The Mail and the BNP

The Mail's approach to the BNP seems to be undergoing a change. I've blogged before about how the Mail used to treat the party, which was to call them nasty names, but follow up the namecalling with a 'but' and then imlplicit support for the party's policies. From a few recent articles, it looks as though the paper's approach is undergoing a welcome change. More actually negative articles have been appearing in the paper that attack the party more effectively.

This week, we've had, 'How the BNP shamefully tried to create a 'white martyr''
and 'BNP hijack murder trial to recruit new members saying 'anyone who gets angry - get involved in the BNP'

And in the lead up to the elections, we had, 'As he battles to become London's mayor, the bizarre truth about the BNP boss, his ballerina fiance and bitter wife', 'BNP boss Richard Barnbrook, ballerina Simone Clark - and the bitter wife he'd rather you didn't know about' and
'Sacked: The BNP candidate who said 'some women are like gongs - they need to be struck regularly''

None of which are as ambiguous as the Mail's earlier coverage of the party.

The biggest clue to the reason for the change looks to be this article
'March of Italy's 'BNP': Surely it couldn't happen here...could it?'. Of course, it blames the government and immigrants themselves for the problem rather than itself, but the paper clearly sees the rise of 'Italy's BNP' as a bad thing, and doesn't want the same to happen here.

The trouble is, as welcoming as the change is, the paper's own approach - aside from negatively reporting the activities of the party - are doing as much to bolster support for the party as anything else. 'March of Italy's 'BNP'...' has this to say:

Police say that while they are no more likely to be arrested than a British citizen, processing them takes more time and costs more because they speak little English.

Further, a new report by the Association Of Chief Police Officers warns that the scale and speed of immigration has led to problems.

It states: "EU migration has led to a surge in the exploitation of migrants and crime, including extortion, pickpocketing, human trafficking and a growing sex trade."

Smaller police forces in rural areas, where hundreds of thousands of Eastern European migrants congregate to work on farms, are facing "the biggest challenges".

The study adds: "While this country has accommodated this influx with little rise in community tensions, in some areas sheer numbers have created resentment."

Which, while far more measured than the paper's coverage elsewhere, still puts the blame on immigrants and immigration and stokes the very fears it worries about leading to greater BNP support. It does even worse across the rest of the paper. In other articles, it relentlessly exaggerates the level of immigration, distorts figures about immigrants' responsibility for crime (at one point spuriously reporting that the suspect in the Suffolk stranglings was Eastern European - which he wasn't) and misrepresents minor things to create overblown Political Correctness Gone Mad outrages, usually targeted at ethnic minorities and non-Christians.

This is in addition to the paper's insistence - as reported by Nick Davies in Flat Earth News - of deliberately avoiding positive reporting about black people and ethnic minorities, shown in this example:

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: 'They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, "Come back." I said, "Why's that?" They said, "They're black."

The result is that the BNP directly use the Daily Mail in convincing the gullible that the sky's about to fall on our heads and that:

Its [Britain is] a cess-pit and its the young people who have to swim in its filth.

In Barnbrook's blog (which is strangely quiet, whether because the party has told him to stop making a fool of himself or because he's been temporarily banned for offensive references to immigrants or whatever), he includes the post 'Lily Allen and the BNP'

In the post, he opens with what is almost certainly a direct lift from the Melanie Phillips article
'The dangerously deluded children's tsar and the truth about knife crime', in which she says:

According to this ridiculous figure, the stop-and-search powers being belatedly used by the police to curb such attacks might further antagonise young people. Said Sir Al: 'Anything that perpetuates the view that children are the troublemakers is a dangerous development.'

Barnbrook himself says:

According to this ridiculous lunatic, the stop-and-search powers being belatedly used by the police to curb such attacks might further antagonise young people. Said Sir Al: 'Anything that perpetuates the view that children are the troublemakers is a dangerous development.'

Spot the difference there, eh.

After banging on weirdly about Lily Allen, he closes with outrage about bunting being 'banned' from flown in Hatfield Broad Oak. He links directly to the Mail's version of events in 'The bunting ban: Flags that fluttered over village parties for a century snagged in health and safety red tape'. This story is likely to be nonsense, and another example of the council issuing guidelines to cover its own back in case anyone gets hurt, but not actually legally prohibiting anything.

According to queenofhearts over in the MailWatch forums:

It's off topic, but I'm moving to that village in about a month and that picture, the one with all the bunting on, was taken last week. There's shitloads of it up there...

So, what we have in 'Lily Allen and the BNP' is an article that has two thirds of it taken up by the BNP's star representative being outraged about stuff he's read in the Daily Mail, some of which is clearly exaggerated nonsense.

