Slack's back!

There's something bizarrely comforting about reading a James Slack immigration article in the Daily Mail. A bit like putting on a pair of old slippers that the cat's weed in. They're nice and familiar and comfortable, but they smell of cat's wee. You know what's coming in a Slack immigration article, but you know it's not going to be nice.

This Saturday saw him get away with the article 'Now the Lords is forced to admit that each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK'. See, the headline's so comforting - we know it's going to sound indignant and outraged. In this instance though, the paper really should be sounding quite chuffed. In January 2007, another Slack headline was ''Migrants bring only 4p a week in financial benefit', says report', so you'd expect pleasant surprise at finding out they contributed at least seven times more than the paper originally thought. But it's not the job of Mail hacks to do anything other than be negative about immigration.

Let's get this out of the way first. The headline has left out that the 28p per week is 28p a week more per member of the entire population than everyone else. It's what you get when you divide the extra contribution of immigrants to the economy by sixty million and then again by fifty two. You'd get a low number like that for just about any arbitrarily defined group. People with curly perms, or blue eyes, say. You'd get a low number doing the same calculation with nurses. If the Mail was consistent with its logic (I know, it doesn't have any in the first place) it would also be calling for doing away with nurses.

*UPDATE* While I was actually typing this post, the headline has changed to 'Immigration has 'no positive effect' on Britain, finds landmark report'. The opening few paragraphs have also been changed to beef up what was originally there, hanging things more on comments by Lord Turner. That only alters what follows a little bit, but bear it in mind.

On to the article. One of its central claims is impossible to test at the moment. It says:

But the most in-depth study of its kind by a parliamentary committee will conclude this is not the best measure of the policy's success or failure.

In a blow to the Government, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee will say on Tuesday that the amount migrants boost the economy per person - rather than overall - is far more relevant.

The report isn't published yet so it's impossible to check. The paper gives the impression that it will be published tomorrow so I'll look at it then, but for now, I'm familiar enough with how the Mail treats the contents of reports to be sceptical. It's entirely possible that the report follows up that statement by pointing out that the per head contribution of any relatively small group will be pence per week. I don't think the paper will be a massive indictment of immigration, since the Mail can only find this one tiny thing it's negative about.

Going past that, it's possible to look through the rest of the article and the padding in it to test its honesty. Especially after having looked at so many earlier articles, which makes it possible to see what a lot of this one is based on.

For starters, there's this:

Experts say this shows only a tiny net contribution to gross domestic product, worth as little as 28p per week.

Note the 'as little as', which dismisses higher estimates. Professor Coleman (co-founder of MigrationWatch and Daily Mail immigration darling) claimed the figure was 50p in 'Academic hits back in migration row' in the Telegraph at about this time last year.

Further on, the article claims:

This has to be balanced against the enormous strain they place on schools, hospitals and other series - valued at almost £9billion.

This is a reference to Slack's earlier article 'Influx of immigrants 'costs every UK household £350 a year'', based on a submission by Professor David Coleman to the House of Lords Committee. A quick point-by-point rundown of what was wrong with that article:

1. The figures in David Coleman's evidence includes a big disclaimer that says, 'For many of the items discussed below it is questionable how much of the cost should be attributed to immigrants or to their descendants, and how much to the indigenous population,' and another that says, 'These different estimates should not be added to make a total. They are preliminary and some categories may overlap with others.' Slack arrived at his total by adding the estimates together, despite disclaimers saying he shouldn't and telling him why he shouldn't.

2. Slack's version of the figures include numbers for the cost of treating immigrants with HIV and the cost of immigrant crimes. Coleman's do not. They only include figures for 'minority populations' connected to those things. Slack has just changed the wording to make the figures look better.

3. Slack rounds up a figure of £3.08bn to £4bn, adding close to an extra billion to the total he shouldn't have been adding together in the first place. He almost makes up for it by rounding down another from £31m to £3m, but the total should still be £7.9bn. He's casually added an extra billion pounds here.

There's more on that article in 'Still worried about Professor Coleman' and 'Coleman's figures. Again.'

The rest of the article just goes over the fact that there has been a Committee examining evidence about the benefits of immigration from people both pro and anti, with the Mail slant we've become accustomed to as the paper overplays the anti's hand. For example, with this:

But critics of government policy have long argued that simply judging the success or failure of Labour's open- door migration policy on their contribution to GDP is short-sighted and misleading.

The use of the term 'open-door' is the typical bit of tabloid hyperbole we know and love. The second part of the paragraph/sentence there is the second bit. The government does not 'simply judge the success or failure' of its immigration policy on their contribution to GDP. The Home Office evidence is here on the Parliament website. It's 43 pages long, and includes way more than a mention of the contribution to GDP. It even includes over a page about the contribution to GDP per head.

Then we get the usual guff about what Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch infamy, has been saying. Obviously without mentioning that his original estimates of GDP per head were out by quite a big factor and based on figures that were only supposed to cover Eastern Europeans. Or that the co-founder of MigrationWatch put the figure at more than 12 times his original estimate.

This is followed by another mention of Coleman's figures. remember, they should never have been added together in the first place. Note the 'at least £330million to treat illnesses such as HIV' which refers to a figure in Coleman's evidence that doesn't actually refer to immigrants, and Slack changed to say that it did.

The article ends with a quote from a critic of the government's immigration policy. In a shocking finding, he doesn't like it much.

