The five stages of Tory grief

Or maybe there aren't as many as five.  I'm still watching the car crash unfold on Twitter, where gullible Tory representative of the Campaign For Gullible Marks Against Political Correctness, who you might remember from the classic 'Why is it racist to black up?' letter and half a gazillion fat-headed and ill-informed comments in lame tabloid stories is attempting to defend himself for saying some things in the Commons today he really shouldn't.

He said that because people with learning disabilities are often turned down for work, they should be allowed to work for less than minimum wage.  I know, right?

How his defences have unfolded has amused me greatly.  There have been four stages so far.

David Cameron's speech revisited

I started this post as a response to Anonymous in the comments of 'Look who's wearing the Emperor's pants', who asked for an analogy because my statistical analysis is hard to follow. That's fair enough, because it is. In fact, it's so hard to follow that creating the analogy made me realise I'd made a mistake in one of my assumptions about how Cameron's speech is trying to hoodwink with its eastern European figures.

Yes, I did give myself an ironic lolly and call myself 'Lumpy'.

Here's a clearer idea of what's wrong with the figures I looked at in Cameron's speech yesterday. I'll be starting by using barrels and marbles for the easier stuff, and then dropping the analogies for the things that are more dishonest than I'd at first realised.

Look who's wearing the Emperor's pants

Twice in two posts? What are the chances?

In the comments to this post, Anonymous asked for an analogy to explain my stats.  In thinking of one, I realised I'd made a couple of mistakes in what I thought Cameron was doing with the figures. Turned out things were even worse than I'd imagined.  Please go to 'David Cameron's speech revisited' for a clearer idea of what the foreign worker stuff is about and a better idea of how dishonest he's being with everything else.  Stay here for more jokes about pants and gussets.

One of the most depressing things about realising how bad the tabloids are and how little attention they deserve is watching people who ought to know better spouting tired, tired tabloid myths that have been debunked a million times over as if they were true.  Whether the motive is deliberate skulduggery or boneheaded stupidity, it's always depressing to watch someone like Baroness Warsi talk about Winterval replacing Christmas or Eric Pickles bang on about health and safety gawn mad as if these things were real.

Multicultural plots and the reason 70 million is a scary number

I thought I'd found it.  After literally a little bit of searching, I thought I'd finally found out what happens if the UK population hits 70 million that is so heinous we need to noisily defecate at the mere thought.

As always happens when you find something important, I was looking for something else when I stumbled across what I thought would be the grail, the one ring, the M'Kraan Crystal of anti-immigration scaremongering.  What I was looking for was reasoning behind the latest weird, outlandish immigration conspiracy theory.

Colour me, ah, still suspicious

A couple of months ago, my Crackers-sense was set all abuzz by a series of articles in the Daily Mail about tabloid bogeymen (ex-asylum seekers, a muslim single mother, brown people) being given very expensive accomodation by tory councils.  I was suspicious:

When policy is based on made up nonsense

My favourite type of tabloid appeasing fake announcements of policy intent are the ones based on moral-panic reporting by lame news outlets that turns out to be wrong in the first place.  Those ones are really pointless and waste everyone's time.

It's not Death Wish and you're not Charles Bronson

David Cameron's latest tabloid appeasing wheeze is to say that burglars leave their human rights at the door when they enter someone's house.  Wurrgh!  Tough, huh?  You could imagine him squinting a steely-eyed hundred yard stare as he said that, while chewing on a matchstick and growling.  Until you saw his stupid chubby posh face.

Predictably, the tabloids, never normally given to the abandonment of nuance in favour of the unrealistic cramming of everything into a simplified black and white worldview, love it.  'More please, Mr Cameron' says inaptly named John Gaunt.

Colour me suspicious

This morning, a story made my Crackers sense tingle.  Not to tell me that a tabloid story was rubbish, but to tell me that something behind a few tabloid stories was very fishy indeed.  there are wavy lines coming out of my head right now.

Nick Fagge, quality journalist

Picture: FAIL
When you're used to reading the tabloids, there are certain subtle clues you can spot that signal that what is to come is going to be exaggerated, distorted or just plain made up. The odd word or phrase here and there should be enough for you to reach for the salt shaker and start pinching away. You can find them yourself with a little practice.

Happy new year, short term migrant workers!

