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.

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'.

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.

Labour's lies about immigration

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

Not really! One-nil!


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And goes on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

It's Political Correctness Gone Slack!

Since starting this blog, I've become familiar with the work of Mail hack James Slack and his interesting relationship with the truth. He was, after all, the guy responsible for kicking off my 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration' series, with a headline and story that claimed 120 people came from Romania and Bulgaria every day to be circus stars in the first three months of last year, when the real total number of Romanians and Bulgarians who had arrived was less than 120 a day, and the actual number of those arriving to be circus artistes wasn't over 10,000 (as his figures suggest), but 55.

He was also responsible for the story about a report on Polish immigrants that prompted one of the report's authors to write to him saying:

Unfortunately, your piece is a mixture of ignorance, misinterpretation and speculation. I couldn’t care less about your intellectual capacity to absorb the data, but you have included my name in an article that conveys a false impression of what the study was about.

Couldn't have said it better myself. As I've said elsewhere, I'm sure there's an office ready with Slack's name on the door in the eighth circle of hell.

Another thing I've become familiar with is the way that almost every Political Correctness Gone Mad story that appears in the tabloids is either made up from whole cloth or has been exaggerated and distorted from a little kernel of truth until the original story is all but unrecognisable.

Spotting a James Slack Political Correctness Gone Mad story is a bit of a win double. You just know there's going to be a withdrawal before you even start reading.

So I wasn't disappointed by his 29 December story 'PC prison bosses ban sexist jokes in jail'. A claim Slack pushes to the limit with:

It means that Fletch, played by Ronnie Barker in the classic television comedy Porridge, would certainly have been in trouble.

In a 1974 episode, while fantasising in his prison cell about having a night out, Fletch mused: "I could call up a couple of birds - those darlings who dance on Top of the Pops, what are they called? Pan's People. There's one special one - beautiful Babs ... I don't know what her name is."

He even includes a graphic of Fletch with speech bubbles showing just what would have got him in trouble and everything.

Except none of them would have got Fletch in trouble. See, he was joking in his cell and hadn't written any of those jokes in a magazine for prisoners, where rapists and wifebeaters would be chuckling along with him. And even if he had, he probably wouldn't have got in trouble either, because all that's really happened is that a magazine for prisoners included some sexist jokes and a reader complained. One reader, not 'prison bosses'. Seriously, that's it.

We begin to see the house of cards getting carefully dismantled with this:

The controversy stems from a lighthearted piece in Inside Time, the monthly newspaper of prisoners in which they swop [sic] jokes, concerns and stories. It was headlined "Victorian views perhaps?"

[...]

But Steve Orchard, a head of operations at the Prison Service, was not amused - and he instructed Inside Time not to trade such "sexist" jokes again.

In a letter to the magazine's editors, the official, who works at Nottingham Prison, said he is not "fanatically 'PC' or lacking a sense of humour," but the jokes go too far.

This still leaves the impression that someone with some clout at the magazine has written a letter and threatened some sort of punishment if similar jokes are repeated.

But he doesn't have any clout at the magazine. Steve Orchard is head of operations at one prison and has no position on the editorial team or board of directors of 'Inside Time' magazine - so would actually have no power to ban anything anyway. He's just a reader.

Nor has he threatened or 'instructed' anything, which we learn from:

Mr Orchard said the magazine would be wise not to repeat its mistake - as good as an instruction, given his seniority.

So, not actually an instruction - just 'as good as', not actually an official prohibition, not actually a ban, not actually 'prison bosses' and not actually anyone with any responsibility at the 'Inside Time'. Just a complaint and a request that the sort of joke in the article were not repeated in the magazine.

On top of that, the request isn't the same as the paper claims - remember the danger of accepting paraphrased or partial quotes from the tabloids. The paraphrase makes the comment look like a veiled threat. Here is the issue of 'Inside today' with the letter in it. The actual request says:

[...] I suggest that you give greater thought in future before publishing such pieces.

See how he 'suggests' and doesn't instruct? See how he just says 'give greater thought before publishing' and not 'would be wise not to repeat', which includes a greater impression of a threat of consequences? Slack knows that bit too, you see. That's why he paraphrased instead of quoting.

So, all that's happened is that a reader has written a letter of complaint. Does this mean that because some negative comments seem to be getting through about Littlejohn's columns recently, he's been banned?

We can but hope.*

*Strawman buster - that was a joke. I don't want him banned. What are you, some sort of PC idiot who gets offended by every little joke? Have I been banned?

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.

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?

Slack's back!

There's something bizarrely comforting about reading a James Slack immigration article in the Daily Mail. A bit like putting on a pair of old slippers that the cat's weed in. They're nice and familiar and comfortable, but they smell of cat's wee. You know what's coming in a Slack immigration article, but you know it's not going to be nice.

This Saturday saw him get away with the article 'Now the Lords is forced to admit that each migrant is only worth 28p A WEEK'. See, the headline's so comforting - we know it's going to sound indignant and outraged. In this instance though, the paper really should be sounding quite chuffed. In January 2007, another Slack headline was ''Migrants bring only 4p a week in financial benefit', says report', so you'd expect pleasant surprise at finding out they contributed at least seven times more than the paper originally thought. But it's not the job of Mail hacks to do anything other than be negative about immigration.

Let's get this out of the way first. The headline has left out that the 28p per week is 28p a week more per member of the entire population than everyone else. It's what you get when you divide the extra contribution of immigrants to the economy by sixty million and then again by fifty two. You'd get a low number like that for just about any arbitrarily defined group. People with curly perms, or blue eyes, say. You'd get a low number doing the same calculation with nurses. If the Mail was consistent with its logic (I know, it doesn't have any in the first place) it would also be calling for doing away with nurses.

*UPDATE* While I was actually typing this post, the headline has changed to 'Immigration has 'no positive effect' on Britain, finds landmark report'. The opening few paragraphs have also been changed to beef up what was originally there, hanging things more on comments by Lord Turner. That only alters what follows a little bit, but bear it in mind.