All the techniques here are familiar. We're obviously going to see the opposition to the Mail's arguments misrepresented and belittled and critics referred to as 'experts' while their opposition aren't. But the references to misleading figures from the paper itself are things you might not notice if you hand't read what has come before. The paper sets up its position on the matter like this - misleading article referred to by another misleading article and on and on.

We should be grateful that the paper's dropped the 4p claims by now, I suppose. Which makes me ask the question again - does Slack know how poor his reasoning is, or does he genuinely believe it? If you're prepared to add figures together and change what they're supposed to refer to, why would you drop another figure that has turned out to be misleading?

*FURTHER UPDATE* The article keeps getting changed and beefed up. Apparently, the Committee reveals all this stuff 'today', which suggests the story won't make the dead tree version until tomorrow since the Economic Affairs Committee says it won't be published until then. I'll be checking back to see how much the article changes and how much extra nonsense gets injected. The 28p a week figure has already gone (only referred to in comments that might also disappear), Slack's name has disappeared from the byline and all the references to Coleman's 'nearly £9bn' have gone. Slack's still included with a link from journalisted.com

Fury over paper printing nonsense front page headlines

I was going to do a quick follow up post to Tuesday's 'Fury over children being taught together and learning about one another', focusing on how the coverage on the Daily Express website managed to get comments that used the same actual quotes from the NUT (which didn't appear in the paper's coverage) to prove that the article was inaccurate and accurate at the same time - but both Express articles have been disappeared. They are unstories now, whisked away by the Express secret police.

The likelihood is that these stories, like the 'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN' fiasco of last November, have been taken down because they're being investigated for being misleading.*

So, less than a week after having to pay a large fine and print embarrasing apologies on its front page for producing misleading stories with no evidence to back them up, the paper has to remove another of its front page stories from its website for being potentially misleading.

Were this any other paper, its editor would surely be handing in his resignation right now to avoid being fired by the owner. Whether than happens here remains to be seen.

One thing that's for sure though - if the paper has a new policy of removing articles from the website whenever they're complained about for being misleading, it could have a very empty site indeed.

If you do have a complaint about anything that appears in the Express or any other paper, see the Press Complaints Commission. Probably nothing will happen and you'll be told your complaint isn't being upheld months and months after you've made it, but at least the Express seems to be removing stories that receive complaints from its website, so it might not be entirely futile.

*I'm waiting for confirmation that this is why the stories have gone. If by some chance there's a different reason, I'll clarify here.

Fury over children being taught together and learning about one another

In one respect, our mid-market tabloids are as reliable as the finest Swiss watches. If anyone anywhere suggests anything about Muslims that doesn't involve screaming hatred and fear, the tabloids will inject it.

The NUT has suggested that single faith schools undermine community relations, given that they separate children into different groups and keep them apart. A solution the Union has offered involves stopping the spread of faith schools and having children taught about religions by representatives from those religions.

A quote from the NUT General Secretary about the subject (from this Press Association article):

"I believe that there will be real benefits to all our communities and youngsters if we could find space for pupils who are Roman Catholics, Anglican, Methodist, Jewish, Sikh and Muslim to have more religious instruction in schools.

"You could have imams coming in, you could have the local rabbi coming in and the local Roman Catholic priest. If there were opportunities where they all talked together to the youngsters, what a fantastic example that would be."

You can probably guess the Express headline. Ready?

'FURY OVER PLAN TO TEACH KORAN IN SCHOOLS'. Marvellous!

The website also has a special 'Have Your Say' question: 'Should Imams teach our children?' It's actually quite a balanced and thoughtful open question that offers both sides of what could be a contentious issue for Express readers. Ha! Gotcha! Course it's not! Here's how it looks on the main 'Have Your Say' page:

Hmmm...I wonder what answer the paper wants us to give.

The fine and front page apology to the McCanns has obviously worked in getting the paper to change its ways and start reporting things properly.

The Mail, which is supposed to be more measured and serious than its thick mid-market rival goes with the headline 'Fury over plan to let imams teach the Koran in state schools'. To be fair, the article is slighty more balanced than the Express's, but it involves a worrying statistic:

The call comes as new research today shows the numbers attending mosques in England and Wales will outstrip Roman Catholic churchgoers by 2020.

Christian Research expects Catholic worshippers at Sunday Mass to fall to 679,000 but Muslims at Friday prayer to increase to 683,000. The figures also suggest the number of Muslims at mosques will overtake Church of England members at Sunday services.

Which is bizarre, since according to the Mail, Britain is a Catholic country because of immigrants. In December the paper went with the article 'Tony Blair converts to Catholicism - as immigration means Britain is now a Catholic country'. Don't these new researchers read the Mail? Or is it that the paper cherrypicks information to scare its readers with that suggests that there will soon be more of THEM than there are of US? (Insert this week's baddies into the 'THEM' section as appropriate).

What the Mail and Express coverage of the NUT paper 'In Good Faith' (not available online yet) shows is how far the tabloids have come in being able to demonise particular 'out groups'. A few years ago, they managed to turn the term 'asylum seeker' into an insult. They've now managed to do the same with 'Muslim' and 'Imam'. An Imam is not now the man who leads Muslim prayer - the obvious choice for someone to teach children about Islam - an Imam is someone who tries to brainwash kids into becoming terrorists, someone who is best illustrated by a picture of Abu Hamza lit from the bottom, like a horror film monster.

