We want more immigrants, says Mail
...but only if they're Christmas trees.
Yes, hardworking overtaxed middle-class people may find it slightly more difficult to find a real Christmas tree for Jocasta and Simeon to sit around in their Surrey semi this year, according to this shock report today:
Horrors! There may be a slight increase in demand across Europe for trees so not so many will end up in the UK. But hang on a tick; what's this?
The Norway Spruce, the traditional British Christmas tree, is also expected to be in short supply, the British Christmas Tree Growers Association says.
I, I, I, I... what what what?! The traditional British Christmas tree is a bleeding spongeing dirty immigrant, coming over here and sucking nutrients away from ordinary hardworking indigenous British firs?!
Eight million real trees are sold in Britain each year and the Nordmann fir has become the favourite because of its dark green needles, which do not shed.
The Nordmann fir? Nordmann doesn't sound like a traditional English gawdblessthequeenmum conifer name, does it? It's exactly the kind of name which, were it the name of a Tory prospective parliamentary candidate, would probably anger Peter Hobbins and the massed ranks of Mail readers who roared in approval about his rant the other day. It sounds like it might well be - pass the smelling salts - a foreign tree.
Meanwhile, the Mail seems to find comfort in this paragraph:
Meanwhile, growers have reported one of the best-ever years for British-grown trees, thanks to the summer's mixture of rain and sunshine.
You mean to say... foreign types of tree... coming over here... taking our soil... there'll be millions and millions of them before 2030, if this increase carries on at its current rate! Aaaaaargh! We're doomed!
But no. It's all right if it's a Christmas tree. Just a bad thing when it's a human being.
(Thanks to Carl for the tipoff!)
Does the benefit system favour migrants?
It does according to the Daily Telegraph, who are just as capable of repeating BNP immigration myths while simultaneously distancing themselves from the extremists.
In a piece entitled 'Telegraph View' (I believe it's the leader column) published on Friday, there appears this line:
The white working class who live there are resentful of the way the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families: the long tail of this recession could whip up yet more support for the BNP, despite its leader's feeble performance on Question Time.
Let me just run that past you again:
The white working class who live there are resentful of the way the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families
Not 'appears to be' but 'is'. No evidence to back that assertion up. It just is. Skewed.
Now I know this is an opinion piece and as a piece of polemic is representing a particular point of view rather than an objective look at the facts. That's fine by me. But how is the benefit system "skewed towards immigrant families"?
The myths of queue-jumping have been exploded very clearly, time and time again. For example, one national newspaper in July this year covered a story which was headlined
Immigrants do not get housing priority, study shows
which had this quote:
The far-right [BNP] spread rumours in target seats that immigrants were given precedence in the queue for social housing accommodation.
Does that sound a bit like
the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families
to you? Because it does to me. Still, the newspaper (which you have by now correctly identified as the Daily Telegraph) carried on:
The IPPR found no evidence of queue jumping or abuse of the system by immigrants but warned that those perceptions were widespread in certain areas.
Yes, I wonder which nasty types have been creating such perceptions? I imagine the kind of people who would say that the benefits system favours migrants - people like the Daily Telegraph, in its leader column - the column which "is the opinion of the Daily Telegraph".
Does the system favour migrants? Well, a look back through the Telegraph's very own archive yields this article, which states quite clearly:
A policy that stops Eastern European migrant workers accessing most benefits for at least a year is to remain in place amid fears lifting the restriction will increase unemployment among Britons.
The continued existence of the worker registration scheme for European migrants would appear to suggest that, far from actively favouring migrants, the benefit system is actively skewed against them.
How you get from that to saying the system is skewed in favour of migrants I'm not too sure. But it's nice to know it's not just the tabloids who are capable of mixing it with BNP-style rhetoric while at the same time pointing at Griffin and saying: "Ooh, look at the bad man".