On to the article. One of its central claims is impossible to test at the moment. It says:

But the most in-depth study of its kind by a parliamentary committee will conclude this is not the best measure of the policy's success or failure.

In a blow to the Government, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee will say on Tuesday that the amount migrants boost the economy per person - rather than overall - is far more relevant.

The report isn't published yet so it's impossible to check. The paper gives the impression that it will be published tomorrow so I'll look at it then, but for now, I'm familiar enough with how the Mail treats the contents of reports to be sceptical. It's entirely possible that the report follows up that statement by pointing out that the per head contribution of any relatively small group will be pence per week. I don't think the paper will be a massive indictment of immigration, since the Mail can only find this one tiny thing it's negative about.

Going past that, it's possible to look through the rest of the article and the padding in it to test its honesty. Especially after having looked at so many earlier articles, which makes it possible to see what a lot of this one is based on.

For starters, there's this:

Experts say this shows only a tiny net contribution to gross domestic product, worth as little as 28p per week.

Note the 'as little as', which dismisses higher estimates. Professor Coleman (co-founder of MigrationWatch and Daily Mail immigration darling) claimed the figure was 50p in 'Academic hits back in migration row' in the Telegraph at about this time last year.

Further on, the article claims:

This has to be balanced against the enormous strain they place on schools, hospitals and other series - valued at almost £9billion.

This is a reference to Slack's earlier article 'Influx of immigrants 'costs every UK household £350 a year'', based on a submission by Professor David Coleman to the House of Lords Committee. A quick point-by-point rundown of what was wrong with that article:

1. The figures in David Coleman's evidence includes a big disclaimer that says, 'For many of the items discussed below it is questionable how much of the cost should be attributed to immigrants or to their descendants, and how much to the indigenous population,' and another that says, 'These different estimates should not be added to make a total. They are preliminary and some categories may overlap with others.' Slack arrived at his total by adding the estimates together, despite disclaimers saying he shouldn't and telling him why he shouldn't.

2. Slack's version of the figures include numbers for the cost of treating immigrants with HIV and the cost of immigrant crimes. Coleman's do not. They only include figures for 'minority populations' connected to those things. Slack has just changed the wording to make the figures look better.

3. Slack rounds up a figure of £3.08bn to £4bn, adding close to an extra billion to the total he shouldn't have been adding together in the first place. He almost makes up for it by rounding down another from £31m to £3m, but the total should still be £7.9bn. He's casually added an extra billion pounds here.

There's more on that article in 'Still worried about Professor Coleman' and 'Coleman's figures. Again.'

The rest of the article just goes over the fact that there has been a Committee examining evidence about the benefits of immigration from people both pro and anti, with the Mail slant we've become accustomed to as the paper overplays the anti's hand. For example, with this:

But critics of government policy have long argued that simply judging the success or failure of Labour's open- door migration policy on their contribution to GDP is short-sighted and misleading.

The use of the term 'open-door' is the typical bit of tabloid hyperbole we know and love. The second part of the paragraph/sentence there is the second bit. The government does not 'simply judge the success or failure' of its immigration policy on their contribution to GDP. The Home Office evidence is here on the Parliament website. It's 43 pages long, and includes way more than a mention of the contribution to GDP. It even includes over a page about the contribution to GDP per head.

Then we get the usual guff about what Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch infamy, has been saying. Obviously without mentioning that his original estimates of GDP per head were out by quite a big factor and based on figures that were only supposed to cover Eastern Europeans. Or that the co-founder of MigrationWatch put the figure at more than 12 times his original estimate.

This is followed by another mention of Coleman's figures. remember, they should never have been added together in the first place. Note the 'at least £330million to treat illnesses such as HIV' which refers to a figure in Coleman's evidence that doesn't actually refer to immigrants, and Slack changed to say that it did.

The article ends with a quote from a critic of the government's immigration policy. In a shocking finding, he doesn't like it much.

All the techniques here are familiar. We're obviously going to see the opposition to the Mail's arguments misrepresented and belittled and critics referred to as 'experts' while their opposition aren't. But the references to misleading figures from the paper itself are things you might not notice if you hand't read what has come before. The paper sets up its position on the matter like this - misleading article referred to by another misleading article and on and on.

We should be grateful that the paper's dropped the 4p claims by now, I suppose. Which makes me ask the question again - does Slack know how poor his reasoning is, or does he genuinely believe it? If you're prepared to add figures together and change what they're supposed to refer to, why would you drop another figure that has turned out to be misleading?

*FURTHER UPDATE* The article keeps getting changed and beefed up. Apparently, the Committee reveals all this stuff 'today', which suggests the story won't make the dead tree version until tomorrow since the Economic Affairs Committee says it won't be published until then. I'll be checking back to see how much the article changes and how much extra nonsense gets injected. The 28p a week figure has already gone (only referred to in comments that might also disappear), Slack's name has disappeared from the byline and all the references to Coleman's 'nearly £9bn' have gone. Slack's still included with a link from journalisted.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are only 148.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

murder in the 12 months before April last year

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurrah for the fourth estate! The slags!

Scare story checklist

There's a theme developing at the moment, involving how articles get reproduced over and over again as if they're new by the Daily Mail.

Well, via the MailWatch forums (cheers bairy), I've seen that there's a new one to add to the list.

Back last May, I covered a couple of Mail articles in '24% of Polish people want to kill us in our beds!' The two articles I covered were '1 in 4 Eastern bloc migrants wants to stay here for good' and 'One third of all Eastern Europeans want to stay in Britain premanently', both published on the same day, both covering the same figures and both written by James Slack. I'm not sure which story made the paper version.

