When someone might be Asian but you're not sure

A Reading man, George Herridge, has apparently been the victim of hostile reactions to his guide dog.

The local paper, in 'Blind passenger hounded off bus because of his dog' told early last month of four occasions in which people have overreacted to the sight of his dog.

Distortions, doublethink and urban legends

Sorry - the headline was sneakily meant to disguise another post about flag bans.  I've gone all Paul Dacre!  I'll be saying the c-word and making stuff up a lot next!

It's always fun looking at Sun roundups of outrageous BANS to see how padded out with exaggerations they have to be in order to fill the space.

How the Mail reacts when one of its myths are exploded

A couple of weeks ago, Zoe Williams wrote this excellent piece about David Cameron's "watch in wonder as I shamelessly parrot tabloid fanstasies to stop them being nasty to poor little me, after all, I'm not going to be Prime Minister or anything" speech, in the Guardian - 'Conkers, goggles, elf'n'safety? You really could make it up'.  In it, she shows how most 'elf 'n' safety gawn mayyd stories are, well, made up.  Here's what she says about the infamous 'conkers are banned at school unless the kids wear conkers goggles' myth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

English is a second language for 1 in 7 pupils. In primary schools. In England. Oh, and nearly half of them are in London.

Hi everybody! My second post has been up on MailWatch for ages with the headline 'Population growth and density. Should we be as frightened as the Mail wants us to be?' go and have a look.

I wrote this for MailWatch, but I don't want to hog the front page over there all the time, so I'll post it here first. I'll cross post it later. Enjoy!

Truth and knives

The press is in the grip of a moral panic at the moment. If you believe the papers, especially the tabloids, you can expect to be stabbed if you dare to leave your house. Try to get up the street and you'll have to dodge marching hordes of brainless hoodies relentlessly plodding towards you thrusting kitchen knives back and forward, like in some weird 80s videogame.

Of course, as unacceptable as any level of stabbings and murders is, the truth isn't exactly as worthy of panic as we're led to believe. The number of homicides by sharp instrument has been at roughly the same level for five years, and violent crime resulting in injury has decreased by 49% since 1995. Crimes involving knives make up only 7% of violent crime.

Still, it's difficult to open a paper without having the shit scared out of you about the danger and lawlessness of it all. The front page of yesterday's Mail screamed 'SCHOOLGIRL STABBED TO DEATH ON HER WAY HOME'. Today's has the first picture of the schoolgirl and the promise of a two page spread inside. That's where this particular moral panic gets merged with another more familiar one.

The big splash headline yells 'Stab girl 'failed by police''. That headline stretches across the story and past it, covering another story given the same billing. It's the story I looked at yesterday, with a different headline.



'The migrant knife culture, by police chief' it says, above a nice picture and an article that isn't actually by the police chief. Nice to see that the alternative headline is as misleading as yesterday's. There's also a cached version with 'mailonsunday' in the URL, suggesting a version has been sitting around on the website for four days, waiting for a good stabbing story to tie it in with.

The intent of this is clear. Chief constable Julie Spence's comments are supposed to prove a connection with 'mass migration' and the stabbings we see most days in the paper, the coverage relentlessly repeated and rehashed until the next stabbing.

Yesterday's paper edition had news of a man being arrested for the last murder splashed across the papers, of an anti-violence campaigner. Unfortunately for the Mail, the suspect is the victim's grandson and not an immigrant. Which might explain why the coverage was tucked away on page 31.

In any case, the link the Mail's trying to make between Spence's comments and the compassionately renamed 'stab girl', as well as the many other stabbings we've been hearing about, is complete rubbish. Here's what she actually said:

'We have had the Iraqi Kurds who carry knives and the Poles and the Lithuanians who carry knives. If it is normal to carry them where you come from, you need to educate them pretty quickly. We have done a lot of work to tell them not to, and we have seen it go down.'

She was talking about people carrying knives because they don't realise they're not supposed to. She was, quite clearly, not talking about anyone being stabbed.

There's a direct connection between this kind of reporting and the BNP knowing it can capitalise on it with things like Barnbrook's 'Blame the Immigrants'. Sure, it's not this exact story, but it isn't as if this was the first time the Mail or other papers like the Express has tried to exaggerate the amount of crime committed by immigrants. And it won't be the last.

It's dog whistle stuff. The reader is encouraged to make a connection without the paper actually making a definite claim. Complain to the PCC and the Commission will only look at the content of the Spence story - but readers can be relied on to get the paper's message.

And the whistle will make some readers hear 'black and Asian people' in place of 'immigrant'. Barnbrook makes a rather more heavy-handed connection with his 'immigrants and the sons of immigrants' schtick, but it's not long before commenters on his post are talking about the number of black people in prison and the genetic differences between black people and the 'indigenous British'.

It's no wonder the BNP like the Mail, and it's no wonder that the party's members are bewildered about the paper not going far enough. Which reminds me of the scene in 'Bad News' where Adrian Edmonson pretentiously tells his interviewer that the band aren't really heavy metal, and Nigel Planer storms off almost in tears, sobbing 'I only joined because you said it was heavy metal'. The paper doesn't have to explicitly say the things the BNP wants it to in order to give us that message.

Which makes it's recent coverage of the BNP more curious. Why, if the paper hates the BNP so much, does it carry on pulling this kind of stunt? We know one thing - the editor interprets his job as being to sell as many copies as possible by voicing his readers' concerns. Some of those readers are the 'I'm not racist, but...' crowd, who can convince themselve's they're not racist or xenophobic because they don't like the BNP. Others are actually the BNP. And when it comes to xenophobia and borderline racism with a veneer of phoney concern and respectability, there's no other game in town. They'll keep slavishly buying the paper no matter how much it attacks them.

