give them anti-immigration stories whether they were accurate or not.

And as to what Sun readers actually want, Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor and current columnist of the Sun, is infamous for apparently saying:

You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdoes and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news).

He's also infamous for producing articles attacking the Liverpool fans at the Hillsborough disaster that turned out to be untrue. Presumably because that's what he thought his readers wanted to hear.

Even if I ran a left-wing paper, my editor might be tempted to run stories without adequate checks, and we'd end up publishing photos of soldiers mistreating prisoners in Iraq that turned out to be fraudulent, because we thought it was more important to tell or readers what they wanted to hear than make sure we were telling the truth.

We'd then get into a weird chicken-and-egg scenario where I was producing newspapers that I thought reflected the views of my readers but couldn't be sure if my readers thought those things because they'd read the distorted stories in my paper of if they'd just absorbed them like osmosis. I'd be under pressure to produce stories about how left wingers want to ban Christmas, say, but because nobody's trying to ban Christmas I'd have to rely on repeating old urban legends, or pretending that things done at Christmas for health and safety reasons were actually done so people are not offended.

I'd be even more tempted to ignore or misreport new evidence because I didn't think my readers wanted to hear it. I'd be so desperate for any validation of what I thought my readers wanted that I'd use information sources that aren't really robust and wouldn't in the past have been worthy of press coverage. These sources would be encouraged to carry on doing what they were doing because papers like mine used them and we'd get caught in a feedback loop with people believed stuff that isn't striclty true because they read it in my paper, which led to my paper producing more stuff that isn't actually true because I thought that was what my readers wanted and on and on forever and ever.

It isn't actually true that all new jobs since 2004 went to migrants. It isn't actually true that Birmingham City Council has renamed Christmas 'Winterval'. It wasn't actually true that Muslim yobs ran brave soldiers out of their home. It isn't actually true that research showed that 50% of Poles wanted to stay in the UK for life. I could go on. The more people who read this kind of tripe, the more people will believe it. This will have an effect on the way they vote, and the way hey treat each other.

So why don't I attack the left wing papers on this blog? Because they're not as dangerous. They don't sell nearly as many papers and don't reach nearly as many people. If a large number of people think there are too many migrants in Britain and that idea is pushed by the right wing tabloids, it matters if those sources of information aren't telling the truth. Also, when I do look at them, they're more guilty of parroting stuff that's appeared in the right wing press than being guilty of their own howlers, so I don't look at them often. I have limited time here. And I have even less of a responsibility to be impartial than any newspaper.

The amazing Strawman and Ad-hom!

When you can't actually come up with a better argument than your opponent but you want to get people on your side, there are a few things you can do. Two good ones are:

• Pretend your opponent has actually said something they haven't that you know people will be likely to oppose - known as creating a strawman argument.
• Attack the person making the argument to distract people from what they've actually said - known as an ad-hominem.

You can ignore either type of argument, since they offer nothing to the debate.

Both were utilised to great effect yesterday by the Mail and the Sun in response to new proposals fror changes to sex education.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn't the Sun that went for the option of the personal attack. Instead, it went for pretending its opponent argued for something it actually didn't, with 'Condoms for kids call', which claims:

THE Government was today urged to offer free condoms to schoolchildren in order to prevent teen pregnancies.

[...]

It called for all children to undergo a course of sex and relationship classes before the age of 11 - unless their parents opt out - in order to enable them to make "informed choices" regarding sex.

This, along with the use of the word 'kids' makes a link with pre-11 year olds and free condoms that doesn't actually exist in real life. The only places the actual leaflet mentions are bars, and since it's talking about teenage pregnancies, it's unlikely that it's referring to children younger than teenageers.

The language of the article paints the picture of adults approaching schooldchildren to give away condoms to them, but the leaflet only talks about making them freely available in places where young people might go.

Of course, most people will instinctively oppose approaching pre-11 year old schoolchildren and offering them condoms. Having them available in places where teenagers might go is a different kettle of fish. (And let's leave aside the role this paper plays in sexualising teenagers, with its competitions for young girls to take their tops off and its salivating anticipations for underage girls to reach 16 like it did with Charlotte Church and the girl from the harry Potter movies.)

The Mail, on the other hand, goes for the personal attack in ''Captain Underpants' MP who posed on gay dating site wants children as young as nine to be given sex advice'. The main thrust of the article is obvious from the headline. But that doesn't mean it tells the truth in the rest of the article.

It manages to mislead by ommission, with comments like:

Chris Bryant, who made the headlines in 2003 after appearing on a gay dating website in his underwear, also recommended distributing condoms in schools.

Which leaves out the fact that the leaflet only reccommends that schools should consider having sexual health clinics where condoms are made available.

It also lies by, well, lying, by saying:

The MP for Rhondda also warned that many young girls get pregnant deliberately to secure a council flat.

This is what the pamphlet actyally says about the subject, in the first entry of a section headed 'The Myths':

Many people believe that girls get pregnant so as to get a flat of their own from the Council. In fact 90% of teenage mums live in other people’s homes – normally their parents’.

So it actually says the opposite, and calls what the paper is claiming a myth.

Littlejohn proves again that he lives in a fantasy world of his own creation in 'Hey, Gordon, leave them kids alone!', when he says:

Had I discovered that Bryant had been offering my children sex advice at the age of nine, I would have taken a baseball bat to him.

In Littlejohn's world, Chris Bryant is actually responsible for actually writing the advice himself.

It's not as if he's not guilty of a little bit of misdirection himself, with:

I realise that puberty seems to encroach earlier with every generation, but I don't recall reading about any nine-year-old mothers - or fathers for that matter.

Which seems to miss that the actual document he's talking about mainly mentions sex education for under 11s so that they're prepared for the changes that are about to hppen to them. Girls can have their first period before they're 11, and ought to know they're not, you know, dying. Maybe he doesn't know that because he hasn't read the actual report. You decide.