Either Slack or a sub seems to have been confused, not knowing whether a quarter or a third of Eastern Europeans intended to stay here for good. Luckily, Slack was on hand to let us know the real number a few months later in ''Immigrants here for good': Half of Poles plan to stay in UK'. One of the authors of the study that the article was supposedly based on decided to write in response to Slack saying:

Firstly, the survey had nothing to do with the numbers of Polish nationals in the UK. The aim of the study was to determine their media preferences and willingness to vote in coming elections in Poland. Let me list sentence by sentence the instances of misleading parts in your piece

Which he then does, in fine style. But now the Mail readers all know - half of Poles want to stay here.

Now it seems that the number has slipped back again, with Saturday's 'One in every four Poles in Britain plan to stay for life, says survey'. Don't you wish the guy would make up his bloody mind?

Bairy has done a good job of dismantling this particular house of cards in the MailWatch forums so register to read it if you haven't already. I thought I'd go through it myself by each point on the checklist Slack must have sellotaped to his monitor for whenever he bashes out another scare story.

Does the headline bear any relation to reality?

It says that 1 in 4 intend to stay forever, and the story claims to be based on does include a table that says that 144 out of 636 respondents said they didn't intend to return to Poland, so on the face of it, the headline is accurate.

How about the article itself, is that telling the complete truth?

Check. Of course not. The main lie is one of ommission, which is coupled with this line:

It followed an admission from Britain's consul in Warsaw that the current record levels of migration - which have seen more than 700,000 Poles arrive in only three years - may continue.

This gives the impression that we're talking about Poles that arrived in Britain after Poland's accession to the EU, especially when you consider that almost every other Mail story about Polish migration is about that.

But this story isn't. According to the survey this story is based on 172 of the 636 (or 27% of) respondents to the survey had arrived prior to May 2004. This is significant as the longer someone has been in the country, the more likely they are to have decided to stay. Plus, prior to May 2004, the nature of migration to the UK from Poland was different. Those who came to the UK then and are still here are likely to have intended to stay for a longer period in the first place, since the type of seasonal migration that's possible now wasn't possible then.

Also, if a significant number of Poles decide to go back to Poland after a short space of time, then it follows that most of the people who arrived in the UK prior to 2005 or 2006, or even 2007, will have gone home. So asking people who have already decided to stay will necessarily skew the results towards those who don't intend to go back to Poland swiftly, since those that do will already have left. But this is more of a criticism of the survey itself than the Mail article.

Have there been any contortions done with the figures?

Check. Slack tries to apply these figures to the 700,000 Eastern Europeans he claims have arrived in the UK since 2004. As regular readers will know, the 700,000 figure he uses is already exaggerated as it includes everybody who ever applied to the Worker Registration Scheme, including those who never arrived and those who's applications were rejected.

On top of that though, can you think of a problem with the idea of using findings from a survey that questioned only people who remained in the UK (and not anyone who returned to Poland) and then trying to apply it accross the board to every Polish person who ever applied to come to the UK?

That's it - lots and lots of Polish people will already have gone home. You can only get an accurate reading of how many Pole in the UK these figures apply to by measuring people who are currently in the UK, not everybody who applied to come here, even the ones who didn't ever arrive, and those who have already left. So when Slack says:

Based on estimates from the Home Office's worker registration scheme, that would mean more than 160,000 Poles and their families staying for good.

He's talking rubbish.

The story also says:

The report also found the majority of Poles were not over-qualified for the jobs they are taking in the UK, amid reports of graduates working in factories or stacking shelves.

Some 65 per cent of respondents said they were working in jobs matching their qualifications.

Meaning that 35% are. That's a greater number than intend to stay here - the number this very article is using to claim that predictions that the majority of Poles will go back to Poland are wrong.

Has the dodgy 700,000 arrivals figure been parroted as if 700,000 people are still in the UK?

Check. See above.

Has the story sufficiently played about with quotes to create a false impression?

Check. It says this:

Received wisdom in Whitehall was also that, after the initial influx, the vast majority of Poles would return home.

Okay, that's an unattributed opinion rather than a quote, but if this story's headline is right, then the received wisdom in Whitehall is correct. 75% intend to go back to Poland.

Has there been a quote from a Tory MP?

Unfortunately not. Slack is slacking.

Has MigrationWatch been bigged up?

Check.

Is the quote from the Home Office left until the very end of the article to make it look less trustworthy?

Check.

So, Slack's managed to miss two checkpoints for creating a really good scare story - the headline and a dunderheaded quote by a Tory MP.

He's managed a great Daily Mail contradiction though, which is a bit of a bonus. Back in April, Slack bashed out another outraged screed about immigrants being able to vote in UK local elections in 'A million immigrants can vote next month'. In this one, he doesn't like the fact that none of the Poles in the survey voted in the same elections, using it as evidence of poor integration.

Of course, the guy should be able to report on new studies whenever they're published, and confirmation bias will mean he won't thoroughly check whether each study holds water, but does he have to present each as if they're new and further muck around with figures and quotes?

Thank you, Daily Express - it’s good to see that you have finally caught up with the BNP

Carrying on with this blog is becoming increasingly difficult. It's not that the tabloids are getting more honest, if anything they're getting worse. It's not that they're getting any better at hiding their lies either. It's just that everything they produce has become so monotonously familiar and predictable that I'm at a loss for what to write about. As merkur said in a comment on 'Deja vu all over again all over again' I could well end up cutting and pasting old entries under new dates, since the distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies stay basically the same.

"Thank you, Daily Express" - BNP

Take the story from the front page of the Daily Express, 'Britain to build 2 million homes for migrants'. Here's what the BNP has to say about the article, by the way:

Today the Daily Express has published an article vindicating all that the BNP has ever said about the strain being put upon the infrastructure of Britain by continuing to permit unfettered mass immigration. Thank you, Daily Express - it’s good to see that you have finally caught up with us.

I have a policy of not fucking linking to those shovel headed goons so you'll have to Google for it, but it's there on the BNP site, and the entire article is reproduced in full there.