Hello people. Hope you all had a nice Christmas and New Year and that. The first thing for days that I managed to keep in my system that wasn't dry crackers, dry toast and water was my Christmas dinner. So mine was ace!

The first post of 2009 will be about a new immigration scare story in the Mail, from everyone's favourite statistic massaging scaremonger - James Slack. Nice to see the paper's starting 2009 as it means to go on. The story seems to be from this Saturday's edition.

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.

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!

Fury over children being taught together and learning about one another

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

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

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

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

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

You can probably guess the Express headline. Ready?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Enoch was right (wing)

One of the good things about having a single issue blog like this one is that I can ignore certain fusses if I want to tht aren't about right wing press nonsense. I decided to steer clear of the Nigel Hastilow stuff because, frankly, I could not be arsed to read another generic nonsense rant of the sort I wade through all the time to come up with material here.

But given my most recent postings about the IPPR study that allegedly called for a downgrade or a ban on Christmas, and my insistence that we look at the words the report actually said, I figured I should read Hastilow's article to see what I thought before making my mind up about it. Was he racist? Should he have got in trouble?

There is another question that it's important to answer first, which is whather or not Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech was racist. Of course it was. Daniel Finklestien nails it right on the head when he points out that Powell said, 'I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me,' before telling a story about how black people take over streets, can't speak English but know the word 'racialist', break people's windows and push shit through letterboxes. He characterises these experiences as happening to hundreds of people. And he explicitly states that the woman telling the story is speaking for him. He is not merely reporting what someone else has said.

Now, one of the things defenders of those accused of racism often do is downplay what has actually been said or done and make it sound as though the accusation is based on something far milder than it actually is. A bit like how my teenage cousin when I was a kid would get in trouble and protest, 'but I only said...' when everyone present knew full well that she had said that and more besides. 'It's not racist to talk about immigration' said the old tory slogan, but who ever said it was? Accusations of racism would normally be said about specific things people say when talking about immigration.

Defenders of Powell often downplay the contents of the speech in the same way. Simon Heffer does this in his defence of Hastilow and Powell, when he says:

Oh, and he foresaw correctly that there would be terrible tensions if immigration were allowed to carry on unchecked in that famous speech - called, by a phrase he never uttered, the "Rivers of Blood" speech - in April 1968. It is for reminding the public that what Powell predicted has come to pass that Mr Hastilow is now an ex-candidate.

which politely skims over the fact that the form Powell's prediction of terrible tensions would take included shit posting and window busting and terrorising poor, racist little old ladies.

Heffer does the same trick earlier in his article, saying:

One Tory MP, Bernard Jenkin, has already been removed from his position in the party simply for warning an Asian candidate that she might encounter racism.

Another, Patrick Mercer, was booted off the front bench for retailing the fact that some NCOs in our Armed Forces have racist attitudes towards black people.

Both are bland mischaracterisations. Jenkin was sacked for telling an Asian candidate that she would not be elected because she wasn't a white middle class male. Patrick Mercer didn't just point out that some NCOs have racist attitudes. He said that black soldiers are often 'idle and useless' but covered that up with accusations of racism and far from just pointing out that some NCOs are racist, he implied that black soldiers shouldn't be offended by that racism because it was part of the normal behaviour in the army.

Iain Dale uses the same tactic over at Pickled Politics, where Sunny has argued that tories like him don't get racism if they don't see anything wrong with saying Powell's racist speech was right. In his comments box protest, this becomes and accusation of racism just for discussing Hastilow's comments.

It's this exact trick that Hastilow uses in the most important passage in his article:

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”.

Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably.

He was right. It has changed dramatically. But his speech was political suicide. Enoch’s successors in Parliament are desperate to avoid ever mentioning the issue.

It’s too controversial and far too dangerous. Nobody wants to be labelled a racist. Immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name in public.

Powell's speech didn't just argue that immigration would change the country irrevocably. He specified how it would change by using examples - supposedly said to him by constituents - of black people pushing shit through letterboxes and saying, "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man," and predicting horrific violence.

I's these elements that are the most famous - or infamous - aspects of Powell's speech. Ask anyone what the 'Rivers of Blood' speech is about and its these things they'll think of. Almost nobody would characterise it as merely warning that immigration would change the country. If you want to argue something as bland and self-evident as the fact that immigration has changed the country, Powell's speech is not the thing to refer to since it includes specific nasty examples of how immigration would change the country. If I wanted to use an example of a story about young people and their adventures in the forest, I wouldn't choose the Evil Dead.