The moral of the story is that if the tabloids actually had a coherent argument against something, they'd use it. The reason you see these types of article, or the ones that exaggerate immigration or the effects of PC is because they don't have a coherent argument. So why do they go with these stories? More on that later.

Give me that old time moral panic

I haven't got a DeLorean and I have no Libyan terrorist contacts to get the plutonium for the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to go back in time, but I still managed to go back to the 80s this weekend, just by reading the papers.

The Sunday Times takes us back to 1983 with 'Stop this debasing film', a headline that must have had subs reaching for their thesaurus to find an alternative phrase for 'Ban this sick filth'. The story covers the breaking news that 'SS experiment - Love Camp' was re-released uncut nearly three years ago. The film that apparently kicked off the original video nasty moral panic in 1982.

The article undermines itself right from the beginning, mentioning the internet in its opening. Even if the film disappeared from the shops, it would only take a couple of minutes to get hold of a copy online. That doesn't stop the paper using 1980s style misdirection with:

. . . the film SS Experiment Camp, which is on sale in the high street alongide [sic] U classified movies . . .

Yes, it's sold alongside U rated films, but since it's an 18, kids can't buy it.

The Express predictably sensationalises and exaggerates things further, going with the front page splash 'Outrage at sick nazi DVDs for sale'. Of course, this paper doesn't shy away from the f word of a quarter of a century ago, saying:

As the Government reviews the laws surrounding game violence, the Sunday Express today demands action to sweep this filth off our shelves.

Bloody hell, is it just me or is that Visage playing in the background?

The Express uses 'I spit on your grave', 'Cannibal holocaust' and 'Faces of death' to justify the plural in the headline, although none of these films are about nazis. If hacks at the paper had any clue, they'd have looked for 'SS Hell Camp', 'Ilsa she wolf of the SS' and 'Ilsa the wicked warden'.

Both stories miss the main thing that most people will notice first when watching most of these films. They're so embarrasingly bad you're more likely to laugh than be sickened. You can see more realistically depicted violence on the average episode of CSI. Here's the opening line of a 5 star review of SS Experiment - Love Camp on Amazon:

This film is so bad I have given it five stars as you really have to see it to believe that film-making can be so atrocious.

They were all made on stupidly low budgets over 30 years ago. Despite the Express calling them "extreme reality" films, they're about as realistic as an episode of Thunderbirds directed by kids with a twenty quid budget. This is what the BBFC apparently had to say about giving the film an 18 certificate in 2005:

"The content of the film is in fact very mild and poorly executed. If anything, it was the title of the film and its original packaging that led to difficulties, rather than the content. The idea of the film may, of course, be offensive to some but that is not a good enough reason to cut or reject it. We would only cut or reject a film for adults if the content was illegal or harmful. "SS Experiment Camp" is neither illegal or harmful, just tasteless."

And they can't be causing that much of a problem. It took nearly three years for anyone to notice 'SS experiment - love camp' had been re-released. The others were released between four and six years ago. Still, it's never too late to panic.

Me? I'm off to watch Knightmare and drink Quatro.

The Daily Express continues courting the BNP

Another day, another scare story about another migrant group used to exaggerate problems. This time, it's Romanians.

First they came for the Muslims, then they came for the Polish, then they came from the Romanians...

'Crime by migrants soars by 530%', shouts the subheading on today's front page. A claim that is quickly withdrawn in the article's second sentence/paragraph with this:

Since Romania joined the European Union a year ago, the number of crimes committed here by that country’s nationals has risen by 530 per cent.

So it's only Romanian migrants. Not migrants in general.

That fact doesn't stop the paper saying on its website's 'Have your say' question 'Should migrants who commit crime be kicked out of Britain?' (gee, I wonder if the Express readers are going to say no?):

FOLLOWING the rescue of ten Romanian child slaves from homes in Slough, it emerged that migrant crime has soared by 530 per cent.

I am suspicious of these figures as there is no source given for them, and we don't know the actual numbers. Back in 'More people want to MURDER us in our BEDS!' I covered how the Mail used Romanian crime in London to scaremonger about immigration. The rise there was over 530%. It could be that the 530% figure represents the nationwide rise, but I suspect we're only talking about Slough here.

Seriously, how long before the paper openly supports the BNP?

*UPDATE* Thanks to Obsolete in the comments for pointing out the article does say the figures are from the whole of Britain. And for linking to the latest actual crime figures from the BCS and recorded crime in his own excellent post on the subject, which is more than worth a read.

Using those, we can see than in the last six months, 2,540,100 crimes were reported in Britain. The 922 crimes the Express is screaming about represents about 0.04% of total crime. That's around one in every 2,755. The actual 530% rise represents around 0.03% of total crime, or one in every 3,273.

That's worthy of a front page headline.

Another classic Express headline - Part II

More wrong than even I thought

Sometimes I forget that what I'm supposed to be doing here is explaining exactly how tabloid stories distort the truth, and kind of assume too much knowledge.

I did this yesterday, covering the classic Express headline '1.3m Poles arrived in Britain last year'. I've also uncovered some other stuff about the story in rereading it. So today I'll look through the story again, point by point this time. I be kickin' it old school.

The headline

The headline is not true. Unlike most Express headlines that get withdrawn later in the story, this one isn't actually clarified anywhere. The article is supposed to be about the Office of National Statistics' 'Travel Trends' report, which measures the number of short term visits made by people from overseas to the UK, and the same from the UK abroad. So, although there were 1.3m visits by people from Poland last year, it doesn't mean that 1.3m Poles arrived here, since some could have made multiple visits.

Plus, the report only includes figures for visits of less than a year, so it's not that these are tourist visits mixed in with people arriving to settle, they're all tourists and business trips and so on. Every single one of them. The average length of visit is 17 days.

The subheading

The subheading, 'And even that's an underestimate', is backed up by one single quote from one single critic. Of course, the paper pretends the quote is from 'critics' plural, with:

But even that massive total was called into question when critics of the Government’s border control policy described it as a “drastic understatement” of the true picture.