The Enemies of Reason has already given the article the treatment it deserves. Obsolete was right to dismiss it out of hand, since it isn't really anything we've never seen before. I looked at virtually identical figures before, in 'Taking a gamble' and 'No crow for me please Mum!' These are just the same figures applied to the future rather than the last ten years. Still, it is nice to have it confirmed that the figures James Slack claimed were from the House of Commons Library were actually from MigrationWatch.

In a nutshell, here is how MigrationWatch pulls off this set of figures.

Back in March, the DCLG produced a set of projections of the future number of households in England, 'New projections of households for England and the regions to 2029'. It says that 33% of new households will be created as the result of net migration. It also explicitly states:

The household projections are not an assessment of housing need.

So what you should definitely not do is assume that the increase in the number of households is the same as the number of new houses that need to be built.

MigrationWatch then produced the briefing paper 'The impact of immigration on housing in England' based on these figures. It explains in its first paragraph what the DCLG figures are, and ends the paragraph with:

This amounts to a requirement for 200 new homes every day to house the additional immigrant population.

Thus completely ignoring the DCLG's disclaimer. I'm reminded here of James Slack's interpretation of Prof David Coleman's lame estimates of the cost of immigration, in which he ignored the disclaimer saying not to add the figures together as the result would be misleading.

Strangely, this connection is left out of the actual evidence presented to the Lords Economic Affairs Committee - but the Express adds it back in. Now call me cynical, but I can't help wondering if that claim was left out because evidence to the Committee will come under far greater scrutiny than the other stuff MigrationWatch produces that gets mindlessly parroted by papers like the Express.

The number of new households is not the same as the number of new homes that have to be built for a number of reasons. Here are a couple off the top of my head. There are derelict and unoccupied properties that can be refurbished. Some people own more than one property that they may decide to sell. Some properties that house only one household at the moment can be converted to house more than one household. Properties that aren't used as housing can be converted, as they have been in some warehouse districts across the country. You might be able to think of more reasons.

Another problem with MigrationWatch's claim in their original briefing paper and the Express's claim in this story is the part that says new houses need to be built 'to house the additional immigrant population'. It might be possible to argue that zillions of new homes will need to be built as a result of immigration, but the idea that they will need to be built to house immigrants can only be entertained by people with their own crazy moon logic. There's a reason most immigrant 'ghettoes' the tabloids talk about are in the most run down parts of town, and that's because housing in those parts is cheaper than everywhere else. Even if immigration means a stupid number of new houses are built, the immigrants are highly unlikely to be the ones living there.

It's this crazy moon logic that the Express story is based on - the same crazy moon logic that led to the Express headline 'MIGRANTS TAKE ALL NEW JOBS IN BRITAIN'. The fact that a larger number of jobs were filled by migrants than there were new jobs created since 1997 does not mean that all the new jobs were taken by migrants. The fact that there will be a number of new immigrant households between now and the future does not mean that they will live in nice new houses. 'BRITAIN TO BUILD 2 MILLION HOMES FOR MIGRANTS' is just as much a bunch of complete rubbish.

In terms of looking at how the tabloids operate, there's nothing much new here. There's the unquestioning acceptance of MigrationWatch figures. There's the further beefing them up. There's the exaggerated claim in the headline. There's the familiar way they make a claim in the most lurid way possible despite explicit disclaimers that say their interpretation is wrong. There's the careful ignoring of the fact that we're talking about England and not Britain. There's the tired old recycling of the old joke Unity talked about in 'The blacks have got all the houses, the blacks have got all the houses' (when I got to secondary school, these same tired jokes were recycled to apply to Asians).

You might wonder if MigrationWatch's press release about their figures was carefully managed to scupper the IPPR's submission to the Committee from a couple of days before. Especially when you consider that MigrationWatch already made a submission about housing in November that they didn't issue a press release for. But I don't think they're clever enough and I don't think they'd need to. The tabloids wouldn't touch anything that didn't say immigration will make the sky fall on our heads with a bargepole, unless they distort and lie about it first.

The only possible new development is watching the Express moving closer and closer to coming out and supporting the BNP.

More on painting by the numbers

Last week, I hurriedly posted 'Paint a picture of immigration by the numbers with the Mail', which could have done with a better title. In it, I looked at the fantastically misleading Daily Mail article ''Immigrants here for good': Half of Poles plan to stay in UK'. In short, the article followed the template of the Daily Mail immigration story by withdrawing the headline's claim, exaggerating figures, misrepresenting a study, referring to the paper's previous distortions and including a plug for MigrationWatch. I wonder if James Slack has a checklist taped to the side of his monitor.

I also said this:

I strongly suspect that the study included an option for people who hadn't decided how long they were going to stay at all - not just whether they were going to stay permanently - so of the many options, they hadn't chosen one. Of course, I can't be sure, but even if we give the paper the benefit of the doubt and assume that the question was only about whether these people wanted to stay permanently, it's incredibly dishonest to count don't knows as definitely going to stay - or even planning to stay.

But since I couldn't get hold of a copy of the study itself, I couldn't be sure.

So I decided to go one better than finding a copy of the study, by contacting one of its authors and asking him. Michal Garapich has kindly given me permission to quote him in a follow-up post.

First things first, his initial reaction:

To be honest I have never felt so bad as social scientist seeing things like these. I am in the process of writing a letter to that journalist. One reason is that there exists only a Polish version of the report, hence there was a multiplication of stupidity here - both the interpreter and the journalist. Stupidity or ignorance, doesn't matter but the fact remains that my name is put under a very misleading piece.

I can't say that came as a surprise. Neither did the fact that Mr Garapich wanted to find out who I was, since he was careful of who he spoke to. Once I'd done that, he kindly sent me an email setting out the problems. Here it is, with minimal editing:

It is true that 15% of my respondents declared that they live here permanently. 26% are here on short term basis (6 months-2 years) and 30% are undecided. Now, to be honest it is all down to good will and inteligence to figure out what these numbers mean. The Mail lacks both.

