Tabloid bullshit of the month - January 2011

It's the last Saturday of the month, and we all know what that means!

No, it's not the day I stalk the streets with a hammer. That's not even funny, stop it.

It's time for the 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award! Stick a conical party hat on and start drinking warm lager from a plastic cup while 'Lily the Pink' plays in the background and your aunt embarrasses herself on the dance floor.

It was a very wide field this month, but I've said why in the email to the lucky winner so I won't make you read that twice.

Apologies and foregin workers again

Howcome they only take two thirds now then?

Hello people. Light posting at the minute because I've been trying to pull together the Littlejohn post and left one of the books at my mum's a couple of weekends ago. Sorry about that.

Luckily for the time-pressed media blogger about town, a nice regular tabloid bunch of crap has splatted out of the Mail and the Express recently.

The Low Countries - traditionally highest population density in Europe?

In scare stories about how we should all be trembling under our beds because England is now the most densely populated country in the EU, it's traditional to include a sentence like this:

It has more people per square mile than the Low Countries, which has long been the most densely-populated region of the continent, MPs have been told.

Is England the most overcrowded country in Europe? Dutch figures get fishy

Look at all that land ripe for development

In my last post, I looked at the Daily Mail's most recent immigration stats and promised to look at the figures from 'This very crowded isle: England is most over-populated country in EU' in a separate post. So here I am.

Usually, when the Mail compares England's population figures to the rest of Europe it's comparing the most recent, up to date figures for England with ones for the rest of Europe that are a couple of years old (those have apparently been from the UN before). I suspected the same this time round and contacted the House of Commons Library for the current Mail figures.

Mail immigration headline changes

It's a cherrypickaaah!

Yesterday, exclarotive covered an extremely misleading headline on a story in the Mail. 'Number of immigrants living in the UK long-term SOARS by 20% as a quarter of babies are born to foreign mothers' didn't actually show that the number of immigrants living in the UK had SOARED by 20%, but that net migration - the difference between people arriving in the UK compared to how many left for a year or more - was 20% higher than last year.

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.

How racist will the Mail be this time?

Hello everybody!

It seems as though I spend as much time here posting about how I'm not posting as I do actually posting - but I'm doing it again.

Real life's still a bit - challenging - right now (trust me, you don't want to know) and this place has to take second place for a while but I promise I'll be back soon with a different look and everything. You might even get a profile picture. Here, I'll do you a deal:

Who needs superpowers to know the Mail will distort positive immigration numbers?

Run for your lives! It's black people!
Not many people in my real life know about this blog, and I write it under an anonymous pseudonym. Trying to right injustice anonymously and secretly, taking little personal credit for my actions - it's a bit like being a superhero but with less kung fu, jumping off buildings and tight-wearing. Well, less of the first two anyway. (Thanks very much, I'm here all week...birthdays, weddings, bar-mitzvahs...).

One of the people who do know who I am and what I do on this blog is my brother-in-law. The other day he mentioned a study that showed how immigrants don't jump housing queues and how it was getting a lot of coverage in the news. He thought papers like the Mail would have to admit the existence of a study that contradicts its line, since it had been covered everywhere else. That should at least be encouraging, right?

But wait! My Crackers-sense started tingling! "No they don't," I said, "They'll either ignore it or take some out of conext quote to make it look as though the report says the opposite." So imagine my lack of surprise when I saw that the report, which had been publicised by a press release headlined 'Research finds no bias in allocation of social housing' had been reported by the Mail with the following headlines:

'One in ten state-subsidised homes goes to an immigrant family'
and
'How ten per cent of State housing is taken up by immigrants'

depending on where you look on the Mail website (brought to you by James Slack's sidekick, Steve Doughty).

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.

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.

What's with all the 'white flight' stuff anyway?

Yesterday's hastily put together 'More white shite' looked at the Mail's most recent foray into scaremongering about the numbers of white people dwindling in this country while we are overrun by - gasp - ethnic minorities. It was a quick and dirty look through the distortions the paper had made to push it's point, but I want to have a separate look at the whys and wherefores of using the main exaggeration technique the paper used - adding Irish people to the 'established white population' of Britain.

Before I go on it would probably be good to get a couple of general points out of the way.