The actual quote says 'is likely to be a massive understatement', so the paper has sexed that up a bit by removing the uncertainty. More on this quote later.

How are tourist visits linked with immigration in the story?

With a bait and switch
The link is made with a good, old fashioned bait and switch. The paper starts by talking about the figures in the 'Travel Trends' document, which it already is misleadingly claiming measure visitors rather than visits, and then switching to talking about immigration without making that switch sufficiently clear. The switch comes here:

At the same time, local authorities complained to MPs that the Government’s failure to monitor the number of people in Britain was leaving them with an intolerable financial burden which had to be borne by council tax payers.

There isn't any signal to show that short term visits to the UK have nothing whatsoever to do with why Local Authorities called for extra funding. Although the paper has tried to cover its back by talking about visitors rather than migrants up until this point, it makes no distinction between the two at all here, leaving the impression that the figures in 'Travel Trends' will lead to more pressure on Local Authorities.

When you consider that we're talking only about individual visits of an average of 17 days here, you'll see how far from the truth this is, and how frantically the paper is clutching at straws to link the two themes.

With quotes
There are then a couple of quotes from people with vested interests that further muddy the waters.

The first is from the papers' idiot quote favourite, David Davis, and it's unclear whether he is giving his opinion of the actual 'Travel Trends' figures or the Express hack's interpretation of them. Given that he mentions Local Authorities being stretched, it seems unlikely that the figures he's talking about are the 'Travel Trends' ones, since they measure visits of an average of only 17 days long and don't effect spending on schools and so on. of course, he could be trying to mislead people too.

The second is from Frank Field. Again, it's unclear whether he actually knows he's talking about trips of an average of 17 days. Part of his quote is actually a paraphrase, which suggests that bits have been removed. Maybe those that make it clear he doesn't know he's talking about short term visits. His hobby horse is the number of jobs taken by migrants, remember, so he could be talking generally about Polish immigration without realising these figures only measure short term trips. Of course, he could be deliberately trying to mislead, too - or have been misled by the hack that asked for the quote.

Back to the bait and switch
The article then switches back to the idea these visitors working, with this:

But adding to the impression that many coming as visitors were in fact looking for work, Poles spent just an average £24 a day in 2006, compared with £129 for visitors from Luxembourg.

This line is a boggling combination of the dunderheaded and the quite-clever-if-you're-trying-to-mislead. Whether or not these people are looking for work doesn't change the fact that they're only here in the short term.

It also selectively leaves out that 'Travel Trends' lists the total spent in these visits is £540,000,000.

As a further part of the bait and switch, the article goes on to say:

When Labour opened the immigration floodgates in 2004, it was estimated that barely 10,000 Eastern and central Europeans would arrive. But 743,000 have registered for work since 2004.

Including self-employed, the true picture is nearer 900,000.

By now, the reader must be well and truly confused. Of course, these figures in themselves are misleading. They fail to mention that many of these have returned to their home country. According to other figures this paper and others have tried to scaremonger with, up to three quarters of them may have gone. The paper also neglects to give any source for the 'real' number being closer to 900,000. Like I said in my last post, the story might as well have said 6 million people and a unicorn.

A further deliberate misdirection with a quote
We then get this:

The figures were revealed as a senior Treasury official confessed that the Government has no real idea of the true number of people who have arrived – legally and illegally – under Labour’s “open door” immigration policy.

Christopher Kelly told the Commons Treasury Sub-committee that the 10-yearly census was next to useless when it came to measuring the impact of migration.

But it seems that Christopher Kelly is only talking about the reliability of the census - not the figures in 'Travel Trends' or the survey they're based on. That's why this is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. The direct quote comes with this:

He said: “We know we have a problem with migration statistics. Everyone accepts it.”

What's wrong with that quote in relation to these stats? That's it - these figures are only migration statistics in the loosest sense of the word, since they measure tourism. Here's a quick quote from 'Travel Trends':

Note that, although data collected on the IPS also feeds in to the calculation of migration statistics, this report does not provide any information relating to international migration.

The final paragraph
The final paragraph is again talking about the census, not the 'Travel Trends' figures.

One thing this article is a great example of is the way that the far right like to peddle their anti-immigration stance. Once you've poisoned the well of official statistics, you can claim anything you like. Bizarrely, you can then use the very same stats to support your own argument. You can even use figures that don't even measure international migration to support your contention that the migration figures are out of whack.

What's the Mail doing now?

The Mail has an ambiguous relationship with the BNP.

As I've said before, what normally happens when the paper covers the BNP is that it calls the party nasty names, but then backs up everything they say and appears to support them, often in the same article.

So I'm completely baffled by 'BNP's London leader joins 22,000 police on pay protest march'.

See, on the Mail hate scale, the police figure pretty high. So is the presence of the BNP guy supposed to be there to bash the police since the paper calls the BNP names, or is showing that the guy supports quite a popular appeal supposed to big up the BNP guy and give him sympathetic coverage? The Enemies of Reason thinks the latter, but how about you? Given the comments the Mail moderators are allowing to be published, I'm not so sure.

As ever, that paper's own coverage is less than unambiguous.

One thing I did notice though, which I spotted a while ago but haven't mentioned, is that the BNP ballerina, Simone Clarke, is now engaged to the senior BNP figure who had his sexuality called into question after making gay soft porn. So, two people who could have caused problems with their relationships - Clarke for being in a mixed race one and Barnbrook for potentially being gay are miraculously betrothed. Mighty convenient for all those involved.

Another classic Express headline

Shit yourself RIGHT NOW!

More scaremongering from the world's greatest newspaper in '1.3m Poles arrived in Britain last year'.

Again, the number of tourists visiting the country is made to look like the number of immigrants. The 'And even that's an underestimate' subheading is priceless at the same time as being totally shameless.

Here's the ONS Press Release the figures come from. It says:

There were a record number of tourist and business visits (that is, visits for less than 12 months)

So we know that these people are ones staying for less than 12 months. They've all gone back to Poland.

