Because occasionally even the Mail can be right

That's all from me.  Septicisle and Anton Vowl have good words about this, and you can discuss the front page at MailWatch.

Does not suing someone mean you're guilty?

Moronic bleating from old smellyface in today's Mail in 'If I'm not here on Friday, you'll know I've been nicked'. Twat.

I'm staying out of the whole Damian Green thing, other than commenting on how the coverage of it in the press is making me want to eat my own head (ooh - they used the word 'grooming', which only has one meaning EVAR) because just like everyone else, I don't really know what happened.

Shadow Minister for Immigration arrested

'Senior Tory arrested over leaks

I don't think I like this development at all. But this is so obviously going to be spun into a story about how a fearless crusader for truth has been silenced by Zanulab thought police that I almost want to cheer it.

It's started already - 'Terror police seize Tory MP Damian Green over 'immigration leaks to the media''

Only two of the four leaks he's supposed to have been arrested for are to do with immigration, and he hasn't been arrested for 'terror' offences.

What's that? The number of foreigners arriving in the UK was lower than last time? There's not as much white flight? I demand a recount.

Sometimes, as I shuffle my way onto the train to work with a blank expression, looking as if I've just witnessed a bomb blast and now I have to find my way to Llandudno, I pick up a copy of the Metro. Ooh look my brain might just barely mumble through the fog, there's John Sargeant or there's some woman or other, and she's getting out of a car with a handbag - there's a close up of her shoes for some reason. But sometimes, the paper can give handy hints for what to expect from that day's Mail.

Today's included a tiny item in a sidebar about immigration, pointing out how net immigration is up this year although the total arriving has fallen, because more people are staying in the country. Ah I thought, I bet the Mail's coverage will be way more shouty than that. Why is there a fuzzy picture of Robert-Kilroy Silk in a yellow vest? Surely that's illegal.

Pandering to the Mail on immigration will never work

**UPDATED** - see bottom

This week has been a pretty strange one. Getting back into the swing of things with work is one thing - trying to get a grip of what's been happening in the news while I've been away is another. I missed almost all of the credit crunch stuff while I was away in the States - what little news I did see centred entirely around which candidate had won which debate (predictably, Palin looked like a complete and utter arse if you believed MSNBC's take, whereas she wiped the floor with Biden if you watched Fox). So I've been trying to work out what's going on and what the papers might say about it - being informed in part by screaming Evening Standard billboards about rising unemployment.

Great, I thought the other day, how long is it going to be before the tabloids start blaming immigrants? I even thought of starting a countdown to the first immigrant bashing article in the big 3 (or rather big 2 and a half - the Express hardly counts as a whole paper).

Little did I know that Labour would beat them to it.

Well done, Phil Woolas - you've managed to out Mail the Mail. Via Justin at Chicken Yoghurt, Jim Jay at the Daily Maybe has some good stuff to say about Woolas, like:

It feels more like desperation. To head off the BNP, by adopting their policies. To distract people from the causes of unemployment. To give people someone to blame who isn't the government. Except I'm not sure it will actually do any of these things.

I've mentioned before how it's stupid for the government to pander to this kind of anti-immigration sentiment, because the anti-immigration tabloids will always portray the government as being soft on immigration regardless of what the government actually does about immigration. Tom makes the same point in the comments on Justin's post:

The funny thing is that Labour is horrendously tough, uncaring and unpleasant on immigration, but the message isn’t getting across because the press know their power and can conjure up entirely imaginary worlds where no one is ever kicked out because of their human rights, particularly if they’re a violent criminal, etc., etc.

My favourite hobby horse when I bang on about the tabloids is that they're not there to report the news to us. They exist to tell the same few stories over and over again, regardless of what has actually happened - and if anything does happen that contradicts any of those stories it's either ignored, lied about or spun until it appears to fit.

One of those overarching stories is that we're being overrun by foriegners who take our jobs, scrounge off our benefits and are destroying this once great nation. A subsection of that story is that it's all the government's fault because Labour loves foreigners and hates the British people. No matter what the government does that suggests the second bit is rubbish, whether we're talking about dawn raids on failed asylum seekers, introducing limits on new potential sources of immigration (like Romania and Bulgaria) or introducing a new points system that will keep out more people with darker skin than white people - the paper must make it fit with their overarching story.

