Don't let the facts get in the way of the scare story

The news that the sudden death of Natalie Morton was almost certainly nothing to do with the HPV vaccination broke last night. Not late last night. Not so late that stories couldn't be changed in the meantime. It's worth remembering that when you see what they printed today - and what's still up on their websites. It's worth keeping that in mind when you consider whether they actually care about the facts of the situation or whether they're merely interested in perpetuating a scare story.

The BBC, for example, play the story very straight:

A girl who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a "serious underlying medical condition", an NHS Trust has said.
NHS Coventry said the vaccination was "most unlikely to have caused the death" of Natalie Morton, 14.
She was given the Cervarix jab at Coventry's Blue Coat School on Monday and fell ill a few hours later.
The government said its national cervical cancer immunisation programme should continue.

However certain these conclusions seem, there is one ray of light for the scaremongers, and it's this:

"We are awaiting further test results which will take some time," she said. "However indications are that it was most unlikely that the HPV vaccination was the cause of death."

Some postmortem tests do take a long time to be processed, so it will be a while before it's absolutely certain the HPV jab had nothing to do with the girl's tragedy. So that strand of doubt can be used, if you want to whip up a frenzy of panic, and irresponsibly demonise a perfectly safe vaccination. But who would want to do that?



Chaos - really? Despite the initial findings? How on earth can the Mail spin that into being somehow chaos? Well, you get quite a way into the story before the findings are revealed. Chaos and fear go before facts:

The cervical cancer vaccination programme is in chaos today after the death of 14-year-old Natalie Morton.
Ministers insisted the scheme must go ahead and refused officially to suspend it.
But many health trusts are cancelling vaccinations due over the next few weeks while they investigate whether vaccine stocks are linked to the dose given to Natalie, who died on Monday hours after receiving the jab.
Initial post mortem results suggested the schoolgirl had a serious underlying health condition which meant it was 'unlikely' the vaccine had caused her death.

See how the death is linked to vaccination all along, with the vaccine stocks that were given to her, despite what we learn in the fourth paragraph. To the Mail, those findings change nothing - it's still full steam ahead with the panic, regardless of the truth of the situation.



And there's the headline on the Mail front page at 9.30am today, deliberately mistrustful of the evidence they've been given. Look at the layers they put around the story - the health trust (evil State apparatus) claim (this is what they're saying, folks) that Natalie could (that's could, not almost certainly did) have died from something other than the jab. Ah, if only the Mail were so careful with the way they dealt with press releases from MigrationWatch or the Tax Payers Alliance, rather than simply printing them as if they're cast iron facts! But then, when the facts don't suit your agenda, you have to try and distance them from your narrative, don't you?

The URL for the story is quite revealing, by the way. As ever with the Mail, it gives you a steer into the way the story was originally prepared. But this time it reveals something else:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216942/Cervical-cancer-vaccine-programme-chaos-death-schoolgirl-14-hours-jab.html

The schoolgirl died hours - yes, hours - after having the jab. Now I don't know about you, but if she'd died seconds after having it, then there might be cause for real panic and concern. Minutes would still be alarming and would be the kind of thing that would spark a genuine need to investigate the vaccinations and ensure they're safe. But hours afterwards...? Lots of things happened in the meantime to the poor girl. She probably ate dinner - why not link that with her death? Why must everything go back to the vaccination? What is the Mail trying to do here? No wonder, though, that they changed the URL - how dare they put in something which emphasises how distant her death was from the vaccination! Keep the panic in, don't take it away!

The local health trust in Coventry, which made the announcement, would give no further details to the nature of the problem.

As is right and proper with patient confidentiality, of course. But look how it almost appears the trust is being secretive, given what the Mail says.

It remains unclear whether Natalie's condition alone was to blame or whether it was a particular reaction when combined with the vaccine.