*UPDATE* Notice as well that the number is 1.3million visits, not 1.3 million visitors. People coming back and forth on business are counted more than once. Thanks to Dembinsky in the story's comments for pointing that out.

Here is the full Travel Trends report. Doing a quick calculation of the average number of nights stayed for all the reasons for visiting combined (holiday, business, visiting friends or relatives and miscellaneous) turns up an average length of visit by Poles of 17 days. 17 day visits make immigration headlines now, such is the parlous state of our press.

There's no clue given that these people aren't here in the long term until 11 paragraph/sentences in, where we get this:

The official figures were based on a survey of visitors by the Government’s Office of National Statistics.

But adding to the impression that many coming as visitors were in fact looking for work [...]

Nothing up until now has let us know that it's only an impression that these people are looking for work. But what is it that the paper says is adding to the impression that they are looking for work? This:

Poles spent just an average £24 a day in 2006, compared with £129 for visitors from Luxembourg.

Ah. So because Poles don't spend as much as people from Luxembourg, then they're looking for work. Not poorer. What's the betting that Luxembourg is top of the list for the amount of money spent in visits to the UK? I can't be arsed to check.

In any case, at an average of £24 a day for an average 17 day visit, that's an extra £530,400,000 Poles are putting into the economy that the paper's inadvertently uncovered. Whoops.

Further to that withdrawal, we get this:

When Labour opened the immigration floodgates in 2004, it was estimated that barely 10,000 Eastern and central Europeans would arrive. But 743,000 have registered for work since 2004.

Including self-employed, the true picture is nearer 900,000.

Aside from the to-be-expected refusal to consider how many of the 700,000 have returned to their country of origin and the mention of the crap government prediction, we get an extra couple of hundred thousand thrown on top that are pulled from nowhere but the journalist's arse. Why not say 6 million and a unicorn? It has just as much basis in actual fact.

A thoroughly nasty and clearly deliberate attempt to mislead, this one. Still, those couple of sentences in the middle of a great long article are enough to ensure the PCC do nothing about it. Of course, the commenters have to a man fallen for what the paper obviously wants them to. Well, most of them except me.

Just lookinig at this paper is making me feel dirty now.

Moderation is on

Comment moderation is on for a while, since I'm expecting SPAM. It'll be back on once I'm sure I won't get any.

All new jobs in Britain?

*UPDATE* Since posting this, I've had an email from the online editor at the Express confirming that the story's been taken doen because of an investigation by the PCC, and the PCC have confirmed that they've had six or seven complaints and the matter is being looked into. It's unusual for the paper to take down a story like this. The Express didn't take down it's Muslims tell us how to run our schools story while that was being investigated.

In an ill thought out attempt to talk some sense into the goons on the Express's 'Have your say' section, I've tried to have another look at 'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN', but it's gone.

Legal reasons because it's, you know, made up shite? We can but hope.

Just in case my comment disappears from the Express site too, here's part of what I've written:

All you need to do to show that the Express headline is an exaggeration is to know one person who isn't a migrant who got a newly created job in the last four years. I know several, personally. You might well too. So the headline must be an exaggeration.

Plus, I've just followed an old link to the story and it's mysteriously disappeared from the site. I've also tried googling it and using the paper's search engine, and it seems to have been taken down.

My guess is that it's been taken down for legal reasons for being misleading. Of course, I could be wrong - in which case it would be great if someone from the paper can explain where it is.

If I'm right, here's concrete evidence of the paper producing a misleading story about immigration. Still want to argue it isn't an exaggeration?

There we go.

I was beginning to worry

After last Friday's posting, I was beginning to wonder whether the contributors to the Daily Express 'Have your say' section thought immigration was a bad thing, since it's been nearly a week since they were last asked.

Thankfully, I can now tell by looking at today's 'Do we let too many immigrants into Britain?'

Maybe the answers are different to last Wednesday's 'Has Labour totally failed to control immigration?', last Monday's 'Does Britain have too many immigrants?', December 26's 'Should immigrants be made to feel welcome?', December 19's 'Is the immigration crisis getting worse and worse?', December 18's 'Has Labour lost control of the asyum crisis?' December 1's 'Should there be a limit on migrants in Britain?', November 13's 'Do immigration bosses deserve a £2m bonus', November 9's 'Should all immigration to Britain be stopped NOW?', November 3's 'Should Britain pass a law to ban migrants?', October 31's 'Should Labour stop taking in migrant workers?' October 30's 'Are there too many immigrants in the UK?', October 24's 'Should Britain be declared full?', October 22's 'Is Britain letting in too many migrants?' and so on. You never know.

Maybe the new question has something to do with the fact that tomorrow, the last 'Does Britain have too many immigrants?' question disappears from the main set of links. I wonder.*

I'm not sure 14 times in three months is enough. I think we need to be updated on how much Express readers hate immigration more often. I'd suggest a live news ticker scrolling across the front page.

Should I start taking bets on how soon the paper gets in an explicit 'Should we send them back?' question rather than the namby-pamby 'Are there too many immigrants?' shilly-shallying?

*Sarcasm. And shameless to boot.

That headline's more like it!

A short entry about a James Slack article today. I suppose that's something to be grateful for.

The story is 'The test that's letting in one migrant every three minutes (and could you pass it?)'.

To make up for yesterday's story, this one's headline bears no relation to reality. The test isn't what 'lets in migrants'. It's one thing that migrants must pass before they get citizenship or leave to remain. They have to meet all sorts of other criteria as well as passing this test before they qualify. Before these tests existed, everyone who passed all the other criteria would be 'let in'. Now, over 30% of applicants are actually turned away because of failing them. The headline would more accurately be 'The test that's keeping out one migrant every ten minutes' since passing the test doesn't guarantee citizenship, but failing guarantees you won't get it.

There's a quote from a Tory MP too. Hurrah!

There's also the bonus of a nice little contradiction of yesterday's story, which estimated that 160,000 Eastern Europeans would end up staying in the UK forever and ever. Today's says:

The first country-by-country breakdown of pass rates also reveals that thousands of EU citizens, already free to live in Britain for life, are choosing to swop [sic] their passport for a British one.