The rest of the article is takn up with references to the speech. The opening is clearly a mirror of Powell's references to constituents, and what follows are Hastilow's summary of the problems of immigration, parroting the useless, self-contradictory crap spewed by the tabloids every other bloody day. None of those comments are in themselves racist or deserve sacking.

But using such a loaded phrase as 'Enoch was right', which he does in his own language, isn't excusable without pretty big qualifiers. The inclusion of the words about immigration changing Britain don't cut it. By saying the speech is about immigration changing Britain without making any qualifiers, Hastilow is accepting everything else in the speech.

That's what was wrong.

Liberal elite working for Murdoch

This is just silly.

In 'A grown-up speech on mass migration' and 'Sky News host back at work after embarrassing on-air immigrant 'extermination' gaffe' we find that Sky News's Julie Etchingham, thinking the microphones were switched off, commented over David Cameron's speech that the Conservatives' policy over immigration should be 'extermination'. This is apparently supposed to be proof that there is a liberal elite in the media and they're out to get us or something.

There are a couple of reasons why this is among the stupidest things I've heard from the paper. The most obvious is that it isn't at all clear from the remark that Etchingham was parodying the Conservative stance at all. From the second story there, we can see the form the actual comment took in its context:

[Cameron says] "Let me outline the action that a Conservative government would take.

"As we have seen, some of the increase in population size results from natural change - birth rates, death rates. Here our policy should be obvious . . ."

At which point Miss Etchingham's voice was clearly heard to say: "Extermination."

It's not clear from this whether Etchingham is parodying the Conservative view or offering her own flippant view of what the policy should be. It would certainly be clever PR for supporters of someone making a horrible right wing comment to actually claim it was a horrible left wing comment. And maybe she was just, you know, mucking about without offering an opinion on anything.

That aside, even if we do take the Mail's interpretation of her comments at face value, this is just effing silly:

[...]wasn't she speaking with the authentic voice of the liberal elite?

For more than 40 years, Left-wingers in politics and the media have successfully silenced rational debate on the impact of mass migration, shouting 'racist' at anyone who dared even raise the subject.

She works for Rupert bloody Murdoch! Is Rupert Murdoch part of the liberal elite now?

Here's the thing - even if she is a horrible lefty, the fact that she has to swallow her principles and work for Rupert Murdoch surely shatters the idea that the liberals control everything.

Clever clutching at straws from the Mail - which manages to report negatively on immigration pretty much every bloody day, often several times a day and still manages to argue that debate on the subject is silenced.

The Mail? Balance?

The anti-immigrant influx continues in the Mail, with 14 articles specifically about immigration appearing as search results for 'immigration' in the past week, including one story that made a screaming headline and another perfect illustration of the paper's attitude to the BNP in 'Some BNP voters have 'legitimate views' on immigration, says Tory peer'.

In among those stories is an attempt to inject balance into the paper's coverage of the pipe attack of a 10 year old, which I blogged about in 'Who always starts the race row?'.

This is the third story about the event in the paper, although in the online version the spurious 'Boy 'who was attacked' may face racism charge' is clumsily tacked on to the beginning of 'Immigrant mother 'battered boy, 10, with a pipe' after he 'told her to go back to her own country' to create the Frankenstein's monster that is 'Boy 'who was attacked' by Slovakian woman may face racism charge', which manages to claim that the woman involved is both 35 and in her twenties.

Still, the new story, 'Revealed: the racial tensions behind Slovak mother's pipe attack on boy' does actually manage to insert a little bit of clarity into the subject. For example, although the paper originally claimed:

About a third of around 400 pupils at the school are believed to be Slovakian-born.

the new article explains:

It [the local council] has also revealed that Luton Junior has 372 pupils, of whom 32 - or 8.6 per cent - are Slovakian.

Which reveals that the original article exaggerated the actual number of Slovakian pupils by three or four times. It would be nice if this new honesty continued and the story didn't use the figures to exaggerate problems further, but that would be too much to ask. More on that later.