This latest white flight story is an example of the paper taking a pre-existing narrative it had only hinted at with innuendo and clever juxtaposition of pictures a little further in explicitly referring to race. It is not an example of the paper merely discovering interesting new statistics and reporting them, since it had previously published a similar story that promoted the exact same idea before it had access to these figures.

Given that, the story is another example of how the actual figures don't matter. The statistics are subordinate to the narrative the paper's trying to push. Since this is the second story that explicitly refers to white people leaving the country, it suggests that an editorial decision has been made to do that rather than imply, which is what the paper did before. Over and over and over.

In the scheme of things though, a drop of about 70,000 in the white British population in 2005-2006 due to emigration isn't actually very scary compared to the hundreds of thousands the paper had previously implied had left, which is why the paper has to distort a bit to increase it - but adding 5,000 to the total by including white Irish people makes little difference and the actual numbers don't matter anyway - so why do it at all?

The key is in one phrase, which shows the second part of the narrative in any immigration scare story in the Mail - and one that I haven't really focused on before properly since I'm normally looking at the main one. Here's the relevant phrase:

The figures have been calculated for every year back to 2002 - and this was the biggest decline yet.

The only way the paper can say that the most recent figures represented the 'biggest decline yet' is to include white Irish people in the calculations. And that's the second part of the narrative in any immigration scare story. That the most recent figures are the highest ever and the situation is getting 'out of contrtol'.

The paper adds to this impression in the story by following up with:

In the previous year, there had been a drop of just 42,300.

This makes it look as though there had been a steady fall of around 42,000 every year and things have shot up in 2005-06 - along with another unusually high spike in 2004 that it does actually mention.

In reality, the 42,300 is the unusually low figure. If we look at the actual figures for the number of white British people emigrating (going through the trouble of adding Irish people in the mix would be following the paper's less than honest agenda - plus, I cannot be arsed - but you can see that the 2004 including Irish people is still lower than all the other years for just British people), we can see the following drops due to emigration:

2001-02: -57,000
2002-03: -67,700
2003-04: -71,200
2004-05: -38,500
2005-06: -70,400

These figures would make a much better scare story about the numbers of white British people emigrating in recent years. Look! It's loads! Thing is though, the 'biggest decline yet' is the most important thing the paper is pushing. A more immediate story is likely to have more impact than one that looks in depth at previous trends.

Of course, in most immigration scare stories, some details get left out if they contradict the impression the paper's trying to give. In this one, the paper is scaring us by giving the impression that the white British population is dropping quickly, with this year being the biggest decline yet - while other ethnic groups are growing. Run to the hills!

The important detail, which would give a vastly different impression than the one the paper is trying to give, is the natural change in the white British popoulation - ie, the number of babies born compared to the number of deaths. While the paper does mention that:

Even though there were more births than deaths, the white British and Irish population still fell by almost 15,000 in 2006.

(This is inaccurate, since the paper has confused itself what with all this adding Irish people and not adding Irish people. The 'almost 15,000' only applies to white British. It would be closer to 25,000 had the paper included Irish people). This doesn't let us know how this compares with previous years. Having a look at the white British population, we can see that the overall change in population including natural change and emigration shows a very different trend:

2001-02: -57,800
2002-03: -62,800
2003-04: -48,900
2004-05: -3,600
2005-06: -14,900

While this year isn't the lowest drop yet, it's the second lowest - and less than half the level of the third lowest drop.

Had the paper been honestly interested in the fall in the numbers of white British people in the country, it would have mentioned these figures - but it's more important to push the 'biggest decline yet' idea, so only one year gets a mention - the figure from the same year we've been told is the 'biggest decline yet' in the white British population.

To be honest though, the level of contorting figures in this article is pretty low compared to others. It's not as if it pretends that over 10,000 people came to the country in three months to be circus stars when the real number was 55. But it shows the shift to explicitly worrying about the number of white people leaving the country, and shows pretty clearly how the paper trims stories to fit ongoing narratives rather than making stories shape those narratives. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. Alongside the playing down of reporting murders of brown people if they're not in gangs and playing up the number of black people accused of knife crimes as the paper has been doing recently, it's a worrying one as well.

More white shite

First day back from being away (I had a lovely time, thanks) and it's time to look at another recycled story with extra bits added, just like the last Mail story I looked at before I went away. Hurrah!