And so the Mail clings on to what little it has left, determined to keep the momentum behind the scare story. HPV is the new MMR for the Mail - a new way of exploiting parents' fears over their children and bashing the evil State for injecting our kids with DEATH because they're PROMISCUOUS and therefore deserve to die. I read somewhere (and I've forgotten where, so apologies to you if it was you) a very good blogger saying the Mail had made a 'mistake'. Which I can't agree with. This is no mistake. There is no error here. This is all calculated and deliberate.

Meanwhile, the graphic on the BBC's report goes like this:



No wonder the Mail doesn't like the BBC, when it refuses to play along with the ramping-up of fear and plays stories like this straight down the line, almost like a real news outlet rather than screeching fear despite knowing its agenda is almost certainly based on suppositions which are crumbling away.

So there you have two ways of dealing with the same story. Press ahead with your agenda of fear and hysteria, or put one terrible and tragic death into context - context not only of what actually happened to this one poor girl and her family, but the wider picture of reactions to the jab. One of those approaches is news. The other isn't.

And look, the Mail must be so proud of itself for having achieved its goal of spreading fear and panic. Look at this reaction to the story:



Job done! I bet they're patting themselves on the back at a tremendous success for their fearmongering there. Well done to you all.

Gordon's a loony! rofl

It's dismally disappointing, the reaction to the Gordon Brown / Andrew Marr bit about 'painkillers'. Whether it was a rehearsed question which had been agreed with Brown in advance, we'll never know. But the Prime Minister answered in the negative. He said he didn't take pills, and besides, his eyesight was fine.

What I would have preferred from Brown would have been something along the lines of: "Look, you spoddy egg-faced public school arsewipe, what the fuck business is it of yours or anyone's whether I have one of the most common problems in the world, one which millions upon millions of people - including voters - deal with on a daily basis, without fuss, without having their judgements called into question, quite rightly without thinking of themselves as lesser human beings? Why the fuck should it matter? The kind of juvenile playground whispering is an extraordinary disgrace, one which was started by Alastair "I'm really sensitive to the needs of people with mental health issues, honest guv" Campbell, who claimed I was 'psychologically flawed' and has now been taken on by the kind of giggling cunts who leave their murky turds in Guido's comment boxes. What the fuck does it matter? So what if I've got depression? What of it? The name Churchill ring a bell to you? Does it, Marr? Or should we only have shit Prime Ministers so long as they're not prone to conditions which afflict millions of others, superhuman politicians who must be eugenically screened to ensure they don't fall below the impeccable standards of the kind of master race we apparently must have as politicians; I mean heaven forbid they might actually be real people who have real illnesses, complaints and conditions the same as everyone else in the world. Fuck Churchill, JFK and FDR; they'd be dumped on the scrapheap according to the arbitrary rules which we should apparently now be applying to our elected leaders, who supposedly mustn't be in any way representative of the populations they serve but should, somehow, be superior beings who are in no way troubled by the stain of being living, breathing creatures with all the potential problems that might bring about. What is it that you and the infantile wankers calling me mental behind my back want? Someone who lives, and breathes, and feels, like the rest of you? Or a steely automaton who has no capability to feel anything? One minute I'm too fucking cold; the next I'm too sensitive and fragile. Well make your fucking minds up you odious bunch of shitwads. Which is it to be? Politicians who are human, and who are perfectly capable of dealing with something like depression by using medication? Or politicians who exhibit the kind of psychopathic coldness and inability to be prone to real life that could lead to genuinely catastrophic errors taking place? By all means, call me a useless bastard - God knows I am. But calling me mental? Fuck you."

But no. He just said 'no' instead.

Embarrassing relatives

Today's Mail puts the boot into comedy Lib Dem Lembit Opik:

...Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik’s great-uncle Oskar was a senior member of a Baltic puppet government during the Nazi occupation and was accused of collaboration in crimes against humanity.
These exclusive pictures show Oskar Opik giving the Nazi salute as a senior member of the Estonian regime.

How terrible! Isn't it awful to think that some people's relatives were Nazi sympathisers?