While attacking the BNP is a nice start for the paper, it might help more if it stopped exaggerating the levels of immigrants and its effects and manufacturing Political Correctness Gone Mad stories.

That doesn't mean I'm arguing it should stop reporting on the levels of immigration and so on. I'm arguing it should stop bloody lying about it. That would do more than any hatchet job of a BNP representative ever could.

Blame the Immigrants

I thought I'd do something a little more constructive than snigger behind my hand and swear about Richard Barnbrook's space to rant at the Telegraph, so I've taken the time to reply to 'Blame the Immigrants'. Since the reply's a little long and looks a bit like one of my blog posts, I've reproduced it below the fold. Lucky you, eh?

What a lot of utter dreck

Wow. Is this really the best the BNP can do?

I can't say I've ever read such a confused, rambling screed in my life. Oh, I've heard them - shouted by dribbly drunks on the tube as they stagger into people's seats and slop Kestrel Super out of the top of the can - but can't say I've actually seen one written down. Maybe we have Boris's ban on public transport boozing to thank for it. Perhaps that bloke who trolls around the Victoria Line blessing everyone will start his own Telegraph blog soon.

It's difficult to know where to start. Probably with the bit in the 'About me' section that says 'I will make sure that he spends your tax on all Londoners and not minorities.' What about the Londoners who are minorities? Or can minorities not be Londoners? Are the minority of people who voted for you not actually Londoners - or do you mean something other than 'minority' by the word 'minority'? If that's the case, what sort of Politically Correct madness are you engaging in? Speak your brains, man.

You open by telling us to blame the immigrants, but you don't really tell us what for. 'Yes....it is the immigrants', apparently. You did tell us what 'is the immigrants' in an earlier version of this post (http://tinyurl.com/5bzn4r), when you said "Most of it [real crime, which is done on the streets, as opposed to fake crime, which presumably goes on in buildings and forests] is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote." but that's gone now. Maybe that's because you realised the person arrested for the crime you go on to talk about is probably not actually an immigrant, but maybe the Telegraph removed it because the claim is clearly rubbish. Most crime is not committed by immigrants. Even the estimates of the not-very-immigrant friendly Daily Mail puts the figure of crime committed by immigrants at one in five. If you have any other actual evidence to back that claim up, let's see it, eh?

In between telling us to blame the immigrants and what we should blame them for, you claim that the police should "not follow orders to boost statistics by criminalising motorists". That is, frankly, a bizarre claim to make, since the police are usually accused of fiddling statistics to send them *downward* rather than upward. Are you actually contradicting yourself here by claiming the police are exaggerating crime figures (you know, the ones they say are falling) and crime is actually even lower than they're telling us? That would be a bizarre premise to base what looks like a call for Martial Law on.

But anyway, I'm digressing. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the idea of blaming the people *actually responsible for committing crimes* for crime. Not some randomly selected group they might or might not belong to. Most violent crime is carried out by men, and that's definitely verifiable. Why isn't this post titled 'Blame the Men'? You could then even tie it in with the football trouble last Wednesday. Still, you might have a follow-up post about football violence in the pipeline with the title 'Blame the Londoners' lined up that would be ruined by that approach.

Incidentally, in the lead up to the election, you made much of your feelings for the children of Simone Clarke, who are the children of an immigrant. Are you saying we should blame them for street crime?

Your proposed solution is at odds with your claim of wanting a free society. You propose that the police, like a great big crowd of Dirty Harrys, ignore their orders (that I suspect you made up in the first place - unless you can demonstrate with actual evidence of how they've been ordered to exaggerate crime statistics by criminalising motorists) and...and...well, that's not clear, since you want to send the army to take weapons off the streets. That's fantastic, by the way. Reduce the number of weapons on the streets by sending in blokes with machine guns and tanks. Of course, you don't make it clear whose orders the army would be following, since the police have to ignore theirs. Are you talking about a military coup? That's not much of a free society.

Presumably, since any knife you take from someone on the street can be replaced by going to the nearest kitchen drawer, you're advocating the army being permanently on the streets stopping and searching people for weapons. And presumably, since you're urging us to blame the immigrants, we could expect raids on 'Walkabout' bars across the capital and a heavy presence in Earl's Court to cover the Australians. This would be in addition to random searches on, well, everybody really, since you can't tell who's an immigrant or the son of an immigrant by looking at them or listening to their accent. Unless of course you propose people 'show their papers' on demand, or that immigrants and their descendants wear some sort of badge to identify themselves.

Finally, you call for young people to accompany you on a march into the Mayor's office and...well, you don't actually make that clear. Would you demand for him to send the army out on the streets?