The Mail appears to have done the same with 'multiculturalism'. Multiculturalism is, to the Mail, a doctrine that forces people to live separately in ghettoes and never interact with one another, ever. The NUT's proposal, which is about stopping people from alienating themselves from one another by mixing in schools and being taught about each others' religions, is greeted by this nonsense from an idiot Tory MP:

"In case the NUT hasn't heard, multi-culturalism is generally regarded as a failure and even central government is abandoning it."

Eh? I wish I knew exactly what this numpty means by multiculturalism, but I suspect it means 'anything at all to do with other cultures and religions that I don't like'. So, in this case, it's putting everyone together and teaching them equally about one another. In another case, it could mean making everybody separate and not have to learn anything about one another.

It's got to the point of being a tired cliche now - but imagine how these articles would look if the same NUT paper were published and the papers decided to go with outraged headlines about Rabbis being able to teach the Talmud, with scary pictures of them lit from the bottom to maximise their scariness potential. It would be a little distasteful, wouldn't it?

*UPDATE* Both Express stories have been taken down from the website. More on that in 'Fury over paper printing nonsense front page headlines'.

The good news is - the Express and Star apologise and lose money - the bad news is that everything else stays the same

Today, I'm torn. Not like Natalie Imbruglia. I'm not cold and ashamed and lying naked anywhere or anything. (Okay, I'll admit to being one of those things, but I'm not telling which). I just can't decide whether to be cock-a-hoop over the news that all Richard Desmond's hate rags have to print front page apologies and pay half a million to the McCanns over printing more than a hundred untrue stories about them since their daughter went missing, or just cocked off.

On the one hand, there's the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing the paper forced to apologise for printing false stories and lose cash, but on the other hand - well, the other hand is illustrated by the front page of the Star (above).

Shunted in small letters at the top right hand corner is the apology - which despite being on the front page is pretty limp, and it's still possible to interpret its headline as saying that Kate and Gerry McCann say sorry.

Taking up the bulk of the front page is a headline about a parent of another previously missing child. A much poorer parent who could never afford to pay for lawyers to force anyone to print any kind of apology at all.

There has been some talk about this development being unprecedented, and some have asked questions about how this will affect journalism in general - the papers involved in particular. I don't think there'll be much of a difference at all. The scream sheets will still attack people less able to defend themselves and will be more careful about attacking people who can afford to sue them. That's all. Poor people will still be fair game.

I can't help but wonder what would happen if the papers could be subjected to a similar case about their treatment of minorities. It's painfully obvious that the PCC will shrug off the recent complaint by the Federation of Polish People in Great Britain, since it's unlikely the Federation have the resources to go elsewhere. If not - if the FPGB could give a detailed list of each misleading story and afford to sic Schillings on the paper, I wonder how quick it would be before the paper was forced to capitulate.

That won't happen though - and not just because the FPGB can't afford a libel case. The papers already bend the rules as efficiently as possible when it comes to attacking minority groups. That's why they choose groups that aren't covered by the Race Relations Act - Poles, Muslims and asylum seekers. Their treatment of gypsies to get around the Act - simply changing the spelling to 'gipsy', is an illustration of how the papers will go to any lengths to vilify one group or another. So we'll see just as many misleading anti-immigrant stories, if not more. Remember that some of the McCann stories were also used by the Express to push its anti-Muslim agenda, with spurious sightings of Maddie being dragged away by swarthy people in Muslim countries, some of whom wore veils.

So, as nice as it is to see the Express and Star squirmm it gives only as much satisfaction as cutting off the head of a hydra. There'll always be more to replace it. And since the McCann story is something fleeting - actually driven by an actual specific event - it's something that would have withered away by itself in time. Hatred of minority groups - including the poor, bizarrely for papers that are supposed to cater for them - is something that will always be there. And they can't get hold of expensive lawyers.

Lolblair

Via Liberal Conspiracy


Here's mine. Have a good weekend, people.

Federation of Poles in Great Britain complains to PCC

Funny how my last couple of posts have been about the Daily Mail dehumanising Polish people, and today, via the ever marvellous MailWatch forums, I learn of this news 'UK Poles attack Daily Mail 'bias''. Apparently:

The Federation of Poles in Great Britain has "reluctantly" filed a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission accusing the Daily Mail of defaming Polish residents in the UK.

In its letter of complaint to the PCC the federation accused the Daily Mail of printing articles that gave rise to "negative emotions and tensions between the new EU immigrants and local communities".

Good on them. They'll have plenty of material to send in a complaint.


Unfortunately though, I can't help but think that any PCC investigation will be a cynical whitewash. Last January, representatives of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Press Complaints Commission gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The JCHR said:

We are concerned about the negative impact of hostile reporting and in particular the effects that it can have on individual asylum seekers and the potential it has to influence the decision making of officials and Government policy. We are also concerned about the possibility of a link between hostile reporting by the media and physical attacks on asylum seekers

The PCC had defended the tabloids' coverage of asylum seekers in its eveidence. The JCHR's reaction to the PCC's evidence:

The evidence we received from the PCC was not reassuring. Its existing system is not sufficiently robust to protect asylum seekers and other vulnerable minorities from the adverse effects of unfair and inflammatory media stories.

The PCC's reaction to the current complaint is less than encouraging. According to Brand Republic:

The Press Complaints Commission will not be able to launch an investigation into the matter unless it receives complaints about a specific story and how it is in breach of the code.