The proof is Barnbrook's blog. Despite two big hatchet jobs about Barnbrook himself, one of his three blog posts is based mainly on stories he's read in the Mail. One of the others is making the exact same claim as the Mail is here, but without the finesse.

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'

How the Express and Mail include figures released months ago as new

There's a technique hacks use when they want to reheat old stuff and present it as new. It's quite a simple one. It's called 'pretending the old figures are actually new'. Or 'lying'.

Our friend James Slack has provided us with a couple of examples. In February he gave us 'More than 860 immigrants enter Britain EVERY DAY - and two-thirds come from outside EU' that reheated three month old figures, and last summer we got 'A fifth of crimes committed by immigrants', which said:

Foreign nationals are now responsible for more than one in five crimes committed in London, police figures revealed yesterday.

When the paper had reported the exact same figures six weeks earlier.

Today, proving that the Express likes to outdo Slack's distortions, we have 'Knifing and shootings up as murder rates soar', which says:

Shocking statistics released last night show a 14 per cent increase in murder and manslaughter in England and Wales between 1998 and 2007.

So - some statistics were released on a Sunday - that is shocking - especially as:

The figures, supplied in Parliamentary answers by Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker, emerged just days after Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed the Government was winning the battle against violent crime.

They were revealed in a Parliamentary answer that was given on a night when Parliament wasn't sitting? What the...?!

In reality, Vernon Coaker took part in a debate last Thursday about crime in London, and answered a written question about knife carrying. In the written answer, he refers to figures revealed three months ago when the Home Office published 'Homicides, Firearms Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/07'. Eagle eyed readers will spot that these are the exact same figures the Express used to scare its readers about the number of dirty murdering foreigners we have on our shores a couple of weeks ago.

Coaker doesn't contradict Jaqui Smith as the paper implies, saying this in the debate about crime in London:

It was interesting that the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) would not go back to 2002-03, but used 1998-99 as his baseline. The reason is that there was a different way of counting crime in 1998-99. Let me go through the figures, just as the Metropolitan Police Service has, from 2002-03 to this year, which are all counted in exactly the same way, so that the people of London know exactly what is happening. Between 2002-03 and this year, there was a more than 20 per cent. reduction in crime. There has been a reduction in the total number of murders in London since 2002-03 of 17.5 per cent, and a reduction in the total number of knife-enabled offences of more than 30 per cent. during that period. The year-on-year figures from the Metropolitan Police Service also show considerable reductions in crime. We need to ensure that the people of London know about these reductions, not because we want to be complacent or because the job is done, but because we want to move forward on the basis of facts.

More importantly, he doesn't refer to any of the figures the Express does, saying only this in the written answer:

Available data from the Homicide Index relate to offences currently recorded as homicide where the apparent method of killing is ‘sharp instrument'. Between 1997-98 and 2006-07 police in England and Wales recorded 2,333 such homicides, 635 of which were recorded by the City of London or Metropolitan police forces. These data cannot be broken down to a more local level than police force area.

And that's it. The paper has pretended that Coaker has contradicted Jaqui Smith, and pretended he's mentioned figures he actually hasn't, all so it can crowbar in some alarmist statistics.

As for the figures the paper chooses to focus on and imply come from Vernon Coaker - they're not much good. Lots of cases from last year will still be going on, and some of these offences will end up being no longer classified as homicide. There are caveats all over 'Homicides, Firearms Offences and Intimate Violence 2006/07' pointing this fact out. As an example, in 2005/2006, there were 769 cases initially counted as homicide, with 44 of those ending up being counted as something else. A similar number this year would show the lowest number of homicides since 2000/2001.

In 2006/2007, 757 were initially recorded as homicide, compared to 729 in 1997/1998, which is a much smaller gap than the one the Express gives us. That's because there were 121 cases that ended up not being counted as homicide that year. In fact, the number of cases initially recorded as homicide is at its lowest since 1999/2000. We have no idea how many of those from this year will turn out not to be homicide. The paper is going on and counting them all anyway.

And why? Because it's not trying to report the news or tell its readers accurately what is going on in the world. It's trying to create a specific false impression to scare them. Remember, kids. 'News' doesn't mean 'news' when we're talking about newspapers.

Another classic Express headline - Part II

More wrong than even I thought

Sometimes I forget that what I'm supposed to be doing here is explaining exactly how tabloid stories distort the truth, and kind of assume too much knowledge.

I did this yesterday, covering the classic Express headline '1.3m Poles arrived in Britain last year'. I've also uncovered some other stuff about the story in rereading it. So today I'll look through the story again, point by point this time. I be kickin' it old school.

The headline

The headline is not true. Unlike most Express headlines that get withdrawn later in the story, this one isn't actually clarified anywhere. The article is supposed to be about the Office of National Statistics' 'Travel Trends' report, which measures the number of short term visits made by people from overseas to the UK, and the same from the UK abroad. So, although there were 1.3m visits by people from Poland last year, it doesn't mean that 1.3m Poles arrived here, since some could have made multiple visits.

Plus, the report only includes figures for visits of less than a year, so it's not that these are tourist visits mixed in with people arriving to settle, they're all tourists and business trips and so on. Every single one of them. The average length of visit is 17 days.

The subheading

The subheading, 'And even that's an underestimate', is backed up by one single quote from one single critic. Of course, the paper pretends the quote is from 'critics' plural, with:

But even that massive total was called into question when critics of the Government’s border control policy described it as a “drastic understatement” of the true picture.