That's not how you do things in a democracy. You have elections, like the one in which you got a measly share of the vote and had to make do with a seat on the Assembly rather than being elected Mayor. You don't march a bunch of rabble into the Mayor's office and demand he sends the army out onto the streets and starts blaming the immigrants. If people wanted that, *they would have voted for you*, that's how it works.

It's kind of a shame that nobody turned up for your lame demonstration at City Hall. Having you carted away by security for trying to barge into the Mayor's office with a gang to demand a military coup would have done even more good for the BNP's attempts at looking like something other than a bunch of rabble-rousing goons than wearing a suit the same colour as Hitler's uniform and authoring rambling blog posts telling us to blame the immigrants.

BNP in the Telegraph

Just after the London elections, I wondered about how dangerous it would be to give the BNP a platform. They might well be a bunch of bozos now, I thought, but what would happen if they got some decent PR?

Richard Barnbrook now has his own blog on the Daily Telegraph website, and thankfully those days look to be a long, long way off. The guy not only doesn't realise that it probably isn't a good idea to have a Hitleresque hairstyle and wear the same colour suit as the Fuhrer's uniform if you're trying to convince people that your party's not actually a bunch of closeted Neo-Nazis - he's stupid enough to title one of his blog posts 'Blame the immigrants' as well. Yeah, that'll convince people you're not a bunch of bigots. Tool.


The three posts so far are comedy gold, they really are. He opens with 'Tombstone Politics', where he reveals his sensible, caring, non-fascist side by saying:

I have no time for these liberals. I despise them.....not for their person, but for their values....for everything that they believe in, although I am not so sure that they even believe it. I am talking about all these dirty politicians and journalists who sit in their homes smoking their drugs and telling themselves they have made Britain better. Well its not. Its a cess-pit and its the young people who have to swim in its filth.

Not on her swivelly-eyedest day could Melanie Phillips come up with that! It's like every crazyloon Daily Express commenter turned up to 11.

This is what liberalism means to our fearless Lionheart:

This is liberalism......these are the great values of the left.........they smoke drugs and your children get slaughtered in the streets. It makes me sick.

Or at least it is in this post. A few hours later, in 'Blame the Immigrants' (I'm not making it up - he really headlined a post that) liberalism means this:

Liberalism to me, means being free from knife and gun attacks.

Eh? Isn't that the exact bloody opposite? Does that make him sick too? You never know, since we're not talking about rationality here. We're talking about dribbly weirdness.

Back to 'Tombstone Politics'and we learn:

They can't even bring themselves to call me Richard. Everyone is on 1st name terms except me. For me it is Mr Barnbrook like they are talking to their Bank Manger or the man in charge

Or like if they're a care assistant talking to the shouty drunk man swinging a plastic bag:

and thats just it....I am the man in charge....because I get out into the street and meet real people.

Nope. You're not the man in charge. That would be Boris Johnson. You're the bloke who's lucky to be in charge of his own stapler. And count your blessings. 'Mr Barnbrook'is better than 'Mr Bell End', which is what I'd end up calling you.

The logic behind 'Blame the Immigrants' is just as dribbly. We're supposed to blame 'the immigrants' for a murder that it seems was carried out by someone who isn't an immigrant. Well done, lumpy. Give yourself a lolly.

Apparently:

This is our city and we are going to take it back. We are going to take all the weapons of [sic] the streets even if that means sending in the Army to do it.

That'll work. The army on the streets will reduce the number of weapons. Not raise them with machine guns and tanks and whatnot. They'll take the knives from the thugs. That'll show 'em! It's not as if they'll be able to get another one by looking in any kitchen drawer in any house.

This is the article that best reveals the true face of the BNP. In it, Barnbrook calls for sending the army in to clean up the streets, for the police to disobey Her Majesty's Government and become completely unaccountable, and:

If immigrants don't like it then they know where the airport is.

Plus, it's completely hat-stand.

Tragically, the post ends with this stirring call to action:

I have invited all of the young people there to come down to City Hall this Tuesday for 9:30 in the morning. This knife crime has to be stopped. If I have to bring a 100 young people into Boris's office then that is what I will do.

A sum total of none young people turned up to march on Boris's office. Shame, that.

His final effort 'Lily Allen and the BNP'is just mad. Apparently:

Much of it [the news] is about the knife attack and the ridiculous comments by the Children Tsar Sir Al Aynsley-Green.

According to this ridiculous lunatic, the stop-and-search powers being belatedly used by the police to curb such attacks might further antagonise young people. Said Sir Al: 'Anything that perpetuates the view that children are the troublemakers is a dangerous development.'

The best thing he could do is shut his mouth. I wonder if these liberals just crave attention so much that they say the most outrageous statements incase they are in danger of becoming insignificant and boring.