Via the MailWatch so-called Forums, I've discovered that the Mail have sort of recycled the story I covered in 'White Shite', including newer, more accurate figures from the National Statistics Office and taking the paper's slow march toward overt racism that little bit further.

The previous article's headline claim of ''White flight' as more than 400,000 Britons head for new life abroad' has been toned down considerably to 'Flight of white Britons from UK leaps to 70,000 per year ... but population still rising as Eastern Europeans come to Britain'. So, is this a celebratory article showing the paper to be cock a hoop over the fact that over 300,000 fewer white Britons than the paper previously tried to imply had left the counttry had actually emigrated? Go on. Guess.

Surprisingly though, for a Daily Mail article, this time the headline is actually more accurate than the article itself.

The figures the article is based on are on the National Statistics site (thanks to Raskolninkov in the MailWatch forum for pointing that out - my workload on this post is now way lower than it could have been).

In the body of the story, there is a considerable amount of farting around with figures to give a misleading impression of the numbers, and one or two outright lies - only one of which that I can see has been withdrawn with a contradiction later in the story (the paper's usual method for slipping in fibs).

While the figures do show that 70,400 'White British' people left the UK in the year to mid-2006, the article claims:

But although 75,000 'white British' men and women are moving away, the population is still rising because of an influx of ethnic minority groups.

So, just under 5,000 extra have been slapped on the top. This isn't arbitrary, as the paper later reveals in its contradiction of this claim:

The white British population went down by 70,400 over the year through emigration. And the white Irish population fell by 4,600 because of emigration, bringing the total decline in the existing white population to 75,000.

So, although this contradiction makes it clear that the figure of 75,000 also includes people who are not 'White British', the article still makes the misleading claim that they all are 'White British' close to the beginning of the article.

More on that withdrawal later, since it includes a bit of a whopper of its own. But before we get to that, there's a bizarre extra fib.

The article makes this claim:

According to Government estimates, the established white population of England dropped by nearly 250,000 between 2002 and 2006.

In reality, the figures show that the 'White British' population dropped by 188,000 between 2002 and 2006. Adding the drop in the number of 'White Irish' people takes the total to 235,600 - so this is possibly the figure the paper's getting at by using the weaselly term 'established white population'. There's a new one for you.

Now, back to the withdrawal of the claim about 75,000 'White British' leaving the UK. Looking at it closely, you'll notice that it makes the bold claim at the end that the total of British and Irish leaving the country is:

bringing the total decline in the existing white population to 75,000.

Important word that 'existing'. Because the number of white people in the country is not made up of purely 'White British' and 'White Irish' people. There are quite a number of white people from all sorts of other countries that live in England, from the US and Australia through to Germany, Poland, Russia and so on. They're lumped together as 'Other White'.

The number of 'Other White' people in the UK grew by 76,000* between 2005 and 2006, which means that the 'total decline in the existing white population' due to emigration was just 4,400. Since 2001, the 'white population' actually grew by 93,800 due to net immigration. Using the word 'existing' covers the paper's back in not including the new 'White Other' people, since they didn't exist in England previously. But if the paper were being accurate, it would exclude 'White British' and 'White Irish' births from its 'existing white population' and include deaths. But it doesn't, because the word's only there to make it possible to exclude 'Other White' people from calculations.

The actual article doesn't exactly make it clear that the 75,000 drop only refers to emigration, making it look as though the total drop in the 'existing white population' is 75,000. Even if we only count 'White British' and 'White Irish' as the existing white population, it only fell by 25,600 between 2005 and 2006. If we actually use the 'white population' term a bit more accurately, we can see that it actually grew by 50,300.

It seems that to the Daily Mail, nobody from outside the British Isles should be counted as being white. How, exactly does being from Ireland make someone more established as British than someone who came from another country who arrived at the same time?

Beyond this, there's this fib:

The figures have been calculated for every year back to 2002 - and this was the biggest decline yet.

It's only the biggest decline of British and Irish combined. There was a greater number of 'White British' emigrating between 2003 and 2004, but there were fewer 'White Irish' emigrating in the same year.

This lumping together of 'White British' and 'White Irish' looks quite charitable of the Mail on the surface of it. It seems to say that being Irish is as near as being British to make no difference, which is quite magnanimous of the Mail, given what it thinks about being British. But of course, it's only done to make us think more British people are leaving, and in more than one way. See, the paper doesn't count Ireland as Britain, although it does count Irish as British.

