The government won't cut enough foreign students for the Daily Mail.

Learn from the Woolas

One thing that was so annoying about scaremongering lying liar Phil Woolas being Immigration Minister was his courting of the right wing press while failing to grasp its narrative on immigration.

Here's what it is - 'waah! There are too many of them! The government is too soft! New proposal? Foreigners might still get in. Waah! (We'renotracistokaythanksbye)'.

Special report: are there too many blacks? What, how is that racist? Can't say anything now.

Via here

Late on Friday, the Daily Mail published a special report headlined: 'Special report: Will the white British population be in a minority in 2066?'

It's a curious question for the paper to ask, since just under three weeks ago it told us that indeed 'By 2066, white Britons 'will be outnumbered' if immigration continues at current rates'.

Why does the author, James Slack, feel the need to ask the question now then?  Is this 'special report' an in depth examination of the evidence behind the last article?

A Home Affairs Editor who could have been refused a job

I've always liked Steven Poole's Unspeak. I'd have liked to have done something similar, but I am neither as clear a writer nor as clever a dude.

I was reminded of Unspeak when I saw James Slack's 'British jobs for migrant workers: Figures ridicule Labour's employment pledge' in yesterday's Mail. (If that headline looks familiar, it's probably because you saw the almost identical 'British jobs for foreign workers: Experts reveal 70% of new jobs taken by migrants' at the top of Slack's similar story last July).

Foreign worker scare stories - it's hard to kill what's already dead

They're back. They're not learning to eat horses rather than immigrants though.

Another foreign worker scare story has risen slowly from the mortuary slab and started shuffling toward us, its insides slopping past its floppy dead genitals to splat on the cold tiles at its feet. Tomorrow's Daily Mail headline story is 'Labour's betrayal of British workers: Nearly every one of 1.67m jobs created since 1997 has gone to a foreigner', and the Express has '97% OF JOBS GO TO IMMIGRANTS'.

Another lesson in what the Mail does when immigration figures aren't scary enough

Regular readers will already know what the Daily Mail does when statistics are released that do not fit with what the paper wants to tell its readers about immigration, but James Slack (the Home Affairs Editor, no less.  Ooh - get him) gives us a lovely lesson for new readers and old alike.  Aren't we lucky!

Statistics were released on Thursday that should by rights please the Mail.  You can find them here and here.  A clue as to what they might be is in the page title of the article on the website (top left in the picture below the fold), which is strangely not the healdine of the story anymore:

How the Daily Mail responds to people who don't toe the line

Remember Julie Spence?  She's the Chief Constable and tabloid darling who got acres of fawning coverage in the Mail for speaking about how immigration strained the police in Cambridgeshire.  In 2007 and 8, she was at the centre of stories like 'Mass migration and a 'fractured' Britain', 'Police force spending over £1 million a year on interpreters due to rise in migrant workers', 'Immigrant motorists fuelling rise in road crashes, says police chief', 'Sex-trafficking soars with at least 100 brothels in Cambridgeshire alone', 'Chief constables called to crisis summit with Jacqui Smith on immigrant crimewave', 'Commentary: The facts behind crime and migration', 'Police chief calls for more cash to fight migrant crime despite official report claiming there isn't a problem', 'Extra funds promised by Government to help police deal with rising immigration levels', ''Economic downturn could spark ethnic tensions', says police chief', 'Mass immigration to blame for knife culture, chief constable warns' and 'It's NOT racist to tell the truth about immigration and crime, says leading police chief'.

Phew!  That's a lotta coverage. 

Seriously dude, why 70 million?

Before Christmas, I asked 'Why 70 million anyway?' in response to the tabloids' constant hammering of the number as an unacceptable level for the UK population.  I keep seeing the figure, but no reason why it should be so scary.

"I risk looking like a total fool if it turns out that everyone knows if the population hits 70 million, the demons start emerging from the mirrors or something, but sod it, I'm confused.  Why have we settled on that number as the one that must not be crossed, ever?"

I said.

Recycling old, old figures and pretending they're new, with MigrationWatch, the Express and the Mail

Sometimes, when you're a plank like me who spends a lot of time examining tabloid rubbish, coming back to look at the papers after a long break can be a bit confusing.   You've seen everything before, especially when you're looking at immigration scare stories.