Yeah, what sort of ridiculous loony would say you shouldn't demonise children after a 21 year old man apparently murders someone. (Okay, nobody's been convicted yet. It could have been a tooled up 8 year old. I'll grant you that.)

Barnbrook's a bit worked up that Lily Allen thinks:

that press photographers are male, don't own houses at the age of 23, like her, and remind her of the BNP. So she says in her blog.

Except she doesn't. She talks about male journalists writing stories about her trying to get back at her ex not owning their own house. It's only the photographers she said wouldn't look out of place at a BNP meeting. Man, they must look weird, on the evidence of this blog.

The rest is about him falling for a Daily Mail elf n safety gorn mad story, which appears to be a bunch of rubbish, and him saying he's going to be an MP. How will he manage that at the same time as being in charge of the London Assembly? Busy man, Mr Barnbrook.

Really, on the evidence of this blog we have nothing to worry about by allowing the BNP space to rant their weirdness at us. If anything, this blog is worth bookmarking for the laughs. Sure, that makes me feel guilty, like a Victorian touring loony-bins for entertainment, but I can't help it. "Of course safety has nothing to do with this. It is all just state-sponsored hate-mongers abusing their power because they like to cause misery." I defy anyone not to laugh at that.

Seriously - if he's allowed to carry on with it after ruining all the good work the BNP have done in pretending not to be racist by titling a post 'Blame the Immigrants' I'll be dipping in for a laugh fix every day. I would though, because I'm a dirty liberal who likes dirty politics and smokes drugs and your children get slaughtered in the streets. There's only one answer. Demonise the children! The bastards!

And now I will give myself a reward for writing a whole post about the BNP without using the term 'shovel-headed cunt'.

The anatomy of a tabloid story

The following is a copy of the instructions given to every tabloid journalist after their initiation ritual, as they arrive back at their desks from the dank catacombs beneath the city where they’ve left the sacrificed remains of their integrity atop a stone altar in the centre of a chalked-out pentagram. They get it emailed to their inboxes by their editor before they’ve even had a chance to remove their hooded black robes.

The anatomy of a story - a brief outline

1. The headline
You probably won’t be writing your own headlines. They’ll most likely be taken care of by a (fully initiated) sub-editor. In the unlikely - and ultimately unwise - circumstance of you writing a story that disagrees with the sacred editorial line, the editor will write one for you to make your story agree with it after all. You are powerless to resist.

Before writing a headline, you must reject everything you thought you knew about headlines. You may have thought that headlines are to summarise the content of a story into one pithy phrase, so that readers can have an idea of what the story says before they read it, or know the basics of the story if they don’t bother looking any further.

Fool! The exact opposite is the truth! The headline is there for you to give an even more skewed version of events than the story you’ve just invented. If a think-tank has made some half-hearted suggestion about changing something, and your story is about how the government is about to ban that thing, the headline is where you say it has already been banned. If the statistics authority release some statistics that say that foreigners are not taking over and getting everything on a silver platter, and your story ignores those parts to make it look as though the figures say the opposite, the headline is where you boldly say the statistics mean the opposite of what they actually do. Be creative! Add fury. Add anger. Remember - you’re trying to scare people here. If you’re writing for one of the downmarket tabloids, remember this is where you can sneak in a political point with humour. A nicely constructed pun can work as well as an outraged shout.

2. The opening sentences
You can make the same false claim as your headline here, but if this is the sort of story where you must reveal what has actually happened, you might want to start surreptitiously adding qualifiers to the text. These sentences are where you add ‘may’ or ‘could’ or ‘are thought to’ and other things that cast doubt on the impression you’re trying to make. Remember, the headline will have taken care of these. You reader will skim over them as if they weren’t there at all because they already think there shouldn’t be any qualifiers.

3. The supporting quotes
One way of making your imaginary story look real is to include quotes from outraged third parties. It may be difficult to find quotes supporting the story you’ve just knocked together, since you pretty much made it up, but don’t despair, there’s plenty you can do.

i. You could call the sort of people likely to be outraged by your fantasy version of events, like tory MPs or members of ‘think-tanks’ which are actually made up of a couple of green-inkers with a fax machine. Tell them your version of the story and just wait for them to spew an ill-informed rant about it.

ii. If you can’t manage that - maybe you can’t get hold of David Davis, or the three blokes at MigrationWatch are off on holiday - you can find an older quote about something vaguely similar. You score bonus points in the eyes of your reader if it’s a quote you’d associate with someone who would normally disagree with the thrust of your argument, like Inayat Bunglawala.

iii. Use vague language like ‘critics of...’ or ‘opponents of...’. These can refer to anyone, and if you can’t find anyone to actually quote, these things can refer to yourself! That’s right. The reader doesn’t know that you’re the critic you’re referring to. The dumb sod will assume it’s someone else!

iv. Be creative with these quotes! If you can only get one quote from, say, one government official, start by saying ‘government officials say...’ and then give the thrust of the one quote you’ve managed to get, and then put the full quote a bit later in the article. That makes it look like a whole host of government officials are outraged. If someone says something that disagrees with the thrust of your article, selectively quote them. Chuck out the bits that make it clear that they disagree with you.