Spotter's badge: Malcolm Coles
The annual 70m scare story
Today's Mail is all about fear - as most Mails are. You might have thought "WILL X AFFECT HOUSE PRICES?" was just a joke template Mail headline that Private Eye used, but no: today there's
Online crime maps 'could wipe thousands off house prices overnight'
and, of course, the immigration scare. There's something reassuring about coming across the POPULATION TO RISE AND NO-ONE IS DOING ANYTHING TO STOP IT AND THEY'RE ALL COMING OVER HERE story, and here it is:
Immigration to drive up Britain's population to 70million within 20 years
Ah, of course. The Mail runs this sort of story every few weeks, just in case you hadn't got the message hammered into your brain by now. Back in August they called a rise of two per cent in foreign-born mothers giving birth in Britain a 'migrant baby boom' and gave Amanda Platell full rein to imply that it wasn't 'people like us' who were procreating with a straightforwardly racist article.
Have a look back through the archive and you can read about "immigration to increase Britain's population by a third", "immigrant population to increase by TWO THIRDS", "Cut population by a third, say crowded Britons", "immigrants make up half Britain's population growth", "immigration and births to non-British mothers pushes Britain's population to record high", "immigrant population swells by 1.4million in five years as British-born residents dwindle", "immigration to trigger massive population boom"... and so on, and so on. That's just me searching for the word 'population'.
Almost exactly a year ago, Phil Woolas - definitively the most anti-immigration minister in Labour history, who regularly comes out with dog-whistles about how he is going to clamp down on immigrants - was labelled as 'hapless' by the Mail and the 70 million figure was touted. Woolas said in the story:
I am trying to reassure the people who are worried about speculation about increased population that they don't have to worry. The figure of 70 million is not a figure of my choosing, it is a figure speculated by others.'
So naturally the headline read
Hapless immigration minister repeats pledge to keep UK's population below 70 million
Hang on a minute. Look back to October 24, 2007 - exactly a year before that other piece - and there's another article on exactly the same subject, with exactly the same figure:
Britain's filling up with population set to hit more than 70 million by 2030
Is October 24th the "70 million" day? I looked back to October 2006 but couldn't find anything except for a thoroughly positive article about the introduction of a vaccine to protect against HPV with overwhelmingly positive comments calling it a 'breakthrough'... hmm I wonder whatever happened to that? Ah, wait a minute, the "70 million scare" story came in July of 2006:
Population 'could hit 70m unless we get a grip on immigration'
and included:
Lord Turner said the population would rise from 60million to 66million by the year 2050. But he predicted that if immigration went unchecked, the real figure would be 70million.
Every year a 70million scare story. And today's story has the same old scares, the same old shocks. And the same old distortion. It's never that the population will reach 70 million, and that might not necessarily be a bad thing with increased medical advances producing an ageing population which requires more young workers to pay taxes and keep the system going. No, it's always that immigration is going to be the one and only cause for an unnecessary rise. Today there's this:
Around 180,000 immigrants will arrive in this country every year, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) said.
And what you're wondering is: how many people will be leaving the country? Well you can keep on wondering, can't you, because it's not like the Mail's going to tell you that. It might give you some perspective on the story, mightn't it? And they certainly wouldn't want that.
But:
Every year 425,000 more people will be living in the UK...
meaning that, even if we assume 180,000 immigrants come in and no-one leaves - which of course isn't the case, but we'll assume it - immigration will only be responsible for 40% of the population rise. Yet it's the most important, almost only, factor mentioned in the Mail's story. Why might that be? And again, this is mentioned as if it's a fact:
When the immigrant baby boom is taken into account, migration will account for two thirds of population growth, the figures predicted.
Another clever bit of conjuring. It's almost claiming that children born in this country to foreign mothers are not British - which isn't a million miles away from what Gr*ff*n and chums might say, is it? And remember, that 'baby boom' is not a boom at all; it's a small rise. But let's call it a 'boom' to demonise the foreigns, shall we?