The National Statistics Office has produced a Commentary Paper to go along with the figures, which gives this helpful note about the 'White Irish' population:

This fall is attributable both to net out-migration (in particular to Ireland)

So, most of the 'White Irish' people are actually returning to Ireland. So, 'White Irish' is the same as 'White British', but Ireland is not Britain. My head hurts.

The conclusion is - that 'White Flight' stuff? Complete arse. There were more white people in the UK in 2006 than there were in 2002, but you don't count as white in the Mail if you don't consider yourself as coming from the British Isles. Take that Hitler! Take that, the Ku Klux Klan! Take that American white power lunatics! You're not even white!

Jeez. It comes to something when the Daily Mail is more exclusive than the Ku Klux Klan.

*Originally, I'd listed this as 706,000 in a massive typo, but I've corrected the number here.

Let's carry on 2008 with a good immigraton scare story!

Back in January, I covered the Mail's 'It's official: England is the most crowded country in Europe' by showing how the article actually said England was set to become Europe's most crowded country - by assuming that populaion density in Holland wouldn't grow at all after 2005. You can see the post at 'Let's start 2008 with a good immigration scare story!'

Now, eight months later, we have 'It's official - England is the MOST crowded country in Europe, thanks to immigration' Why, it's almost as if the Mail recycles stories.

It's not quite recycled, though. This new one takes actual population density figures for 2008 rather than just estimates for what it might be. So that's alright then. The headline must be true. Case closed.

But wait a minute! What about the figures for Holland? They're from 2008 right?

Sadly, no.

The paper is comparing England's 2008 figure with three year old Dutch ones. Its excuse is that because Dutch opulation density fell by 2 between 2002 and 2005 (although I have no idea what the source is for this, since the UN puts Holland's density as growing by 10 between 2000 and 2005), it must still be dropping.

Back in January, I looked at the UN's World Population Prospects site to do some calculations. Checking how Dutch population density would change between 2005 and 2010 shows it rising to 397 - not remaining steady or falling.

It's not possible to check figures for England on the UN site, but checking the UK shows a rise from 248 to 253 between 2005 and 2010. The Mail article actually quotes 253 as being the current population density of the UK.

Now, the written answer from statistician Karen Dunne (that the Mail says it bases its figures on) isn't yet available on the Parliament website, but I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction for when it is available.

I predict that when we get to see the actual figures, we'll see that they're based on th UN prediction for 2010, which would mean that England is still behind Holland and the story is a load of made up nonsense.

In the meantime - all those figures in the article's funky graphic? Based on 2005 figures, giving the impression of a higher difference between those countries and England than there actually is.

But hey - when have we ever been able to trust anything the Mail says about immigration?

Yeah, I thought it was you!

The story I covered in yesterday's 'Haven't I seen you somewhere before?' was just the opening shot in an anti-immigration scare story salvo in the Mail. Today we have:

'1 Million more Britons in just three years as immigration fuels biggest population boom in a century'
'One new British passpport is handed out every three minutes'
and
'More than 200,000 Britons quit the country each year for a new life abroad'

At least two are spectacularly dishonest and, curiously for a paper that complained about the 'mountain' of stats released yesterday, cover six month old figures the paper reported on last November.

'1 Million more Britons in just three years...' starts as it means to go on - with a massive lie in the headline. Yesterday's 'Persons granted citizenship United Kingdom 2007' shows that the number of Britons added to the population by migration in the last three years is less than half the headline's claim - at 480,355. The 1 million figure is the figure for net migration of non-British citizens in the last three years, which will include people on temporary stays of a year or more, from November's 'Emigration from UK reaches 400,000 in 2006'. These people aren't now Britons - they're the other Daily Mail demon - 'foreign nationals'. This story isn't news - it's just been added to create a connection with the number of people granted citizenship and a rise of a million furriners in three years.

'One new British passport is handed out every three minutes' covers the same figures as yesterday's 'Over 200,000 Britons fleeing the UK each year as record 160,000 foreigners are granted citizenship' but adds an extra bit of spin by doing the 'each minute' calculation. This is just farting around for scaremongering's sake. You could do a similar calculation that said 'One foreign national leaves the UK every three minutes' and it would be just as accurate and tell you about as much. (In fact, it would be more than one every three minutes, but let's not split hairs, eh)?