I mean, imagine if the Daily Mail's owner Jonathan Harmsworth had a grandfather who was not only a fascist, writing in praise of the Blackshirts, but also wrote to 'my dear Fuehrer?" - imagine that!



Mind you, if Jonathan Harmsworth's grandfather really had been a Nazi sympathiser and friend of Hitler, his newspaper - the same one which printed HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS - surely wouldn't criticise people whose own relatives had been collaborators, would it?

After the war, Oskar Opik justified his Nazi collaboration by saying Estonia needed ‘a robber to save us from a robber’. He claimed his support for the Nazis was an attempt to give his country some kind of post-war independence rather than the subjugation under the Soviets which, in the event, occurred.

Oh, hang on, it would. The story is apparently to highlight the hypocrisy of the Lib Dems, given that they have - correctly - accused the Tories of siding with extreme right-wingers and fascists in the European parliament. But how can Opik be responsible for his relatives' choices? That's not the same as William Hague happily jumping into bed with racists and extreme right-wingers now - that's an active choice the Tories have made, whereas Opik can't change what his relatives have done. And nor can Jonathan Harmsworth.

Friday links 25/9/09

Haven't done one of these for a while, but here you go anyway. Enjoy.

Sarah Ditum on Jeremy 'Dunce' Hunt's call for there to be more Tories employed by the BBC to counteract a supposed liberal bias. If only they could employ the former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association to be their political editor, for example; or a well-known right-wing pundit to lead their daily political coverage. Ah well, they'll just have to make do with the existing bunch of Trots!*

Bloggerheads: Patrick Mercer has some explaining to do. It appears the MP is attempting to weasel out of his association with the now thoroughly discredited Glen Jenvey by claiming that he personally didn't speak to him, it was only his aide. We'll see whether that's true or not. And here's an update, in case you were in any doubt as to Mercer's confusion.

Tory Troll: Richard Barnbrook suspended for murder claims. In which the BNP's very own sandy-suited nonsense-monger gets told to take a course in ethics and is reprimanded for making stuff up to suit his agenda - I hope that course in ethics doesn't require an exam to be passed, or he'll never get his job back.

It should also be noted that the Telegraph was happy to keep his lies up on its website for a considerable time after they were first called out as such. What a fine journalistic institution, letting the BNP tell lies to the public. Well done, Telegraph.

Upon Nothing: The Daily Mail and bullying. Middle Britain's favourite paper might occasionally fake concern over bullying victims, but is happy to make nasty repeated comments about Natalie Cassidy's weight and appearance, for no justifiable journalistic reason whatsoever.

Johann Hari: The Queen Mum (gawdblesser) was actually a right-wing parasite. Well I suppose we all knew that, but it's nice to see it all laid out, especially the hypocrisy with which she was treated:

[WF Deedes] was in favour of the dole after all – provided it was worth three million pounds, and went to one single aristocrat.

Septicisle: The Lib Dem conference has been pretty underwhelming.

Chicken Yoghurt: Relations with Libya are a bit funny. Funny in the sense that while he's painted as a figure of ridicule, he's having the last laugh over us.

Feminazery: Why the Daily Mail thinks feminism is an evil scourge, and why one person's anecdotal evidence doesn't discredit an entire movement.

Daily Quail: Let's have more bombs, says Stephen Glover. While even the mainstream right are happy to order cutbacks in nuclear weapons, it takes a special kind of tool to argue that disarmament is a bad thing. Glover is that tool.

* Footnote to Andrew Neil's BBC blog: underneath there's the message "This blog is open for people to comment about the subject of Andrew's blog - but we reserve the right to delete entries which are excessively long or off-topic." Then they should delete all of Brillo's, surely?

Don't let the corpse get cold Vol 2

See 'Don't let the corpse get cold' for a bit of history from me on how the Mail & chums like to put the boot into folk when they're recently dead, presumed dead and even not quite dead yet. Yes, even before she was dead, lying in hospital and unable to defend herself, the Mail couldn't wait, and ripped into dying newsreader Carol Barnes.