The same themes are covered, with the same actual numbers with quotes from the same boring talking heads.  It's like a racist Groundhog Day.  If Punxsutawney Phil sticks his head out, 'IMMIGRATION IS OUT OF CONTROL' and if he doesn't, 'IMMIGRATION IS OUT OF CONTROL'.  Yuck.  When do I get to punch the twat trying to sell me something I'm not buying?

The tabloids and right wing extremism

Just who are these blackshirted fellows?
The relationship between tabloid reporting and the increase in the BNP's popularity is an interesting one to look at.

The most violent country in Europe?

Bus stop outside Lidl in Penge High Street yesterday
"I'd like to think this [printing misleading headlines that bear no relation to the truth of a story] doesn't happen in the Mail - I'm not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn't. It does happen in some areas of the media."
Paul Dacre, 2009

Aaargh! A foreign worker scare story! You're on your own now.

James Slack, yesterday
I've mentioned it before, but sometimes it gets mania-inducingly boring to look though tabloid nonsense, because so much of it is repeated, seen it all before, why are you bothering with that one again when it wasn't even right in the first place, lazy old poo.

Is there ever a press release from MigrationWatch that doesn't make the Daily Mail?

Today's Mail includes a nice immigration scare story that's pretty typical of the paper's output. 'UK migrant total is 'three times the world average'' is the headline. Frightened yet?

The basic premise of the article is this. The percentage of the world's population who are migrants has risen from 2.5% to 3% between 1960 and 2005, while the percentage of the UK's population who are migrants has risen from 4.5% to 11% between 1961 and 2008. Therefore, claims that the rise in the number of migrants in the UK is part of a global phenomenon are rubbish, we have a ridiculously high proportion of migrants in the UK and it's all Labour's fault.

The smell of racism and the Mail

I have been pulling together a post about the Mail's most recent flurry of anti-immigration stories, reflecting on the reliability of MigrationWatch's stats that have been used to back up a couple of the stories and the paper's own shoddy stats that I'll post when it's ready - but I have to say that something sailed almost completely past my radar.

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.

When there's no more room in Hell, the immigration scare story will walk the earth

With zombies, it's the sheer number that's scary
I've said said it before, no matter how many of these buggers you shoot in the head, they just keep on coming. I've just dispatched one stumbling, empty eyed corpse only to turn around and see another three or four behind me. Gah!

Teenage muggers to get free gold plated BMWs just like asylum seekers

Some typical teenagers yesterday
You don't have to have very keen bullshit detectors to spot when some Daily Mail headlines are away with the fairies exaggerated cobblers. There's an example on the website today, in 'Teenage muggers to be let off if they say sorry under new plans'. Only the most gullible of readers would spit their toast in indignant rage at this one.

This is the quality journalism scandal pays for

I hadn't realised when I was posting about Paul Dacre's speech yesterday, but at the time there was a typical example of the kind of 'reporting and analysis of public affairs' that we might lose if the tabloids have to stop reporting scandals kicking around on the Mail website.

'Home office controls on migrant workers 'are a con'' is the headline. It's a cracker - since that 'is a con' in the headline is attributed to nobody. When James Slack later says in the article, 'The Home Office was immediately accused of attempting to 'con' the public,' he's probably left 'by me' off the end of the sentence. So, we're off to a good start.

Ministers have slashed the number of jobs available to non EU migrants by 200,000.

But the number of work permits given to those outside Europe is likely to be cut by only 14,000.

What a con. I tell you what, I'm bloody scandalised.

Where does the 'is likely to be cut by only 14,000' figure come from? How likely is it? Don't go searching the ONS to try to find the figures. They're not there. They've been made up calculated by James Slack himself. Here's how:

Under the Home Office's old work permit rules, there were around one million jobs falling into the category of shortage occupations.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said that, when the Government's new points-based system is introduced for shortage occupations later this month, that figure will be cut to 800,000.

Right. There are a million 'shortage occupation' jobs, and these have all been available to non-EU migrants. Woolas has promised to cut these jobs by 200,000, which he has done. But this is not good enough because:

Jobs which have been removed from the list include secondary school teachers, other than those specialising in maths and science.

However, the vast majority of the jobs on the list - while open to non EU nationals - are not currently filled by them, with EU workers taking a significant number instead. Of the current one million shortage occupation posts, only 70,000 are filled by non-EU migrants.

Based on the assumption non-EU migrants will, under the new list, continue to fill 7 per cent of shortage occupation jobs, this number will reduce to around 56,000 - a fall of only 14,000.