Not to be outdone, 'More than 200,000 Britons quit the country each year for a new life abroad' includes two big whoppers in the headline. More than 200,000 left the country in 2006, but less than 200,000 did in every other year since 1997. That's whopper number 1. Whopper number 2 is the 'for new life abroad' since some of the 200,000 will be returning at some point. 81,000 Britons returned to the country in the same year. Again, this article is based on six month old figures that appeared in the paper last November.

It's fine to use older figures for context, but basing two entire articles on them as well as heavily relying on them in another is a bit much. Especially if the paper in question moans about the 'mountain' of stats released in one day but ignores two whole reports in three out of four articles about the same issue.

But of course, the paper isn't about reporting the facts, or about giving us an honest appraisal of what the figures might mean. It's about trying as hard as it can to make us think that immigration is a terrible, terrible problem that will be the doom of us all. The paper starts with its conclusion and fits the evidence to it rather than the other way around.

It isn't racist or xenophobic to examine what impact immigration might have on the population - including the immigrants themselves - and try to come up with decisions that minimise negative effects on everyone involved. It's not even necessarily xenophobic to argue for limits and restrictions on the numbers. What is xenophobic and does border on racism is muddying the waters by artificially exaggerating the numbers and negative impacts to scare people, or to misrepresent the nature of migration to make temporary changes look like permanent ones. The Mail does this all the time.

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.

Let's start 2008 with a good immigration scare story!

It's the second of January, and we have the first of the immigration exaggeration scare stories of the year in the Daily Mail. Hurrah!

This one is 'It's official: England is the most crowded country in Europe'. Of course, even using the Mail's own table shows that England is the second most crowded country in Europe, demonstrating yet another headline that isn't actually true.

But this story isn't one that falls completely into the category of made up nonsense. The figures really do come from the ONS, and really do appear in a House of Commons Written Answer. This story falls mainly into the categories of 'leaving out relevant information to create a false impression' and 'not actually news'. Like the stories that get repeated every three months whenever new immigration figures come out. England has always been one of the most populous countries in Europe. Pick up any encyclopaedia from the last fifty years and you'll find the same thing.

This is the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs website. On it, you can search for things like population density by country back as far as 1950. This is what the league table of countries from the Mail would have looked like back in the days the Mail treats as the best ever (with their 2005 placing in brackets):

1. (1) Malta - 987
2. (3) Belgium - 283
3. (2) Netherlands - 244
4. (4) United Kingdom - 208
5. (5) Germany - 192
6. (6) Italy - 156
7. (7) Luxembourg - 114
8. (8) Czech Republic - 113
9. (9) Denmark - 99
10. (11) Portugal - 91
11. (10) Poland - 77
12. (12) France - 76

The table is virtually identical. Population density has risen in every country in this table since 1950, which might have something to do with a little war that happened a few years before and advances in modern medicine on top of immigration. Looking at the full table in the Commons Written Answer shows that the United Kingdom held exactly the same spot in the league table in 2005 as it did back in 1950.

The only new thing is the separating out of England's population. It is possible that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland's density has stayed static or fallen while England's has shot up, but unlikely. If anyone can find the same figures for the UK separated into individual countries from 1950, let me know in the comments. *UPDATED TO ADD* It would be interesting to see London's figures split out from the rest of England, too, since about 14% of England's population lives in Greater London. According to this Wikipedia article, that makes London's population density 4,761 people per srqare kilometre, but I don't know what that does to the rest of England's density.

More important than the relative population densities are the rates they've risen by. The Mail would have us believe that immigrants have been pouring into the country, making the UK's population density grow at a much higher rate than the rest of Europe. Here are how the countries in the table stack up by the percentage their population densities have risen by since 1950 (rounded up or down to the nearest percentage point):

1. Luxembourg - 55% (114 to 177 per sq km)
2. Poland - 53% (77 to 118)
3. France - 46% (76 to 111)
4. The Netherlands - 38% (244 to 343)
5. Malta - 29% (987 to 1274)
6. Denmark - 27% (99 to 126)
7. Italy -25% (156 to 195)
7. Portugal - 25% (91 to 114)
9. Germany - 21% (192 to 232)
10. Belgium - 20% (283 to 341)
11. United Kingdom - 19% (208 to 248)
12. Czech Republic - 14% (113 to 129)

That would be the UK down at second from bottom. I haven't bothered to work out the rates for the other countries in the ONS's table so I don't know where the UK lies in the full table of European countries, but we know for sure it's not even in the top ten.