So with that previous in mind, it's not a surprise that Paul Dacre's finest couldn't give a shit about the feelings of those close to Tory MP Piers Merchant, who died yesterday.

The headline,

Piers Merchant: Tory sleaze MP dies of cancer, leaving behind wife who stood by him after sex scandal

lets you know how sensitive the piece is going to be. And it deteriorates from there.

Mr Merchant hit the headlines over his affair with glamorous blonde Soho hostess Anna Cox at the height of the election campaign in 1997.
Days before polling day, he was photographed by a national tabloid newspaper kissing and canoodling with17-year-old Ms Cox in a park in his constituency.
...
[Mrs Merchant] was still by his side in 2004 when Mr Merchant was caught out again cheating on his wife with 41-year-old property consultant Caroline Bew in yet another tabloid sting.

Look, Merchant was the kind of person whose politics I can't stand. But that doesn't mean it's right to piss all over his grave before he's even in it. There should be some dignity awarded to all human beings in the aftermath of their death - these people have families, and loved ones - and Merchant has two children.

Think about that for a moment - two children. Two children who, if they picked up a newspaper or clicked on the internet, would read that kind of garbage about their father just hours after he died from cancer.

I must be some kind of ridiculously oversensitive idiot, because I think that's pretty low. Of course there's no point in airbrushing personal history when a public figure dies; but surely does every single detail have to be gone into like this? It seems a little unsavoury.

The Mail, of course, will be the first to cry foul when Margaret Thatcher dies, and many people will be less than respectful about her (I'll try and keep the fireworks to a minimum). But while Thatcher caused hatred and resentment among millions of people, this poor sod did nothing more than be a human being - a human being with faults and failures, of course, but so what? The truth is they couldn't care less about the dignity of death or the feelings of relatives. They've made that abundantly clear.

Today's Countdown Conundrum

Today's Mail has a creepily written feature about the female presenter on Countdown, Rachel Riley, illustrated with the kind of masturbatory freeze-frames that are truly disturbing - look, here's a woman bending over slightly so you can have a look at a quarter of an inch more cleavage than you might otherwise have done; here's a freeze-frame of her standing by the Countdown board in a dress that shows that she possesses legs.

If the photos make you shiver at the stalkerishness of it all, then you'd better put down that sandwich before you read the words. Sometimes it seems like the Mail writes like a sex-crazed old codger having a lazy wank under a tartan blanket:

While she looked more suitably dressed for a night on the town, it was business as usual as the 23-year-old blonde performed her routine of getting the vowels and consonants on to the board.

Later she added up the results of her revealing choice of attire as she led the numbers game with the show's contestants.

Ewwwwwwwww.

It comes as the second time this week she has poured her figure into a daring dress, having worn a short pink dress on Monday, prompting the question - is this a ploy to pull in the viewers?

Of course the Mail wouldn't ever try and 'pull in readers' with dribbling garbage like this, would it? It's not as if the Countdown mock-outrage is anything other than an excuse to print screengrabs of the '23-year-old blonde' in a middle-market newspaper, is it?

And another irony: in a story about a word game, this delightful sentence appears:

Since she took up the mantle in January with Jeff Stelling, ratings have fell from 1.3million to 650,000.

Ratings have fell, have they?

PS Elsewhere in today's Mail: Cheryl Cole in a see-through top! Katy Perry getting her breasts touched in 'wet and wild' video shoot! Sugababes shoot raunchy video!

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.

Why it matters

If you've ever wondered why I started blogging about the excesses of the right-wing press then this spectacularly good post by Five Chinese Crackers tells you everything you need to know.

Our friends at the English Defence League recently released a video to plug a forthcoming rally in Manchester. What did they use to justify their arguments about Islamic extremism? They used a pack of lies from the Mail and other tabloids. Like the Mail and the other right-wing papers, they conflated unpleasant extremists like Anjem Choudhary with all Muslims. Like the papers, they look for what they want to find, find it regardless of the evidence, and drive a fucking great train through the truth in order to create fear, hatred and exploit prejudice.