The actual quote says 'is likely to be a massive understatement', so the paper has sexed that up a bit by removing the uncertainty. More on this quote later.

How are tourist visits linked with immigration in the story?

With a bait and switch
The link is made with a good, old fashioned bait and switch. The paper starts by talking about the figures in the 'Travel Trends' document, which it already is misleadingly claiming measure visitors rather than visits, and then switching to talking about immigration without making that switch sufficiently clear. The switch comes here:

At the same time, local authorities complained to MPs that the Government’s failure to monitor the number of people in Britain was leaving them with an intolerable financial burden which had to be borne by council tax payers.

There isn't any signal to show that short term visits to the UK have nothing whatsoever to do with why Local Authorities called for extra funding. Although the paper has tried to cover its back by talking about visitors rather than migrants up until this point, it makes no distinction between the two at all here, leaving the impression that the figures in 'Travel Trends' will lead to more pressure on Local Authorities.

When you consider that we're talking only about individual visits of an average of 17 days here, you'll see how far from the truth this is, and how frantically the paper is clutching at straws to link the two themes.

With quotes
There are then a couple of quotes from people with vested interests that further muddy the waters.

The first is from the papers' idiot quote favourite, David Davis, and it's unclear whether he is giving his opinion of the actual 'Travel Trends' figures or the Express hack's interpretation of them. Given that he mentions Local Authorities being stretched, it seems unlikely that the figures he's talking about are the 'Travel Trends' ones, since they measure visits of an average of only 17 days long and don't effect spending on schools and so on. of course, he could be trying to mislead people too.

The second is from Frank Field. Again, it's unclear whether he actually knows he's talking about trips of an average of 17 days. Part of his quote is actually a paraphrase, which suggests that bits have been removed. Maybe those that make it clear he doesn't know he's talking about short term visits. His hobby horse is the number of jobs taken by migrants, remember, so he could be talking generally about Polish immigration without realising these figures only measure short term trips. Of course, he could be deliberately trying to mislead, too - or have been misled by the hack that asked for the quote.

Back to the bait and switch
The article then switches back to the idea these visitors working, with this:

But adding to the impression that many coming as visitors were in fact looking for work, Poles spent just an average £24 a day in 2006, compared with £129 for visitors from Luxembourg.

This line is a boggling combination of the dunderheaded and the quite-clever-if-you're-trying-to-mislead. Whether or not these people are looking for work doesn't change the fact that they're only here in the short term.

It also selectively leaves out that 'Travel Trends' lists the total spent in these visits is £540,000,000.

As a further part of the bait and switch, the article goes on to say:

When Labour opened the immigration floodgates in 2004, it was estimated that barely 10,000 Eastern and central Europeans would arrive. But 743,000 have registered for work since 2004.

Including self-employed, the true picture is nearer 900,000.

By now, the reader must be well and truly confused. Of course, these figures in themselves are misleading. They fail to mention that many of these have returned to their home country. According to other figures this paper and others have tried to scaremonger with, up to three quarters of them may have gone. The paper also neglects to give any source for the 'real' number being closer to 900,000. Like I said in my last post, the story might as well have said 6 million people and a unicorn.

A further deliberate misdirection with a quote
We then get this:

The figures were revealed as a senior Treasury official confessed that the Government has no real idea of the true number of people who have arrived – legally and illegally – under Labour’s “open door” immigration policy.

Christopher Kelly told the Commons Treasury Sub-committee that the 10-yearly census was next to useless when it came to measuring the impact of migration.

But it seems that Christopher Kelly is only talking about the reliability of the census - not the figures in 'Travel Trends' or the survey they're based on. That's why this is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. The direct quote comes with this:

He said: “We know we have a problem with migration statistics. Everyone accepts it.”

What's wrong with that quote in relation to these stats? That's it - these figures are only migration statistics in the loosest sense of the word, since they measure tourism. Here's a quick quote from 'Travel Trends':

Note that, although data collected on the IPS also feeds in to the calculation of migration statistics, this report does not provide any information relating to international migration.

The final paragraph
The final paragraph is again talking about the census, not the 'Travel Trends' figures.

One thing this article is a great example of is the way that the far right like to peddle their anti-immigration stance. Once you've poisoned the well of official statistics, you can claim anything you like. Bizarrely, you can then use the very same stats to support your own argument. You can even use figures that don't even measure international migration to support your contention that the migration figures are out of whack.

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?

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?

More on moronic use of stats in the Mail

Okay. After my own tabloid style outrage over the Mail's choice and use of figures in '196,000 out, 574,000 in: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars', I've managed to have a closer look at the article. Plus, the gods of leaving papers on public transport seats smiled on me and left a few pages of the paper copy of yesterday's Mail on the tube, including the inside pages covering the headlines, which make an interesting illustration of the difference between the Online and paper versions of the, er, paper.

In the paper version, the 'full story, pages 10-11' includes more than just the '196,000 out...' article. The double page spread is topped with the headline 'Thousands join the great exodus', and includes three stories across two pages. There's the '196,000 out...' article (with its own heading 'Record number of Britons leave for new life overseas'), theres '1 in 4 babies had a parent born overseas' (which has the more misleading headline 'A quarter of all UK babies have a foreign parent' in the Online version, which is substantially different in content), and there's 'Fiasco lets migrants use 'human rights' to stay here', by our friend, James Slack (who never replied to queries about where his shonky figures I looked at in 'No crow for me please mum!' came from - anyway, the Online headline for that is 'The failed migrants told its their right to stay').