And so, I knew, it would inevitably be with Woolas's latest bit of fearmongering. It doesn't matter that he comes close to parroting MigrationWatch's preferred line - he's a dirty lefty who likes foreigners and hates the British so there must be something wrong with it, right? But what?

We find out on the same day that the Mail reports his comments in 'Minister calls for stricter immigration controls amid fears rising unemployment could lead to racial tension'. Since the paper can't spin what he actually said, given that it was pretty unequivocal, it decides to go with the technique of just implying it's a bunch of lies anyway, with - drumroll please:

'Labour challenged to show details over plans to curb migrants'

If this immigrant bashing is really Labour's strategy to win back the core working class vote that they fear has been deserting for the BNP, it's a very bad one. For the people who are tempted away, Labour are a namby-pamby soft on immigrants bunch of Britain hating socialists. Nothing the party does will convince them otherwise. The government could announce the introduction of registration, internment camps and forced repatriation tomorrow and they would still be portrayed as wishy-washy lefties by the press and the right - and people would still go on believing them.

I was turned off Labour many years ago - not because they are soft-on-immigrants-but
-hard-on-the-British lefties, but because they're all too ready to pander to the crowd that think they are - and I'm pretty sure I'm not on my own. Maybe, if the party focussed on winning us back they'd win back some of the others by actually making a principled stand, sticking to it and arguing forcefully for it.

And, for those the party doesn't win back from the BNP - what Flying Rodent said.

***UPDATE***

The Sun's take: Migrants limit branded 'stunt'

The Express's: Backlash against idea to limit immigrants

The Daily Express - for when a James Slack scare story just isn't misleading enough

I posted about a Daily Express story earlier today, and signed off with a throwaway comment about how the hack involved rivaled James Slack for including made up nonsense in an immigration scare story. No sooner had I hit 'publish' than I looked on the Mail site and saw a version of the same article there, penned by none other than James Slack himself. I've taken down the older post so I can look at both papers' coverage.

The two stories are 'Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal' in the Mail, and 'FOREIGNERS ARE TO BLAME FOR ONE IN FIVE OF UK’S MURDERS' in the Express.

Both are rubbish from top to bottom, but the Express article takes away the prize of being the most misleading. Yay, the Daily Express!

These figures were arrived at in a similar way to ones I looked at earlier this year about general crime figures that were included in both papers. I sumbitted an FOI request to the Met Police to try to work out how the two papers had come up with different figures for the same thing. I covered the results in 'How many foreign criminals were there in London?'

What's happened this time is that someone - probably at the Daily Mail - has submitted an FOI request to all 43 police forces in England and Wales, and counted up the numbers of people accused of homicide who specify their nationality on their arrest form.
There were three main things that were misleading about the two papers' earlier crime figures:

• The figures both papers used didn't actually measure foreign nationals. They're potentially very misleading, which is why the police don't publish them. The Met were explicit about this.
• The Express had taken figures from only half the police forces in the country and extrapolated them across the forces that didn't respond to their request. This is despite the fact that their figures included those from the Met Police, which almost certainly accounted for more than half the figures they had.
• The Mail claimed that its figures measured people charged with offences. They didn't. They measured the number of people accused.

The two new articles suffer from similar problems, and more besides. Their figures are from 25 out of 43 police forces and are extrapolated in the same way, although the Mail keeps that fact quiet.

Let's look at the Mail first. It claims:

According to figures revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, the 96 foreign nationals convicted of homicide last year were from 28 different countries.

They were involved in 21 per cent of the total of 461 murder and manslaughter cases. [Taken from the stats from the 25 forces who answered the FOI request, which the paper keeps quiet. There were 755 in total, which is revealed much, much later in the article].

We know it's misleading to count these people as foreign nationals.

It's also misleading to claim they're convicted. Here's how.

'Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/2007' covers the number of homicides in detail. If the Mail is telling the truth, these figures will contain at least 461 convictions for homicide.

But there are only 148.