They include 944 from Poland and 2,000 from the other seven former Eastern Bloc countries which joined the EU in May 2004.

This is, presumably, the period between January and October last year. Let's say it is, and estimate the total by bumping up the figures a bit for 2006 and 2005 to take into account the fact that these were full years, and be way generous and push them up to 5,000 a year for those to and 3,000 for 2004. That would mean that less than twenty thousand have actually applied for citizenship and passed a test since May 2004. Slighty fewer than 160,000. Of course, there will be people here who intend to stay but haven't applied yet, but eight times as many?

This is another potential goldmine for Slack, since the government are now extending the test to include people only applying for permanent residence as well as those applying for citizenship, so the number passing will necessarily be higher next time figures are announced because an extra category of people is being tested.

So, a number of unquestioning Mail readers will now be wobbling around under the impression that all you have to do to be granted citizenship is answer some questions about what to do if you spill someone's pint, and that these tests let in hundreds of thousands of people rather than turn away over 30% of applicants. When the figures including those applying to remain in the country are released, Slack can fudge them to look like more and more people coming to stay in the UK, rather than just extra people being made to take the test. Job done. Good work, Slacky!

Scare story checklist

There's a theme developing at the moment, involving how articles get reproduced over and over again as if they're new by the Daily Mail.

Well, via the MailWatch forums (cheers bairy), I've seen that there's a new one to add to the list.

Back last May, I covered a couple of Mail articles in '24% of Polish people want to kill us in our beds!' The two articles I covered were '1 in 4 Eastern bloc migrants wants to stay here for good' and 'One third of all Eastern Europeans want to stay in Britain premanently', both published on the same day, both covering the same figures and both written by James Slack. I'm not sure which story made the paper version.

Either Slack or a sub seems to have been confused, not knowing whether a quarter or a third of Eastern Europeans intended to stay here for good. Luckily, Slack was on hand to let us know the real number a few months later in ''Immigrants here for good': Half of Poles plan to stay in UK'. One of the authors of the study that the article was supposedly based on decided to write in response to Slack saying:

Firstly, the survey had nothing to do with the numbers of Polish nationals in the UK. The aim of the study was to determine their media preferences and willingness to vote in coming elections in Poland. Let me list sentence by sentence the instances of misleading parts in your piece

Which he then does, in fine style. But now the Mail readers all know - half of Poles want to stay here.

Now it seems that the number has slipped back again, with Saturday's 'One in every four Poles in Britain plan to stay for life, says survey'. Don't you wish the guy would make up his bloody mind?

Bairy has done a good job of dismantling this particular house of cards in the MailWatch forums so register to read it if you haven't already. I thought I'd go through it myself by each point on the checklist Slack must have sellotaped to his monitor for whenever he bashes out another scare story.

Does the headline bear any relation to reality?

It says that 1 in 4 intend to stay forever, and the story claims to be based on does include a table that says that 144 out of 636 respondents said they didn't intend to return to Poland, so on the face of it, the headline is accurate.

How about the article itself, is that telling the complete truth?

Check. Of course not. The main lie is one of ommission, which is coupled with this line:

It followed an admission from Britain's consul in Warsaw that the current record levels of migration - which have seen more than 700,000 Poles arrive in only three years - may continue.

This gives the impression that we're talking about Poles that arrived in Britain after Poland's accession to the EU, especially when you consider that almost every other Mail story about Polish migration is about that.

But this story isn't. According to the survey this story is based on 172 of the 636 (or 27% of) respondents to the survey had arrived prior to May 2004. This is significant as the longer someone has been in the country, the more likely they are to have decided to stay. Plus, prior to May 2004, the nature of migration to the UK from Poland was different. Those who came to the UK then and are still here are likely to have intended to stay for a longer period in the first place, since the type of seasonal migration that's possible now wasn't possible then.

Also, if a significant number of Poles decide to go back to Poland after a short space of time, then it follows that most of the people who arrived in the UK prior to 2005 or 2006, or even 2007, will have gone home. So asking people who have already decided to stay will necessarily skew the results towards those who don't intend to go back to Poland swiftly, since those that do will already have left. But this is more of a criticism of the survey itself than the Mail article.

Have there been any contortions done with the figures?

Check. Slack tries to apply these figures to the 700,000 Eastern Europeans he claims have arrived in the UK since 2004. As regular readers will know, the 700,000 figure he uses is already exaggerated as it includes everybody who ever applied to the Worker Registration Scheme, including those who never arrived and those who's applications were rejected.

On top of that though, can you think of a problem with the idea of using findings from a survey that questioned only people who remained in the UK (and not anyone who returned to Poland) and then trying to apply it accross the board to every Polish person who ever applied to come to the UK?

That's it - lots and lots of Polish people will already have gone home. You can only get an accurate reading of how many Pole in the UK these figures apply to by measuring people who are currently in the UK, not everybody who applied to come here, even the ones who didn't ever arrive, and those who have already left. So when Slack says:

Based on estimates from the Home Office's worker registration scheme, that would mean more than 160,000 Poles and their families staying for good.

He's talking rubbish.

The story also says:

The report also found the majority of Poles were not over-qualified for the jobs they are taking in the UK, amid reports of graduates working in factories or stacking shelves.

Some 65 per cent of respondents said they were working in jobs matching their qualifications.

Meaning that 35% are. That's a greater number than intend to stay here - the number this very article is using to claim that predictions that the majority of Poles will go back to Poland are wrong.

Has the dodgy 700,000 arrivals figure been parroted as if 700,000 people are still in the UK?

Check. See above.

Has the story sufficiently played about with quotes to create a false impression?

Check. It says this:

Received wisdom in Whitehall was also that, after the initial influx, the vast majority of Poles would return home.

Okay, that's an unattributed opinion rather than a quote, but if this story's headline is right, then the received wisdom in Whitehall is correct. 75% intend to go back to Poland.