Movement of Jah people

We're clearly supposed to read these three stories as being the 'full story' mentioned on the front page. The first doesn't get past page 10 (except for a large photo), the second is spread across the two pages, and the third is positioned above the second on page 11, with the 'great exodus' headline covering all three. This is something it's all too easy to miss when looking exclusively at the Online version of the paper. Often, different stories are presented together like this to create a connection we wouldn't necessarily get Online. There is a cumulative effect to the misleading coverage of stats, reports, papers and policies in the Mail, and they're often deliberately positioned to encourage us to create connections, like this.

They also fit in with the Mail's general overarching narrative concerning immigration, and the reader will presumably be familiar with that. Like I mentioned in the first post of the 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration' series, there's a context here. The Mail's implied reader already assumes that immigration is unacceptably high, the government is too incompetent to count it properly at best and actively secretly encouraging it to get migrants' votes at worst, that immigrants are chancers who want to live off the state and that immigration is ruining the country and the 'British way of life'. Those assumptions will push readers toward reading these articles in a certain way even before they start.

Record number of Britons leave for new life overseas

The first article fits in nicely with the general Mail stance on immigration, but the entire approach to the story is interesting. The ONS release that the article is based on clearly shows that both net migration (the amount that the population has risen by as the result of immigration after counting the number who left) and the total number of people migrating to the UK are both lower than the last year measured. The number of those immigrants who are foreign is also lower than the last year. So immigration hasn't 'soared'. It's dropped. 'Soar' is a weasel word that implies 'risen' but doesn't actually state it.

At the same time, the number of foreign nationals leaving the UK - which the Mail virtually ignores and only mentions obliquely 18 paragraphs in - has risen from 146,000 in 2004-2005 to 187,000 in 2005-2006. In the same period, the gap between the number of British citizens and non-British citizens leaving the country has closed from 42,000 to just 9,000.

In Daily Mail terms, you'd think this would be good news. Fewer foreigners coming to the UK than last year, a record number leaving. You'd expect the Mail to be happy - until you remember that every story about immigration must fit into the narrative that shows it to be a Bad Bad Thing in crisis at all costs. Hence the focus on the high number of British citizens leaving even though that number is only 1,000 higher than the next highest figure, and the ignoring of the high number of non-UK citizens leaving even though that number is 29,000 higher than the next.

So even before we go into how misleadingly the paper represents the figures it has chosen, there's already a certain amount of misdirection in the choice. A year that has shown fewer foreigners coming to the UK than the last, as well as more leaving and a lower level of net and total immigration is reported in terms of there being a 'great exodus' with an almost total surpression of all other statistics.

There are some real problems with the article beyond this choice of stats and the way they're presented. There's this, for example:

It also included 74,000 who came from Eastern Europe, the ONS said. This brings the official estimate of migration from the new EU countries since the middle of 2004 to 151,000.

However, ministers admit that in reality more than 600,000 have come over here. Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch said that the ONS calculated that only 57,000 of the recent Eastern European arrivals had stayed in Britain.

Unless the Mail has been talking to different Ministers than the BBC, this is simply not true. The Home Office only states that the 600,000 the paper mentions have applied to come here. Some haven't turned up, some haven't qualified, and others haven't stayed long enough to be counted. One set of stats don't discount or contradict the other. They measure different things. And they show exactly what we'd expect to see from a process where people come to work temporarily and then leave.

There's this:

ONS officials, who continue to base immigration estimates on a largely-discredited survey taken at ports of entry, said compiling the figures was becoming "difficult" and "challenging".

If the Mail thinks the figures here are based on a 'largely-discredited' survey, why does it even bother covering them here? And why does the paper use that survey numerous times to exaggerate the level of immigration? This very caveat helps show how irrelevant the stats actually are to the story. If the paper really thinks they're rubbish and not to be trusted, it wouldn't actually put them on the front page. Also, note that it only states that immigration is based on the survey and not the emigration figures in the headline, even though they're both based on the same survey. It's only relevant that the paper thinks the survey is discredited when it disagrees with its preconceptions.

There's this:

The figures include asylum seekers but do not count, and make no estimate of, the levels of illegal immigration.

How can you possibly count people who by their very definition have avoided being counted and are impossible to count? This is such a fat-headed agrument that I'm still dumbfounded when I hear people use it.

As I said recently, the figures don't actually matter. The paper is not interested in giving a realistic or nuanced view of what is happening in the world but, as Paul Dacre himself says, reflecting the views of the public. The public the paper is targeting are people who think immigration is a shambles - that's what they want to hear and dammit, that's what they'll hear.

I'm not saying here that the paper ought to be impartial, or that it should ignore the rise in the number of UK citizens leaving the country. I'm pointing out that figures that could have been used to create story that would be positive about immigration in Daily Mail terms were ignored in favour of ones that fit the negative narrative. Sure, a drop from one year to the next doesn't say anything about future trends, you'd think they were at least worth mentioning.

I'll cover the other two articles in my next post. Lucky you, eh?

How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part VI: "The Final Chapter"

This is the last in a series of posts about exactly how the Mail article '120 immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria arrive in Britain every day to be circus stars' misleads the paper's readers. The other parts of the series are linked at the bottom of the post.

Okay, so far we have a few quotes, attributed and unattributed (or genuine and made up, if you're being uncharitable) compounding the confusion over whether the article is dealing with Romanian and Bulgarian immigration or immigration from the other Eastern European countries. Leading up into the article's withdrawal, we have some nice misleading statistics to muddy the waters and create the impression of a bunch of workshy scroungers.
Lies, damn lies and statistics

The article leads up to the inevitable withdrawal with some slippery statistical shenannigans. I don't need to quote it here in full, but there are a couple of points that need to be made.