Here however it is important to understand that this is a very diverse collection of people and of course some will stay, some will come back etc, some will continue to circulate (9% of our sample expressed that they are seasonal). The picture is complex. Apart from the question on whever this is good or bad for the UK economy (and the recent IPPR report stated that this has a positive impact) the problem is the creation of a perception that all Poles are either this or that. They are not.

My survey - in the same way that the survey I did last year for BBC Newsnight (see www.surrey.ac.uk/arts/cronem - very similar results) show that some will stay, some will surely go back and another group keeps options open - in today's risk society a quite rational way of behavior.

Now, I don't want to be smug, but I will anyway (if only for the benefit of the recent anonymous commentator on 'Careful now! The safety of this information could be questionable'). It seems that I was right, in that there was only a 'don't know' option relating to how long people intended to stay - and not one specifically relating to whether or not they intended to stay permanently. Mr Garapich also kindly forwarded me the relevant data table from the study. Blogger doesn't seem to like me trying to post the whole table, but the option is translated as 'Don't know/difficult to say' for how long respondents intended to stay. NOT for 'thinking about staying for the rest of their lives'. NOT for 'Planning to stay' 'for good'.

Now, more:

This doesn't change that the sentence in Mail piece:

"A further 30 per cent are thinking about staying for the rest of their lives. Even those Poles who plan to return home intend to spend long periods in Britain, according to the survey by Mig Research"

is misleading manipulation. I never wrote that 30% are thinking that and the wording here suggests that this is on top of the 26% that can be seen as long term migrants.

Also the use of the word "long" is misleading, since for some migrants 6 months is pretty long.

Just thought that point was worth repeating. How about the rest of the story:

The rest of the piece is further misleading the readers. You cannot take Home Office figures at face value, because a lot of people came back [to Poland]. The [Worker Registration Scheme] numbers are cumulative and they don't reflect the dynamics of these flows - people come and go very frequently.

Mentioning "one million" is pure speculation, a rumour, nothing else. I have never seen any sure data on this. True, Polish statistics mention that around 1.5 million Poles have worked abroad, but this includes all EU and US, and is mainly seasonal, short term. If 1.5m economically active people would disappear from Polish labour market (Poland has one of the lowest % of people active economically in relation to overall population), it would probably collapse economically from one day to another. Instead the economy is growing there.

Which is also much as I thought it would be (hi anonymous). The 'million' figure is most probably speculation and not actually based on any empirical study. So it seems the Mail - or at least James Slack - has raised the exaggeration game by not only counting every Eastern European who ever applied to work in the UK ever, but including a figure that comes from god knows where, which adds a few hundred thousand on top of the already exaggerated figure. Nice eh?

There you go. That's nothing that anyone familiar with the Mail wouldn't know, but it's nice to hear it from someone actually involved in the study the Mail's decided to tell fibs about.

Thanks very much indeed to Michal Garapich of Roehampton University.

James Slack adds a million immigrants to the electoral register in just the time it takes to bash out one article

There are certain things the Daily Mail is actually very good at, especially when ‘Home Affairs Editor’ James Slack is in the writer’s chair. One is using figures to mislead its readers into thinking that numbers connected to immigration are higher than they actually are. Another is just giving the reader enough information to come to a conclusion without actually directly stating what it wants its readers to think.

A perfect example of both pops up in today’s ‘Immigration adds a million new voters to the electoral register in just two years as total hits record 46million’. See, immigration doesn’t add a million to the electoral register in two years, something the subs on the dead tree version were clearly aware of, since the paper version’s headline is ‘Migrants help swell electoral roll by 1m’. That’s more accurate, but it’s wonderfully ambiguous. You could still interpret it as meaning that migrants help swell the electoral roll by adding a million to it.

The article itself is actually incredibly vague. The central concrete point of the article is that 1 million new people have been added to the electoral register in the last couple of years and some of them are immigrants.

"Some of the new people added to the electoral register are immigrants, Mister Holmes? I say, I am almost certain that your assertion contains the minimal amount of faecal matter," said Watson.

The whole article is an exercise in throwing different stats around to confuse the reader. We learn that:

Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship or who poured in from Eastern Europe.

How many hundreds of thousands? What’s the split between British citizens and eastern Europeans? Surely the Mail doesn’t have a problem with British citizens voting?

Anyway, this is supposed to lead to the conclusion:

Critics said the increase made the case for changes to the electoral rules allowing non-British citizens full voting rights.

So, because hundreds of thousands of British citizens have been added to the electoral register and some eastern Europeans have been given limited voting rights, we should change the rules giving non-British citizens from places that aren't eastern Europe unlimited voting rights. That makes sense. Go to the top of the class, Logic Boy.

Since the other group mentioned in the vague 'hundreds of thousands' claim are eastern Europeans and they’re not allowed to vote in General Elections, this begs the question – which electoral register has had a million people added to it in the last two years? Local or general?

Ready for the answer? Neither. Okay, I’m being uncharitable. The article later reveals that 976,000 have been added to the electoral register for local elections in the last two years, which is nearly a million – and that 679,000 have been added to the register for general elections, which is closer to half a million. (Remember, we’re talking about the total number of people added here, not the number of immigrants). Hands up who thought the headline referred to General Elections when you first read it. How many hands can I add to my own? Of course, that's the whole point of the story.

The general election stats are presented in a nicely subtle misleading way, too:

There is a separate register for general elections only, which was boosted by 307,669 last year. It had 223,172 additions in 2005 and 371,770 in 2006.

See how last years stats are presented first, and far apart from the figures from the previous year? That way, you're less likely to notice that the number has dropped, just as the number for local elections has. This is why the article combines the last two years rather than just reporting 2007's rise. If it didn't we'd actually be able to see that the number of additions is dropping rather than dramatically rising.

Earlier, I asked if the Mail had a problem with British Citizens voting. The question wasn’t rhetorical, and here’s the answer:

The growth in the overall register also reflects how immigrants coming to the UK since Labour came to power are now being granted citizenship.

With passports being handed out at the rate of 100,000 every year, all these people can vote.