Has there been a quote from a Tory MP?

Unfortunately not. Slack is slacking.

Has MigrationWatch been bigged up?

Check.

Is the quote from the Home Office left until the very end of the article to make it look less trustworthy?

Check.

So, Slack's managed to miss two checkpoints for creating a really good scare story - the headline and a dunderheaded quote by a Tory MP.

He's managed a great Daily Mail contradiction though, which is a bit of a bonus. Back in April, Slack bashed out another outraged screed about immigrants being able to vote in UK local elections in 'A million immigrants can vote next month'. In this one, he doesn't like the fact that none of the Poles in the survey voted in the same elections, using it as evidence of poor integration.

Of course, the guy should be able to report on new studies whenever they're published, and confirmation bias will mean he won't thoroughly check whether each study holds water, but does he have to present each as if they're new and further muck around with figures and quotes?

Express and the BNP sitting in a tree...

Now, I know it's been a long time since we asked about immigration, but...

It really shouldn't be any wonder that the BNP showers the Express with praise, and not just because the paper parrots the views of the shovel-headed racists to such a large degree in stories like 'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN', 'At last they admit: Immigration has damaged Britain' and 'Ethnic baby boom 'crisis''.

It's not even those stories combined with how willing the paper is to lie and distort to push the BNP's agenda with stories like the ones above, and others such as 'Muslims tell us how to run our schools', 'Muslim juror wore MP3 player under hijab' and 'Schools where children don't speak English'.

It's all of those combined with the paper's 'Have your say' section, populated as it is by goons representing the party dribbling over their fists as they bash out yet another ill thought out diatribe about immigration and Muslims, or about Muslims and immigration.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that the Express allows the goons to spew their bile all over its website that bothers me. Free speech and all that - people can make tits of themselves as much as they like. It's that the paper actively encourages them, effectively inviting virtual pro BNP canvassing several times a week.

Today, the 'Have your say' section has links to discussions titled:

Should Britain's taxes go to Muslim fanatics?
Should veils be banned in courts?
Has Labour totally failed to control immigration?
Have you had enough of minorities dictating the rules?
Does Britain have too many immigrants?
Are you fed up with the fanatics changing Britain?
Should immigrants be made to feel welcome?

All of them attract goons like flies on poo. If you were into strawmen, you might accuse me of not liking it that the Express dares to ask what people really think. But that's not what bothers me.

Look at the way the questions are formulated. The first one assumes Britain's taxes do indeed go to Muslim fanatics, widening out the scope of the story from the possibility of some aid money going to one organisation that might be connected with fanaticism if you follow the trail of links and connections to Palestine to a term that could apply to loads of organisations right here in the UK. The second seems to be asked every couple of months, as if the answer is ever going to be any different. The answers to the third are a foregone conclusion, since the goons seem to like saying that yes, Labour has failed to control immigration almost every day. The fourth assumes that minorities do in fact dictate the rules. The fifth is virtually the same question as the third. The sixth assumes that fanatics are changing Britain. The seventh is also a foregone conclusion.

When you already know the answer to a question, you don't ask it unless you want to hear the answer repeated. By asking the same questions over and over again in the 'Have your say' section, the Express is guaranteed to have open praise for the BNP linked to from the front of the 'Have your say' section constantly.

Whether this is deliberate or not, the question of when the Express will start backing the BNP is closer to being answered. It's already doing it now. Perhaps not directly, but still enough for the goons to thank the paper for 'vindicating all that the BNP has ever said about the strain being put upon the infrastructure of Britain by continuing to permit unfettered mass immigration'.

Incidentally, there were only 5 replies to 'Can Alesha become the British Beyonce?', the best being:

Who cares, she's not pure bred.
Vote B.N.P. for a blond with blue eyes. and someone told me she had a gay brother. Thats proof enough no English man would be a bummer.

Fair enough, it's probably someone pratting about, but it's sometimes difficult to tell.

After so many months of being given space to pretty much openly canvas, it's no wonder the BNP are grateful.

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

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

"Thank you, Daily Express" - BNP

Take the story from the front page of the Daily Express, 'Britain to build 2 million homes for migrants'. Here's what the BNP has to say about the article, by the way:

Today the Daily Express has published an article vindicating all that the BNP has ever said about the strain being put upon the infrastructure of Britain by continuing to permit unfettered mass immigration. Thank you, Daily Express - it’s good to see that you have finally caught up with us.

I have a policy of not fucking linking to those shovel headed goons so you'll have to Google for it, but it's there on the BNP site, and the entire article is reproduced in full there.

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

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

Back in March, the DCLG produced a set of projections of the future number of households in England, 'New projections of households for England and the regions to 2029'. It says that 33% of new households will be created as the result of net migration. It also explicitly states:

The household projections are not an assessment of housing need.

So what you should definitely not do is assume that the increase in the number of households is the same as the number of new houses that need to be built.

MigrationWatch then produced the briefing paper 'The impact of immigration on housing in England' based on these figures. It explains in its first paragraph what the DCLG figures are, and ends the paragraph with:

This amounts to a requirement for 200 new homes every day to house the additional immigrant population.

Thus completely ignoring the DCLG's disclaimer. I'm reminded here of James Slack's interpretation of Prof David Coleman's lame estimates of the cost of immigration, in which he ignored the disclaimer saying not to add the figures together as the result would be misleading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral of the story? Don't fib

One problem with telling lots of fibs is that you can forget what lies you've told in the past and inadvertently reveal the truth in an embarassing blunder.

You think that wouldn't necessarily be a problem for the Daily Mail, since it tells the same basic lies over and over again, but it's caused a bit of a problem with 'Immigrant pupil numbers rise 50 per cent since 2005, with 20,000 joining last year'.

The Mail has lots of stories about how terrible it is that the numbers of immigrant children or children who speak English as an additional language in schools are rising. They often fudge figures to exaggerate how much the number is rising by, too. Way back in October 2006, I covered a particularly good example in 'The'yre coming to turf us out of our beds and EAT OUR CHILDREN!' parts I and II.

