PCC - Rod Liddle was inaccurate

Good news - the PCC has upheld a complaint against the Spectator for Rod Liddle's nasty little blog post last year on the grounds that it was inaccurate, which it was.

This time, rather than just sit behind the idea that Liddle is a columnist so nobody will believe a word he says anyway - the Spectator decided to defend Liddle by claiming his post was in fact accurate and offer some evidence in his support.

Barnbrook suspended from Barking & Dagenham Council, made to go on ethics training

Richard Barnbrook has finally been suspended for a month from Barking & Dagenham Council for lying about the number of knife murders in his area. Tory Troll has more, including the full set of sanctions, which mention ethincs training. Ethics and someone from the BNP? Can you say 'cognitive dissonance'? Barnbrook probably can, but only with great diffculty.

Moron Richard Barnbrook's potential suspension

Richard Barnbrook in front of a picture of the 1966 World Cup Squad surrounded by all his friends
This is the second of two posts about Richard Barnbrook's potential suspension. This will look at Barnbrook's defence, and how the tabloids are relevant to it and the actions that made it necessary.

Can the Mail really be this bad?

**Correction** In this post, I managed to miss that while the original Mail on Sunday version of this story did mention that the suspect was white, it put him in his twenties rather than thirties. Apologies for any confusion - but it doesn't much alter the thrust of the post.

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News:

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

Sometimes I jump the gun when I write this blog. I suppose it's the nature of a medium that's so given over to instant reaction that sometimes we can say things that given a little bit of time will prove to be a bit hasty.

I hope I'm being hasty today, because I really don't want to believe that even the Mail can be as offhandedly nasty as I think it's being.


On Monday, I looked at the Mail's coverage of the apparently racist murder of a Sri Lankan teenager, Nilanthan Murddi. It was a bit of a sprawling 'on the fly' post, but the jist of it was:

1. the Mail used the picture of a white kid, Connor Black, who was also murdered over the weekend but not the main subject of the article's headline ('Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed two lives') to illustrate search results for the story

2. the original print version of the story, headlined 'Knife crime claims another two teenage lives' had a great amount of space devoted to pictures of Connor Black, the scene of his murder, flowers left at the scene and a picture of the victim of another crime included under the headline despite her not being a teenager, not being the victim of knife crime and not having her life 'claimed' - but no picture of the Asian victim

3. the original print version of the story tried incredibly hard to link the murder to turf wars between rival Sri Lankan gangs, despite the man arrested for the murder being a white 31 year old.

The online version of the story puts some of these things right. It includes a couple of pictures of Nilathan Murddi. The headline's changed to reflect the possible racist motive for the crime. The attempts to link the murder with a Sri Lankan gang turf war have been cut back to saying just that some locals thought he was a member of a gang (scaling back considerably the original claim that a local Councillor said that - which casts doubt on whether he actually did).

The search result picture, however, has disappeared. Not because it's been replaced with a picture of Nilathan Murddi, but because the story doesn't appear in search results for it on the Mail website.

Searching for the headline doesn't return any results. Searching for 'racist murder' doesn't return a result for this story. Searching for 'Nilanthan Murddi' doesn't return a result for this story, but does for another one about David Beckham and knife crime. The only result I can get for this story is by searching only for 'nilanthan' or the original misspelling of his name in the story 'nilanthan moorty', both of which return a result for the new story, with the old version of the headline 'Knife crime Britain claims two more teenage lives as boys aged 16 and 17 are brutally killed'.

Last night, searching for 'connor black' returned the same result (old headline, new version of the story), along with what must be a much earlier incarnation, 'Boys aged 16 and 17 stabbed to death in latest Blade Britain tragedies'('Britain's knife culture claims more victims as two teenage boys are stabbed to death' in the search result) that doesn't include much information about Nilanthan Murddi's murder - probably because not much was known at the time it was written. This morning, searching for 'connor black' only returns the second, older story.

It looks very much like the paper is removing keywords from the new version of the article to make it as difficult as possible to find in a search of the site, while making changes to the version of the story online so that anyone who might follow a link to it doesn't find any material that might be legally sensitive. Whoever's responsible for the site's content has just managed to miss the older misspelling and Nilanthan's forename on its own.