Firstly, as Obsolete points out - the number of Eastern Europeans on benefit for being out of work are incredibly low. A fantastic quote:

As you can see, the numbers claiming benefits for being out of work are still so minuscule as to be almost entirely negligible. The Express and Mail have instead thrown their toys out of the pram about the numbers claiming child benefit and tax credits, which on the surface do look large, leading the papers to claim that this is adding up to around £100m in benefits going to migrants. What neither paper bothers to tell you though is that the accession statistics (PDF) also tell you how many national insurance numbers have been allocated since 2004 for employment purposes, through which they'll be paying tax. These stand at 610,751. That means that over 500,000 migrants are taking nothing out while putting far, far more back in than the others are claiming back. And anyway, why shouldn't those 90,000 migrants that are paying tax just the same as the rest of us are not be allowed to claim the same benefits that we're entitled to?

There. Stats trashed. Job done. It would be nice to see a comparison of taxes paid and benefits received by the eastern European countries, even if the Mail and MigrationWatch would dismiss it if it weren't negative.

Secondly, look at the hyperbolic language here. 'Raking in child benefits'. Just over a tenner a week per child is 'raking it in'. To qualify for £200 a week you'd need nearly 20 kids! And £200 a week is hardly raking it in. And look at the term 'state handouts'. Nice. No mention, of course, that 610,751 National Insurance numbers have been issued. This actually stands at more than the number of applications for work permits that have been allocated. This could be because people exempt from the registration scheme have applied for National Insurance numbers, or that some were allocated before applications were rejected, or that some have been allocated to people whose application is outstanding. All sorts of reasons. Still, even more people than are registered with the Worker's registration scheme are likely to be paying - or to have paid - National Insurance and tax.

The other point to make is that the access to benefits for migrants from Romania and Bulgaria is more restricted than for the other Eastern Eurpoean countries. The two are not equivalent. We know that the paper is trying to imply that they are, but they're really not.

The closing sentence

The closing sentence tails off the article perfectly, and brings its focus back to the accession of the two new countries, nicely downplaying any impression that the reader might have that the two sets of migrants are different, treated a different way with different rules. It's also a perfect example of using the 'Withdrawn!' tactic at the very end of an article to make it look as though the person quoted is either lying or wrong. Here is is in all it's glory:

Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said: "While it remains too soon to evaluate the full impact of the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU, the early indications are that our policy of restricting access to the UK's labour market is helping to ensure that only those who have something to offer the UK are allowed to work here."

We already know what the paper thinks of that statement. It has gone to great lengths to contradict it throughout this and innumerable other articles about immigration.

This article is a brilliant example of how the fallacy equivocation, or the bait and switch technique, works. Liam Byrne's statement is broadly accurate if you think that migration from Romania and Bulgaria should have been restricted to a lower level than the other A8 countries. This isn't just a case of it being my partisan choice to go with what Liam Byrne says. I'm not a Labour supporter anyway, although I am left wing. These figures really do show a vast difference to the figures for A8 migration. They count a lot of the people the government was lambasted for not counting in the existing Worker Registration Scheme for A8 countries, and they're significantly lower than those figures. The government knows more about these migrants than the others, and they're less likely to be able to claim benefits - although whether the amount claimed by other Eastern Europeans is significant is certainly debateable. But the Mail has gone to great lengths to trash them, and hasn't once used a valid argument to do so.

To recap

I'll end with a quick recap of all the dishonest tactics this article uses to misrepresent the new government figures. Here goes.

Out and out false statements

• 120 Bulgarians and Romanians a day have come to the UK to be circus stars

• Over 120 a day in total have come to the UK

• 10,535 have come in total

• The government figures cover the last five months

• The top profession listed by Romanians is circus artiste (remember, it's only the top of a certain subsection, not all Romanians)

• The top profession listed by Bulgarians are chef and carer, with a couple of others thrown in (for the same reasons as above)
  

False impressions the article creates by equivocating

• The actual number of immigrants from te two new EU countries must be absolutely huge, since 120 a day have applied to be circus stars

• The 10,535 total number (itself mysteriously 115 higher than the real total) must be a massive underestimate because of this

• Since most Romanians have applied to be circus stars, they must be lying

• Since most Romanians must be lying about being circus stars, the system must be really easy to cheat
  

• The govenment has predicted that 40,000 more Romanians and Bulgarians will arrive by the end of the year
  

• This prediction is likely to be as wrong as the original estimate of 13,000 a year from the other Eastern European countries

• Since 40,000 a year is nearly 4 times as high as 13,000, the actual number could end up almost 4 times as high as 630,000

• Officials have admitted the figures for Romanian and Bulgarian immigration is the tip of the iceberg

• These figures do not include the self-employed

• Damian Green said the Romanian and Bulgarian figures blow the government's 13,000 a year prediction for other A8 countries out of the water

• Critics warn that the Romanian and Bulgarian migration could now put public services under pressure

• The government has implemented restrictions on migration from these countries because of the 10,000 that have arrived so far

• The government can do little to stop people coming to the UK from these countries if they claim to be self-employed

• David Frosts's quote was in reaction to these new figures, specifically those about Romania and Bulgaria

• The numbers of Eastern Europeans already here who claim benefits is astronomically high

• This creates a burden on the existing non-Eastern European population

• The proportion of Romanians and Bulgarians who claim benefits will be equivalent to those from the other Eastern European countries

• This means the 'benefits bill' will shoot through the roof

• Liam Byrne must be having a laugh to claim that the new restrictions must be successfully keeping the numbers migrating from these two countries lower than from the other Eastern European countries

There may be others I have missed, but as you can see, most of the false impressions this article creates are accomplished by implication and equivication rather than out and out lying. And I hope I've managed to show that the lie that seems most pointless and dismissable at first - that 120 a day have come to be circus stars - is actually the lie that enables the equivocation and shoddy implications to be made in the rest of the article.