The story then was 'Schools overwhelmed as 1 in 5 speak English as a second langage'. The current story says:

The proportion of pupils in England whose first language was not English rose from 9 per cent in 2003 to 12 per cent last year.

See the difference? Just over a year ago the paper pretended the number had risen to 20%, and now we see that in fact it was only 12%. Oh dear.

Aside from that, the rest of the story is quite obviously complete tripe. We get seven or eight sentence/paragraphs of the paper talking up its claims before we actually find out what they're based on:

Nearly 2,000 pupils were removed from last year's GCSE league tables at their teachers' request because they had recently arrived from overseas and did not speak English at home.

The figure was 50 per cent up on 2005.

If the numbers were similar for other year groups, about 20,000 immigrant pupils who do not speak English would have joined schools during the 2006/07 academic year.

The problem is with the word 'recently'. A rather large number of the pupils removed from GCSE league tables might not have arrived this academic year. They could have arrived at any point within the last three to four years, say. So the whole article is built on a wobbly house of cards.

There are better ways of finding out how many pupils arrived in schools from overseas in the last year. Trouble is, you probably wouldn't get such a scary headline for the Mail readers from it.

It's Political Correctness Gone Slack!

Since starting this blog, I've become familiar with the work of Mail hack James Slack and his interesting relationship with the truth. He was, after all, the guy responsible for kicking off my 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration' series, with a headline and story that claimed 120 people came from Romania and Bulgaria every day to be circus stars in the first three months of last year, when the real total number of Romanians and Bulgarians who had arrived was less than 120 a day, and the actual number of those arriving to be circus artistes wasn't over 10,000 (as his figures suggest), but 55.

He was also responsible for the story about a report on Polish immigrants that prompted one of the report's authors to write to him saying:

Unfortunately, your piece is a mixture of ignorance, misinterpretation and speculation. I couldn’t care less about your intellectual capacity to absorb the data, but you have included my name in an article that conveys a false impression of what the study was about.

Couldn't have said it better myself. As I've said elsewhere, I'm sure there's an office ready with Slack's name on the door in the eighth circle of hell.

Another thing I've become familiar with is the way that almost every Political Correctness Gone Mad story that appears in the tabloids is either made up from whole cloth or has been exaggerated and distorted from a little kernel of truth until the original story is all but unrecognisable.

Spotting a James Slack Political Correctness Gone Mad story is a bit of a win double. You just know there's going to be a withdrawal before you even start reading.

So I wasn't disappointed by his 29 December story 'PC prison bosses ban sexist jokes in jail'. A claim Slack pushes to the limit with:

It means that Fletch, played by Ronnie Barker in the classic television comedy Porridge, would certainly have been in trouble.

In a 1974 episode, while fantasising in his prison cell about having a night out, Fletch mused: "I could call up a couple of birds - those darlings who dance on Top of the Pops, what are they called? Pan's People. There's one special one - beautiful Babs ... I don't know what her name is."

He even includes a graphic of Fletch with speech bubbles showing just what would have got him in trouble and everything.

Except none of them would have got Fletch in trouble. See, he was joking in his cell and hadn't written any of those jokes in a magazine for prisoners, where rapists and wifebeaters would be chuckling along with him. And even if he had, he probably wouldn't have got in trouble either, because all that's really happened is that a magazine for prisoners included some sexist jokes and a reader complained. One reader, not 'prison bosses'. Seriously, that's it.

We begin to see the house of cards getting carefully dismantled with this:

The controversy stems from a lighthearted piece in Inside Time, the monthly newspaper of prisoners in which they swop [sic] jokes, concerns and stories. It was headlined "Victorian views perhaps?"

[...]

But Steve Orchard, a head of operations at the Prison Service, was not amused - and he instructed Inside Time not to trade such "sexist" jokes again.

In a letter to the magazine's editors, the official, who works at Nottingham Prison, said he is not "fanatically 'PC' or lacking a sense of humour," but the jokes go too far.

This still leaves the impression that someone with some clout at the magazine has written a letter and threatened some sort of punishment if similar jokes are repeated.

But he doesn't have any clout at the magazine. Steve Orchard is head of operations at one prison and has no position on the editorial team or board of directors of 'Inside Time' magazine - so would actually have no power to ban anything anyway. He's just a reader.

Nor has he threatened or 'instructed' anything, which we learn from:

Mr Orchard said the magazine would be wise not to repeat its mistake - as good as an instruction, given his seniority.

So, not actually an instruction - just 'as good as', not actually an official prohibition, not actually a ban, not actually 'prison bosses' and not actually anyone with any responsibility at the 'Inside Time'. Just a complaint and a request that the sort of joke in the article were not repeated in the magazine.

On top of that, the request isn't the same as the paper claims - remember the danger of accepting paraphrased or partial quotes from the tabloids. The paraphrase makes the comment look like a veiled threat. Here is the issue of 'Inside today' with the letter in it. The actual request says:

[...] I suggest that you give greater thought in future before publishing such pieces.

See how he 'suggests' and doesn't instruct? See how he just says 'give greater thought before publishing' and not 'would be wise not to repeat', which includes a greater impression of a threat of consequences? Slack knows that bit too, you see. That's why he paraphrased instead of quoting.

So, all that's happened is that a reader has written a letter of complaint. Does this mean that because some negative comments seem to be getting through about Littlejohn's columns recently, he's been banned?

We can but hope.*

*Strawman buster - that was a joke. I don't want him banned. What are you, some sort of PC idiot who gets offended by every little joke? Have I been banned?

Let's start 2008 with a good immigration scare story!

It's the second of January, and we have the first of the immigration exaggeration scare stories of the year in the Daily Mail. Hurrah!

This one is 'It's official: England is the most crowded country in Europe'. Of course, even using the Mail's own table shows that England is the second most crowded country in Europe, demonstrating yet another headline that isn't actually true.