So the fact that the Federation of Poles in Great Britain are able to supply 80 inflammatory headlines isn't enough, the PCC won't investigate unless they complain one by one. Plus, as we know, some of these inflammatory headlines will be placed atop articles with a bit of dissenting opinion buried somewhere inside, so the paper can spuriously claim balance.

The Daily Mail's reaction would be funny if the paper wasn't using such nonsense to excuse such hateful behaviour:

"We do reserve the right to criticise bogus asylum claims, benefit cheats, tax dodgers and militant fanatics no matter where they were born," he added.

"The Mail is entitled to run stories about immigration, the more so as the last ten years have witnessed immigration on a scale at a vastly increased rate than at any time in this country's history since and including the Norman invasion of the 11th century."

Here we have the first resort of the dishonest - the strawman argument. Nobody said the paper shouldn't be allowed to report about those things. People complained about the paper demonising the Polish, which they do rather a lot.

The paper's spokesman talks about how many positive stories it runs about immigration. I nearly got a hernia laughing at that one. One if its examples is this 'The new Britons', which says all this in the writer's own narrative voice:

I feel like a foreigner, but this is not Warsaw, Kracow or Gdansk. I am in Southampton, an English city where one in ten of the 220,000 population is now believed to be Polish.

No one knows exactly how many Poles live in the city, but estimates start with "at least 10,000" and rise to 30,000.

And:

The phenomenon of the Polish plumber - the hard-working, ever-available tradesman - has been experienced all over Britain. There can hardly be a street in the country where a kitchen or roof hasn't been fixed by an eastern European.

But while the middle classes have been full of praise, others claim the competition has meant British workers losing out. Last month, unemployment figures climbed to three per cent - the highest since October 2003 - giving fresh ammunition to the critics.

And:

What emerges is an extraordinary picture of contrasts: hope and greed; hard work and exploitation; ambition and grinding poverty. But one thing is certain - the outcome of this 'open door' policy is nowhere near as clear cut as the Government would have us believe.

And:

Yesterday, David Roberts, director of enforcement and removals at the Home Office, admitted that the Government is no longer bothering to hunt hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and told MPs he did not have the "faintest idea" how many were at large in the UK.

Nice bit of obfuscation about people who aren't necessarily eastern European in there. And:

The Government's figures are notoriously unreliable. They admit that two million Poles have travelled to Britain since the borders opened in 2004. The influx - greater than the population of Warsaw - records the number who have travelled to the UK, not the number who have stayed.

And although the Government admits to 204,000 Poles working here, that does not include those who have set up as self-employed or are living in the black economy and are paid in cash.

The ludicrous disparity between government statistics and reality was revealed in autumn last year when the Government said there were just 95 Polish plumbers working in Britain, yet the Daily Mail gathered that number together in West London within 24 hours with one card in a newsagents' window and three phone calls.

That last bit is disingenuous. Since the paper's already told us that self-employed people aren't counted in the Worker Registration Scheme, we know that the bulk of the ones the paper found are probably self employed.

There is a bit of positive coverage here, but most of it is in the reported speech of others. Although there are one or two positive bits in the author's own voice, there aren't enough to balance the above out.

One of the Mail spokesman's defences (the same guy who gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights) is that the paper has printed letters that cover positive aspects of Polish immigration. As if a letter can match the importance of a front page headline.

Pathetic as the Mail's defence is, the PCC will lap it up. Nothing will ever be done about the paper's dreadful coverage of eastern Europeans until it's far too late and the paper has started picking on someone else. Exactly the same way the paper got away with deminising asylum seekers for years.

Still, I popped a couple of examples in an email to the FPGB. Fingers crossed.

How to insert extra hate about eastern Europeans into the Daily Mail

I wanted to look at a further example of the Daily Mail dehumanising eastern Europeans yesterday, in an article about Peterborough Council moving a camp occupied by eastern Europeans, but I didn't have time. I decided to have another go today, but the article 'Council to pull down immigrants' illegal camps - because they give the city a bad name' has disappeared from the site (what a shame - such a snappy headline) and been replaced with 'Living in a squalid camp and existing on handouts, migrants from EU 'who don't want a job''. This is even better, since we can have a look at how the Daily Mail takes a standard generic bit of churnalism and adds to it to ramp up the nastiness and hate.

Before we start, Google the term 'Council raps immigrants' illegal camp'. See how many stories there are with that identical headline? Click anything later than page four and you'll get this disclaimer at the bottom of the page:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 35 already displayed.

This is pretty much the definition of the word 'churnalism'.

I've had an original idea! Let's write about camps of migrants in Peterborough!

The original Mail article, reproduced at LiveLeak.com, is pretty much identical to all the other Google results I looked at - except for the headline (which handily ignores the bit in the article saying the camp gave migrant workers a bad name - presumably because migrant workers have nothing but a bad name in the Mail). This version talks only about one camp, housing 'up to 20 people', exaggerated in the headline to 'camps'.

The second version wades straight in with the hyperbole in the headline. The camp is 'squalid', the migrants are 'living on handouts' and they 'don't want to work'. Before we even get to the article, we're invited to abandon all sympathy for anyone living here. They're not the victims of the rising cost of housing, or examples of the result of harsh rules on claiming benefits on arrival in the UK. They're just lazy and they live on handouts in squalor. As if that's not enough, the opening sentence tells us:

The torn tents, slop buckets and overpowering odour of human waste suggest it is a refugee camp.

They're so dirty and smelly they might as well be refugees. Ugh. Not refugees!