Here's a question that might sound a bit crazy. Bear with me. What if - right - what if most of the people from outside the EU fill the jobs that have been cut from the list? Wouldn't that mean a bigger drop than 14,000? Here's a list of the shortage occupations. Only certain types of doctor and nurse are included. Aren't quite a lot of dcotors and nurses from outside the EU?

On top of that, a condition of the new system is that:

Employers will need to get a sponsor licence to enable them to bring migrant workers into the country from outside the European Economic Area. [From the UK Border Agency press release]

That would have the potential of reducing the numbers of non-EU workers even further.

Sorry, did I just knock over your house of cards?

For a bit of comic relief in the story, Slack quotes Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch infamy, saying:

Sir Andrew said the announcement was 'pure spin'.

He added: 'We believe this so-called shortage occupation route should be suspended to give British workers first crack at all these jobs.'

Here's a quote that might be pertinent to Sir Andrew Green's comment from the Shortage Occupation List Q & A:

Q: Are jobs on the shortage list available to British people?

[Wait for it...]

Yes

What was that about 'pure spin'?

But this is clearly a NuLiebore con. The Government promised to reduce the number of non-EU migrants by 200,000 and it's likely that the total drop in non-EU workers will be less than that.

Waitaminute! Here's that press release from the UK Border Agency website I quoted earlier - '200,000 fewer jobs available for migrant workers under new rules'. It would appear that there's not a single claim about specifically non-EU migrants.

This is probably the best bit about this article. I love it. If I'm right, everything else in this post is basically filler. Take a couple of seconds to brace yourself for it.

Where does the idea of a reduction of 200,000 non-EU migrants come from? Who originally tried to trick us all? When you want to find this sort of thing out, Google is our friend.

Searching for 'non-eu migrant reduce 200000' returns an article with the headline 'Number of non-EU workers allowed into Britain is cut by 200000 ...'. Where? In the Daily Mail. Click the link and you get the new version about the claim being a con. A claim that was made in the Daily Mail.

It would seem that someone at the Mail looked at the figures and made the wrong assumption about them, because they are a fucking idiot.

What a con! How dare we lie to us? Bastards!

Whether or not that person was James Slack is unknown - but we have a lovely echo of the classic question asked in Slack's 'Analysis: Spinning and a gullible liberal media led to 'migrant crime wave myth' headlines':

Even if accurate, the coverage would have begged several questions, not least who had claimed there was a migrant crimewave in the first place?

A question answered by looking at Slack's earlier article 'Chief constables called to crisis summit with Jacqui Smith on immigrant crimewave'.

Has James Slack just fisked himself, or another Daily Mail hack? Who knows - and who cares?

I was going to end this post by asking what sort of person would decide that a claim about the number of jobs offered to migrants being reduced is a con if it doesn't reduce the number of people coming from outside the EU - given that most non white people coming into the UK would fall into that category, but I hadn't stumbled across the possibility that the initial claim was made in the Daily Mail.

Seriously - if anyone can find any claim made by anyone in government or from any government agency that suggests that 200,000 non-EU migrants would be stopped from coming to the country, put it in the comments. Please. As much as I'd like to have my work here cut short by Mail hacks fisking each other (or indeed themselves), I really don't fancy having to try to work out whether it's the government or itself the paper is sticking it to.

I tell you what - thank god for the Mail reporting on the contents of Kerry Katona's shopping bags. Without that, we wouldn't have such incisive analysis of policy as this.

What a difference a year makes

That door slamming? That was all sense of perspective running out of the door.

One of the things I've learned about newspapers - especially the tabloids - in the couple of years that I've been writing this blog is that their purpose is not actually to report the news. When I started, I understood that they spun the news a certain way, but I don't think I realised the lengths to which newspapers go to crowbar events into pre-prepared narratives. I used to play a game with the Daily Mail - 'Spot the Asylum Seeker Scare Story' - try to guess the number of pages before the first scare story about asylum seekers. I normally didn't have to count very far.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was how far stories like those were invented. Sure, I realised that the paper would have taken something that happened and exaggerated it out of all recognition, but I hadn't realised how many of them were based on thin air, or were actually based on lies. I've blogged before about how the figures the Mail (and other tabloids) use in a story - especially an immigration scare story - don't actually matter. They're just window dressing for pushing whatever the paper wants to push at any given time - like how Immigration Is A Bad, Bad Thing. To push this idea, the paper is not beyond exaggerating figures it knows to be misleading before being exaggerated, repeating figures from months ago and pretending they're new, or just pretending reports have said things they actually haven't.