4. The actual evidence
This is the trickiest part of your story. Give away too much and your reader will spot something’s up. Give away too little and they’ll wonder what all the fuss is about.

The trick is to be vague about the things that contradict your story and explicit about the things that appear to support it. Mention ‘figures released yesterday’ for example - but don’t tell your readers what those figures are or how they can find them. You can get creative here and say ‘figures released yesterday’ for figures that were released months ago. Anything that makes it more difficult to track down the evidence that will show your story to be a sham is a winner for you.

If you do have figures that appear to support your story - say where they come from and play up the source’s independence from the government. If you ever need to discredit figures from the same source in another story, just downplay the independence from government angle to make it look like they’re stasi-style lackeys. Your reader won’t remember.

Include other figures that don’t really have any bearing on the ones you’re quoting. Confuse the stupid gullible fools who read your expertly crafted misinformation with as much irrelevant nonsense as possible.

Remember - if the figures don’t actually support what you say - make shit up to pretend they do. If they’re not scary enough - add more to them, or pretend they measure something they don’t. Who’s going to bother to check? Not your regular readers, that’s for sure.

If you’re talking about an event you’ve skewed rater than a set of figures, the same applies. Include references to earlier stories you or another member of the evil brotherhood have made up. This can work even if we’ve been found out and had to apologise for making up the earlier story.

5. The closing
If you get this part of the story right, you can contradict everything you’ve just said with one sentence, or quote from one official - but if you’ve constructed everything properly - they’ll look like the liars! Talk enough about how figures show how many millions and millions of new houses will be needed for immigrants, include enough outraged quotes from divs and chuck in the right amount of misrepresented skewed figures and the reader will never believe the ‘spokesman’ who says ‘What? These figures don’t even measure the number of houses we need to build.’

Yeah, I thought it was you!

The story I covered in yesterday's 'Haven't I seen you somewhere before?' was just the opening shot in an anti-immigration scare story salvo in the Mail. Today we have:

'1 Million more Britons in just three years as immigration fuels biggest population boom in a century'
'One new British passpport is handed out every three minutes'
and
'More than 200,000 Britons quit the country each year for a new life abroad'

At least two are spectacularly dishonest and, curiously for a paper that complained about the 'mountain' of stats released yesterday, cover six month old figures the paper reported on last November.

'1 Million more Britons in just three years...' starts as it means to go on - with a massive lie in the headline. Yesterday's 'Persons granted citizenship United Kingdom 2007' shows that the number of Britons added to the population by migration in the last three years is less than half the headline's claim - at 480,355. The 1 million figure is the figure for net migration of non-British citizens in the last three years, which will include people on temporary stays of a year or more, from November's 'Emigration from UK reaches 400,000 in 2006'. These people aren't now Britons - they're the other Daily Mail demon - 'foreign nationals'. This story isn't news - it's just been added to create a connection with the number of people granted citizenship and a rise of a million furriners in three years.

'One new British passport is handed out every three minutes' covers the same figures as yesterday's 'Over 200,000 Britons fleeing the UK each year as record 160,000 foreigners are granted citizenship' but adds an extra bit of spin by doing the 'each minute' calculation. This is just farting around for scaremongering's sake. You could do a similar calculation that said 'One foreign national leaves the UK every three minutes' and it would be just as accurate and tell you about as much. (In fact, it would be more than one every three minutes, but let's not split hairs, eh)?

Not to be outdone, 'More than 200,000 Britons quit the country each year for a new life abroad' includes two big whoppers in the headline. More than 200,000 left the country in 2006, but less than 200,000 did in every other year since 1997. That's whopper number 1. Whopper number 2 is the 'for new life abroad' since some of the 200,000 will be returning at some point. 81,000 Britons returned to the country in the same year. Again, this article is based on six month old figures that appeared in the paper last November.

It's fine to use older figures for context, but basing two entire articles on them as well as heavily relying on them in another is a bit much. Especially if the paper in question moans about the 'mountain' of stats released in one day but ignores two whole reports in three out of four articles about the same issue.