Equivocation is the favourite tool of the tabloids - especially the Mail. Complain about any of the second set of false impressions in this article, and you'll get the reply of, 'but we were talking about the other set of figures then,' even though the fact that this was never made clear shows that the paper isn't really interested in allowing the reader to make the distinction.

I was talking about this article with my other half last night - because we have a dynamite social life - and she said, 'but that's not reporting the news - that's just propaganda!'

She was dead right.

Click below for the further thrilling instalments in 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration'!

How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part I: "The Context"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part II: "The Bait"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part III: "The Switch"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part IV: "The Big Little Lie"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part V: "The Quotes"

How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part V: "The Quotes"

This is the fifth in a series of posts about exactly how the Mail article '120 immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria arrive in Britain every day to be circus stars' misleads the paper's readers. The other parts of the series are linked at the bottom of the post.

The article doesn't just perform a bait and switch and then carry on by telling the truth about the other A8 countries. It misleads about them, too - and carries on switching confusingly between them and Romania and Bulgaria.

The first way the article misleads is by packing the centre section with out of context attributed and unattributed quotes. These quotes are used in two ways - to further muddy the waters about the differences between the A8 figures and those from Romania and Bulgaria, and to give the impression that a host of external authorities agree with the article.

The quotes

First off, we have shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green. Of course he's going to be negative about government figures. It's his job. But what's interesting is how the quote is used. Here it is:

Conservative shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "This blows out of the water the Government's proclamation that just 13,000 workers a year would arrive from the eight former eastern bloc countries."

Now, there's not a lot wrong with that in itself, but remember that leading into this, the article has made a point that purely applies to A8 migration, while giving the impression that it applies to Romania and Bulgaria. Plus, the entire focus of this article is supposed to be about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration. So, although when Damian says, 'This blows...' he's probably talking exclusively about the 49,000 who came in the first quarter of this year from the A8 countries, or at least the total figures for last year. The article gives the impression that he's talking about the 630,000 overall total as well as Romanians or Bulgarians.

Next, we have Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. Round of applause please. Thank you. Here's the quote:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: "The latest figures confirm that massive levels of immigration from Eastern Europe continue unabated.

"The extra 10,000 from Romania and Bulgaria that the Government knows about is a further addition to the total.

"This makes it even more essential to reduce immigration from elsewhere."

Ladies and gentlemen, Sir Andrew Green. When he's talking about the latest figures, he means the latest figures A8 migration and for Romania and Bulgaria. Then he shifts to talk about Romanians and Bulgarians, and then he makes a nonsense statement about reducing immigration from elsewhere. Why? What level is it at?

Anyway, it's the way the Mail uses this quote that's misleading - not necessarily the quote itself. What the article did with the switch was create the impression that some things that cast doubt on the figures for A8 migration also apply to migrants from the two new countries when they don't. So before they get this far, the reader has been given the impression that the self-employed and family members from Romania and Bulgaria are not counted. So when they see the comment about adding the 10,000 - with the nice little 'that the government know about' caveat - it only serves to bolster the idea that the two new countries' figures measure the same thing in the same way. But the government knows about a much, much higher proportion of Romanians and Bulgarians, because self employed people, some family members, those who claim to be self-sufficient and students are counted.

So, in effect, these two quotes extend the false association between the two sets of figures by adding what seem to be confirmations from two external sources that the association is valid.

Unattributed quotes and more equivocation

Always be sceptical of unattributed quotes. There are a couple here that reinforce the impression that people external to this paper support the article's criticism. Here's the first:

Critics are now warning that key public services, including schools and hospitals, could be put under increasing pressure.

The trouble with this is that critics of the government figures would include the writers of this article. This might be nothing more than a made up warning. Next:

Business leaders say they are concerned that up to half a million British youngsters may find themselves out of work.

'Business leaders' is wonderfully vague. Which ones? Do they know what they're talking about? How can we evaluate whether or not their conclusions are supported by the evidence? Why should we trust them? Do they even exist?

We'll come back, but for now, let's skip forward a bit to the next attributed quote in the article, as it probably sheds a bit of light on this:

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "The Government must understand that migration is not a long-term solution to the tragic skills shortages that many young people have.

"Over 500,000 18 to 24 year olds are presently out of work. Yet no one seems to notice because many of the jobs have been filled by willing migrant workers.

"This is unsustainable and we are in danger of creating a two tier society, with many going straight from school to a life on welfare."

This is probably who the paper is referring to as 'business leaders'. One guy. This quote is separated from the unattributed one to give the impression of greater numbers. Initially, I thought this might be a quote taken from a statement about something else, since nothing in the quote links it to Romanian and Bulgarian migration. Turns out I was wrong. It is about the Bulgarian and Romanian figures, buth the reason there's no link is because it has been cut out. It's been cut out because it's positive. It's from a BCC press release with the snappy title 'BCC statement: migration not the long term answer to tackling the tragic skills shortages of British school leavers'.

Here's the section of the release that the Mail has removed:

The current buoyant UK economy means it is no surprise that the high level of migration from Eastern Europe is continuing.

UK businesses value the benefit that migrants bring, recognising the work ethic that so many have in comparison to young potential British employees.