I'm hoping that this is because the paper is preparing much larger coverage of the story. This is not completely unlikely - it would allow the paper to flex its 'we're not racist' muscles, and from a tabloid editor's point of view it won't hurt matters that he has some very photogenic relatives to interview. There's been nothing in the dead tree version of the paper so far - but the original dodgy version was in the Mail on Sunday so we might have to wait until the weekend to see it.

If we don't (as I suspect), then the paper is not allowing its print readers to find out that Murddi is not actually the victim of a turf war between Sri Lankan gangs and that the real likely motive of his murder is racist. It's also making it as difficult as it can for its actual online readers to find that information, while keeping it there to please the lawyers. That would go beyond confirming my worst expectations of the Mail, and they're very low to start with.

Either way, it doesn't change the fact that the paper's initial reaction to news of the stabbing of an Asian kid - with a white man in his thirties as the arrested suspect - was that he must have been the victim of a Sri Lankan gang turf war.

Like I said - that coverage of Stephen Lawrence was over a decade ago.

The Daily Mail, race and knife crime

I'll start with a quick question.

You're involved with the online content of a national newspaper. You have to summarise a story with the headline 'Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed two lives'. You only have space for one picture to illustrate the story on search results. Do you:

a. Use a picture of the victim of the racist attack, since he's the subject of the main thrust of the headline (and the one sentence summary: 'A boy of 17 was killed in a racist attack in the street, his friends claimed today')?

b. Use a picture of the victim of the other murder?

Now, two bits of extra information before you decide. Firstly, the national newspaper in question is the Daily Mail. Secondly, the victim of the allegedly racist murder is Asian, and the other victim is white. Answer below the fold:


Don't look for the comments. They've long gone
Naturally, it's the white guy in the picture. He's not the main subject of the headline and anyone who only sees this picture might think the victim of the racist murder is white, but there you go.

The story now has the headline 'Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed three lives', and includes this sentence:

Some residents claimed Nilanthan was connected to Tamil street gangs but police said there was no reason to suspect the attack was gang-related.

Remember that - no reason to suspect the attack was gang-related. We'll come back to this later.

As well as the headline change from 'two' to 'three' lives claimied at the weekend, the article also completely replaces the original that appeared in the Mail on Sunday with the headline 'Knife Crime Britain claims another two teenage lives'(one URL that pops up in a Google search for that headline is:
www.mailonsunday.co.uk/.../Knife-crime-Britain-claims-teenage-lives-boys-aged-16-17-brutally-killed.html). It appeared in a spread across the top half of two pages in the dead tree version, which I've pictured below. But something's missing? What could it be?

What's missing from this picture?
Let's see. Big picture of victim - check. Big picture of scene - check. Close up of flowers at scene - check. Big picture of the non white victim - waitaminute! There's no picture of the victim who isn't white! There's space for a picture of the scene of the white kid's murder and a close up of flowers at the scene, and space for a picture of the white victim of another crime included under the headline although she's neither a teenager nor the victim of knife crime, but no space for a picture of the non-white victim. Why, anyone might think he's been deliberately left out.

Have a look again at the two page spread. See where the join of the two pages is? That's where the main coverage of the murder of the Asian kid starts. There looks to be roughly two and a half columns of text devoted to the white kid, plus a montage of pictures that makes the coverage total of around six columns. The Asian kid gets about one and a third, and two sentences in the story's introduction.

Remember the bit in the new version about there being no evidence the murder was gang related? Just over a third of the scant coverage of Nilathan Moorty's murder in the original article it taken up by attempts to link it with gang activity, starting with this in the intro:

The 17-year-old, Nilanthan Moorty, was stabbed to death in South London after apparently being caught up in a clash between rival gangs.

And later, this:

Croydon councillor Mike Selva said the victim was a member of a Sri Lankan gang known as the Tamil Boys. The owner of a local dry cleaning firm, who did not want to be named, added that a bloody turf war had been raging between rival Sri Lankan gangs in Croydon and nearby Tooting.