But of course, the paper isn't about reporting the facts, or about giving us an honest appraisal of what the figures might mean. It's about trying as hard as it can to make us think that immigration is a terrible, terrible problem that will be the doom of us all. The paper starts with its conclusion and fits the evidence to it rather than the other way around.

It isn't racist or xenophobic to examine what impact immigration might have on the population - including the immigrants themselves - and try to come up with decisions that minimise negative effects on everyone involved. It's not even necessarily xenophobic to argue for limits and restrictions on the numbers. What is xenophobic and does border on racism is muddying the waters by artificially exaggerating the numbers and negative impacts to scare people, or to misrepresent the nature of migration to make temporary changes look like permanent ones. The Mail does this all the time.

Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

I've mentioned before that papers like the Daily Mail don't exist to report the news, which is what most people imagine that newspapers exist to do, but to ceaselessly push a few unchanging narratives that their editors imagine their readers want to read. Instead of accurately reporting on published studies or newly released statistics, the papers distort and adapt them, until they're made to fit in with the pre-existing narratives the paper has already prepared.

Of course, one big story the Mail tells over and over is that immigration is out of control and a bad, bad thing. Within the bigger narrative is a smaller one that implies that British Citizens are leaving in droves and being steadily replaced by foreigners.

There's another example of this today, in 'Over 200,000 Britons fleeing the UK each year as record 160,000 foreigners are granted citizenship'. You don't have to be a genius to spot the implication that Britons are leaving the country because of the new citizens. That's what the word 'flee' does.

As we'd expect from a story that appears under the byline of James Slack and Steve Doughty, what appears below the headline twists and misrepresents figures in order to bolster the misleading impression created by the headline. Regular readers (all three of you) will probably be familiar with most of these from Mail classics like last November's 'Record numbers of people are leaving the UK as more immigrants arrive', or last August's '196,000 out, 574,000 in: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars' - but here's a quick rundown of the techniques this new version uses to fool people. The two main sets of figures we're talking about are 'Emigration from UK reaches 400,000 in 2006' and 'Persons granted citizenship United Kingdom 2007'.

Comparing apples with oranges
The difference between this and earlier permutations of the same story is that it compares the number of people settling here permanently with the number of UK Citizens leaving the UK for what is probably a much shorter stay. Already, this distorts things quite a bit.

Lying by omission
The paper conveniently neglects to tell us that while over 200,000 UK citizens left the UK in 2006, 81,000 returned from visits abroad of 12 months or more. The net total is a loss of 126,000 UK citizens for a period of a year or more. Quite a lot less than the number of new citizens. Doing this means the paper creates an impression that is exactly the opposite of what the real figures actually show.

It also leaves out that the number of people applying to become citizens has also risen in the last year. This means the reader will never find out that the number granted citizenship rose by 7% while the number actually applying rose by 8%. Zanu Liebour haven't just made it way more easy for people to get citizenship.

Lying about what the real figures show
After setting up all this, the paper says:

The rising rate of emigration meant that nearly 1.6 million Britons left the country to live abroad between 1997 and 2006.

This is rubbish. Just over 1.6 million Britons left the country for a period of at least 12 months. Not to live. Between 1997 and 2006, 979,000 returned to the UK too. That leaves around 700,000 that have actually left the UK not to either return or be replaced by other Britons returning. Instead of there being 400,000 more Britons 'fleeing' the country than foreigners becoming citizens since 1997, there are actually around 500,000 fewer.

Misrepresenting Government measures
The article says:

The increase in the number of passports being given out comes despite Government attempts to make it harder for migrants to 'earn' the right to live here permanently.

Were the measures introduced purely to make it harder for people to become citizens, or to make sure that those who did met certain standards?

The rest of the article introduces other unrelated figures to help pile on the impression of an avalanche of new information emerging about the avalanche of foreigners invding our tiny island. It says:

The mountain of statistics released today also contained bad news for the Government on asylum.

This conveniently neglect to mention that half the 'mountain' of statistics it has used up until this point are six months old.

Assigning non-existent sinister motives to the statistics' release
This follows on from the implication that there has been a 'mountain' of immigration statistics released today (there have actually been three reports). The article says:

The Home Office opted to focus on a fall in the number of arrivals from Eastern Europe, revealed in yet another statistical release.

Here's the Home Office Press Release section. There are no press releases from today, and only two from Monday. Neither focuses on Eastern European migration. The only way the Home Office has 'opted to focus on' a fall in the number of applications (not arrivals) from Eastern Europe is by releasing them at all. And since they came underneath a 'mountain' of other stats, they can't have been focussed on.

General hyperbole
People are 'fleeing'. There's a 'mountain' of statistics released by the government. The number of people being granted citizenship has 'surged' by 7% (the number actually applying has surged by 8% as well - but the paper leaves that bit out).