But this story isn't one that falls completely into the category of made up nonsense. The figures really do come from the ONS, and really do appear in a House of Commons Written Answer. This story falls mainly into the categories of 'leaving out relevant information to create a false impression' and 'not actually news'. Like the stories that get repeated every three months whenever new immigration figures come out. England has always been one of the most populous countries in Europe. Pick up any encyclopaedia from the last fifty years and you'll find the same thing.

This is the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs website. On it, you can search for things like population density by country back as far as 1950. This is what the league table of countries from the Mail would have looked like back in the days the Mail treats as the best ever (with their 2005 placing in brackets):

1. (1) Malta - 987
2. (3) Belgium - 283
3. (2) Netherlands - 244
4. (4) United Kingdom - 208
5. (5) Germany - 192
6. (6) Italy - 156
7. (7) Luxembourg - 114
8. (8) Czech Republic - 113
9. (9) Denmark - 99
10. (11) Portugal - 91
11. (10) Poland - 77
12. (12) France - 76

The table is virtually identical. Population density has risen in every country in this table since 1950, which might have something to do with a little war that happened a few years before and advances in modern medicine on top of immigration. Looking at the full table in the Commons Written Answer shows that the United Kingdom held exactly the same spot in the league table in 2005 as it did back in 1950.

The only new thing is the separating out of England's population. It is possible that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland's density has stayed static or fallen while England's has shot up, but unlikely. If anyone can find the same figures for the UK separated into individual countries from 1950, let me know in the comments. *UPDATED TO ADD* It would be interesting to see London's figures split out from the rest of England, too, since about 14% of England's population lives in Greater London. According to this Wikipedia article, that makes London's population density 4,761 people per srqare kilometre, but I don't know what that does to the rest of England's density.

More important than the relative population densities are the rates they've risen by. The Mail would have us believe that immigrants have been pouring into the country, making the UK's population density grow at a much higher rate than the rest of Europe. Here are how the countries in the table stack up by the percentage their population densities have risen by since 1950 (rounded up or down to the nearest percentage point):

1. Luxembourg - 55% (114 to 177 per sq km)
2. Poland - 53% (77 to 118)
3. France - 46% (76 to 111)
4. The Netherlands - 38% (244 to 343)
5. Malta - 29% (987 to 1274)
6. Denmark - 27% (99 to 126)
7. Italy -25% (156 to 195)
7. Portugal - 25% (91 to 114)
9. Germany - 21% (192 to 232)
10. Belgium - 20% (283 to 341)
11. United Kingdom - 19% (208 to 248)
12. Czech Republic - 14% (113 to 129)

That would be the UK down at second from bottom. I haven't bothered to work out the rates for the other countries in the ONS's table so I don't know where the UK lies in the full table of European countries, but we know for sure it's not even in the top ten.

One bit of the Mail article that does fall into made up nonsense territory is this:

Its [the Netherlands'] population is growing at a much slower rate than Britain because of the higher immigration levels in this country.

No it isn't. The Netherlands' population has actually risen at roughly three times the rate of the UK's between 1950 and 2005. The Dutch population has gone up from 10,114,000 to 16,328, which is a massive rise of 61%. The UK's has gone up from 50,616,000 to 60,245,000, a rise of 19%. Even in more recent years, the Netherlands' population has been growing at a higher rate that the UK's, at 9% between 1990 and 2005 and 6% between 2000 and 2005, compared to 5% and 2% in the UK in the same periods.

These are taken from the UN stats and not the ONS - but one thing that is curiously missing from the Mail story is that the ONS figures are based on UN ones. That way, its readers can blindly imagine much higher figures because the government obviously always lies about immigration.

This connection is made for them by the Mail in 'The real challenges facing Britain', which says:

The result, as today's official figures show, is that England is poised to become the most overcrowded nation in Europe. Indeed, government statistics are so notoriously unreliable that our population density may already be the highest in the EU.

It does say that the source is the UN in rather big letters at the bottom of the ONS figures. I wonder how the Mail hacks missed it. And let's not mention that to be the highest in Europe, the government's estimate of England's population density would have to be out by a factor of three or four, Meaning England's population would have to be over 100,000,000 without any of us noticing.

There's a bit more oversimplified misleading in the rest of 'It's official: England is the most crowded country in Europe', with:

The figures are likely to increase concern over Labour's plans to build hundreds of thousands of homes, mainly in southern England.

The homes are needed to cope with the increasing population and there are fears that many will end up on green belt land that is currently protected.

The growing population is only one factor in the need for building new homes. Others include people owning more than one property and the fact that some older properties become uninhabitable. Plus, there's the usual Mail tactic of adding 'there are fears that' which it could use to claim anything it liked. Like, 'there are fears that they will be made up of converted ice cream vans that play the music every time the van is empty, inviting burglars and squatters and that'.

The rest of the article is pretty much generic Daily Mail immigration territory, with quotes about how immigration is a Bad, Bad Thing from a Tory MP and from MigrationWatch, but one interesting thing is a new moving of goalposts that I've only noticed recently.

Now, it would seem, demonstrating that there are still vacancies in the UK is not enough to show that the dirty foreigners haven't taken all our jobs. Because some people are on benefits. There are all sorts of reasons why people might be on benefits, and the clue of why some people may be on Incapacity Benefit is in the title, but it would seem that they all pale into insignificance next to the fact that immigrants are here. Presumably, without them all the people with no GCSEs would be filling the vacancies for doctors, nurses and teachers. Or something.

So there we have it. 2008 kicked off with a by the numbers Mail scare story about immigration. The only let down is that it wasn't by James Slack but his sidekick, Steve Doughty. I have to admit that, like a lot of Mail immigration scare stories, it turned out to be more misleading than I'd originally thought when I started looking at its claims. All I suspected to start with is that the UK was probably in the same position it has always held in the league table of population density because the story didn't include any figures for comparison, but I hadn't expected the little fib about Dutch population growth rates or the fact that the UK's density had been growing at such a low rate compared to other countries in Europe.

Expect more of this sort of thing in the coming year, every time any population figures are released.