What sort of pansified lefty elitist wants to stop locking up innocent children?

Nick Clegg anounced a new policy today that you'd think would send the tabloids into paroxysms of rage. From May, he claims that children of failed asylum seekers will no longer be kept in detention centres, and the family unit of Yarl's Wood will close. Perhaps a bold move for a government hat seems as beholden to Sun and Mail readers as the last.

Last word on the Brand/Sachs/Ross affair

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

Nice to see consistency there.

Alice through the bonkers nut nut glass

I don't know if the tabloids are getting more blatant, or I'm getting too used to their lame tactics, but back with the Express again, we have 'Secret 'amnesty' for 500,000 asylum seekers'. The exaggeration and distortion isn't very well disguised, even for an Express article.

I mean, look at the opening sentence:

BRITAIN may allow nearly half a million failed asylum seekers to stay here under a back-door amnesty scheme.

Withdrawing the headline's claim straight away with a 'may'? What is this paper coming to?

Here's what prompts the claim of a [imagine some creepy music please] secret amnesty:

Yesterday, the Home Office confirmed hundreds of thousands of claims would be looked at on a “case-by-case basis”.

The Home Office told everyone about it, meaning it's not a secret. Oh, and there's no amnesty either.

Here's the whole non-story in a nutshell. There's a backlog of some 450,000 failed asylum claims to be sorted through to assess whether any should be given indefinite leave to remain as naturalised citizens because they've lived here long enough to qualify. In other words, there's a backlog - which is bad - and the government have done exactly what they should be expected to do to clear it - which is good. In the Express, this means a vast conspiracy to give them all amnesty. Based on no evidence whatsoever.

What would the Express rather have? Actually, scratch that. I think we already know.

They don't even seem to be trying anymore. Still works though. There's a petition linked to to sign in the comments, from the woman who called for the compulsory sterilisation of immigrants after the second child. That comment's been deleted for being racist, so it's nice to know that the Express stops short of publishing stuff that comes that close to actual Nazi dogma.

Wonder if any of the people in the comments who worry about this amnesty sending the wrong signals to people who might want to falsely claim amnesty realise that the only people sending them those signals in the first place are the Express and the commenters themselves.

Actually, no I don't.

*UPDATE* I edited the 'whole non-story in a nutshell' paragraph, as the applications don't need to be sorted through to see if any claims are valid, since they're all not. So all that's being looked into is how long the people involved have been here.

So they are biased against asylum seekers after all!

Remember this? 'Not biased against asylum seekers? Do me a favour'? Well, the Joint Committee on Human Rights has published its report into the treatment of asylum seekers, and it seems they were nearly as impressed with the Express and the Mail's defences of their coverage as I was. It's not clear whether they laughed hard enough into their mug to send a splat of tea onto their desk as well, but they might have, so I'll pretend they did.

The report 'The Treatment of Asylum Seekers' is available in PDF format on the Parliament website. It's a meaty report that I haven't read all the way through - but there is BBC coverage if you're interested, in the story 'Asylum hardships "are deliberate"'.

What I want to focus on, though, is the section of the report that deals with the press - especially the Express and the Mail. It says:

As the editors who gave evidence to us recognise, the right to free speech and the freedom of the press are not absolute, but must be exercised in accordance with the duties and responsibilities of the media. 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. [Emphasis mine].

The PCC's own defence is interesting, and shows exactly why the whole complaints process is ineffective, and essentially useless. The PCC says:

“The number of complaints (received by the PCC) does not reveal a huge groundswell of concern about them from people against the national press, given that they can complain about issues to do with accuracy, privacy, intrusion, discrimination about individuals and so on.”

Which is the PCC claiming that it's not the quality of complaints it receives about anything, but the quantity. It doesn't matter if the papers produce blatantly false material that gets complained about as long as not too many people complain.

The PCC is also reported as saying:

The PCC believes that the mechanisms in place work effectively. It provided two examples of upheld complaints concerning asylum seekers (issued in 1999 and 2000) which it says “gave an important signal to the whole of the press” and that “it has not been necessary to issue similar rulings for some time”:

“The important thing is that there is a mechanism in place for handling complaints from anybody who is affected by inaccurate or intrusive reporting. Such complaintsin turn help to raise standards generally. In the context of your inquiry, therefore, I believe that the current system fairly and effectively balances the rights of freedom of expression with other rights such as the right to respect for privacy.”

The important thing here is to notice the subtle little insertion of 'complaints from anybody who is affected', as there have been complaints about misleading articles that were wrongly rejected - but they were not from people the PCC deem were 'affected'. Also, the fact that the PCC hasn't issued a ruling for some time is supposed to be evidence of the system working - but this report shows, quite clearly, that it has not been working. And it's probably not working precisely because it has not issued a similar ruling for some time.