First though, the main attempt at balance comes from the actual inclusion of some quotes from Eastern Europeans in the area. This is nice, but as you would expect, more weight is given to those from white-British parents at the school. For instance, the introduction of the situation is given over to a parent saying:

Consider, for starters, the words of British parents like mother-of-three Carla Spanton: "Our kids are being threatened with having their throats slit.

"It's happening every day but no one is taking any notice. This used to be a good school but it's not any more."

Another parent is then quoted saying her boy had been beaten up, an account we are supposed to examine uncritically although she defends her son by saying he'd tried to teach the new kids British Bulldog. Since that's a game that almost inevitably ends up with one group of kids throwing another to the floor and pummelling the crap out of them, maybe a bit of scepticism is in order.

The apparent other side to the story is given to us this way:

The Slovak parents, meanwhile, paint a very different picture. It's not we who are the problem, they say, but the British.

Who said that? We never find out. The one named Slovak parent is then given an extended quote, which is followed by tit-for-tat quoting from unnamed British and Slovakian parents, with the final exchange going:

Another Brit says: "They come over here and get everything before our people - it's only a matter of time before it kicks off."

To which another Slovak says: "They tell us: 'Go back to your own country.' I get very angry. If someone is saying these things to me, I will go over and slap them."

Which of these two looks aggrieved and which looks aggressive?

This exchange of quotes follows the repetition of a detail that appeared in earlier articles on the subject:

The Mail has discovered that in the past six months the area has seen 13 race-related incidents, and on Saturday two unemployed teenage girls, of 16 and 18, were arrested for throwing stones at and abusing a Slovakian man just yards from the school.

Who were the victims in these attacks? Which area are we talking about? How big is it? What's the average number you'd expect in 'the area', wherever that is? This is an incredibly vague figure that is supposed to give the impression that the area has become a powderkeg in the last six months, but lack of context makes that claim very difficult to gauge. The tit-for-tat style of quoting that follows the statistic gives the impression that the race-related incidents are tit-for-tat too, but since the paper doesn't tell us who the victims were, we have no way of knowing if that's the case. If the paper knew it were, somehow I doubt it'd neglect to tell us.

It must be said that these additions are welcome though. This story is head and shoulders above the others in terms of balance. Maybe the white-British parents' word deserves more weight, even though the Eastern European kids are outnumbered by around nine to one. Without investigating ourselves, we can't know. This is why we have to rely on the media for our information and why papers like this should aim for balance rather than distortion.

It would be nice if the hack had refrained from using figures to exaggerate problems though, which comes later in the article.

What we're treated to further down is a perfect example of the paper's overall attitude towards immigration. The article first tells us what the council and the school say and says itself about immigration's impact on the schools in the area:

In other words, we are being told, it isn't that bad.

A closer look at the statistics suggests otherwise.

Ooh, the authorities are pretending problems are minor. Where have I read that before? But as we would expect from the Mail, one vital figure is left out of its look at the statistics. One that make the problems it says the stats show look actually, well, not that bad.

Here's what the paper says:

According to the school's Ofsted report of 2004, just eight per cent of the school was drawn from all ethnic minorities, with no single group predominating.

Three years on, and more than 8 per cent are Slovakian alone - with a further four Polish children, one Lithuanian child, one Russian and one Bulgarian. Given maximum class sizes of 30, that's quite a change.

And the impact of that influx is potentially all the more difficult for the school to cope with, given the circumstances in which it is already operating.

See what that implies? 39 new kids to insert into a school with an average class size of 30. How ever will the school cope?

The detail the story leaves out is that the school had a total of 365 pupils in 2004, and has 372 now, so in fact the total has risen by only 7. This perfectly mirrors the way the paper only ever counts new incomers and not those who leave.

Another perfect mirror of the paper's general approach to Eastern European immigration is the implication that there was no immigration from Eastern Europe prior to 2004. How many of the original 30 ethnic minority pupils were Eastern European? Sure, we'd expect the number of Eastern Europeans to be less in 2004, but not to go from 0-39 in three years, as the article implies. One of the Eastern European pupils is Russian. Since Russia isn't part of the EU, this pupil's presence has nothing to do with EU expansion. What about the others? As immigrants tend to settle in areas where there are already groups of people from their country of origin, surely the fact that the biggest group here is Slovakian suggests that there may already have been a small Slovakian community in the area prior to 2004. The only Slovakian named in the article has lived in the UK for eleven years, after all. Surely in any balanced article about the tensions in an area this should be properly examined?