This story makes extensive use of the tabloid weasel word 'many' (which the Daily Express has shown us can actually mean 'none'). Apparently the camp 'shows how many live after arriving from Eastern Europe[...]', 'the city council said many at the camp had refused offers of help to find work and accommodation', 'many do not even have tents, but sleep in the open on the ground or in nests of blankets.' How many? Why not give a number? And do people sleep in nests, or would that be animals?

The few attempts at giving numbers are just as weaselly. The "up to 20" living in this camp from the original article becomes "around 20" and:

Sources say there could be up to 200 migrants living in a dozen similar temporary settlements around the city.

Note the paper covering its back by inserting 'sources say' (what sources?), there 'could be' and 'up to' 200 migrants. If there are a dozen similar settlements, why aren't we shown them? The closest we come is a picture of some rubbish, which the caption claims is from 'another' of the camps, probably the one the article describes that actually isn't there ay more.

While we're talking about pictures, how do we know the picture of men in a car park was taken in Peterborough? How do we know they're eastern European? How do we know the photos that seem to be of the camp are actually of the same place, since they come from different sources?

Apparently:

Pots and pans sat on grates, ready for fires to be lit when the residents returned from a shower and a change of clothes at a centre for the homeless.

Because that's where all the people not around had gone. Not to work, obviously. because none of them want to work.

The paper uses a few out of context sentences from people to back up its claims. Curiously, one of them says, "I came here because I heard that when you arrive there would be a job." Proof! They don't want to work!

Finally, there's a picture with the caption "The immigrants are given food hand-outs and only work occasional days" (the article mentions only once that these people get charity 'handouts', not state or Council ones). Hang on - they work occasional days? The headline says they don't want to work. Does that mean the paper was using that in the same sense that I don't want to work? In the sense that I do work, but I don't bloody want to.

So, these camps are squalid and smelly, the people are lazy and live on handouts and they represent 'many' of the people who have come from eastern Europe to the UK. If this was a one off story, it would be easier to defend. But it isn't. It's part of a relentless conveyor belt of negative stories about eastern Europeans and Polish people, tapping into some of the very first scare stories about how many 'gipsies' would flood to the UK after the accession of eastern European countries. It's a story about eastern Europeans living rough that goes on for around 800 words without once mentioning that they don't qualify for housing benefit. It obfuscates about where the 'handouts' the people apparently live on come from. It begs far more questions than it answers.

It's no wonder then, that this sort of thing leads people like David Gibson to think that someone cooking their dinner near a dead swan must be eating the swan. And not only that, but this from 'Immigrant caught cooking swan surrounded by the bodies of slaughtered birds':

Several of the campsites were littered with dozens of old car batteries but it was not clear what use these were being put to.

Mr Gibson said: "Maybe they are stripping them apart for the lead, or perhaps they are tipping the acid in the water to kill the fish.

"Unless we catch someone it could be one of a number of things."

Why on Earth would you see a car battery at a camp site and not think 'I wonder what someone hooked that up to. Telly or radio?' Why would a fisherman think it was at all likely that someone would use battery acid to kill fish that they were presumably going to eat?

Might it be because the fisherman has become predisposed to think of certain people as dirty, smelly, lazy scroungers and thieves?

Rebirth of a Legend V - The Dehumanising of the Swan Eating Polish

I'm reading another great book at the moment. 'The Lucifer Effect' by Philip Zimbardo looks over his involvement running the now infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. One interesting thing the author mentions is another psychological experiment into how easily good people can be made to do bad things, similar to the Milgram experiment.

In this one, three groups of three college students were told they were taking part in an experiment to improve the teamwork of three students from another college. The students from the other college would carry out tasks in another room, and when they made mistakes, the students in the experiment would have to administer electric shocks to them, and decide how severe the shock would be.

One group of students were sent into the room and over ten trials ended up administering shocks at around 5 on the scale. But the other two groups were treated differently. One was allowed to "accidentally" overhear an assistant describe the students from the other college as "nice guys", and the other was allowed to overhear the assistant refer to them as being "like animals". The ones who heard the "nice guy" script shocked the other students at a level of about three. The ones who heard the "like animals" script went up "toward the high level 8".

Zimbardo says:

Think carefully for a moment about the psychological processes that a simple label has tripped off in [the students'] mind. [They] overheard a person, whom [they did] not know personally, tell some authority, whom [they had] never seen, that other college students like [them] seem like "animals." That single descriptive term changes [the sudents'] mental construction of these others.

This leads me, in a roundabout fashion, back to the 'Polish people ate our swans' urban myth.

The Mail followed up its earlier coverage with this bag of rubbish 'Immigrant caught cooking swan surrounded by the bodies of slaughtered birds'.

I don't need to go through the thing again, but the evidence we're given that shows an immigrant was caught cooking swan is this:

Mr Gibson did not need to look in the pot to know what it contained: the piles of feathers and stripped carcasses were evidence enough.

And:

By the time he had alerted the authorities, the man - believed to be an East European immigrant - had packed up his tent and fled.

"I just saw a Colombian drug dealer with drugs in his pockets around the corner. I don't need to look in his pockets to know what they contain. Heroin, cocaine and Clarky caps! Arrest any Colombian you find in the area!" You see the problem.

Here's a very brief rundown of what's supposed to have happened - this man stripped several swans for meat, leaving the skeleton intact with the head and neck attached, even plucking and picking the neck and face. Even though he stripped the meat from the bones of the swan, he bothered to remove all its internal organs. In doing all this, he managed to leave several feathers attached to the corpse. He did this instead of just cutting the swans into smaller pieces. He cooked the stripped swans in a pot not much bigger in diameter than his shoe.