When the Mail says 'convicted', it means 'accused' - just like it did earlier in the year with the number of foreign criminals in London. The paper's figures are meaningless, since they don't measure foreign nationals and they don't measure convictions.

To add to that, the paper includes this bit of rope for hanging itself with:

The figures show a wide variation between areas. In London, as many as 76 out of 231 identified killers were foreign nationals.

In Manchester, it was eight out of 42, and in Bedfordshire, three out of seven. But in West Yorkshire, it was none out of 47.

So, the force that arrests more foreign nationals than any other is responsible for 79% of the total number of pretend foreigners the paper claims for the 25 forces that answered its request. That means there were only 20 homicides pretend foreigners were arrested for in 24 other forces. 20 out of 230, which makes about one in 11. It's not realistic to assume that the 18 other forces will be the same as the group that includes London.

Here's a quick rundown of all the claims made in the Mail's headline:

Foreigners [lie] carry out [lie] one in every five [fanciful] killings in Britain [lie], police figures reveal [no they don't]

Built on the same soggy house of cards is the Express coverage, which ramps up the hyperbole by pretending we're talking about murder instead of homicide. It does make clear that we're talking about:

Of 461 people convicted of, or charged with... [emphasis mine]

but ruins it by lying, saying they were charged with:

murder in the 12 months before April last year

And it lies about how they're responsible rather than just accused of in the headline. Here's a quick summary of the Express headline and the claims it makes:

FOREIGNERS [lie] ARE RESPONSIBLE [lie] FOR ONE IN FIVE [fanciful] OF UK'S [lie] MURDERS [lie]

There is a reason why this could be worrying. If the Mail is telling the truth about one claim in its story (and there's no reason to think it is, so that's alright), then:

The statistics are so alarming that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will hold a migrant crime summit on Thursday amid worries that police are struggling to cope.

Of course, the truth of this could well be that the summit has been called to explain how these figures are misleading, or could have been called ages ago and have nothing to do with these figures. The second is more likely, which means this is the screamsheets' attempt to influence proceedings there, like they've managed to mislead tory numpty David Davies, and MigrationWatch, both of whom get their gullible quotes inserted into both papers.

They'll have a good chance of misleading New Labour too, if past experience is anything to go by.

Hurrah for the fourth estate! The slags!

Labour's lies about immigration

So, the Lords Economic Affairs Committee published 'The Economic Impact of Immigration' last week. I had promised to look at it alongside the Mail's coverage, and I wish I could say that the only reason I couldn't is because life got in the way, but I can't. The earth-shattering report so deftly speared the lies Labour have been telling us about immigration and included so much new information that it's taken me a week to realise how accurate the Mail's coverage has been all this time.

Not really! One-nil!


Now, while the Lords report is actually way more negative than most of the things we're used to seeing distorted by the Daily Mail (the paper that managed to take a document that said there 'was no evidence of widespread disorder' as a result of immigration and report it with the headline 'Migrant surge led to 'disorder and crime'), it's obvious from the get-go why the paper decided to replace 'Now the Lords is forced to admit that each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK' with the new article rather than publish a separate new one.

That would be because the Lords doesn't 'admit that each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK', nor does it mention the paper's 'almost £9bn' cost figure, which the paper arrived at by distorting the figures of Professor David Coleman, adding together a list of figures he explicitly warns not to because the results will be misleading; not to mention rounding up a figure of £3.08bn to £4bn, adding almost a billion pounds to the already misleading total. In fact, the 'each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK' claim is itself a serious distortion of the calculations that have been made to arrive at the figures for how much migrants are worth to GDP per head, but that's by the by.

The article that has replaced it has gone through a number of changes itself, with the original including James Slack's byline at first, but dropping it when a lot of extra information was clumsily weaved in - presumably to insert 'balance'. The new version is now 'Lords' report exposes Labour's lies on the 'benefits' of mass immigration' on the paper's website - shouted triumphantly as 'IMMIGRATION: THE GREAT LIES' (beneath a smaller 'Labour's case for mass migration demolished') on the front of last Tuesday's dead tree version.