And yes, it's the same old faces being interviewed: Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, and Lord Turner. As they were in 2008. And 2007. And 2006. And maybe 2005, but I lost the will to live while I was wading around the Mail online archive. Still, put a big red ring round the second-last week in October for 2010: we'll be getting exactly the same story again. Maybe they'll push it up to 75 million for a bit of variety? We'll see.
*slight update* The BBC has its own take on the story here, which as you can see involves slightly more than just ringing round every anti-immigration voice they can find and saying "How bad do you think it will be?" The bit about British-born babies from foreign-born mothers being counted as immigration comes, surprisingly, from the ONS itself. Are British-born children of immigrants counted as immigrants? I find that a little odd.
Lying about immigration? Surely not
This is not about Nick Griffin. I've decided I'm not going to mention the smellyfaced cockwipe on here for a few days, so that I'm not accused of being obsessed with the vile bastard or giving him any undue credit. So although this is about immigration lies, this is not about the man whose entire raison d'etre is immigration lies - partly because everyone knows he lies about immigration, whereas they may give a little more credence to what a reporter in their daily paper says; and partly because he's a shit-stuffed hatemonger who is getting lots of attention already, which he's presumably delighted about. The despicable weaselly-voiced lie-vomiting Nazi. So from here on in, he's not going to turn up at all.
No, while Gr*ff*n is fairly open about his stance on immigration, and you can be fairly confident he'll come out with lies to back up his unsavoury views, our newspapers represent a position from which they claim to be looking at the facts objectively and merely revealing what's going on. Which would be fine if that was indeed what they did. But no. They look for outlandish stories that will outrage their readers; they look for statistics that can be warped into shape; they look to give their blue-rinse brigade a ride in the "They're all coming over here!" ghost train at the breakfast table.
So we had the story earlier this week of a man being allowed to stay in the country just because he's got a cat. Except of course you know that's not the case. The cat had nothing to do with it; it was merely a minor detail in the case which everyone involved in it insisted had no bearing on the final result. Strange, then, that it was only the Telegraph who decided to bring that rather important point to our attention, with other newspapers simply hacking away at the facts until what remained was what they wanted to write: BLOODY FOREIGNER COMES OVER HERE AND WE CAN'T KICK HIM OUT BECAUSE HE'S GOT A BLEEDING CAT! YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP... oh. You could.
Not that that stopped Littlejohn, of course, who based his entire argument about the piece in the Daily Mail and ignored all the details in (marginally) better quality publications which showed what the facts were. Sometimes I wonder if he reads past the headlines. Oh but so what, you're saying to yourself, everyone knows Littlejohn is a tedious little man who mysteriously wins Polemicist of the Year awards despite constantly lying about immigration, telling porkies about PC Britain and basically never checking his facts - Why should all this matter? Well:
Unfortunately, for the BNP, Stormfront and other racist website/forums where this story has appeared, it is now accepted as 'fact'.
Guess what - racists care even less about the truth than Littlejohn. Once it's appeared in a national newspaper, though, they can use it as 'evidence' to back up their hatred, for there's still a degree of trust (albeit rapidly diminishing) in what people see on the printed page, as opposed to what's been typed onto a computer scren. Was it really a surprise that the horrific English Defence League used a video composed almost entirely of Daily Mail and Daily Express stories for its recent campaigning? Does it matter when newspapers get it wrong with agenda-driven rubbish? Yes. Yes it does, when it's giving racists, and violent racists at that, justification for their hatred.
And so to yesterday, and this marvellous sentence from Five Chinese Crackers:
Using the magic words, "according to the Daily Express," which is about on a par with saying, "according to that bloke swinging a plastic bag and shouting Bible verses in French next to Victoria Station," in terms of reliability, the Mail regales us with the same flipping figures I looked at way back in March...
Have a look at the post to see how the papers make the immigration figures misleading, and you can see for yourself what they're trying to do. MigrationWatch are the people sticking the coke in the furnace, but the Mail and Express know what they're doing. And when they don't have a new immigration story to lie about, like the man and his bloody cat, they simply regurgitate exactly what they wrote several months ago.