Bringing the two together, the Joint Committee Report says:

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. [Emphasis not mine - the Joint Committee wanted to emphasise this paragraph themselves - para 349].

It repeats this without the emphasis in its 'Reccommendations' section, before:

We recommend that the Press Complaints Commission should reconsider its position with a view to providing practical guidance on how the profession of journalism should comply with its duties and responsibilities in reporting matters of legitimate public interest and concern. We emphasise that such guidance must not unduly restrict freedom of speech or freedom of the press any more than similar guidance does in the USA. (Paragraph 366)

So there we go. Newspapers are guilty of hostile reporting about asylum seekers in such a way that has the potential to influence Government policy. It's official. Of course, it's nothing we don't already know.

The Mail, perhaps in reaction, has sort-of-sympathetic coverage of a Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation report into failed asylum seekers living in poor conditions in the 28 March article 'Asylum seekers "living in poverty"'. Of course, it misleadingly calls them asylum seekers after their applications have been refused, and there's a barb in the last word from Joan Ryan (weird dystpoian world again - the Daily Mail have to rely on a Labour minister for a barb about a minority group), but it's sort of a start.

But it's too late. The horse has already bolted. The Mail and Express are bored with asylum seekers now - they're so 2003. The papers moved on to Muslims and the Polish. By the time they've been slapped for that, they'll have moved on to someone else. I reckon it should be the Walloons.*

*Not really. I don't think it should be anyone. I just like the word 'Walloon'.

Not biased against asylum seekers? Do me a favour

I had to laugh when I read these: 'Tabloids defend asylum coverage' and 'Mail and Express deny asylum coverage'. Laugh and laugh and laugh. There's a great fat lie from Peter Hill in the Guardian article:

"I would never put any of my journalists under pressure to write something that they wouldn't want to write. I would never do that," Mr Hill told the committee.

Oh really? Never? What's this about then? 'Express newspaper faces criticism from its own journalists for anti-Roma stance':

Journalists at the Daily Express say that editors are pressurising them 'to write anti-Gypsy' articles. Last week, the newspaper ran a campaign to prevent Roma (Gypsies) from new EU countries coming to Britain - which led to the government announcing new restrictions.[...]

Journalists at the paper have now called on the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) to help protect them from the demands of their own editors and management to write such articles.

If Hill would never pressure his journalists to write something they don't want to, why would a group of them complain to the PCC that they'd been pressured to write something they didn't want to write?

There's another cracking quote from Hill - the man whose paper went with the headline 'Bombers are all spongeing asylum seekers' after July 21 2005, when the identity of only two of the bombers were known and neither was an asylum seeker:

"We must be able to be truthful in our headlines what the facts are, palatable or otherwise," he said.

"We can't tailor our headlines to fit news as you would wish it to be."

What?! Has this nutjob ever actually read any of the headlines in his paper? I'm not just talking about the bombers one, but for others I've mentioned here in 'Police killer escapes in veil', 'How much is an Express headline worth?', 'Comparing reactionary articles can be fun!', 'Daily Express in 'Headline is misleading arse' shocker!', 'The world's most bigoted newspaper', 'No wonder their readers are ignorant tossers', and 'Daily Express headlines worth the paper they're written on?' And that's not to mention all the shite about Diana's 'murder' and the rubbish about the weather that's so often wrong.

Paul Dacre didn't give evidence, but the representative from the Mail apparently said:

Mr Esser told the joint committee that said that Daily Mail journalists were given a copy of the Press Complaints Commission code that they kept in their wallets.

If that's the case, why do they keep calling people who aren't seeking asylum 'asylum seekers', which goes against the PCC guidelines? And:

"But the idea that they are running around looking for inflammatory things to say about asylum seekers is wrong."

AH HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHA HAAAAAAAH! I think a bit of wee came out.

Great stat from the Guardian article:

Daily Express readers believed that 21% of the population were immigrants, Daily Mail readers thought that 19% of the population were immigrants and Guardian readers thought that 11% of the population were immigrants.

In reality 7% of the population were immigrants, Mr Travis said.

Says it all really.

And on the subject of immigration, I forwarded my reply from the Treasury about MigrationWatch's figures to MigrationWatch last week, suggesting that a correction or a retraction might be in order. Nothing from them in my inbox. Not even a tumbleweed. Surprised?

At least it's not about Christmas

It's about the Mail's other favourite topic instead, asylum seekers (seems I was hasty in thinking the paper had dropped the references, although they have gone down).