Oh noes! All ‘these people’ can vote. All these British citizens. Notice how the first sentence there is utter balls? According to the paper, passports are ‘handed out’ at the rate of 100,000 a year – or 200,000 in two years. An addition of a million people to the electoral register in two years somehow reflects this? Only if the mirror you hold up is one of those comedy funfair ones that makes you look five times bigger than you actually are.

The story doesn’t once tell us how many of the 1 million added to the register are immigrants. It doesn’t tell us how many are new British citizens. It doesn’t tell us how many are old Commonwealth citizens. It does say that 150,000 eastern Europeans a year have been added to the register for local elections, so could be that the paper has the missing figures, but doesn’t tell us. Of course, it’s equally likely that the 150,000 is a nonsense figure James Slack made up earlier, like his £9bn cost of immigration figure, but I haven’t the time to check.

To muddy the waters and frighten Mail readers a bit more is this article, ‘Two million Muslims now live in Britain and 10,000 are millionaires, reveals Home Secretary Jacqui Smith during visit to Pakistan’. This is a separate article on the website, but in the dead tree version a somewhat abbreviated version is just added to the electoral register story without its own headline, in bold print.

We’re clearly supposed to associate these figures with one another. That there are now 2 million Muslims in the UK (which Smith never actually said – she just said the figure ‘may be as high as 2 million’ – so it’s clearly not a concrete definite) is supposed to be digested alongside the news that immigrants have added 1 million to the electoral register, so [cue the ominous music please] more Muslims can vote now.

The figures the Mail use in the article about the number of Muslims are classic scaremongering. Look at how percentages are used to inflate the impression of the number of Muslims who pray every day here (in the dead tree version of the article):

There are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, and 25 million baptized Anglicans.

But only 6.3 per cent of Christians in the 2001 census said they went to church weekly compared to 51 per cent of Muslims who prayed daily.

6.3% compared to 51%? Wowsers! That’s loads more Muslims, eh? Except no.
6.3% of 29.2 million is just over 1.8 million. 51% of 2 million is 1,002,000. Notice also how the numbers for Christians are taken only from England and Wales, and the number of Muslims is the vague, upper limit figure for the total in the UK.

As if that weren’t enough, going to church every week is compared to praying every day. The two are different, since one takes more effort. And both lots are way outnumbered by the ones who don’t pray every day, don’t go to church, mosque, synagogue, temple or anything else.

So, what’s all this scaremongering for then? Why include a snippet about the number of Muslims in the UK under the same headline as an article about the number of immigrants added to the electoral roll? This is where the paper shows off its ability to push an idea without explicitly stating it, just giving its readers enough information to come to the conclusion themselves.

There’s a bizarre conspiracy theory that abounds in the comment boxes of the right wing tabloids, one that is espoused by Richard Littlejohn. It goes like this – immigration is high because Labour is importing voters from overseas. Because all immigrants – from the wealthy financier working in the city down to the lowliest office cleaner – are guaranteed to vote Labour. Somehow, this includes eastern Europeans, despite their not being allowed to vote in general elections. In Littlejohn’s version, Labour started importing immigrants ten years before they had the power to do so, in 1987.

This article doesn’t say that Labour is importing voters, but it does include this to give us readers enough to arrive at the conclusion:

Pressure group Migrationwatch UK said one million votes could swing a close electoral campaign.

Why else would the paper take the figure for the number of people added to one electoral register or another and focus straight in on the fact that some of these people will be immigrants without actually knowing how many are immigrants in the first place?

Deliberate or not – it’s worked. Here are some random comments:

This has been obvious to anyone who cares about England the mass migration has been about votes for Nu-Labour and the English has had to pay with our sovereignty.
- Mike, UK

Small wonder that this discredited Labour Government are so enthusiastic about uncontrolled immigration, they want to force a demographic change to make sure that they stay in power. Could there be a more unscrupulous Government?
- Chris H, Preston, Lancashire

One million immigrant voters who will doubtless be saying a big "thank you" by voting Nu Labour. I see this as a temporary blip, considering the record numbers of Brits who are saying a big "something unprintable" and leaving the country.
- Glyn, Southampton, U.K.

If I tried to reproduce all the similar comments I’d be here all day.

Thinking about it, though – although the idea is David Icke stuff, I can see why it could be attractive to some people. I mean, we’re told over and over that the government lies about immigration, that it knows that nobody benefits except the immigrants and it’s ruining the country for the rest of us. The Mail’s headline last week shouted about Labour’s lies about immigration – not mistakes or things it was incompetently wrong about, but lies.

If you think the government is deliberately lying despite knowing that immigration is ruining the country and that the crazy Muslims are going to take over, you need a motive. This is as good a one as any.

As for the paper pandering to it – that’s its job, according to Paul Dacre. If the public believe crazy nonsense, that paper must reflect it. Except it really is bizarre crazy nonsense, which the paper would much rather pander to than have the 'honest dabate' it pretends to want to have about immigration.

*UPDATED* meant to mention this earlier, but the version of the story on the website seems to be one version tacked on the bottom of another. It begins with:

One million voters have been added to the electoral register in only two years, taking the total to a record 46million.

Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship or who poured in from Eastern Europe.

Critics said the increase made the case for changes to the electoral rules allowing non-British citizens full voting rights.

And then halfway through, starts again with:

One million new voters have been added to the electoral register in only two years – taking the total to a record 46 million, it emerged last night.

Hundreds of thousands of the new electors are immigrants who have been granted British citizenship, or have poured in from Eastern Europe.

Critics said it made the case for changes to the electoral rules – which allow non-British citizens full voting rights.

The article carries on covering the same ground that led up to the whole thing starting over again halfway through.

There have been 77 comments so far, quite a lot repeating the nonsense about importing voters, but it seems nobody's pointed out that the article starts all over again in the middle. Remember what I've said before about people not reading the whole article?

That headline's more like it!