The pot's at the bottom right, in case you missed it

And then he was meticulous enough to remove all the swan carcasses, gather up the thousands of feathers that were allegedly fluttering around and dispose of them out of sight in an open plot of land before running off, leaving one swan corpse behind. We're not told why he's believed to be eastern European - or an immigrant at all.

It's the flimsiest of flimsy evidence, taken from a single eyewitness. But the paper treats it as if it's absolutely accurate, and even exaggerates it with the headline's definite claims (although the headline does hedge its bets a bit, using the word 'birds' instead of 'swans'). It does this with no scepticism even though an earlier story on a similar theme turned out to be nonsense.

So why do the papers come back to this particular story? As Anton Vowl points out, in the case of the Mail it doesn't seem to be a deep concern for swans, since there are other, worse stories of swan mistreatment the paper ignores. It's something else that attracts the Mail.

Stories about immigrants eating taboo animals are familiar from other urban legends and from fiction. We all know about the Chinese restaurants that serve cat and dog. From that Snopes article:

Also in North America, the Vietnamese are tarred with a variation of the Chinese restaurant rumor - according to this slander, when a Vietnamese family moves into the neighborhood, all the stray cats disappear. That the Vietnamese don't eat cat doesn't impact this rumor one whit.

Sam Sevlon's 'The Lonely Londoners' includes a comic passage involving a West Indian immigrant attempting to catch and eat a pigeon as a woman looks on in horror and cries out for help.

After the original 'Swan Bake' story appeared in the Sun, the Daily Star followed it up by claiming that Somalian asylum seekers were stealing and eating Donkeys from a donkey sanctuary, and that donkey is a delicacy in Somalia. Somalia is a Muslim country. Donkey is considered Makruh (undesirable) to Muslims.

The swan eating variant is a perfect metaphor for immigration for the Daily Mail. If David Gibson had seen a man cooking his dinner somewhere near a duck carcass, it's unlikely that he would have assumed the man had stripped the duck carcass for food, given the state of the body, or that he would have assumed the man was eastern European. I don't think the Sun or Mail would have covered the story either - but both papers are desperate for proof of this particular myth. Because this one doesn't just show foreigners to be stupid people who have weird customs but don't understand ours, it shows them to be stealing from the Queen. Oh noes!

The Mail has covered stories about swans being eaten by eastern Europeans a number of times. This incident itself has been covered twice and attracted over 60 comments. The only incident of anyone actually being convicted of killing a swan for food wasn't eastern European, but a Bengali Muslim. That story was covered once by the Mail, and attracted a total of four comments, mostly lighthearted. But there haven't been any rumours with all but non-existent evidence about Muslims eating swans that the paper has covered since then, and there hasn't been an urban myth constructed around the idea. There's something particularly attractive about the idea of Eastern Europeans eating swans (and stealing from the Queen) that makes the paper return to the theme whenever any story about the subject emerges, however flimsy the evidence.

This is where the experiment on the college students is relevant.

The students who were 'shocked' (they were actually acting) with the highest voltage were the ones that the experiment's subjects had heard were "like animals". The Mail, and the other tabloids, tell their readers different things about different groups of scapegoats and set up different ones for each. The Polish, according to the Mail, are scrounging dishonest criminal cheats who want to take our jobs and benefits and drain all our resources while diluting our traditions by speaking Polish, opening Polish shops and pubs and being dirty, uncouth, living in our toilets, sexually assaulting our women and spitting everywhere (handily, this story includes vagrancy - something else the paper is keen to associate with eastern Europeans). The paper sees Muslims in a different way, as fanatical, violent terrorists who unfairly demand concessions from the majority while trying to take over with their strange foreign customs - which include not liking to eat animals we consider normal, to the point of wanting to ban pictures of them. Having them actually wanting to eat extra things rather than demand that we don't eat things they don't want to isn't part of the script. Especially if the demand doesn't come in a (misrepresented) report from the MCB.

So the sort of spurious stories that appear in the papers about Muslims involve food like hot cross buns being banned so as not to offend them (when in fact they've never been served, or someone forgot to order them), or banks banning promotions involving piggy banks (when in fact one bank in the story had never used piggy banks and the other just had one promotion period come to an end, and would use piggy banks again in the future). This encourages people to wrongly think similar things are happening for similar reasons to the ones they've read about, so when little Johnny comes home from school around Easter and he hasn't had hot cross buns, his parents assume they must have been banned so as not to offend Muslims. When Mrs Johnson sees no piggy banks in any adverts in her bank, she assumes it's because they've been banned so as not to offend Muslims.

And when Mr Gibson sees a man eating his dinner near a dead swan, he assumes he must be eastern European and eating the swan.

The Mail pushes stories that often turn out to be untrue or exaggerated that make us think harshly of immigrants in order to push its anti-immigration stance. It does that because it assumes its readers are already anti-immigration and want to hear negative stories about it. Paul Dacre thinks that's fine, and the paper's job is to reflect what 'the public' thinks.

But the experiment I talked about at the beginning shows that people are more likely to treat people badly if they've been dehumanised. The students in the experiment had only been labelled as being 'like animals' by one assistant in an experiment who they'd heard once. How many extra sentiments have we been subjected to about the Polish, Muslims and black people (who, as Nick Davies covered in 'Flat Earth News' are likely to have stories in the paper about them dropped as soon as the paper finds out what colour they are)? Is this likely to merely encourage an anti-immigration stance, or something more sinister?