One bit of the Mail article that does fall into made up nonsense territory is this:

Its [the Netherlands'] population is growing at a much slower rate than Britain because of the higher immigration levels in this country.

No it isn't. The Netherlands' population has actually risen at roughly three times the rate of the UK's between 1950 and 2005. The Dutch population has gone up from 10,114,000 to 16,328, which is a massive rise of 61%. The UK's has gone up from 50,616,000 to 60,245,000, a rise of 19%. Even in more recent years, the Netherlands' population has been growing at a higher rate that the UK's, at 9% between 1990 and 2005 and 6% between 2000 and 2005, compared to 5% and 2% in the UK in the same periods.

These are taken from the UN stats and not the ONS - but one thing that is curiously missing from the Mail story is that the ONS figures are based on UN ones. That way, its readers can blindly imagine much higher figures because the government obviously always lies about immigration.

This connection is made for them by the Mail in 'The real challenges facing Britain', which says:

The result, as today's official figures show, is that England is poised to become the most overcrowded nation in Europe. Indeed, government statistics are so notoriously unreliable that our population density may already be the highest in the EU.

It does say that the source is the UN in rather big letters at the bottom of the ONS figures. I wonder how the Mail hacks missed it. And let's not mention that to be the highest in Europe, the government's estimate of England's population density would have to be out by a factor of three or four, Meaning England's population would have to be over 100,000,000 without any of us noticing.

There's a bit more oversimplified misleading in the rest of 'It's official: England is the most crowded country in Europe', with:

The figures are likely to increase concern over Labour's plans to build hundreds of thousands of homes, mainly in southern England.

The homes are needed to cope with the increasing population and there are fears that many will end up on green belt land that is currently protected.

The growing population is only one factor in the need for building new homes. Others include people owning more than one property and the fact that some older properties become uninhabitable. Plus, there's the usual Mail tactic of adding 'there are fears that' which it could use to claim anything it liked. Like, 'there are fears that they will be made up of converted ice cream vans that play the music every time the van is empty, inviting burglars and squatters and that'.

The rest of the article is pretty much generic Daily Mail immigration territory, with quotes about how immigration is a Bad, Bad Thing from a Tory MP and from MigrationWatch, but one interesting thing is a new moving of goalposts that I've only noticed recently.

Now, it would seem, demonstrating that there are still vacancies in the UK is not enough to show that the dirty foreigners haven't taken all our jobs. Because some people are on benefits. There are all sorts of reasons why people might be on benefits, and the clue of why some people may be on Incapacity Benefit is in the title, but it would seem that they all pale into insignificance next to the fact that immigrants are here. Presumably, without them all the people with no GCSEs would be filling the vacancies for doctors, nurses and teachers. Or something.

So there we have it. 2008 kicked off with a by the numbers Mail scare story about immigration. The only let down is that it wasn't by James Slack but his sidekick, Steve Doughty. I have to admit that, like a lot of Mail immigration scare stories, it turned out to be more misleading than I'd originally thought when I started looking at its claims. All I suspected to start with is that the UK was probably in the same position it has always held in the league table of population density because the story didn't include any figures for comparison, but I hadn't expected the little fib about Dutch population growth rates or the fact that the UK's density had been growing at such a low rate compared to other countries in Europe.

Expect more of this sort of thing in the coming year, every time any population figures are released.

Deja vu all over again

Every quarter, the oNS releases migration statistics. Every quarter, the Mail can report on them as if they're shocking and new as if they haven't said anything similar three months ago. The rascals.

The Mail's stock 'scary brown people' picture. Look as the white girl holds her head in despair.

Three months ago, I posted 'Half a record number leave the country' and 'More on moronic use of stats in the Mail' about the paper scaremongering over immigration figures that could be looked upon as good news in Daily Mail land. Three months later, we have more scaremongering over very similar figures measured three months later. This paper's crap could be spat out by an automatic script. All you'd have to do is enter the actual numbers and an enraged scare story would pop out of the other end, like an Angel Delight that's made of poo and is capable of screaming in your face until you pass out from fear.