A short entry about a James Slack article today. I suppose that's something to be grateful for.

The story is 'The test that's letting in one migrant every three minutes (and could you pass it?)'.

To make up for yesterday's story, this one's headline bears no relation to reality. The test isn't what 'lets in migrants'. It's one thing that migrants must pass before they get citizenship or leave to remain. They have to meet all sorts of other criteria as well as passing this test before they qualify. Before these tests existed, everyone who passed all the other criteria would be 'let in'. Now, over 30% of applicants are actually turned away because of failing them. The headline would more accurately be 'The test that's keeping out one migrant every ten minutes' since passing the test doesn't guarantee citizenship, but failing guarantees you won't get it.

There's a quote from a Tory MP too. Hurrah!

There's also the bonus of a nice little contradiction of yesterday's story, which estimated that 160,000 Eastern Europeans would end up staying in the UK forever and ever. Today's says:

The first country-by-country breakdown of pass rates also reveals that thousands of EU citizens, already free to live in Britain for life, are choosing to swop [sic] their passport for a British one.

They include 944 from Poland and 2,000 from the other seven former Eastern Bloc countries which joined the EU in May 2004.

This is, presumably, the period between January and October last year. Let's say it is, and estimate the total by bumping up the figures a bit for 2006 and 2005 to take into account the fact that these were full years, and be way generous and push them up to 5,000 a year for those to and 3,000 for 2004. That would mean that less than twenty thousand have actually applied for citizenship and passed a test since May 2004. Slighty fewer than 160,000. Of course, there will be people here who intend to stay but haven't applied yet, but eight times as many?

This is another potential goldmine for Slack, since the government are now extending the test to include people only applying for permanent residence as well as those applying for citizenship, so the number passing will necessarily be higher next time figures are announced because an extra category of people is being tested.

So, a number of unquestioning Mail readers will now be wobbling around under the impression that all you have to do to be granted citizenship is answer some questions about what to do if you spill someone's pint, and that these tests let in hundreds of thousands of people rather than turn away over 30% of applicants. When the figures including those applying to remain in the country are released, Slack can fudge them to look like more and more people coming to stay in the UK, rather than just extra people being made to take the test. Job done. Good work, Slacky!

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'

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.

Beam me up, Slacky!

Amazing proof of the actual usefulness of Daily Mail hacks was uncovered yesterday when reporter James Slack invented something other than outrage and inflated immigration statistics - an amazing teleporting fence!


The article 'Illegal immigrants only have to climb a fence in Calais to sneak into Britain' reveals the existence of the Star Trek style barrier, which can teleport illegal immigrants across over 21 miles of open water in the English Channel.

The modest reporter has kept news of his incredible invention under wraps, not publishing any details in any scientific journals or other news sources, only revealing its existence in the his own paper and not taking any credit for his inventiveness.

"It's very selfless," said some bloke in the street I threatened with physical violence if he didn't give me the quote I wanted, "imagine inventing what could be the major technological breakthrough of the new millenium and not letting anyone know you'd made it up - and donating it for the sole use of illegal immigrants. The man is truly a marvel!"

Staff at the Mail were unavailable for comment on Slack's invention, but it's unlikely they'll be happy with his helping the illegal immigrants community, traditionally vilified by the paper. Privately, think-tank MigrationWatch are thought to be in fury. "Maybe it's a ruse and Slack will sell the technology to the Home Office to teleport them all back again," they might have said. Or something.

Some readers sceptical of the news. One Guardian reader said, "It looks more like he's exaggerated in a headline to scare his readers than actually invented teleporting".

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said*, "The implications of this technology are truly staggering. Building one of these fences around a prison or detention area could ensure that escapees are sent straight back to their cells. Benefit claimants could be made to scale the fence to get to the benefits office, sending Polish ones right back to Warsaw."

Energise!

*Not really.

The usual kind of tabloid racism. Almost makes you nostalgic

There's a slight return to form for coded racism in today's Express, and another example of the style of coded racism we're used to seeing in the Daily Mail today.

The two stories are 'How a baby boom among migrants is rapidly changing the face of Britain' in the Express, and 'East European influx 'could trigger race riots in villages'' in the Mail.

This is the sort of thing we're used to seeing reported in the right wing press. The Black and Ethnic Minority population isn't usually directly blamed in the same way as Der Sturmer's last effort, which also cringemakingly used the BNP's preferred terminology of 'ethnics' to describe them. Instead we get a proxy group to stand in for them, like asylum seekers or Muslims. It's what we get with these two articles.

First, the Express again on a similar theme to before. This is exactly what we're used to seeing. Migrant baby boom - note the migrant - is what's 'changing the face of Britain', whatever than means. There's a nice picture of some brown people getting on a train to Marseilles. They're going to change us into France!

Anyway, it's just as exaggerated and obfuscatory, trying to distract the reader from smoke and mirrors. The opening is about immigrants 'helping' to push Britain's birth rate up. They still count for less than a quarter. There's a nice little plug for the earlier BNP-esque article, followed by some more nonsense about Mohammed being the second most popular name.

As for the nonsense about that - first of all, it isn't unless you combine all possible spellings. Second of all, Mohammed is an incredibly, incredibly common name among Muslims. How many other traditionally Muslim names are there in the top 100 boy's baby names for England and Wales? Guess, go on. Six? Four? One? No. The answer is none. None more Muslim names. All ninety-seven other names in the top 100 are not Muslim at all. And how many in the girls' names? None again. At all.

But notice the conflation of Muslim with immigrant here. Some of the people called Mohammed might have grandparents born in the UK, but they'll never be British in the Express. Just in case you hadn't made the connection - or rather, the disconnection - between Muslim and British women, the next paragraph is about British women. Nice. I'd like to just address the point about the Muslim birth rate being three times as high. So what? The entire Muslim population of the country stands at less than three percent.

