Today's Daily Express:
Do you think Richard Desmond, the owner of these two rags, is trying to telling us something?
Anton at Enemies of Reason has blogged about the Express' front page. He says:
Leave aside that we're all 'ethnics' of one mongrel sort or another; this makes it quite clear what's going on. There are whites and there are 'ethnics'. How much more explicit does it have to be before we start calling it what it is?
As Anton points out, the Express illustrate this 'vile story' with this image of Muslim women:
Yet the article, based on population forecasts from the University of Leeds about what might happen in 2051, clearly says:
The White British and Irish ethnic groupings are expected to grow very slowly, while the Other White category is projected to grow the fastest, driven by immigration from Europe, the US and Australasia.
Funny how the don't use pictures of French, American or Australian women, isn't it?
In the last week we've had 'Muslims force pool cover-up', 'Now asylum if you're gay' and now this.
Maybe they should change their claim to the World's Nastiest Newspaper.
As for the Star, the story of Abdi and Sayrug Nur, who are unemployed and have seven children, has been doing the rounds for a few days, since the family moved into a house Kensington which the papers claim is worth £2m. The Sun, Mail and Mirror have all written about it.
Yet the Star is claiming sole responsibility for having the family 'booted out':
Ministers last night vowed to kick out a family on benefits from a £2million home after a hard-hitting Daily Star campaign.
Your favourite newspaper intervened to stop Somali spongers Abdi and Sayrug Nur continuing to milk the system.
Alas, a few sentences later:
We demanded answers from the Department for Work and Pensions and they have agreed to evict the family.
Officials said they would remove the Nurs when the new rules come into force next April.
So the Nurs will apparently be moved when the rules change next April. Funny the Star did say that it would be in nine months time when it probably would have happened without the Star's 'hard-hitting campaign' anyway.
And look again at the headline '£2m asylum scrounger'. £2m represents the value of the house they live in, so he hasn't 'scrounged' £2m. The papers are up-in-arms about the £2,000 a week the local council is paying for the house - but that goes straight to the owners, so he doesn't get that either. (The Mail claims the rent had been £1,050 per week, but this was raised to £2,000, the maximum available under housing benefit rules, but there's little anger directed at the owners of the house.)
Also 'asylum'. Nur sought asylum in the UK in 1999 after working for the Red Cross in Somalia. It was granted and so now he is a refugee. But the Star and its ilk want to associate 'asylum' with 'scrounging' and so continue to label him as that.
And clearly the Desmond papers want to continue to demonise Muslims, foreigners, immigrants, 'ethnics' for their own miserable ends.
(Jonathan has also written about the Express front page here)
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