Last summer, the tabloids were in the throes of a frenzy about a missing girl.

The Daily Express included mentions of the missing girl on around 100 consecutive front pages. That's a third of a year devoted to one missing child, although approximately 100,000 children go missing in the UK every year. There are a few reasons for the overwhelming coverage of the story, but the main one is that the abduction took place abroad, so the tabloids were free to print all sorts of speculation that would have been illegal had the child gone missing in the UK.

The interesting thing is that within all the reporting of what is a specific event, the tabloids managed to fit the story into regularly reported narratives, some of which had little to do with the story. One of the main threads of the coverage was the apparent incompetence of foreigners, this time in the form of the Portuguese police. Another was scaremongering about child safety. Perhaps most surprising was the ability of these papers to crowbar the kidnapping story into the general anti-Muslim narrative that the papers like to run.

From memory - and I have to work from memory since the Express has removed all the stories from its website - there were at least three stories in the Express about the girl being kidnapped by Muslims, which I made a brief post about at the time. The Mail had ''Stop the car, there's Madeleine': Witness sees her dragged by Muslim woman', 'Witness: Seeing 'Madeleine' in Morocco sent shivers down my spine', 'Bosnian police slow to react to new Madeleine 'sighting'', 'Madeleine hunt turns to Balkans after girl is heard crying for 'Daddy'', 'Third 'Madeleine in Morocco' sighting: 'I'm still convinced it was her,' says woman' and 'Madeleine: Eight possible sightings of her in just two days' which says, "[one witness] said the girl was accompanied by three women dressed in Muslim attire who were pushing three pushchairs" in one of the eight sightings, and in a sighting in the South of France, a "tall, swarthy man" was described with the child.

After the main frenzy died down, the Daily Star published the front page headline 'Muslim Sicko's Maddie Kidnap Shock'. The story didn't actually include details about Muslims kidnapping Madeleine McCann, as the headline promised, but details of how some Muslims on the internet had suggested that the McCanns might be responsible for the kidnapping of their daughter. The Daily Star, along with other Express Newspapers had to pay £500,000 and print an unprecedented front page apology to the McCanns just weeks before for the exact same thing.

Along with that apology and fine, several papers have now had to pay compensation to Robert Murat, another innocent person the papers smeared. The Tapas 7, friends of the McCanns, have also reportedly attempted to sue the tabloids for being smeared.

These legal wranglings are the result of the paper disregarding the actual truth because the reality didn't seem to fit into a proper internal narrative structure (separate from overarching narratives like 'foreigners are stupid' or 'Muslims are nasty'). Stories like this need a villain. They need an Ian Huntley, or a John Venables and Robert Thompson, and if they don't have one, the papers will invent them. Ask Colin Stagg, Robert Murat or maybe even Barry George. The truth is subordinate to the creation of a coherent narrative.

So, it should be no surprise that this summer's frenzy seems to have little basis in reality. As Septicisle covered, the newly released BCS figures show that the percentage of violent crimes involving a knife actually dropped marginally since last year, and the Metropolitan Police figures show a drop of 16% in recorded incidents. There may be areas where there are rises in knife crime, and there may be a rise in the number of young people involved, although that remains to be properly measured - but it is clear that the overall figures don't warrant the relentless press coverage of the last few months.

But the figures don't matter. What does matter is the narrative - this time a combination of the common one that the country is going to hell in a handcart, and another one that our youth is feral, criminal and out of control. There's another, new thread - but more on that later.

You know all caution about reporting the truth has been thrown out of the window when you see headlines like 'Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that freezes victims' organs'. Yes. I'm sure Britain's on the alert for that. It's probably one position above the sharks with lasers.*

Another story in the Mail, linked to on the website with the headline 'Shock figures reveal no part of Britain is safe as knife violence spreads EVERYWHERE' is 'Thugs committing 350 knife assaults EVERY DAY, as blade menace spreads to rural areas'. This story displays willful ignorance of actual figures, since it ignores every part of the evidence in the BCS of knife crime falling, although it does mention an overall drop in crime and that, 'Firearms offences recorded by police rose 2 per cent last year to reach a total of 9,803, while homicides were up three per cent to 784.' Instead of reporting the drop in knife crime, it reports the actual break down of knife crime figures, which were released for the first time this year and therefore impossible to compare with what has happened in previous years.