He said: ‘It’s non-stop. There are fights between them all the time – the police are always splitting them up.

‘There have been three or four murders in the past year around here but they never get reported. It’s like living in a war zone.’

You get the picture. A turf war between rival Sri Lankan gangs led to this murder (and a mysterious three or four other murders that somehow never got reported to the police), except as we know from the new version, no it didn't.

You might be tempted to give the paper the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe the bit about no evidence of gang involvement came later than this article and the two hacks involved had no idea who was involved and that was the most likely explanation at the time. But then, I've read the rest of the article and you probably haven't. It goes on to say:

Scotland Yard said in a statement: ‘ The suspect, described only as a white male, got out of the cab and was involved in an argument with the driver.

The suspect is a white male - which kind of implies that he isn't involved in a turf war between rival Sri Lankan gangs. And yet the only explanation we're offered for the murder is the turf war and rival Sri Lankan gangs. No wonder the story's been replaced on the website.

The Mail's main claim to being anti-, or at least not-racist rests on its coverage of the Stephen Lawrence murder. One of the most shocking aspects of that murder and the police's complete mishandling of the case, which led to the MacPherson Report and a massive shake-up in the way the police work, was the way that the police assumed that Lawrence must have been up to no good because he was black. Here, we have the Mail assuming that the Asian victim of a murder must have been the victim of a Sri Lankan gang turf war - even though the person accused was white.

The Mail's coverage of the Lawrence murder, which it still cites in its defence when being accused of racism, took place eleven years ago.

**UPDATE** The story no longer shows up in a search of the Mail site for 'Racist Murder' or any other term I can think of that should turn this article up at all. Could be that there'll be better coverage in tomorrow's paper to make up for this, since Moorty's picture didn't turn up in the Standard until today. Could be I've jumped the gun a bit. I hope I have.

What a difference a year makes II

Last week, I posted 'What a difference a year makes' - a rather rambling examination of how the tabloids have managed to push their usual storylines through two very separate frenzies of sensationalised coverage of two particular events.

The train of thought that led me to posting it started with me wondering exactly what the tabloids were focusing on last year, since figures suggest that knife crime was actually higher then. Of course, I remembered the Maddie story and realised why all bets were off.

But today, I've been trawling through my archives of Political Correctness Gone Mad stories because of the Anthony Browne thing. I came across this: 'Let's make up some nonsense about PC with the Sun', which referred to this Sun article: 'Why kids need to learn APCs'.*

The Sun randomly chops the end off archived articles for some reason so this A to Z ends at E, but I managed to put all the letters in my post about it. These two entries are the ones I'm on about today (below the fold):

K is for KNIVES. Schools now have the power to introduce metal detectors to search pupils for hidden weapons.

X is for X-RAY. See K is for Knives.

So, last year - tough measures to stop kids carrying knives? It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!

This year? 'Britain on alert for deadly new knife that freezes victims' organs'**.

* Hur hur, geddit? APCs! Just in case the actual Sun readers didn't geddit, the original had the PC in a red font. In a way that reminds me of being nudged in the ribs by some wag telling a funny, thus making me want to nudge them in the fucking kidneys.

** Love that 'deadly new knife'. Old knives aren't deadly. No sir. They can't freeze your spleen!

The BNP, honesty and Mothers Against Knives

Oh, did you think we were from Mothers Against Knives? Whatever gave you that idea?

Back when there was a bit of a flap about Richard Barnbrook, of BNP infamy, getting a blog at the Telegraph, I said I'd be checking in for a regular comedy fix. I have remained true to my word, and the bumbling oaf regularly makes me laugh with his ridiculous proclamations about sticking it to the Assembly when what really happened was that he got told off for eating a banana or something. Well, I laugh until I remember who he is and who he represents, and then my smile dies on my lips, but up until then it's okay.

What his blog reveals, among other things, is the relationship with the truth we'd expect from the BNP. Whether he's making stupid claims that get removed when they're shown to be bullshit, pretending things didn't happen in a video by pointing viewers to the wrong point, or just clearly having a fantasy version of what has happened in meetings swimming around his head, the man is clearly not averse to pointing his readers away from the truth.