How many foreign criminals were there in London?

Last month, the Express tried to scare the crap out of everybody with the headline 'Every 4 minutes a migrant is arrested in Britain'. As ever, the figure was a bit rubbish. This time it involved using data from less than half of the police forces in Britain, including the Metropolitan Police, and extrapolating from there. I looked at the figures in 'Every 4 minutes, an Express hack pulls a figure out their bum'.

One of the rubbish things about the figures is that the number for London didn't tally with similar ones the Daily Mail tried to scare its readers with last year in 'Foreigners commit 20 per cent of crime in London, say police' and 'A fifth of crimes committed by immigrants'. I submitted my own FOI request to the Met Police to find out which paper's figures were right, because my life is so rock and roll. I'm doing that devil horns thing with my fingers right now.

I aksed the Met for two things, figures for the number of foreign nationals charged for crimes by month in 2007, and a copy of whatever had been sent to the Daily Mail last August.* In 'Foreigners commit 20 per cent of crime...' the Mail says:

During the period there were 22,793 crimes in the capital for which a foreign national has been charged.

There are two claims there - that a certain number of people have been charged with crimes in London, and that these people were foreign nationals.

Let's look at the foreign nationals claim first. Just like Nikki Sixx would. And that bloke out of the Who that no-one knows who he is. Rawwwwwkinrollllll!

Sorry.

The covering email from the Met makes extra effort to draw my attention to this note in the figures that appeared in the Mail:

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

So, straight from the off we know that the figures don't measure foreign nationals. Well done, the Mail. That's 50% rubbish in that sentence.

Next, the Mail says that 22,793 foreigners have been charged for crimes in the first half of 2007. That takes the Mail's claims up to 100% rubbish. The The Mail's figures count the number of people accused of a crime - that means people who have been arrested or had proceedings taken out against them. The number of people who listed themselves as non-British who were charged with a crime in the first half of 2006 is 9,818.

Just in case you missed the bit where the article claims this is the number of people charged, it says it again after its big, scary graphic:

The new statistics cover the number arrested and charged for "notifiable offences" - those which are more serious - and show a total of 106,678 crimes.

Not true. The total number of people charged for the whole of 2007 is less than that, let alone the first six months.

A month after that, James Slack tried to scare readers with exactly the same figures on the back of Chief Constable Julie Spence's call for extra funding. 'A fifth of crime committed by immigrants' is the nonsense headline on this one. It doesn't make the same claims about charges, but it does say:

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

Remember, the people in Slack's stats aren't necessarily foreign nationals. So that's one part of this claim that's rubbish. The second part is that they're responsible for more than one in five crimes committed in London.

He's using the same 22,793 stats from before. According to the Met police, there were 447,628 crimes committed in London in the first half of 2007. That would make foreigners responsible for 1 in 20 crimes committed in London, not 1 in 5. Foreigners are accused of just 5% of crimes committed in London. Using the number of people who specify that they're non-British who were charged with crimes in the first half of 2007 - 9,818 - foreigners would be responsible for 1 in 50 crimes in London.

But using figures like that would be just as dishonest as the Daily Mail. We don't know how many foreign nationals were responsible for how many crimes committed in London because it isn't measured, and as the Met points out in its covering email:

Please also be aware that it [the bit of an arrest form that asks for nationality] is not a mandatory field, it is self-defined and as such there is no way of checking that the data is actually accurate, e.g. if someone provides their nationality as Jamaican we have no way of checking whether this is actually the case.

Even if we specify we're talking about people who don't enter 'British' on the form when they're arrested, neither set of figures would show how many crimes they're responsible for. Nobody is arrested for nearly three quarters of crime in London, so we have absolutely no clue as to who is responsible for them. To say X number of foreign nationals are responsible for X amount of crime is rubbish.

The Express is more accurate in that it doesn't say these people are responsible for crime, but it misleadingly calls them migrants and foreign nationals. We don't know who's a migrant or foreign national and who isn't. Plus the extrapolation from the half of the forces who gave information is really fanciful. The total number of arrests of 'migrants' from 26 police forces 2006 in the Express is 79,308 - but we can be reasonably certain that at least half of those are from London, since people who specify a non-British nationality account for way over a quarter of 79,308 for just the first six months of 2007. In the first six months of 2007, there were more British people arrested in London than there were for the entire number of 'non-British' people arrested across 26 police forces (including London) in the whole of 2006.

There. I've gone over some old ground, but we now know that any figure that claims to be about the number of foreign nationals arrested is rubbish, and that the Mail is likely to claim people have been charged who haven't.

Rock on!

*The Met didn't have a record of sending anything to the Mail, since people don't have to specify where they're from when they make a request. They sent me identical figures they'd sent to an individual in August, which are likely to be the ones they sent to the paper.

Beam me up, Slacky!

Amazing proof of the actual usefulness of Daily Mail hacks was uncovered yesterday when reporter James Slack invented something other than outrage and inflated immigration statistics - an amazing teleporting fence!


The article 'Illegal immigrants only have to climb a fence in Calais to sneak into Britain' reveals the existence of the Star Trek style barrier, which can teleport illegal immigrants across over 21 miles of open water in the English Channel.

The modest reporter has kept news of his incredible invention under wraps, not publishing any details in any scientific journals or other news sources, only revealing its existence in the his own paper and not taking any credit for his inventiveness.