That's about it. I do like the way the story crams three reports into one article and attacks the government for releasing a 'mountain' of statistics, as if they all need to be covered right now because the paper never regurgitates old figures and presents them as new. This is the third time the paper has tried to make the same point in nine months, but it still claims to be troubled by the sheer number of new statistics it has to deal with.

It's so badly done, I wonder if it's self parody.

Propaganda frenzy!

OMFG!

Metro front page: Girl of 8 used as 'suicide' bomber
Telegraph: Girl, 8, 'kills Iraqi officer in suicide mission'
Daily Mail: Iraqi insurgents use eight-year-old girl as suicide bomber

An eight year old girl has been used as a suicide bomber in Iraq!

Except no.

Eagle eyed readers will spot this, halfway down the Metro article:

The Americans called it a 'suicide' attack and put the number of injured at seven. Later, they gave the age of the girl as between 16 and 18.

Not eight then. See that headline? That's rubbish, that is.

And a new story about how nasty and barbaric Muslims are enters the current mythology. Hurrah for crap newspapers.

More at The Anti Press.

*UPDATE* And it's gone!
The Metro site is now 'experiencing difficulties', so the link above probably won't work. Possibly because most of the comments on the story pointed out the lying headline and one urged readers to complain to the PCC.

Still there on the Mail and Telegraph websites, which strangely don't mention the actual age of the bomber.

*UPDATE* Nope, it's back
Readers shocked by the honesty shown by the Metro pulling the article will be relieved to know it's still there. The comments are excellent.

London elections and the BNP

Okay, so the Mayoral election result narked me off. Big surprise there. Finding out the results on Friday evening made me feel like I was in the prologue of a dystopian science fiction novel about how evil baddies take over Government and get to use fucking stupid laws enacted by the previous administration to oppress and terrify the population. Like that one with that bloke kneeling in front of a half buried Statue of Liberty at the end, screaming 'You maniacs! You blew it all up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!' Gulliver's Travels, I think it was.

More worrying than the oaf who became Mayor is the frankly bizarre result of the BNP managing to get someone elected to the Assembly. If there's anything that'll convince me of the possibility of one day standing in front of Max Von Sydow as he swishes a riding crop and barks that, 'There can be no escape!' from somewhere or other, this is it.

Having said that, watching his acceptance speech felt a little more like watching the shouty pissed up bloke on the tube swinging his carrier bag and frothing at the mouth than the icy, clipped Von Sydow, and it has contributed to some people suggesting that we should just allow them to show exactly what a bunch of nutters they are.

But I'm not convinced. Part of the reason Barnbrook looked like such a tit is because he isn't experienced in making this sort of speech to what will inevitably turn out to be a largely hostile crowd. Giving him and his sort more experience might lead to them getting better at it. It's only a matter of time before someone whispers to Barnbrook, 'Psst! Stop ranting like a shouty nutter. If you want people to think you're really concerned and hard done by rather than just a nazi - act like it. And drop the gimmick of wearing a suit exactly the same shade as a Hitler Youth uniform. You arse.' Then where would we be?

Fair enough - we'd probably be in the same position as people who turned up at the zoo to laugh at chimps sticking their fingers up their bum only to find that the chimps with their fingers up their bum had combed their hair - but maybe not.

The BNP have been relatively successful in sanitising their image recently. They're very good at overrunning newspaper and BBC message boards with their 'I'm just a normal person like you and I went to a BNP meeting and they were all normal people like you too' messages that get people looking at the BNP website. The site itself is pretty sanitised - you'll only find a summary manifesto with most of the bonkers stuff taken out, and you'll find what purports to be a list of answers to criticisms, which will satisfy less sceptical readers.

It's quite easy for them to tell people they're not racist and point them toward a page on their site that says 'the BNP isn't racist' as proof, especially since they've removed the most overtly racist stuff and replaced it with vague question begging pronouncements. We're unlikely to be in the position of seeing Dimbleby skewering Nick Griffin with words taken from the BNP site again - at least in the near future. Sure, there's some stuff still on the site there - like the claim that Baghdad is different from other places because of the genes of the people who live there - but it's disappearing gradually.

At the moment, Barnbrook is probably being roundly congratulated for his speech for mentioning Londoners of all colours and not accidentally blurting the word 'coon', but that will change the more practice they get.

There's another important thing to remember here. It's that the BNP lie. No, really. You only have to look at their old Press Officer admitting he'd have used different language to explain that black people will grow up with low IQ and end up mugging you if he knew he was being recorded - or Mark Collett's reaction to being told he'd been filmed telling a documentary maker that his children would have been better off living in Nazi Germany in Young, Nazi and Proud to see that. Giving them the space to show their true colours also gives them the space to lie.