As I said, the Lords report is more negative than most of the things we see the Mail farting around with, but it has of course been exaggerated by the paper. Nowhere does it say that the Government has lied about immigration. It does say that the £6bn total contribution the government uses to show the contribution of immigrants to the economy is 'irrelevant and misleading', which is pretty harsh, but it doesn't say the £6bn is made up or isn't true - just that it shouldn't be used to argue the benefits of immigration.

One of the claims in Slack's original article is this:

Dismiss Ministers' "preposterous" assertion that migrants boost the economy by £6billion a year;

See that word "preposterous" in quotes to show that it's a direct quote from the report? It isn't. The word "preposterous" doesn't appear once in the whole report.

To be fair to the Mail, the Lords report does argue against some of the governments arguments for immigration, but it doesn't say the government has lied.

So, while the report does say that using figures for GDP per head are more accurate than overall GDP figures, it also neatly illustrates how those figures can be distorted to give a misleading impression about the lack of benefits of immigration. In 'Labour finally admits minuscule benefit each migrant brings to Britain - just 58p a week', the paper argues:

Migrants benefit the UK population by only 58p each week, the Government has finally admitted.

And goes on to say:

Ministers have been focusing on the so-called £6billion boost delivered to the economy each year by immigrants.

But a landmark report by the authoritative Lords Economic Affairs Committee yesterday dismissed the argument as "irrelevant and misleading".

Now, what does that suggest to you? To me, it suggests that the Lords report said that immigrants are not actually worth £6bn a year to the economy, but are in fact only worth 58p a week - a paltry thirty quid a year rather than £6 billion. Which is rubbish.

Nowhere does the article explain how the 58p a week figure is arrived at or even what it represents. It doesn't explain that this is 58p per week for each of the sixty million people in the country. It does say:

Now it has emerged that Home Office officials did compile a figure of the annual benefit of migration to the native population, which is also known as Gross Domestic Product Per Capita.

A memo quietly passed to peers says the total is only £30 a year, or a paltry 58p a week in 2006.

Which doesn't exactly clarify things. And, presumably, the 'memo quietly passed to peers' was publicly available on the Oral & Written Evidence pages for the Lords Committee (which has disappeared now the report's been published), in the same way that Professor Coleman's paper for costs was. Except the Mail didn't say Coleman's figures weren't quietly passed to peers.

The paper carefully leaves out the way the 58p a week figure was calculated. If it was calculated in the same way as other attempts to do this, it takes the number of people immigration added to the population in a year, the amount immigration contributed to GDP, took the difference between those figures and divides it by sixty million and again by fifty two. Professor Coleman explains here, in an article where he says the benefit is close to 50p a week where he's supposed to be defending MigrationWatch's 4p a week figure. Doh! This article makes it look as though we're talking about the total figure migrants contribute to the economy. Which if we're talking about GDP per head and the xtra contributed by migrants would total about £1.8bn.

And, of course, it leaves out that MigrationWatch's original figure for migrants contribution to GDP per head, trumpeted loudly by James Slack in the Daily Mail was over fourteen times too low, at 4p a week.

Of course, being a James Slack article, it includes his misleading '£ 8.8billion' figure for the costs of immigration. Unlike the government figures, we have actual evidence of Slack deliberately manipulating those figures to arrive at that total.

So, it's as I've said before. Don't take what Ministers say about immigration at face value - but that goes double, triple and quadruple for the Mail and MigrationWatch. The government might take a total figure of around £1.8bn and make it sound like £6bn, but the mail will make the same sound like thirty quid.

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.

Another classic Express headline - Part II

More wrong than even I thought

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

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

The headline

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

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

The subheading

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

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

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

How are tourist visits linked with immigration in the story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abandon ship?

It seems that Sunny provoked a bit of a row over at CiF with 'Liberals: abandon the BBC', sparking a couple of comment thread tear ups under the piece, over at Pickled Politics and at Iain Dale's reaction. Obsolete and Unity have offered their thoughts, which are more than worth a look, and I think it's probably time for me to offer my tuppence worth.