But why now? Look, I promised I wouldn't mention him again, but it's just that there's a certain arsehole appearing on a certain outdated politics programme on Thursday night, and to coincide with that, the most anti-immigration screamsheets are trying to do two things: firstly, to say that they are distancing themselves from him; secondly, to say that they are repeating his arguments word for word, then having thousands of rabid commenters turning up on the stories saying "I WANT TO VOTE FOR SOMEONE WHO'S GOING TO SAVE BRITAIN, LOVELY OLD NICK'S GOT MY VOTE AND NO MISTAKE!" - do you know, I just wish they'd come out, and be honest, and say: "Yes, we're only a fag-paper away from Griffin, what of it? We sell loads of papers based on absolute bollocks and lies about immigration, and our readers love it, because they're racist too. And what the fuck are you going to do about it?"
But no, they have to go through the same pantomime every time. We're not racist, but... here's some racism.
Meanwhile, today's Express carries yet another immigration scare story, this time about 40,000 'illegal immigrants' who have gone 'missing'. The files date from 2003 and many are not 'missing' but simply 'not here any more' or 'not traceable because they're here illegally and perhaps understandably don't want to draw attention to themselves'. It's not a new story - you'll remember that back in April, Boris Johnson called for an amnesty on illegal immigrants. But it's a story about immigration, which implies there's chaos, and THOUSANDS OF 'EM, and every week is immigration week at the Express - and luckily enough our friend at MigrationWatch was contactable, now there's a relief:
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the population think tank Migrationwatch, described the revelation as “Yet another skeleton in the Home Office cupboard.” He said: “This is symptomatic of the utter chaos in the asylum and immigration system during the past 10 years. Nobody in the private sector would get away with such a performance.”
'Population think tank' - yes, of course it is. Not a pressure group which attacks everything to do with immigration, no sir.
Of course, all these stories come from the same newspapers which do the tango with a certain fat one-eyed politician who shall not be named, but which then claim only to have brushed against him on their way to the toilet. And then they dismiss him and attack him in the strongest possible terms, with a nod and a wink to his supporters, who flock to their publications in droves.
The Express reaches out to international readers
Let's suppose you ran a newspaper which has an international edition, rounding up news from your paper in a handy seven-day package. It's distributed all over the world and can be found in airports, newsagents, all sorts of places. In a lot of ways it reaches out to those international readers to give them an idea not just of your newspaper but also your nation.
What message would you want to give to the world about Britain? Perhaps the people in the airport are excitedly on their way to Britain for the first time, wondering what it's like, so they might have a peek at the press from that country to get an idea of the people's views. What would you tell them?
Oh. I see.
Spotter's badge: Andrew Ellson of the Times.
And bonus points for the "Giscard d'Estaign".
The anti-immigration pissing competition
When I saw this toilet bowl of a front page this morning
I thought to myself: well, you've really outdone yourselves this time, Express. And they have, of course. I've been avoiding the Express for a while and concentrating on the Mail because I kind of hope that the Express will just wither away and die, that its poisonous hate towards minorities will be seen through and that these are the last acts of a vicious, dying brand which deserves to be condemned and forgotten like the shit it is. But it's still going. It's still clinging on.
What surprised me, though, is where they got the justification for their inflammatory headline from. I had just assumed it would some kind of Astroturf pressure group, but no. It comes from a Tory MP. First, though, comes this sentence:
While some reports said the French would use British taxpayers’ cash to offer the migrants financial incentives to go home, most experts believe they will simply disperse to smaller makeshift camps around the Calais docks and continue their attempt to enter Britain illegally.
What of these reports that the French would be using British taxpayers' cash to 'send em back'? Is that stood up anywhere in the story? Of course not, it has no basis in fact, it's a misleading fabrication, and is revealed as such with the 'reports'. The Express has no proof of this claim at all, yet puts it in anyway.
How to really whip up the readers against the refugees, though?