See, there's a nice bit of shifting definitions and figures here. The one fifth of births to mothers born outside the UK doesn not represent the number of Muslim births, and the Muslim birth rate being three times as high as the non-Muslim birth rate does not mean that three times as many babies have been born to Muslim parents. Why doesn't the paper give us a number for the overall proportion of those births? Because it would be too small to scaremonger with.

As is quite common with Express articles, this one contradicts itself just over half way through. Bizarrely, it talks about immigrant birth rates 'changing the face of Britain', then talks about what good news it is that the birth rate is so high, then says:

But experts warned yesterday that the surge in birth rates might be short-lived. They said many migrants from EU countries such as Poland and Romania who came to Britain with their husbands for work, may only stay for a few years to earn a decent wage before returning to their families and friends back home.

Are they changing the face of Britain or not? Make your bloody mind up!

There's one marvellous comment on this article (as long as it's not a wind up). Here are some nice bits:

It has long been said they breed like rabbits and these figures prove it!. [...]
Our own responsible young people are unable to afford a house or flat and these scroungers get it all handed on a plate. This situation is obsene and will destroy this country.[...]
These idiots are very good at spending other peoples money and scounging but very bad at paying their own way!.

You know what? I'd probably think the same if I believed what I read in the Express.

Overall though, this article is the usual confused jumble of opening with a negative conclusion from something they actually can only find positive comments about. It purports to be about the birth rate of immigrants, but it isn't really. It's about Muslims. Muslims are bundled together confusingly with immigration all the time with this paper, usually to hide its dog-whistle stuff, which is why the article I last looked at was so unusual. Except in that it included two women in niqabs to illustrate the theme of ethnic minorities. The caption in this one mentions the Muslim birth rate as well, just to hammer the connection between Muslims and migration home a bit more forcefully.

There is a nice companion piece that goes along with this one : 'Is the scale of migration changing Britain for the worse?' Just so you're not in any doubt of which way to vote, there's a nice illustrative picture of some immgrants (natch - Muslims in niqab). It's the really neutral one that doesn't give a negative impression at all of one niqab-earing Muslim flicking the vs at the camera. Some nice knuckle dragging comments too.

Next, the Mail article. Funny how this one is so similar to the Express one about 'ethnics' breeding like rabbits and causing riots.

The scapegoat du jour is the Eastern European migrant in the Mail, so this article naturally focuses on Eastern Europeans. I suspect that the Mail would have done the same had it covered the report that the Express pretended was about 'ethnics' causing riots. As ever, it misrepresents something that has been said to exaggerate and scaremonger, but whod have thought anything different?

It's also by James Slack, the hack responsible for lots of Eastern European migrant number massaging to exaggerate how many people are currently intent on murdering us in our beds whilst juggling a spirit level and a plunger and riding a unicycle. This is important. Remember it for later.

The full report it claims to be talking about hasn't been published yet, so it's likely the article is based on another one, this time 'Rural towns face risk of community tension flare-ups' from the Local Government Chronicle.

First things first - the article doesn't say an Eastern European influx 'could trigger race riots in villages'. The phrase 'could trigger race riots in villages' doesn't appear anywhere in the article, so this is another example of lying with quotation marks.

I'm sure I don't really need to go through this again with another article, but the one in the Local Government Chronicle doesn't talk about triggering riots in villages at all, in fact. What it does is warn that there's more likely to be tension about migration in areas that aren't used to seeing it, like rural villages. That's a bit of a 'no shit Sherlock' statement and doesn't blame dirty foreigners, so you can see why the Mail couldn't give a straight representation.

The Mail article starts:

Race riots could erupt in rural towns and villages with large numbers of Eastern European immigrants, a Government report will warn.

If the Local Government Chronicle article is anything to go by - no it won't.

Here's the only quote that mentions the likelihood of rioting. It deserves reproducing:

“I think we would all be complacent if we thought tensions would only arise in urban areas, but I don't think we will get a large number of people arriving here at once. I don't think we would anticipate there being rioting on the streets.” [Emphasis mine].

Now look at the Mail headline and opening sentences again.

The only mention it makes of rioting actually taking place is in connection with beered up goons throwing bottles at a Portugese managed pub in Suffolk after England were knocked out of the World Cup. Last time I checked, Portugal wasn't exactly in eastern Europe. I witnessed something similar with some red faced tosser screaming at a bloke in a Portugal shirt at Oxford Circus tube on the same day. 'How can you wear that fucking shirt? You're in the capital of fucking England!' he eloquently slobbered. It wasn't the presence of the Portugese bloke that was to blame though. It was the presence of the shouty red gorilla. Would the Mail blame the Portugese people who managed the pub for making the goons throw bottles?

In fact, we already know. Back in October, there were reports in the press about a riot in Windsor where a Muslim owned dairy was apparently firebombed. In 'Firebombed Muslims 'Asking for it'', I covered how the mail blamed the dairy owners.

The reason I mentioned who wrote the article is to make a small comparison between some figures. In the two misleading articles '1 in 4 Eastern bloc migrants want to stay here for good' and 'One third of all Eastern Europeans want to stay in Britain permanently' (see the difference already, which one's right? Neither of course), James Slack gives a figures of either 160,000 or 157,000 Eastern Europeans who want to stay here permanently, but in this article, he's shifted back to 630,000 without bothering to mention that he thinks that three quarters won't want to stay. Not exactly honest, this bloke, given that he's responsible for triggering the seven part extravaganza 'How the Daily Mail tells lies about immigration'. He's probably the Mail's immigration correspondent or something. If there's not a special room reserved in the ninth circle of hell with that job title on the door, the devil doesn't deserve the name.

So it's the same depressingly familiar situation of articles that distort and misrepresent something someone else has said until it says something that is in fact pretty much the opposite.

It is nice that neither actually blame things on 'ethnics', although their readers will possibly make the connection.

Even so, how can either possibly still be arguing against the BNP, as they do? What is it exactly that differs from their line and the goons' line? I think the papers would be hard pressed to come up with any argument other than, 'We don't like the BNP because . . . because . . . they smell!'