This is new territory for me, since this is a single issue blog about the excesses of the right wing press rather than having much to do with the wider media and political arena. Yes, I know the issue of whether the BBC have a left or right wing bias does come close to what I talk about here, but it's a comfortable cell I live in, padded as it is with copies of the Sun, Express and Daily Mail. Any change of scenery is daunting. Bear with me.

To start with the most obvious point - the BBC doesn't have a left wing bias. Don't be so chuffing silly. Seriously, stop it. The cherrypicking of stories that Biased BBC does often makes me cackle and knock the back of my head against the padding on the cell wall behind me. A great recent example is the furore over the BBC Newsround's explanation of 9/11 on the website, which was originally pretty darn close to the 9/11 Commission's own coverage.

What those who attack the BBC for being left wing are often doing is attacking it for not having a right wing bias - or a bias far enough to the right for their liking. The situation now isn't that different from the one back in 1982 when the BBC was attacked for being a bunch of lefties when it refused to refer to 'our' soldiers in the Falklands war. The Conservative government's real problem then was that the BBC wasn't pumping out sufficient propaganda for it.

The BBC isn't left-wing - it's just not as far to the right as some right wingers would like. Its political coverage, as has been pointed out, tends to range from New Labour to Conservative to back again. This may shock some people, so hold onto your hats - but New Labour isn't particularly left wing itself. No, really. I find it funny that one commentator on Sunny's original CiF piece thought that giving Alastair Campbell coverage was evidence of a left wing bias. Especially as the BBC also included Campbell getting a mauling from John Humphreys. Does that mean there's a right wing bias then? Ooh, brainaches!

Politics in this country has been towed rightward by New Labour. The arguments we hear from politicians don't range so much from right to left anymore as from right to, well, a bit less right. The party that used to be the centrist party is now the furthest major party to the left, and not because it has moved. Labour Ministers can get thanked by the BNP for the help they've given to their campaigning, for flip's sake. It's not exactly the DPRK here. The BBC reflects that rightward shift to a degree.

But I like the BBC. I think it does provide a useful antidote to the right wing rubbish in the press. The rightwinger's strawman, as displayed nicely by Iain Dale in response to Sunny's piece, would say that this is evidence that the BBC is left wing. But it isn't. It's really not hard to be to the left of most of the press in this country - because most of it is so far to the right that it actively distorts, misrepresents and lies to make its points, as I cover here until even I'm bored of it. Anything short of pretending reports have said things they haven't, or reporting that people have done things they haven't to push a right wing agenda would be to the left of the bulk of the tabloid press. I think the BBC on the whole does a good job of producing a balanced view not because it agrees with my position, because it doesn't, but because it doesn't agree with the position of those further to the right of it, and it at least tries to be impartial and to correctly report events.

Unity's point about the BBC providing a bullshit detector, already quoted by Sunny, is a very important one. Part of the reason Sky News isn't Fox is that it would look incredibly stupid next to the BBC if it were. If that's true (and I think it is), lord knows where the tabloids would be.

Recently though, that has been changing. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that the BBC have been following the media herd to a greater degree. An example, as Obsolete points out, is the pointless blanket coverage of the Madeline McCann story. Another reason is the success of the likes of Biased BBC in getting things changed, which is what Sunny points out at CiF. Both of these things lead to things like the BBC giving coverage to MigrationWatch when they really don't deserve it. MigrationWatch's reaction to all things immigration are included across the media as if they're worth listening to when, as they proved in January, they're not. Somehow, the views of a bunch of anti-immigration blowhards with a fax who don't even bother to check if the figures they use measure what they say they do have been given national importance. The BBC are complicit in this, even if their reaction is sometimes sceptical.

Obviously, I'd like this rightward drift to be stopped. Like Sunny says, a good way of achieving this would be to shout as loud as Biased BBC when there are examples of right wing buffoonery. When I got to the bottom of the massive blunder in MigrationWatch's 'small Mars bar a week' GDP per head calculations earlier in the year, I did email the BBC but never heard anything back. A greater volume of voices might have managed much more. I'm all for calling the BBC on their more obviously biased right wing output whenever it appears. It would have been nice for one national news outlet to even have bothered to cover that the main figure MigrationWatch used to come up with its 'small Mars bar a week' figure actually measured something completely different to what it claimed, and without that, all that happened is that I eventually managed to get the report quietly changed on the MigrationWatch website, which nobody seems to ever have noticed. Does anybody know that the 4p a week per head figure was complete rubbish?