This is something the actual Nazis took advantage of in Germany in the 1930s. The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz is an excellent book that charts how the Nazis tailored their message for specific audiences, giving the stormtrooper types what they wanted in 'Der Sturmer', the SS something more outwardly sophisticated in 'Das Schwarze Korps' and distributing copies of 'Mein Kampf' with the more inflammatory references to Jews taken out. Hitler himself avoided more overt anti-semetic pronouncements for years - which allowed him to be painted as less radical than some of his followers.

The BNP are doing something similar now. They are helped to some extent by the tabloids who set things up for them. Barnbrook wouldn't have been able to growl about 'perlrdgl cructnuss' if the tabloids hadn't spent so many years spoonfeeding us all stories about PC Gone Mad that almost inevitably turn out to be bollocks. He wouldn't have found it quite so easy to slur about money going to minority groups if papers like the Mail didn't do things like take reports that show that immigrants don't get a disproportionate share of local authority housing and turn them into scare stories about the amount of immigrants who get local authority housing. With that done for them, the BNP don't have to a massive amount themselves.

It's nice that they're too rubbish to manage even than that right now, but with practice, we could end up seeing something similar to the situation of creationists debating scientists in the US. Often, creationists come out on top in these debates despite having the weakest argument because they've discovered a few techniques that work - like asking a question that takes two seconds to ask, but an absolute age to answer. Like bussing in sympathetic audiences. Like regurgitating utterly discredited outright lies that the audience might not have heard before.

Saying that we should defeat the BNP's arguments is all well and good, and I agree. But we do need to remember that we're talking about people who aren't arguing in good faith, and are desperately trying to hide their real motives. I was a little unimpressed with the 'You're fired!' Hope Not Hate leaflets handed out at tube stations this year. They reproduced old arguments that the BNP have already attempted to counter, like stating the BNP don't support the England football team. What they should have done is actually point out the techniques the BNP use to fool people and identify how they work - like posting to message boards posing as normal people, or including supposed rebittals to critics on their website that actually lie even more*. Point out the bits where they expose themselves as racist - like the argument that Baghdad is the way it is because of the genes of its inhabitants (which has the added bonus of exposing their pretence that they're only arguing against the religion of Islam).

It's a little naive to expect them to remain a bunch of wuuurghing shouty men forever, and we should be prepared for gradual improvement.

And besides, if looking like a ginormous bell-end was a barrier to being elected, we'd have a different mayor.

*There's a section that attempts to explain their 'Africans for Essex' lies which includes another lie about the numbers of Africans who took advantage of a council rehousing scheme. See this discussion in the comments on this post over at Eric the Fish for more.

Remember - all murders are homicides, but not all homicides are murders

Here's a quick one about the Telegraph, a paper that is no stranger to shonky statistics despite being more 'respectable' than the tabloids.

Since I've recently looked at homicide figures, they're fresh in my mind - so the Telegraph article 'Less than 50pc back death penalty' seems very fishy at the end, when it says:

In 1964, there were fewer than 300 murders. By 1994, the year of the last parliamentary vote, there were 565 and last year there were 850.

Here's another link to 'Homicides, Firearms Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/2007'. It records the number of homicides (murder, manslaughter and infanticide) and goes pretty far back.

There were indeed fewer than 300 homicides in 1964, although it's not clear how they break down and how many were murders. The 1994 figure the hack is using actually represents the number of homicides in 1993. The actual figure for 1994 is 632 - but remember, they count homicides, not murders.

There's a handy breakdown of how many homicides ended up being recorded as murders in the document, and although the figures don't stretch as far back as the 60s or 1994, we can see in an earlier version that in 1995, out of a total of 662 offences that ended up being recorded as manslaughter, 251 ended up being murders. Unless there was some weird freak result in 1994 (or 1993) there were not 565 murders.

The figure for last year is the most out of whack. There are only 757 offences initially recorded as homicide and 743 still recorded as homicide as of November last year. The 805 figure is from 2001/2002 as far as I can tell.

In that year, 275 of the homicides ended up being recorded as murder. Only 22 have been decided to be murders for last year, but most of the cases are still ongoing so we won't be able to accurately say how many murders there were for quite a long time yet. The year before last showed 241, which would show a drop since 1995, although we're still waiting for verdicts on some of those.

The thing is - be cautious when you read anything about the number of murders in any given year. The hack involved is probably talking about homicides for maximum effect. A rise from 'under 300' to 'under 300' isn't that dramatic. Either is 251 to 275. Remember - the journalist's job isn't to tell you accurately what's going on.