Their attitude was summed up by one Afghan immigrant removed from The Jungle yesterday who said: “We’re determined to stay as close to the port as possible because it’s the way to England.
“Nothing will stop us getting there. We are all determined to start a new life in Britain.”
I'm not saying that's not the reason why a lot of these refugees are in Calais, because of course it is. But doesn't it just seem a little too convenient that the Express have managed to quote a refugee saying that they are "all" "determined" to "start a new life" in Britain? Of course the dying Express can't afford to send anyone out to The Jungle to report from the scene, so where does this quote come from? Well, I can't see it in any other publication this morning, so I don't know.
Anyway, to the Tory MP [Philip Davies], who must be patting himself on the back today after using the language of the BNP and far-right to get it splashed on the front page of a national newspaper:
“It is totally irresponsible to be trying to pass them on to us. Obviously both the French government and the asylum-seekers know how soft we are and that once people are here, however bogus their claims, they will never be kicked out again.
Lie. Of course it's a lie. We all know of refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers who've been deported - and who can forget the charming tale of cancer patient Ama Sumani being dragged out of her home in Britain so she could be forced to die in Ghana? There are prison-like buildings to hold asylum seekers in Britain. An MP would know this. An MP should know this. If an MP doesn't know this then he is a disgrace to his party, to Parliament and to politics. And I don't think it is ignorance. Either the Express has misquoted him or he is lying. Which is it to be? Let's assume the quotes are genuine, though, and proceed:
“But we’ve done more than our fair share. We can’t cope with the people we have. There is still a massive backlog of cases, people who have been here years. We need to put the ‘full’ sign up. France is a big enough country. They’ve got lots of room.”
Ah yes, put the 'full' signs up - the language of the far-right, adopted by the mainstream right. Well at least they're showing their true colours, I suppose, and there's no way of mistaking the attitudes that the next likely Government of this country has towards people who have fled dangerous and violent regimes in order to try and make their way to friends and family in Britain. And as ever there's the narrative that 'soft-touch' Britain 'never' kicks anyone out. Never. And that we're full. Full.
It's become an anti-immigration pissing competition in the middle-market papers to see who can muster the most outrage and fear, and today's effort in the Express is pretty typical. This is the language we're going to see on asylum and immigration from now to the election, with all parties trying to outdo each other. Of course the irony could be that these constant statements of 'soft-touch Britain' are what convince some refugees to think that Britain is, er, a soft touch. I mean, if you heard that you could 'never' be deported from Britain no matter how bogus your asylum status, wouldn't you try and go there first? This kind of lying rhetoric may actually be encouraging more people to try and claim asylum in the first place. I wonder if Ama Sumani thought about 'soft-touch' Britain as she was forced onto the plane to go back to Ghana to die? Who knows. The Express and Mail and the usual suspects couldn't have given a shit, though. It was job done for them.
As I often say, it's my contention that these stories do more than just make middle-Britain housewives clutch their pearls over the breakfast table. They create a climate of hostility towards foreigners and immigrants, in which it's acceptable to see 'them' as the enemy and 'us' as the victim. But is that really the case? There was a court case which concluded yesterday which might give us an idea of the answer. It was the kind of case that sometimes makes headlines in the Express and Mail - a judge condemning modern British society, a vicious and unprovoked attack in broad daylight with no-one doing anything to help... so why hasn't it got more coverage? Oh I see. It's an immigrant being attacked by racists.
A JUDGE hit out at `21st century Britain' as he jailed two skinheads who punched and spat at a woman for talking in a foreign language on a bus.
...
The yobs, who both have previous convictions for racist thuggery, were linked to the attack by 25-year-old Wykes' saliva, Manchester Crown Court heard. The victim, from Malawi, was talking in her mother tongue on her mobile phone on a bus when Wykes called her a racist name and said `what are you doing in my country, speak English'.
It's a vile attack on a woman who had done nothing except speak in a foreign language on public transport.