That said though, like Obsolete, I have to disagree that we should withdraw support for the BBC. The BBC has its very existence attacked enough without me adding my voice to the chorus. As much of the success of Biased BBC shows, the loudest squeak gets the oil and in among the 'The BBC is rubbish' chorus, the loudest squeak would come from those calling for the BBC to be privatised. That would be a disaster.

Here's the thing. Politicians are unscrupulous. All you'd need is an administration fed up with the BBC and a large portion of the public being anti-BBC, and bubbye Beeb as we know it. It wouldn't matter a jot to someone unscrupulous to take a large number of people dissatisfied with the BBC and use it as a reason to privatise it, even if a large chunk of that crowd were explicitly anti-privatisation. This would go double, treble and even further if that unscrupulous person were a right winger, because a privatised BBC would almost definitely shift way off to the right. That's why right wingers like to argue for it. And that would happen not because the public are mostly right wing and like to pay money for right wing news sources, as right wingers like to believe, but because the large corporations that pay large amounts of money for advertising to right wing news sources are mostly right wing. The broadcast media would then drift the same way as the tabloid. So bubbye BBC coverage as we know it and hello 'Bombers are all spongeing asylum seekers' headlines. Where would anyone be able to find an alternative then?

Even subscripton would be a disaster. The alternative voice of the BBC would then only be heard by those willing to pay for it, and everyone else would be spared ever having to have their views challenged. There's a reason left wingers are labeled 'Guardianistas' and 'the PC Brigade'. It's done to remove any need to actually listen to them. The output of the BBC is caricatured by the likes of Biased BBC and Twatface Littlejohn enough as it is without access to what the BBC actually says being restricted only to those prepared to pay for it. The tabloids do very well lying about and distorting what reports by people they don't agree with actually say, safe in the knowledge that their readers will never bother checking. The BBC would become just another organisation its possible to be dishonest about, for both the tabloids and rival media networks.

Now, one final strawman buster before I go and regret publishing this. When I say the BBC is an alternative voice to the right wing media, I'm not arguing that it's left wing, just that it's further to the left than the Daily Mail, the Express and the Sun, and that's not hard. I'm saying it's an alternative because it at least tries not only to be impartial, and to actually report facts as they occur. I'd like it to remain available to all because it makes it possible for someone who's read the Express's coverage of, say, an MCB report, to have a chance to see what the MCB actually said, as opposed to what the Express pretended it did. I'd like for people to be able to see Chief Constable Spence's requests for funding for Cambridgeshire police themselves - which they can if they visit the BBC site, which links to it - rather than read a deluge of stories to twist it to say we're being held hostage by Eastern Europeans - like the Mail has devoted several stories and leaders to. If the right wing tabloids (and broadsheets, sometimes) were less cavalier with the truth and more inclined to report in good fath, I might be more critical of the Beeb. They're not, so I'm not. Not because the Beeb is left wing, but because it's more likely to at least attempt to report events in good faith and not distort them, or even make them up in the first place.

Phew. Finished. Off to butt my head against the picture of a swarthy Eastern European immigrant out to cause crime and scrounge off our dole on my padded wall now.

A rare departure from just slagging off the papers

In the Mail today, we have a story with the headline 'Unemployment rate six times higher than official figures' and it fair takes me back, it does guv'nor.

See, way back in the eighties, when I was an impressionable adolescent in my early teens, I used to be a bit of a tory boy. I didn't really understand an awful lot about politics, and when I went to school, being on the right side of the fence actually made you a bit of a rebel and - oh sod it, enough of the weak excuses. I didn't know what I was doing. I swear. I turned to the light side after seeing an old schools and colleges programme about Plato's ideas on rhetoric, which explained how someone with a weaker argument can end up winning a debate, and the whole house of cards began to tumble down. Lucky New Labour weren't around then, eh?