We also have the familiar implication that pupils from ethnic minorities create problems for schools, without explaining why. There's usually a spurious link between speaking English as a second language and not speaking English at all, although that's not explicitly made here. There's just a vague:

Put simply, because of the link between house prices and schooling, it is those schools already dealing with the most challenging circumstances that will have to cope with the greatest impact of Eastern European migration.

What impact? Seven extra kids over three years? Plus, the only Eastern European kid with a named parent quoted in the article was born here and has an English first name.

There's more in the article, but that's all I can be bothered with for now. So, signs of improvement but could do better. See me.

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.

How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part V: "The Quotes"

This is the fifth in a series of posts about exactly how the Mail article '120 immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria arrive in Britain every day to be circus stars' misleads the paper's readers. The other parts of the series are linked at the bottom of the post.

The article doesn't just perform a bait and switch and then carry on by telling the truth about the other A8 countries. It misleads about them, too - and carries on switching confusingly between them and Romania and Bulgaria.

The first way the article misleads is by packing the centre section with out of context attributed and unattributed quotes. These quotes are used in two ways - to further muddy the waters about the differences between the A8 figures and those from Romania and Bulgaria, and to give the impression that a host of external authorities agree with the article.

The quotes

First off, we have shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green. Of course he's going to be negative about government figures. It's his job. But what's interesting is how the quote is used. Here it is:

Conservative shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "This blows out of the water the Government's proclamation that just 13,000 workers a year would arrive from the eight former eastern bloc countries."

Now, there's not a lot wrong with that in itself, but remember that leading into this, the article has made a point that purely applies to A8 migration, while giving the impression that it applies to Romania and Bulgaria. Plus, the entire focus of this article is supposed to be about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration. So, although when Damian says, 'This blows...' he's probably talking exclusively about the 49,000 who came in the first quarter of this year from the A8 countries, or at least the total figures for last year. The article gives the impression that he's talking about the 630,000 overall total as well as Romanians or Bulgarians.

Next, we have Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. Round of applause please. Thank you. Here's the quote:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: "The latest figures confirm that massive levels of immigration from Eastern Europe continue unabated.

"The extra 10,000 from Romania and Bulgaria that the Government knows about is a further addition to the total.

"This makes it even more essential to reduce immigration from elsewhere."

Ladies and gentlemen, Sir Andrew Green. When he's talking about the latest figures, he means the latest figures A8 migration and for Romania and Bulgaria. Then he shifts to talk about Romanians and Bulgarians, and then he makes a nonsense statement about reducing immigration from elsewhere. Why? What level is it at?

Anyway, it's the way the Mail uses this quote that's misleading - not necessarily the quote itself. What the article did with the switch was create the impression that some things that cast doubt on the figures for A8 migration also apply to migrants from the two new countries when they don't. So before they get this far, the reader has been given the impression that the self-employed and family members from Romania and Bulgaria are not counted. So when they see the comment about adding the 10,000 - with the nice little 'that the government know about' caveat - it only serves to bolster the idea that the two new countries' figures measure the same thing in the same way. But the government knows about a much, much higher proportion of Romanians and Bulgarians, because self employed people, some family members, those who claim to be self-sufficient and students are counted.

So, in effect, these two quotes extend the false association between the two sets of figures by adding what seem to be confirmations from two external sources that the association is valid.

Unattributed quotes and more equivocation

Always be sceptical of unattributed quotes. There are a couple here that reinforce the impression that people external to this paper support the article's criticism. Here's the first:

Critics are now warning that key public services, including schools and hospitals, could be put under increasing pressure.

The trouble with this is that critics of the government figures would include the writers of this article. This might be nothing more than a made up warning. Next:

Business leaders say they are concerned that up to half a million British youngsters may find themselves out of work.

'Business leaders' is wonderfully vague. Which ones? Do they know what they're talking about? How can we evaluate whether or not their conclusions are supported by the evidence? Why should we trust them? Do they even exist?

We'll come back, but for now, let's skip forward a bit to the next attributed quote in the article, as it probably sheds a bit of light on this:

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "The Government must understand that migration is not a long-term solution to the tragic skills shortages that many young people have.