"It's very selfless," said some bloke in the street I threatened with physical violence if he didn't give me the quote I wanted, "imagine inventing what could be the major technological breakthrough of the new millenium and not letting anyone know you'd made it up - and donating it for the sole use of illegal immigrants. The man is truly a marvel!"

Staff at the Mail were unavailable for comment on Slack's invention, but it's unlikely they'll be happy with his helping the illegal immigrants community, traditionally vilified by the paper. Privately, think-tank MigrationWatch are thought to be in fury. "Maybe it's a ruse and Slack will sell the technology to the Home Office to teleport them all back again," they might have said. Or something.

Some readers sceptical of the news. One Guardian reader said, "It looks more like he's exaggerated in a headline to scare his readers than actually invented teleporting".

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said*, "The implications of this technology are truly staggering. Building one of these fences around a prison or detention area could ensure that escapees are sent straight back to their cells. Benefit claimants could be made to scale the fence to get to the benefits office, sending Polish ones right back to Warsaw."

Energise!

*Not really.

Migrants get 85% of new jobs in Britain? Not ALL?

Septicisle and Anton Vowl were there first spotting the Keystone Cops style comedy bungling with yesterday's Daily Express headline. Apparently 'MIGRANTS GET 85% OF NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN'. I though it was ALL of them.

The same logic that led the paper to conclude that ALL new jobs had gone to migrants and get the story removed for being potentially misleading is what led to this one.

The logic goes like this. Since 1997, the number of people in the workforce has increased by 1.7 million. 1.45 million migrants have been added to the workforce since then, therefore migrants have taken 85% of new jobs.

It sounds plausible enough on the surface, but it's this kind of logic that led to the paper claiming that ALL new jobs had gone to migrants in the last three years. That's clearly rubbish, since everyone in the country is likely to know at least one UK born person who got a new job since 2003.

It also led the Express to conclude in its previous article that migrants took more new jobs than the actual number of new jobs that existed. If you were honestly calculating the percentage of new jobs that had gone to migrants, and your working showed they took more than there actually were, wouldn't you decide there must be something wrong with your assumptions? Depends on whether you were looking for an honest answer, eh?

I can't link back to the article now since it's been taken off the site while it's being investigated for being misleading, but it said:

The total of migrant employees since 2003 has soared by 740,000, while the number of Britons in work has gone into reverse and dropped by 120,000. This means that foreign workers filled all the extra 620,000 jobs which were created during those four years.

The reason those figures don't add up is the same one that means you can't say 85% new jobs have gone to migrants. People retire. People leave the workforce. Some people who entered the workforce won't be counted because they filled those positions.

In fact, that's one of the main reasons people use for encouraging immigration. There are more people about to reach retirement age in the UK than are old enough to enter the workforce, so we need people to take up the slack. You can disagree with that proposition if you like, but if you use the argument that using immigration to take up the slack is a bad thing because more foreign people will get jobs, you're sailing dangerously close to the bit of the ocean known on the maps as 'Xenophobia'. The one with the dirty great whirlpool in it the sailors call 'Racism'. Arr.

If you wanted to honestly measure the percentage of new jobs went foriegn-born people since 1997, you'd have to use the total figure of new entrants into the workforce in that time - not the total for the overall rise because the number of people who leave the workforce will obscure the results. Doing it the wrong way in a shorter time period is what led to the Express's ridiculous 'ALL new jobs headline and the even more stupid 'more than ALL new jobs' calculation.

On top of that, there are the usual tabloid tricks, like the claim that:

Figures slipped out to MPs last month showed that the number of UK-born workers in employment increased by just 242,000 between 1997 and the end of last year to 24.1 million, the lowest level since 1997.

They weren't slipped out last month. They were published in Hansard last October which is available to the public. (The ones from last month cover the other figures in the article, about individual indistries. Those was published in Hansard too). Presumably 'slipped out' means 'publicly available but not given to us in a press release'.

And notice the 'lowest level since 1997', which gives the impression that the numbers of UK born in work have been in freefall for ten years, when in fact the number is higher now than it was then, but it's just that it's been higher in the intervening years.

There's also a nice bit of low level lying:

In contrast, the number of foreign-born workers in jobs in the UK increased by 1.45 million over the same period.

You could forgive the paper for rounding that up to 1.4 million, but adding the .05 on the end takes the biscuit. The actual rise is 1.365. Using the real numbers of new members of the workforce (1.682m) and foreign born workers gives only 81%. Still high, but not as scary as 85%.

Why is this on the front page? Are five month old figures really the most important thing happening in the world today?

To make it an almost perfect immigration scare story, there's even a quote from David Davis. Hurrah! Plank.

Broadsheet Crackers

Apologies for the absence from blogging for the last few days, and for the blog being down for a while this morning - but I've had the Polish builders in!

I've gone all broadsheet and that. Swanky, eh?

One of the new things is the 'read the rest' link, which you should be seeing at the end of every post now, so I can just have tabloid website style summaries on the main page. Click this one. Go on, you know you want to.

Other new things are the split into two sidebars on the right since mine was getting a bit long and I wanted to add to it. I'll be linking to some old posts that explain well-worn newspaper tricks, but I'll be editing the older posts first to freshen them up a bit. You'll see them when they appear.

I still need to tweak a few things before it's totally finished, so mind the rubble.

Please stick any suggestions or comments in the, er, comments box.