Anyway - one of the actual issues that started me on the path of thinking 'hang about - they're talking shite' is when the tories started banging on about how figures were much lower than reported 'in real terms'. The tories' new measure of unemployment figures 'in real terms' were one of the main things that had me blowing raspberries at right wing politics. The government had started banging on about how much lower unemployment was in 'real terms' when what they actually meant was 'if we discount loads of people who are actually unemployed from the figures, and only count those on unemployment benefit'. I suppose it was my introduction to lying spin.

I kind of always knew it was a matter of time before the right started bleating about these figures as if it's not lying tory spin. Of course, it's lying Labour spin now too, but we're still in pot-meet-kettle territory.

And it could have been so different. Back in '97, as I emerged from a number of years of wearing too many lumberjack shirts, listening to too much Smashing Pumpkins and declaring politics as 'rubbish' - as I sat in a chip shop and was among the people in the shop who cheered when a bloke walked in and said, 'I'll have my first portion of chips under a Labour government for eighteen years please,' Labour had so much goodwill to spend. How easy would it have been to say, 'right, this is where things are and we have to fix them,' and then report things as they actually were instead of carrying on with the spin that had already been put on them? Not to mention spinning things like a spinny spinny spin thing themselves.

Instead we got all that Thatcher's heir bollocks.

Tosser.

If only the DCLG hadn't dropped a bollock

Sometimes, when you're the sort of sad sack who likes to mock how the tabloids spin and distort Government figures and documents (along with other documents they don't like), the Government doesn't do itself any flipping favours.

It looked like there was a doozy in today's Mail with the headline 'Councils ordered to carry out charm offensive for migrants and travellers' to add to my last posting, but the DCLG had to go and shoot itself in the foot and lose a toe.

If you hadn't guessed, the report is about the myth busting information packs I mentioned in 'At last they admit: the tabloids have damaged Britain' - sort of. And it's a real pity the DCLG makes a blunder, as the article was shping up to be a fantastic example of how the tabloids make use of a rhetorical crowbar to make the facts fit their agenda - so I'll look at that first, and then the blunder.

Ruth Kelly is ordering councils to take part in a huge charm offensive on behalf of migrants and travellers.

The Communities Secretary wants town halls to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money 'combating misinformation'.

Says the article in the opening, almost certainly talking about the myth busting packs mentioned in the report 'Our shared future', but maybe not. This is left ambiguous for a reason, and that reason is that the fact sheets the article go on about are from way back in April, and not connected to the report at all. So, bear in mind that the report was a set of recommendations, which may or may not be taken up by Ministers. The 'ordered' bit - just a tad fanciful.

The next bit is great, it's why it really is such a shame that the DCLG dropped a bollock. It says:

Her officials have produced sheets of pro-migrant information. But critics warned that Miss Kelly was asking councils to promote 'selective propaganda'.

The messages councils must give out include the statement that: "Romany Gipsies [sic. Remember, this is the paper's preferred spelling so it can avoid accusations of siscriminating against Gypsies] have very strict customs about hygiene and cleanliness, developed over many years to cope with living on the roads."

See that? Any positive massage about 'migrants' = selective propaganda. As opposed to the considered, balanced message put forward by the Mail. Stop laughing. It fantastically uses that point to segue into talking about how Romany Gypsies have rules about cleanliness, leaving us no doubts about what the Mail thinks about that. And check out the use of the word 'must'. The information 'must' say this. Except the actual pages on the DCLG website say this:

The information in these pages contains a number of facts which can be used by local authority frontline staff to discredit many popular myths as well as being provided to councillors and candidates when impartial information is required. [Emphasis mine].

See, 'can' doesn't mean 'must'. That's why they're, you know, different words. And on:

Councils are also told to claim that the Health Service would 'literally collapse' without migrant nurses, doctors and cleaners.

Umm...because it would. Next:

Supposedly impartial civil servants are instructed to plant favourable stories in local newspapers, and even take part in election campaigns where immigrationis a big issue.

Not quite. Here's what the DCLG site actually says:

The code of recommended practice, which regulates local authority publicity, does not prevent councils, while exercising proper caution, from providing accurate and impartial information during an election campaign, without making reference to a particular political campaign.