In fact, that might be a reason for the absolutely bonkers coverage of knife crime so far this year. Last year, the first government stats for the number of Romanians and Bulgarians who came to the UK since the two countries joined the EU were released. In the run up to the figures' release, the Mail reported that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK was 60,000 in one story, and 150,000 in another. The real figures showed that 8,000 came in the first three months, but by then 8,000 looked way too low since the paper had already poisoned the well for its readers. Late last year, the Mail unleashed another deluge of anti-immigration stories (even more so than usual) in the lead up to the government publishing its first ever report about the effects of immigration, ensuring that by its release anything positive in it would look absurd. It could be that the deluge of 'Blade Britain' stories has come as the result of a perceived threat to a staple tabloid narrative.

Even if it's not deliberate, the Moral Panic has had the effect of poisoning the well of official figures, at least with some commentators. See Neil Clark for one, or Keith Waterhouse for another in 'The British Crime Survey? It's all lies, damned lies and crime figures', whose ignorance of how polling systems work can only be wilful. Unless, of course, he's incredibly, incredibly stupid. I wouldn't know since I don't often read Mail columnists. I get enough opinion in its news coverage. [Hat tip to The Popular Front for the Liberation of Discordia for that one].

There's one thing missing from the feelgood hit of this summer, and that's a villain. Who's responsible for the stab party on ALL our streets?

It's a mixture. Mainly, young people are demonised - partly because the BCS doesn't record under 16s, so the papers (and Keith Waterhouse) can cling to the idea that we're all doomed in the face of actual figures, and partly because they fit in with a pre-existing narrative. Last month, the Mail crowbarred the knife crime hoo-hah into an attack on immigrants in 'Mass immigration to blame for series of crime 'spikes', chief constable warns', which was a suitably dishonest twisting of something Chief Constable Julie Spence said about recent immigrants not knowing it's illegal to carry knives. Oh, and it was someone else that mentioned the crime 'spikes', not the Chief Constable.**

This weekend though, developments are beginning to look more worrying than the scapegoating of migrants. Because now, apparently, the villain of the piece is black people.

'Over half of young knife suspects are black, Scotland Yard figures reveal' is a headline from Sunday. In itself, there's nothing wrong with reporting the stat, providing it's accurate. Of course, the paper focuses on the age group in the stats that shows the greatest proportion of black people accused in standard tabloid scaremongering style, but there's something a bit more distasteful than usual about that standard focus when we're talking about black people and violent crime.

The most irresponsible reporting comes in the paper's coverage of the ethnicity of the victims.

The article includes a handy table, subheaded 'THE EVIDENCE'. The table juxtaposes the number of under 18s accused of knife crime with the victims, as if to say that these perpetrators are responsible for crimes affecting these victims - and the text of the piece handily informs us that:

A highly-sensitive report reveals that 124 of the 225 under-18s legally 'proceeded against' for knife offences in the past three months are from the black community.

Yet in the overwhelming majority of reported cases of knife crime involving young people, the victims are white.

Notice how the last sentence doesn't tell us the actual number of victims. That could be because the number of victims is much higher than the number of people accused - partly because some may be victims of people over 18, and partly because there will be more crimes where nobody is accused than crimes where someone is. In not mentioning this discrepancy, it makes it look like the accused are responsible for all the crimes with a victim - and make it look as though young white people are overwhelmingly the victims of young black people in knife crime involving under 18s.

That aside - the biggest problem with that quote is that it isn't true. The table shows that in the victim's ethnicity isn't known in the overwhelming majority of knife crime reported to the police.

Although the paper offers this explanation for the number of people not specifying their ethnicity:

One possible explanation is that in many cases, the victims are black gang members who did not wish to co-operate with police, meaning the figures do not necessarily give a complete picture.

it doesn't bother to go as far as suggesting that victims might be black people (gang members or otherwise) who didn't report anything to police at all, for fear of reprisal. In any case - look at how even the victims of knife crime are villains who don't want to co-operate with the police if they're black. But only if they're black.

Also, since the paper admits that these figures are incomplete and it finds the time to mention this:

Since January 1, 16 teenagers have been stabbed to death in London, forcing Scotland Yard to launch a high-profile campaign targeting youngsters and hot-spots of knife crime.

you'd think that paper would find the room to report that of the teenagers stabbed to death in London this year (20, according to the London Paper, which in a perfect example of tabloid scaremongering about knife crime includes one person stabbed with broken glass, two people who were shot and two people who were beaten to death in its 'London knife crime teenage fatalities 2008' gallery), only three were white. You'd think that would be relevant in an article that pretends to examine the ethnicity of knife crime victims in London. You'd think an article that looked at figures that showed that the largest number of knife crime victims' ethnicity is unknown would mention the number of black victims of the most serious knife crime possible, but this one doesn't. Do you think the paper would ignore this figure if it showed that only 3 out of 16 teenage victims of knife murder in London were black, and around 10 were white?