Wouldn't you know it - it was the positive bit! Who'd have thought that eh? It shouldn't come as a surprise, but the Mail have cherrypicked the negative bit. The bit about the benefit and the positive work ethic. Well, if you were about to start talking about how eastern Europeans are workshy benefit scroungers, you'd want to downplay that as well, wouldn't you?

Little swicthes among the quotes

Going back to where we'd got to before I skipped to that quote, there's a nice little bit of misdirection about the Romania and Bulgaria figures:

To tackle the problem, ministers have promised to limit the number of work permits handed out to Eastern Europeans to 20,000.

Since the article is mainly focused on migration from the two new countries, and has included quotes that deliberately serve to further the confusion between the two sets of figures, the reader could take away the impression that these new 10,535 from Romania and Bulgaria are what have led to the limit being introduced. It isn't a blatant implication, but there could be confusion that isn't clarified.

At this point, the paper could make the scope of the new figures from Romania and Bulgaria clear by revealing the number who have been issued with work permits so far. At the moment, the number including family members is 815 - out of 1,115 applications. The rest of the 10,000 are made up of those exempt from needing permits, the highly skilled, the self employed and those who register as self-sufficient. Keep that in mind when you see what the next unattributed quote is:

But critics have pointed out that the Government can do little to stop immigrants travelling to Britain or claiming to be selfemployed.

This comes straight after the article has just made a claim specifically about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration - mentioning the 20,000 limit. It then makes a definite claim about the figures, linking the sentences with the word 'but'. But if you're talking about the Romanian and Bulgarian figures, this sentence is demonstrably false. Looking at the actual figures, we can see that 155 people who applied to come as self-employed people to the UK have had their application refused. So yes, the government can stop people coming claiming to be self employed.

This may be getting a little confused, so it's time to boil everything down here a bit.

• Damian Green's quote is about one set of migrants, but is used in such a way that makes that fact unclear

• Sir Andrew Green's quote - which itself isn't entirely clear - has been used in such a way to compund the impression that the A8 migration is the same as Romanian and Bulgarian migration

• Later on, the paper quotes David Frost of the BCC, nicely cutting the bit where he mentions the benefit of this migration. It separates this quote froma an earlier unattributed comment from 'business leaders', which is likely to be the paper's way of using the same quote twice
  

• All these quotes are used to make it appear as though the three people quoted are agreeing with what the Mail has said up until this point. That includes the lie about the number of circus artistes

• The paper uses unattributed quotes to make its own criticisms look well supported by a host of external authorities

• A definite statement is made about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration, with a little bit of equivocation that makes it unclear exactly what has led to the imposition of a 20,000 worker's permit limit

• A statement is made that only applies to the other A8 countries, but is linked to the previous statement about Romania and Bulgaria with a 'but', giving the false impression that there is no way to stop Romanians and Bulgarians designated as self-employed from coming to the UK

This is taking some time, but there really are lots of ways this article misleads and covering all of them will take a lot of effort. Bear with me. There's only the exciting conclusion to come.

Click below for the further thrilling instalments in 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration'!

How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part I: "The Context"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part II: "The Bait"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part III: "The Switch"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part IV: "The Big Little Lie"
How the Daily Mail lies about immigration. Part VI: "The Final Chapter"

How to lie about immigration with the Mail

In 'They go together like Batman and Robin', I looked at how the Mail lied about the number of people coming to work in the UK from the two new EU countries by counting tourists as migrants in the article 'Migrant numbers triple from new EU countries'. It was quite a shameless attempt to knock out some misleadingly high figures before the official ones get released on 22 May.

In today's edition (10 May) the paper has gone and topped that with some even more shameless lying about the figures. It's pretty staggering, actually.

The article is headlined '50,000 a month arrive from two new EU countries'. Those of you unfortunate enough to have read the Batman and Robin post will remember that the figure the paper claimed in that one was only 20,000 a month. That's less than half this claim. So the Mail is spinning the numbers it had already spun by including tourists as migrants to more than double its already exaggerated figures. Get your head around that one.

Here's how the paper did it last time. The Overseas travel and Tourism First Release lists the number of visitors from all 27 EU countries combined (EU27 countries), and the number from all 25 countries that were members of the EU prior to the accession of Romania and Bulgaria (EU25 countries). Last time, the paper just subtracted the number of EU25 countries from the total EU27 countries to give the total from the two new countries. As misleading as counting these people as migrants might be, it's the only way to find out how many visitors came from the two new countries.

This time, the paper does this:

In March 2007 some 230,000 visitors arrived from the member countries of Eastern Europe, 57,000 more than in the same month last year.

And claim that these are all, or at least mostly, from the two new EU countries. But they're not. And we know they're not because we found that out in this very paper. In fact, the total for all three months since accession is only 3,000 more than the paper is claiming for just one month. The paper gets its 57,000 for March by taking the total number of extra visitors from all 12 Eastern European countries for three months and dividing it by three. It then says these are nearly all from two countries.

The actual number of extra visitors from the two new EU countries so far since accession in January compared to last year is just 29,000. Yes, the Mail's original 'Migrant numbers triple' story claimed a rise from 23,000 in three months of 2006 to 60,000 in 2007, but it was using the figures of December 2006 to February 2007, including one month before accession. The more recent figures show that the number of visitors from January to March 2006 was 31,000, and in the same period of 2007, the figure is 60,000. So, the actual number of extra visitors from the two new EU countries in March 2007 is around 10,000. The Mail implies that the accession of the two new countries is responsible for a rise of 50,000. Does the Mail lie much?

A comment septicisle made on the Batman and Robin post:

Even by their standards this is pretty contemptible.

How do you like these apples?