"Over 500,000 18 to 24 year olds are presently out of work. Yet no one seems to notice because many of the jobs have been filled by willing migrant workers.

"This is unsustainable and we are in danger of creating a two tier society, with many going straight from school to a life on welfare."

This is probably who the paper is referring to as 'business leaders'. One guy. This quote is separated from the unattributed one to give the impression of greater numbers. Initially, I thought this might be a quote taken from a statement about something else, since nothing in the quote links it to Romanian and Bulgarian migration. Turns out I was wrong. It is about the Bulgarian and Romanian figures, buth the reason there's no link is because it has been cut out. It's been cut out because it's positive. It's from a BCC press release with the snappy title 'BCC statement: migration not the long term answer to tackling the tragic skills shortages of British school leavers'.

Here's the section of the release that the Mail has removed:

The current buoyant UK economy means it is no surprise that the high level of migration from Eastern Europe is continuing.

UK businesses value the benefit that migrants bring, recognising the work ethic that so many have in comparison to young potential British employees.

Wouldn't you know it - it was the positive bit! Who'd have thought that eh? It shouldn't come as a surprise, but the Mail have cherrypicked the negative bit. The bit about the benefit and the positive work ethic. Well, if you were about to start talking about how eastern Europeans are workshy benefit scroungers, you'd want to downplay that as well, wouldn't you?

Little swicthes among the quotes

Going back to where we'd got to before I skipped to that quote, there's a nice little bit of misdirection about the Romania and Bulgaria figures:

To tackle the problem, ministers have promised to limit the number of work permits handed out to Eastern Europeans to 20,000.

Since the article is mainly focused on migration from the two new countries, and has included quotes that deliberately serve to further the confusion between the two sets of figures, the reader could take away the impression that these new 10,535 from Romania and Bulgaria are what have led to the limit being introduced. It isn't a blatant implication, but there could be confusion that isn't clarified.

At this point, the paper could make the scope of the new figures from Romania and Bulgaria clear by revealing the number who have been issued with work permits so far. At the moment, the number including family members is 815 - out of 1,115 applications. The rest of the 10,000 are made up of those exempt from needing permits, the highly skilled, the self employed and those who register as self-sufficient. Keep that in mind when you see what the next unattributed quote is:

But critics have pointed out that the Government can do little to stop immigrants travelling to Britain or claiming to be selfemployed.

This comes straight after the article has just made a claim specifically about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration - mentioning the 20,000 limit. It then makes a definite claim about the figures, linking the sentences with the word 'but'. But if you're talking about the Romanian and Bulgarian figures, this sentence is demonstrably false. Looking at the actual figures, we can see that 155 people who applied to come as self-employed people to the UK have had their application refused. So yes, the government can stop people coming claiming to be self employed.

This may be getting a little confused, so it's time to boil everything down here a bit.

• Damian Green's quote is about one set of migrants, but is used in such a way that makes that fact unclear

• Sir Andrew Green's quote - which itself isn't entirely clear - has been used in such a way to compund the impression that the A8 migration is the same as Romanian and Bulgarian migration

• Later on, the paper quotes David Frost of the BCC, nicely cutting the bit where he mentions the benefit of this migration. It separates this quote froma an earlier unattributed comment from 'business leaders', which is likely to be the paper's way of using the same quote twice
  

• All these quotes are used to make it appear as though the three people quoted are agreeing with what the Mail has said up until this point. That includes the lie about the number of circus artistes

• The paper uses unattributed quotes to make its own criticisms look well supported by a host of external authorities

• A definite statement is made about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration, with a little bit of equivocation that makes it unclear exactly what has led to the imposition of a 20,000 worker's permit limit

• A statement is made that only applies to the other A8 countries, but is linked to the previous statement about Romania and Bulgaria with a 'but', giving the false impression that there is no way to stop Romanians and Bulgarians designated as self-employed from coming to the UK

This is taking some time, but there really are lots of ways this article misleads and covering all of them will take a lot of effort. Bear with me. There's only the exciting conclusion to come.

Click below for the further thrilling instalments in 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration'!

How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part I: "The Context"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part II: "The Bait"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part III: "The Switch"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part IV: "The Big Little Lie"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part VI: "The Final Chapter"