Seriously?

In not including that figure, which is arguably the most relevant of all, the paper is doing the BNP's work for it. Yes, we say this all the time about the right wing tabloids - but in this case the Mail really is. Richard Barnbrook is making quite a lot of figures he claims to have that show that black people are responsible for 42% of knife crime in London. This stat is almost certainly something he's got confused with the number of black people accused of crimes involving an offensive weapon - but he's asked about this twice in Mayor's Question Time. Where he's going with this is anyone's guess - but mine would be that he wants extra sanctions against black people. Probably stop and search - but who knows? Now, he has an article in a supposedly respectable newspaper to back him up - and so does the wider BNP, which goes on about unreported white victims of violent crime perpetrated by black people (or Muslims, depending on who the shovel headed goons want to demonise on which particular day). Whatever Barnbrook wants to lead up to, this article slots perfectly into BNP propaganda, and it does so by ignoring very relevant details.

So, in a year we've gone from tabloids using a definite news event to fill space and perpetuate certain tabloid narratives, to tabloids pretty much inventing a moral panic, and using that to fit certain tabloid narratives. Last year, that included painting foreigners as incompetent and possible child kidnappers. It ended up with the tabloids demonising Muslims.

This year, it includes painting young people and foreigners as being responsible for knife crime. It's ended up with demonising black people for being responsible for knife crime perpetrated mainly against white people, even though only 3 out of 16 victims of stabbing murder in London have been white (one of whom was stabbed with glass and not a knife).

That's a nasty development. And a nasty regression to 1981. How far the tabloids go with this remains to be seen, but it feels like a mark has been overstepped.

Another question that will never be answered is this: if this summer's tabloid bonanza were about specific individuals rather than vaguely defined groups, how much money would the papers have had to pay in compensation for misrepresenting the truth?

*Yes, I know the wasp knife exists - it's just stupid to think it's going to be a major problem when it's just as easy to do damage to a person with a normal knife at a fraction of a fraction of the cost.

**Brilliantly, this article was written by James Slack, who on 17 April this year wrote 'Analysis: Spinning and a gullible liberal media led to 'migrant crime wave myth' headlines', which asked - in all seriousness - 'Even if accurate, the coverage would have begged several questions, not least who had claimed there was a migrant crimewave in the first place?'

This is despite the fact that he writes for the paper that published 'Chief constables called to crisis summit with Jacqui Smith on immigrant crimewave' on 7 February. The author? James Slack. Priceless.

**UPDATE**As if by magic, the table from the Mail appears in Richard Barnbrook's blog, with even the scant context given the figures by the paper removed. Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

James Slack and the truth

Jame's Slack's relationship to the truth is revealed today in 'Mass immigration to blame for series of crime 'spikes', chief constable warns'

See how the headline says that a Chief Constable says that immigration is to blame for crime spikes?

Here's what the actual article tells us, after a series of partial (and probably very selective) quotes from Chief Constable Julie Spence:

In the same evidence session, Local Government Association chairman Sir Simon Milton warned a series of 'spikes' in crime have taken place as a result of mass immigration .

He told the Home Affairs Select Committee there had been an issue with largely Romanian pick-pocketing gangs in the Westminster area.

Sir Simon added: 'Nationally there has been no crime wave but there are instances where there have been spikes in certain types of criminal activity.

'Much of it is low-level driving offences, and so on.'

Ah - so a Chief Constable didn't mention spikes at all. And the person who did said something a bit less alarming than the rest of the article implies.

The article then goes on to quote Spence extensively some more. The mention that it was actually someone else who talked about spikes is buried in a flurry of quotes to make it difficult to spot.

So Slack's relationship to the truth is a bit like my relationship with Jim Davidson. I've seen him on telly a few times, but didn't like it at all and hope I never see it again.

*UPDATE* Since posting this, the paper has changed the headline, removing the dodgy quote attribution. There's a cached version with the old headline here.

See also 'Truth and knives'

Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misrepresenting Government measures
The article says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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