Now, we have 'Record numbers of people are leaving the UK as more immigrants arrive'. Why is this news? Three months ago we had '196,000 out, 574,000 in: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars'. Now, to be fair, the last set of figures split these up into foreigners and the British and the new one doesn't. But that's it. The rest is the same figures measured from three months later. The record numbers are still record numbers, including the ones leaving. The full set is here if you can be bothered.

There's also a nice break down of the numbers of immigrants in the Mail, showing that 6,000 were asylum seekers but mysteriously forgetting to mention that 81,000 were British. Or to mention that there's also a record number of foreigners leaving too.

I can't really be arsed with his one, other than to point out the sheer dogged bloody minded boringness of the paper trying to frighten its readers with the same thing all the bloody time. It's like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The first one's alrght and a bit scary, but the rest are wasting your time. Until you get to the last one, where Freddy enters the real world. God, imagine the world actually being like it's depicted in the Mail.

It feels like Groundhog Day. That would be a good thing if it meant I could punch out a Daily Mail hack in the street every day without getting arrested, but I can't so the paper should sodding well stop it. Or grant me permission to punch its hacks at random.

Open and honest debate?

The IPPR report is a long one which deserves a harder look at than the bits I've fleetingly covered here. I'll be reading it thoroughly before posting about it again. I just wanted to make the following cheap points.

Okay, an IPPR report is published that includes comprehensive information on the average economic status of immigrants to the UK, broken down by country of origin - 'Britain's Immigrants: An Economic Profile'. As we would expect from such a report, the results are complex and cover many things, but the conclusion states:

What we can say, however, is that based on the relatively simple ranking system employed in the tables presented above, it is clear that on most criteria, most immigrant groups do better in economic terms than the UK-born population. Overall, when we take into account the relative size of the groups studied in this report, it would seem that the average immigrant has better economic characteristics than the average UK-born person. [Emphasis in the original]

So, how does the Daily Mail cover the report? Does that part of the conclusion get top billing, is it fudged or is it completely ignored?

That's right! It gets completely ignored! Well done you - give yourself a big curly tick.

The headline is 'Labour thinktank names immigrants who are a drain on the taxpayer', and no mention is made of the fact that the average immigrant 'has better economic characteristics than the average UK-born person', or that most immigrants groups rank better than the UK-born either. None at all.

And, although the Mail story does say:

The report also confirms the widespread perception that Polish-immigrants work hard for less money than most British-born workers would accept.

the report also says a lot of other things about the Polish that go curiously ignored. More later, but firstly, the paper does include the number of people from Poland who are in employment, the number who claim income support and the number in social housing on a table. Poland is joint 3rd highest in terms of the number in employment according to the IPPR, tied with Canada. It's also joint 4th with Canada in terms of the lowest number in social housing, at 8%. Poland is joint second in terms of the lowest number on Income Support, with just 1% claiming it , and Canada is joint 6th, with 2%. Now, bizarrely, although the Mail's table only combines these three criteria, which should show Poland as third on the table - higher than Canada since fewer Poles are on Income Support - Poland is shown below Canada at 4th. That's just childish.

Anyway, some things the paper doesn't mention (which is no surprise given it's earlier screeching I covered in 'Why the figures don't matter') are that Poland tops the tables for the fewest people on unemployment-related benefits, the fewest number on sickness and disability benefit, and has the second lowest number of people on Child Benefit. In fact, in every single category concerning claiming benefits and social housing, Poland comes above the UK-born. Don't expect that to mean an end to crowing about how much the Polish get though. This is the Mail we're talking about, and it's already successfully ignored that fact in this very article.

There's a nice comment article in the print version too, headlined 'Counting the cost', which says:

FROM Labour’s favourite think tank comes a fascinating insight into the biggest wave of immigration in history.

In what amounts to a league table of groups claiming the most benefits, the Institute for Public Policy Research reveals that 39 per cent of migrants from Somalia are on income support, while 80 per cent live in subsidised social housing.

The other incomers most likely to be dependent on welfare come from Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iran.

Of course there is another side to the story. Properly managed migration can bring considerable advantages. Indeed, key services couldn’t function unless they employed people from overseas.

But have we seen even a hint of proper management under ten years of Labour? The case for an honest, open debate on this issue grows ever more compelling.