And:

The Code of Conduct on Local Government Publicity also makes it acceptable for councils to respond to events during an election period, as long as their responses are factual and not party political. In practice, this means councils can, and should, refute any untrue or misleading information circulating in the area that could lead to racial hatred or damage relations between people from different racial groups.

The site doesn't talk about favourable stories, but using facts to counter misinformation. Presumably , the Mail would prefer Councils to let stuff like BNP claims about Africans being given thousands of pounds to move into an area go unchallenged. Along with the garbage it churns out itself, obviously. Next:

Officials are told to seek 'quick wins' by planting stories in local newspapers and on TV. The website says: "Promote human interest stories in the media locally, for example how migrants volunteer and contribute to society in various roles."

Since the site is peppered with references about facts, and given that there's a 'for example' before the bit about migrants volunteering, it's clear that this is only being suggested to councils to say if it's true. Next:

Time must also be spent preparing councillors to take part in the charm offensive. The DCLG says: "Ensure members have good accurate information and advice so they can speak with confidence on controversial issues."

What would the Mail prefer? Clueless councillors who have no idea whether the negative stuff they hear about migrants is true or not? I think we should be told.

Next:

But critics said many of the claims are themselves open to challenge.

One states: "Priority for social housing is based solely on housing need." But the Government's own integration commission last week said social housing should no longer be provided for particular groups.

This is being a bit loose with the facts. 'Our shared future' talks about restricting funding for single groups provided by charities and housing associations and so on. Not the direct allocation of Local Authority housing. Here's what it says:

All agencies, including Local Authorities and affordable housing providers, should operate inclusive allocations and lettings policies. Unless there is a clear business and equalities case, single group funding should not be promoted (see Annex D). In exceptional cases, where such funding is awarded, the provider should demonstrate clearly how its policies will promote community cohesion and integration.

But then!

Another claim is that: "The belief that Britain has a particularly high rate of immigration is false. About 5 per cent of the UK population was born abroad."

But data produced by the Office for National Statistics for MPs said 5,699,000 people living in Britain today were born overseas - 10 per cent of the population.

And it was all going so well! The 2001 census puts the level at 1 in 12, or just over 8%.

And then:

The fact sheets also state: "There is no discernible statistical evidence that migrants from accession countries contribute to a rise in claims for benefits."

Yet Government figures show there have been at least 92,000 successful benefit claims made by Eastern Europeans. The bill is likely to be £100million.

This is the Mail being a little bit dishonest with what the DCLG is saying, but only because the DCLG have given the paper the opportunity by not wording things very well. Since the section of the site this is taken from is talking about the myths surrounding employment, and follows points about how Eastern Europeans come here to work rather than claim benefit, it is pretty clear that the Department is talking about unemployment benefit. Here's the full quote, along with the point that comes directly before it:

• Data shows that migrants come to the UK to work, not to claim benefits. 99 per cent of applications for National Insurance numbers made by new migrants from May 2004 - Sept 05 were for employment purposes.

• There is no discernible statistical evidence that migrants from accession countries contribute to a rise in claims for benefits. In the same period only 4 per cent were allowed to claim Income support and Job Seekers Allowance benefits

• Migrants are only able to claim income related benefits once they have worked legally in the UK for a full year.

This last point is followed by some rent-a-quotes from the Tax-Payers Alliance and MigrationWatch, and that's it.

This article still shows what the Mail does. You can so easily imagine the hack (James Slack - natch) seeing the bit about myth busting packs and buggering off at top speed to find them. I should have guessed the Mail wouldn't ignore the existence of the myth busting packs, but move to trash them as early as it could. Anyway, that what he found was a couple of months old and not exactly what the report was talking about didn't matter. In it goes as if it's new, getting jumbled up and made to look like it's a set of new diktats rather than old guidelines that predate 'Our shared future'. Add lashings of snide implications about minority groups (Gypsies are just dirty you know) and some great suggestions that anything not rabidly anti-immigration must be dodgy propaganda and away you go. Never mind the site actually emphasises over and again the importance of combating myths with facts. But then, one of those facts turned out not to be true.

Poor show, DCLG, poor show.