Handing Mortimer 12 months in jail and Wykes eight months, Judge Rudland said: "What took place was the most disgraceful catalogue of behaviour. This can't be allowed to take place on public transport in 21st century England.
I wonder what newspapers they'll be reading in prison?
*update* The ever-excellent Tabloid Watch points out that the Express headline is exactly the same as a BNP slogan. Coincidence?
Next stop: Racism central
This journey terminates at Riot, calling at Fear, Exploitation, Prejudice, Xenophobia, Lies and Shit Journalism.
Yes, it's the Mail again, doing what they do best: lying about immigration. You'll see from the URL on this story about the clearance of "The Jungle" that originally the story was about "Britain-obsessed" asylum seekers who were going to be allowed in to Britain 'at the earliest convenience' thanks to the European Justice Commissioner.
Yesterday, that Justice Commissioner says:
On Monday a spokesman for EU justice commissioner Jacques Barrot denied reports he had called for a change in the law to allow some migrants to be fast-tracked into the UK.
Michele Cercone told the BBC there was no attempt to force countries to take asylum seekers and Mr Barrot was urging France and the UK to "find a joint solution".
How odd that the Mail didn't ask him for a quote before saying he'd said the exact opposite! Why, it's almost as if they wanted to create an entirely false impression. Whoopsy! Of course, having said something which has been directly contradicted, the Mail have done the decent journalistic thing and printed a correction. Oh no hang on a minute, they haven't. They've simply deleted the original story and pretended it never existed. Classy.
Also in the original story, there was a claim that the "Britain-obsessed" asylum seekers had been 'groomed as suicide bombers'. Yet in fact these are people who had fled from the Taliban. Kind of almost as if they didn't like suicide bombings, or something.
So there you have the Mail's journalistic standards. Print a load of fearmongering rubbish about immigration and asylum, then hastily delete it from the internet and walk away whistling, pretending it never happened.
You can bet that some will have noticed those bullshit headlines, though - our friends at the EDL, who used a compendium of Mail atrocities to further their cause in a recent video. They'll have lapped it right up thanks to their friends at the Mail. Is it irresponsible of the Mail to be like this? Undoubtedly? Do they care? Of course not. Immigrants painted as perpetrators when in fact they're victims: perfect. "They're all coming over here" when in fact they're not: perfect. Job done.
The stories they want you to read
This story over at the BBC caught my eye:
Many economic migrants from central and eastern Europe who came to work in the UK are returning home because of the recession, a report suggests.
That doesn't sound like the kind of immigration story you see very often in the newspapers. But it's even got a quote from (Anti)MigrationWatch big cheese Sir Andrew Green, who says:
Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch said migrants from the A8 countries were "only a small part of the picture which, at least for the time being, is getting smaller".
Come again? That's Sir Andrew Green saying that immigration is decreasing from the former A8 European Union countries. Decreasing!
Unfortunately, I couldn't find this new immigration story on the Mail or Express website today. Perhaps they're not as quick off the mark as the BBC as far as these things go? I don't know. Funny though, because they're usually so keen to run stories about immigration. You know the kind of thing:
Or even this, which was yesterday's front page at the Express:
Foam! Roar! Slaver! Costing us millions!
It's a familiar story
the "baby boom" from those despicable foreign reprobates; and of course this one is going to cost 'us' ("We" are not immigrants, after all) a billion pounds. The "boom" stories came about last week when the headlines on immigration weren't quite what the screamsheets wanted, as detailed by Five Chinese Crackers - so perhaps we can expect similar ignoring of the decline in immigration in tomorrow's papers? Well, we'll have to wait and see.
Buy my book, it’s great
Switch site
Donate
Recent Posts
Most Commented On
Recent Comments
- Eddie on A day with the Daily Mail
- Eddie on A day with the Daily Mail
- Eddie on Peter Hitchens depresses me. But I won’t kill him.
- Emily on Update
- Angela Webb on This isn’t a flounce
About Me
Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
If you're struggling to read the site please use the drop down box below to increase the text size.