Ooh - not a hint of proper management. No mention though, that the average immigrant has better economic characteristics than the average UK-born citizen, or that most groups rank better than the UK-born. Funny that.

Which perfectly reveals the biggest myth of all about immigration pushed by the right wing tabloids - that they want open and honest debate. Do they heck as like.

Very silly season indeed II

There were two articles that caught my eye in yesterday's Mail. As I said in yesterday's post, one of the articles was the sort of thing that usually gets my knickers in a twist, and it was this 'Migrants sending more than £1m of child benefits home EVERY month'.

Obsolete looked at the Sun's coverage of this yesterday and pretty much everything I'd like to say about the Mail's version is covered there, but it's interesting to note the difference in approach between the two papers. While the Sun seems to be outraged that 'there is NO requirement for them to send the money home to their families', the Mail is pretending that they all are, proving that the people involved are in a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation. It's worth noting at this point that the 'come over here, nick our benefits' argument against immigration stretches back far enough to have been used before state benefits even existed. Back in the nineteenth century, the Irish were criticised for taking church charity that usually went to the English poor.

One thing I do want to do with this article is point out something I've been looking recently, which is how each tabloid story comes with a ton of baggage from other stories and is part of a wider narrative, setting up a whole ideology of sorts.

Back in 'More on moronic use of stats in the Mail', I looked at how three separate (and dodgy) stories about immigration had been mashed together on a two page spread to create connections between them in the paper version. I happen to have a copy of yesterday's paper version here too. Hurrah for the unnamed gym chain who gives away free copies! (Unless any of my membership goes on buying them).

This article appears on the same page as yesterday's Desperate Dan nonsense, directly underneath in fact. As I kind of rambled about while I was hyped up on goofballs and painkillers and anti-inflammatories, the overblown Political Correctness Gone Mad myth overlaps the Open Borders and Uncontrolled Immigration one, often being used as an explanation for why the Government are apparently hell bent on encouraging immigration in the face of the obvious fact of the country being ruined by it. So here we have PC Gone Mad right next to immigration scare story. Mention two things close together often enough and its not long before people start making connections.

It's not really possible to capture the full effect of the constant deluge of nonsense from the tabloids by looking in detail at the occasional obviously nonsense article. I might cover one story about immigration that amusingly farts about with statistics, while having to ignore others that appear alongside it that maybe aren't as blatantly false, but nonetheless bolster the impression the paper's trying to create. It's also sometimes impossible to know when the paper is alluding to an earlier article that appeared in the same paper rather than an external source, leading to a whole bunch of articles that reference only themselves for corroboration.

Take the article I'm talking about now. It appears alongside a 'Political Correctness Gone Mad' piece of fluff, and within it references other Mail articles. For instance, it says:

The Home Office also gave assurances that Eastern European migrants would be unable to exploit the benefits system, by drawing up rules which meant they could not claim unemployment and out-of-work benefits until they had been working here for a year.

But benefit claims by Eastern Europeans now swallow £ 125 million a year.

Without mentioning three very important things; firstly that the £125m is not a Home Office figure, but an 'estimate' by a Daily Mail journalist (covered in more depth by Unity); secondly that the overwhelming bulk of the £125m the Mail hack came up with (over £100m of it) is taken up by things other than out-of-work benefits; and lastly that the hack had no idea of how many of the migrants who claimed benefits are still claiming them.

There are other sections of the Mail Eastern European Invasion myth that also pop up here, again without being explained:

Around 700,000 Eastern Europeans are thought to have come to Britain since their countries - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia - joined the EU three years ago.

Yeah, thought by the Daily Mail - which include every single Eastern European who ever applied to the Worker Registration Scheme, including those whose applications were rejected and some who may never have come to the UK at all. And:

The Home Office expected 13,000 a year to come.

With no mention that, spectacularly out of whack as it is, the Home Office's estimate was based on what it thought would happen if other EU countries didn't implement restrictions. They did.

When looking at stories in the Mail and other scaremongering tabloids, it's important to remember that they each come with baggage from thousands of other articles, and it's impossible to catalogue everything each one alludes to. This story isn't just about how many Eastern Europeans claim benefits for children who are not living in the UK. It's tied up with a whole lot of other nonsense. Even rubbish about how PC Gone Mad has ruined Desperate Dan.