One example is the creation of 'Mothers Against Knives', a group that appears to sponsor a petition he circulates on his blog calling for undefined 'tough new measures' to bring about the end of knife crime.

Except it doesn't. There is a real group called 'Mothers Against Knives', which apparently wants nothing to do with the BNP and has asked that the party remove all references to it from its literature.

Now, this could be an honest mistake . The BNP may well have nobody who knows how to use Google to see if there's already a group with the name they want to use for their front organisation.

If this was the case, you'd expect the name of the group to be changed to something difficult to confuse with the existing one, the petition changed to reflect the new name and an apology published so that nobody confuses the two.

The actual reaction has been to quietly change the title of the blog post that introduces the petition (after it's dropped off the front page), leave the petition as it is and make no mention about the change either on the blog or in any of the blog's comments.

That new impossible to confuse blog title? 'Mothers Against Knives Steps Up A Gear' has become 'London's Mother's Against Knives Steps Up A Gear'. Score one for openness and honesty!

If the BNP had no idea they were piggybacking a genuine group and could well be confusing people into thinking there was some affiliation between the two when they set things up - they do now. Adding the word 'London' to the beginning of the blog post that introduces the petition does nothing to inform people who might be tempted to sign the form.

Of course, the party may be in the process of changing everything and in the next couple of days there'll be an apology and everything. But then again, maybe not eh?

**UPDATE**The petition on the blog has now had 'London's' bunged on the top in a different font. That's probably about as honest as we can expect.

Let's play a game

The Metroplolitan Police Authority has published new figures for homicide and violent crime, comparing 12 months up to June 2007 with 12 months up to June 2008. How long before the tabloids leap all over the figures and bellow front page headlines at us about them? Go on, guess.

Made your guess? Now read on.

Okay - now I can tell you that the figures show that knife crime has dropped in the capital by 14%, robbery is down by 24%, youth violence is down by 7% and homicide is down by 12%. Here they are in full if you don't believe me.

Want to change your guess?

Of course, we may see some coverage that either:

1. Pretends the figures say something they didn't. Probably by mixing the figures up with some unrelated ones from somewhere else to make it look as though they say knife crime has 'soared'. You know the sort of thing. 'Crime in London 'soars', say police' in the headline, stats revealing that someone not in the police says cake baking has risen by a few percent in the main body of the story, real stats tucked away at the bottom.

2. Bangs on about how you can't trust police statistics. Except when they tell you there are more black people involved in committing knife crime, and more white victims. Then you can even pretend 'unknown' victims means 'white', even though the one explanation for who those unknown people are says they're black. And it's alright to include that explanation even though it contradicts one of the main premises of your article, because it assumes the black victims are villains anyway.

3. Attacks lefties for ignoring the truth. Why are you ignoring the truth? Feral youths on the streets have knives that can freeze your spleen. Won't someone think of the children's spleens?

But we'll probably see nothing but tumbleweeds.

I got these stats from Mark Easton's marvellous blog at the BBC. The comments there include the most perfect distillation of the first sentence in no. 2. You can't trust police statistics because:

If you beleive other government figures accidents are down at speed camera sites.

That is why they are covering up the fact that a motocyclist was killed last week at a camera site because he braked and the numpty behind him in a car tail-ended him.

It is not an isolated case. Norfolk "safety camera partnership" and the bbc are covering up the footage that the BBC had clearly showing braking for speed cameras causing accidents.

I'll beleive crime is reducing when i see it. three people I know have had their motorcycles stolen this year that is up from one last year a 300% increase. My partners car was keyed this year thats up from no times last year.

Priceless. Accidents can't be down at speed camera sites because this fella knows of some accidents at some speed camera sites in Norfolk. Crime can't be down in London because he knows some people who had their motorbikes nicked and someone who had their car keyed last year (in Norfolk, by the looks of things).

Hat tip to Anton Vowl at the ever-cool Enemies of Reason for this one. Top spot, that.

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!