Mail laments "desperately sad" lack of benefits for immigrants

Earlier this month the Mail's irony meter exploded into a thousand tiny pieces when the paper expressed its shock at a French newspaper daring to criticise British ski instructors taking French jobs. You see, the usual invective about foreigners stealing "our" jobs doesn't apply if the foreigners in question are white and British.

Today the Mail is at it again, attempting to drum up sympathy for Brits who ploughed their life savings into homes in Spain only to see the bottom fall out of the market leaving many in negative equity.

It's sad stuff - nobody wants to see someone suffering like this - but once again the Mail displays extraordinary double-standards. Would we get two pages of sympathetic copy if an Asian Muslim family based in Britain found itself in similar straits?

One paragraph that leaps off the page contains a quote from 62-year-old widow Marian Henderson:

"I’ve looked for work but there just isn’t any. If you go for an interview and there are five Spanish people and one British person, they’ll have the five Spanish first. You can’t blame them, but that is just the way it is. As for help from the government there is nothing. If I was in England I would get help with the council tax and pension credits, but because I am in Spain there is nothing. They don’t hand out anything for free here - it’s terribly depressing."

The Mail describes her plight as "desperately sad" - but isn't this EXACTLY what the Mail wants to see happen in this country? Remember all those front pages demanding British jobs for British workers? The years and years and years of complaints about immigrants receiving benefits paid for by hard-working natives? Doesn't anyone at the Mail realise that the Brave New World the paper is constantly calling for will result in exactly the same "desperately sad" circumstances affecting Brits on the Costa? Would the Mail be at all sympathetic towards a 62-year-old Polish widow living in a house worth half-a-million pounds who couldn't get any benefits and was therefore struggling to get by?

I think we all know the answer...

Mail + Migrants = MUSLIMS!

So shrieks the headline in today's Mail. The story is based on a press release from MigrationWatch, which itself is informed by a written Parliamentary question from Tory backbencher Priti Patel.

The central claim is that Britain is a "soft touch" for illegal immigrants, because quite a few people who arrive here illegally go on to successfully claim asylum, even though the figures actually show that the number of illegal immigrants refused asylum is more than double the number who were granted it. Oh, and the base figure they use to provide the "one in five" statistic includes people who haven't had their cases heard yet, people who left the country of their own voilition, people who withdrew their claims and people who DIED before their cases were heard. Why IS Britain so bad at deporting dead people?

But the real highlight of the story is the picture chosen by the Mail to illustrate it.

Because as every Mail reader knows, Muslims = illegal immigrants.

"Fuelling xenophobia"

Former Tory spin doctor Amanda Platell (who achieved the impressive feat of getting fired as editor of the Daily Express for not having high enough standards) used her column in Saturday's Mail to look at last week's Transatlantic Trends survey. You may recall that it found that Britain topped the league table for intolerance of immigrants, and noted that the average Brit thinks there are three times as many foreigners living here than there actually are.

Platell chose to ignore this finding, instead concentrating on the claim that "two thirds of Britons see immigration as a problem".

Is it any wonder that a poll this week found that two-thirds of Britons see immigration as a problem, not an opportunity for this country, when we have cases like that of the woman known only as ‘ZH’? She is the failed Tanzanian asylum seeker who continually lied to officials, but who has now been allowed to stay in Britain because she has had two children in the 15 years she has been here.

Of course, political correctness gone mad etc. But Platell - herself an Australian citizen who has come over here and taken a job that could have otherwise been done by a British spin doctor-turned columnist - actually has a little bit of sympathy for ZH's kids, and concedes that it wouldn't be fair to throw them out of the country where they were conceived (by a British father), born, and raised. That's because the problem in this country isn't all down to immigrants like ZH and Plattell:

Surely the real villains here are the hand-wringers on the Left who established a legal system which allows transparently fraudulent asylum seekers to stall and appeal for so long that it becomes impossible to deport them. In so doing, they have only fuelled xenophobia against the many legitimate immigrants who have helped enrich British life.

Now, there may be a kernel of truth in this - too many politicians (of all sides) have made life easy for the likes of the BNP by refusing to address the fears and prejudices of voters who have misconceptions about the impact of immigration on this country. But where do those fears and misconceptions come from in the first place? From where do the BNP and EDL forums copy and paste a steady stream of stories that support their views? Where can you reliably go to get stories about immigrants that are at best gross distortions and at worst totally untrue?

Could it possibly be from a certain right-of-centre daily newspaper whose name rhymes with "fail" and that at the time of writing has more than 5,600 stories on its website that contain the word "immigration"?

Cause and effect

An international poll, details of which are published today in the Financial Times but have yet to pop up elsewhere, shows that Britain tops the league table of anti-immigrant hostility.