Not content with pretending that tourists are migrants, the paper has now decided that near enough every single extra visitor from Eastern Europe is from the two new EU countries when it knows full well that's not the case. How contemptible is that?

The rest of the article is just filler really - but let's go through it a bit. Firstly:

The first count taken since the beginning of the year shows there were around 50,000 arrivals each month from the two new members.

Lie. We know it's a lie because the paper reported the real figure of roughly 20,000 two weeks ago. Here's the deal. When you know the truth and you report something else, that's a lie. It's not a mistake. It's not a miscalculation. It's a lie.

Next:

The figures are, admittedly, subject to the vagaries of the International Passenger Survey, the heavily- discredited Government survey used to plot levels of immigration and emigration. Officials are desperately searching for a more accurate way to count.

They're also subject to the vagaries of this newspaper, which has nearly tripled the number of visitors the study actually said came from these two countries. Not only has the paper pretended that tourists are migrants. Not only has the paper pretended that the number of tourists is almost three times the number it actually is, the number it reported itself two weeks ago. But it's now trying to imply that its pretended, exaggerated number is actually an underestimate.

Expect more of this sort of bald faced lying between now and 22 May, when the official figures get released. After then, expect lies about how these figures prove how inaccurate the official ones are.

I mentioned the other day that since starting this blog I've come to hate the tabloids more than I thought possible. This is why.

We know why the BNP lies about immigration. Why would a national newspaper want to do that?

'This is outrageous!' said Tarquin Fitztory II

In my original '"This is outrageous!" said Tarquin Fitztory' post, I talked about how the tabloids mislead with the quotes they use in their stories, mainly by having contacted someone for a reaction to an event without giving them the full story. I missed one vital aspect of fibbing with quotes that I've spotted a couple of times recently.

As well as doing all the things I mentioned, the tabloids will often include a quote from someone and give the entirely false impression that the person they are quoting are reacting to the events in the article, when in fact they're talking about something else that happened another time. There have been good examples in a couple of my recent posts, which is handy because it means I don't have to look very far.

In 'They go together like Batman and Robin' I mentioned how the Mail had created a story around the number of people visiting the UK from Romania and Bulgaria and misleadingly twisted it to make it look as though the figures actually represented migrant workers. Part of the way it did that was to refer to a group of people - the vast majority of whom are tourists - as 'migrants'. The other way it creates a link between visitors and migrant workers is to include an extended quote from Grag Hands MP about how he thinks the cap on the number of workers from these countries should be scrapped. (There's also a quote form Damian Green, but remember the original post. Is he actually reacting to the real figures, or the misleading view of them the paper sets up in the article's opening sentences?)

The thing is, Greg Hands's quote isn't in response to the Mail's story, but part of a far more lengthy statement he made in a Westminster Hall debate on the same day. The article frames the quote as though it is in connection with the figures it is reporting, but since one of the questions the paper didn't quote was:

I have five specific questions for the Minister. First, how many Romanian and Bulgarian nationals have come to the UK to work since 1 January 2007, what proportion of the total number of visitors from those countries does that figure represent, and how many have already exited?

I sorely doubt that Greg Hands would accept the Mail's fudged tourist figures are genuine. His entire question has very little to do with anything this article says. Of course, the paper has cherry picked the bits of his statement that make it look as though the government's policy on restrictions of A2 migrants is a shambles - which it probably is - but it downplays a major part of the thrust of his arguments. Here are some quotes from the statement you'd be unlikely to see in the Mail or der Sturmer:

First, they are unfairly discriminatory: Romanians and Bulgarians are treated as second-class people, especially when compared with other European Union citizens, including those from recent accession countries.

and:

I strongly favour equal access to the UK labour market for all citizens of EU countries—a view that is already on the record from a previous debate of mine in this Chamber on local authority funding and the impact of A8 immigration.

and:

Generally, A8 immigration to my part of London has been very positive, with only a few negative side-effects, such as homelessness and handling people whose trip to the UK has not worked out.

and:

Ironically, owing to the fact that there are probably so few A2 nationals compared with A8 nationals, most employers do not bother to check the regulations behind A2s.

and:

The Home Secretary has called A8 immigration “a success”, and I for one agree with him.

You get the picture. The paper has cherrypicked a quote that is only tangentially related to the article in that it deals with the subject of A2 migration to give a bit of weight to its lame figures. Oh, and you might be interested to know the answer to the question about the numbers of A2 migrants. It's this:

The hon. Gentleman asked for data on the number of A2 migrants coming to this country, and they will be available on 22 May, when they will be published alongside Office for National Statistics data on a range of other migration matters.

So we'll get the proper figure in a few weeks. If the paper really wanted to report on the number of migrants, it would wait. But it's more interested in banging out a probably exaggeratedly high figure and its time's nearly up.

The second example is from my last post, 'No they don't'. I don't need to do much more than reproduce the quote from Inayat Bunglawala from his piece in the Guardian, but I want to point one thing out. First, the quote:

To add further insult, the Express story contains a quote from me saying that: "We believe one legal code should apply for all citizens of the UK. There is no place for multiple legal systems for people of different religious or ethnic backgrounds."

Now I had certainly not given this quote to the Express reporter, Paul Jeeves, under whose byline, the story appears. I have never spoken with Paul Jeeves about Shariah courts. I can only imagine that he cut and pasted this quote of mine from over a year ago when I was discussing the question of a dual criminal code system operating in the UK - not voluntary Shariah courts dealing with civil matters.

So, you can see that Der Sturmer have used a misleading quote to give the impression that Mr Bunglawala's position is actually the opposite of what it would be in this case. That's unbelieveable if you think about it.

Always, always be sceptical about quotes you read in the papers. Always.