Anyway, this will be a quick one. Hurrah! The article is 'Asylum seekers escape after dozy guards allowed a cigarette break'.

Right there in the opening sentence/paragraph is this:

A failed asylum seeker is on the run after escaping deportation when he was allowed off a coach heading for the airport to have a cigarette.

So it's just one then. The headline makes it sound like it could be loads. It's not as masterful as making 100 look like 3,000 but it's still fibbing. The question is, can the Mail and the Express ever tell the truth in their headlines?

Ha. Bloody. Ha.

Nice to see that Private Eye picked up on the 'Free Houses' story in the Mail . It seems that the Refugee Council have complained to the Press Complaints Commission. (I tried to do that myself after I blogged the story, but either the online form wasn't working or they've got three copies of my complaint).

They only mentioned the 'they're not asylum seekers' line, and didn't mention the picture of black people on the site, so I might write to the editor if I get time, but nearly a week has gone by. Watch this space.

Despicable shits

There are no depths that the Daily Mail won't sink to. Apparently, a judge has ruled that two Dutch citizens, who have declared themselves 'economically inactive' and refuse to look for work since they came to the UK will receive council housing for themselves and their families while they're dealt with by immigration (ie. sent back to Holland). The Daily Mail headline?

Free housing for asylum seekers from EU

Seriously. That's the Mail website and not a spoof. I would say it's difficult to know where to start taking the filth to pieces, but it's not. You can start with the title. You can't have asylum seekers from the EU, because there are no repressive regimes to seek asylum from in the EU. The people involved are EU citizens who were already granted asylum by the Dutch government, and therefore no longer seeking asylum and not asylum seekers. Actual asylum seekers in the EU are not granted free movement, so wouldn't be affected by the ruling. The headline is nothing but a big, fat lie.

Look at the picture on the right. Ooh, scary. Black people. The majority of the people this ruling affects are white people of European descent. Why does the Mail have a picture of black people to illustrate it? Because they're racist fucknuts and they want to scare their racist fucknut readers with pictures of black people, that's why. Black people wearing hoodies, no less. The caption is good, too: "Ruling: Asylum seekers from the EU could travel here and demand a home" No they can't. Only EU citizens can. And they won't get 'a home', they'll get temporary accomodation until they're deported. Plus, the judge has stated that this is a special case.

The invitation to comment says "Has the Government gone soft on asylum? Tell us below in reader comments". What has this got to do with the Government's rules on asylum? These people aren't seeking asylum. They already got it.

"Around 500,000 refugees are thought to have been granted nationality by our EU neighbours over the past decade. They then assume the rights of a person born in that country."

What would you prefer then? A class of untermenschen who have different rights than people born in the country? And they don't 'assume the rights...' they become a citizen. What relevance is it that they weren't born in the country? Especially as if they've been granted asylum, they are by definition genuine. If there's anything that reveals the Mail's prejudices, it's this.

If you think nobody would be misled by this arsery, think again. From the comments:

"What is happening to our country. We would not get the same priveliges in other EU countries, free housing and hand outs - can't this goverment see that we will not be able to support the amount of asylum seekers? And if they are truely asylum seekers why are they crossing so many countries to get to England and the question is how are they doing it?

- Christabel Showering, bristol"

They're not seeking asylum here, you fucking Benny. They've already got it somewhere else.

Another one:

"Whilst I feel sorry for these poor asylum seekers, I really don't feel that they should be put ahead of people who have probably been on the housing list for a long time and who will be put further back on that list to accomodate these people, some sort of temporary housing should be found for them and let them wait their turn for permanent accommodation, also proving first that they are an asset to the community and wont just live off social security.

- Hg, Cyprus"

They're not being given permanent residence. They are being given temporary housing, before they get kicked out of the country. They don't even get a turn for permanent accommodation.

I shouldn't be harsh to these people really. What the Daily Mail does is mislead it's readers. It does it on purpose, and it does it quite well. I wish they weren't so good at it.

The thing is, the Mail uses the term 'Asylum Seekers' so they can appear to be not racist. In using a term that describes someone's actions rather than what they are, they can claim this. But by calling people asylum seekers after they've been granted asylum, they show that the term really doesn't describe their actions. It describes what they are. It's clever and weaselly, but it's still racist.

At the moment, the comments system is off for this article, but not for elsewhere on the site. Whether or not it's because they've provoked a deluge of the racist filth I think they might have been trying to provoke, or whether it's because people are pointing out how unremittingly evil and shite this article is is anyone's guess. I'm going for the former.

Wankers.