The study, carried out by a group of international bodies including the UK's own Barrow Cadbury Trust, found that almost half of Britons think there are "too many foreign-born people in this country". In other European countries this figure averaged three in 10, and in the USA - where there's been a huge amount of anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Tea Party - it was just a quarter.

The FT goes on:

"Britons were also more likely to think foreign arrivals damaged “national culture” [and]some 70 per cent of British people think their government is doing a “poor job” of tackling the issue."

So far, so depressing. The interesting stuff is further down, where it becomes clear that, in the FT's own words, public opinion seems "out of step with reality":

"When asked to guess how many people in Britain were foreign-born, the average UK response was three in 10. When told the estimate by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was in fact just one in 10, more than two-thirds of UK people thought this was either “not many” (36 per cent) or “a lot but not too many” (31 per cent). Just 30 per cent thought it was “too many”. Far more British people than their western counterparts also thought migrants were a burden on public services, even though most research suggests they are in fact a net contributor."

But why do so many people overestimate the number of migrants living in this country? The FT isn't afraid to point the finger:

"Immigration experts blame this on the hostility to foreign newcomers espoused by many British newspapers and the fact that the arrivals from eastern Europe rose so rapidly during the middle of the last decade."

Virtually every day of the week the likes of the Mail and Express provide a drip-feed of scare stories about immigrants that have, as TabloidWatch, Minority Thought, Angry Mob and the rest of the gang regulalry point out, a relationship to the truth that is tenuous at best.

We're repeatedly told that "you can't talk about immigration" without being called a racist. Yet the taboids talk bollocks about it day after day after day, feeding people lies and distortions that lead to the average Brit overestimating the number of migrants living here by a factor of three. And when people are told the true figure, two-thirds of people think that, actually, that's not too many at all.

Newspapers sell copies by reflecting the views of their readers - the Guardian supports student protesters for the same reason the Express hates people who aren't white. But is it too much to ask for papers to at least base their prejudices in fact?

PCC says it's OK to lie

So after a couple of months of pondering, the PCC have got around to replying to my complaint. You remember the one, where I pointed out that Richard Littlejohn was talking out of his arse when he claimed that "any Afghan climbing off the back of a lorry in Dover goes automatically to the top of the housing list"?

He said this despite the fact that it is simply not true - asylum seekers do not even join the housing queue and illegal immigrants (for fairly obvious reasons) aren't entitled to council houses and benefits at all. So Richard Littlejohn, who likes to portray himself as a man who speaks uncomfortable truths, made something up. He gave false information to his readers. He lied. And he did all this in an article that essentially blamed Afghan asylum seekers for the fact that an ex-soldier who served in Afghanistan couldn't get a council house, thus continuing the Mail's policy of whipping up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hatred based on misinformation.

The PCC code is very clear on such matters. Section one, clause one says:

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures

And they've gone further on the subject of asylum seekers, issuing a note to editors that says:

"The Commission – in previous adjudications under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code – has underlined the danger that inaccurate, misleading or distorted reporting may generate an atmosphere of fear and hostility that is not borne out by the facts."

So obviously after I pointed out that Littlejohn had published inaccurate, misleading or distorted information that generated an atmosphere of fear and hostility that is not borne out by the facts, there was only ever going to be one outcome:

Commission’s decision in the case of Stable v Daily Mail

 

The complainant considered that the article falsely stated that “Afghans climbing off the back of a lorry in Dover” were given precedence in the allocation of council housing.

 

The Commission acknowledged the complainant’s concern over the statement; however, it had to consider the remark in the context of the article in which it appeared. The article had been clearly presented as a comment piece, in which the columnist expressed his concern that a soldier who had served in Afghanistan had not been granted a council house. The Commission considered that the columnist had exaggerated and simplified the example of housing immigrants for the purpose of stressing his assertion that the “system of government exists simply to punish those who do the right thing”. It emphasised that the newspaper should take care when using such rhetorical methods of expression that readers would not be misled into understanding that they reflected statements of fact. In this instance, on balance it considered that readers would be aware that the columnist was not accurately reflecting the government’s policy on the housing of immigrants, but that he was making an amplified statement for rhetorical effect. It was therefore the Commission’s view that, on this occasion, readers generally would not be misled in such a way as to warrant correction under the terms of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code of Practice.

The covering letter notes that I can't complain about the decision or ask them to reconsider, but notes that they'll forward my letter to the editor. You couldn't make it up.

Now that the PCC has been quite clear that it's OK for journalists to lie for rhetorical effect, I think I'm on safe ground when I say that Richard Littlejohn is a fine, upstanding journalist, the Daily Mail is a wonderful publication whose employees can be proud to work for it, and that the Press Complaints Commission is an effective, relevant and entirely useful organisation that continues to make an excellent case for ongoing self-regulation of the UK media.