It matters to call out this rubbish because newspapers shouldn't be twisting the truth to create a false narrative which is easily picked up by extremists. The fear is of extremism, but the irony is that in order to create a climate of fear through distortion, sleight-of-hand and downright lies, it whips up extremism of a different kind.

Well done to the press. You created the EDL. Happy with yourselves? Proud of what you do for a living? Glad there's a bunch of thinly-disguised football nuts marching around trying to have a ruck with Muslims? Pleased with that? Job well done? Go home and pat yourselves on the back did you? Enjoy seeing your lies in that EDL video?

That's why it matters.

Katie Price and the value of celebrity

I've written before about the allegations Katie Price has made about being raped. They were widely reported, especially by Richard Desmond publications, as the interview in which they were contained appeared in Desmond's OK! magazine. The other papers covered it, but not to the same degree.

Now, though, there's been another spike in interest in the story - it's much bigger news than it was before. Why's that? Well now it turns out that Price has said an unnamed celebrity was behind the attack on her. All of a sudden, it becomes a bigger story, appearing on the front page of every tabloid every day this week so far. Today's papers are a good example:







Celebrity raped? Meh. Celebrity raped by celebrity? Wow! I don't know if I'm alone in feeling a little queasy about this state of affairs. I also think the use by the Sun of the phrase 'celebrity rape' is fairly grim as well - this from a paper which used the chortling headline "By gum" the other day to describe alleged sex attacks by a dentist. And is "I didn't rape Jordan" really a story? Whatever you think of Katie Price and her desire to be in the papers, this whole business does not reflect well on tabloid papers in this country.

The Express, meanwhile, has gone back to familiar territory in what is clearly a new policy to return to the old favourites:



The same old tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories; the same old nonsense. I even discovered today that the Mail have recently been delving into this drivel thanks to Lauren Booth's article implying Our Queen of Hearts may have been slaughtered because she was about to single-handedly destroy the arms industry. The sort of guff you'd laugh off if it appeared in a student magazine, but not something worthy of turning up in a national paper.

It seems little changes.

Sheer hypocrisy! Oh, hang on a minute...

The Daily Mail had a right old chortle the other week when it heard of plans by the union Unison to cut back on some pension entitlements:

'Sheer hypocrisy' as country's largest union moves to cut final salary pensions for members

...

The move is highly embarrassing for the union which is fighting a high-profile campaign against cuts to final salary pension schemes in the public sector.

I suppose one could see it as embarrassing, certainly. I'm sure it's not a decision that will fill Unison workers with delight - although it's not a scrapping of the final-salary scheme, as the story explains:

The union is reported to have considered even scrapping its final salary scheme in favour of one based on average career earnings. A similar scheme has already been introduced for new entrants to the Civil Service.

Imagine that - scrapping a final salary scheme! How outrageous. What kind of bastard employer would do such a terrible thing?

Oh.

Daily Mail & General Trust is closing its final salary pension scheme to new members from October, but insists its retirement benefits remain "generous".

Mm, OK. Of course, one could see it as 'embarrassing' and 'sheer hypocrisy' for a newspaper to slag off a trade union for cutting back on its final-salary scheme - but not scrapping it altogether - and then scrapping its own final-salary scheme a couple of weeks later, and calling it 'generous'.

Let's not be so po-faced

I'm a grumpy shit at the best of times, but I wish people wouldn't be so po-faced about a lot of things. Whatever happened to fun?

Firstly, Derren Brown. That was a great magic trick last week - a great magic trick. It made you sit there and think: "How the fucking hell did he do that?". It was ace. But it didn't take long for po-faced types to come snarling out from underneath their rocks, sighing: "Oh well obviously it's X, Y and Z, what a silly magician, obviously he didn't really predict the lottery numbers, did he." Of course he fucking didn't. I know that and you know that. He didn't do it. It's a bloody trick, and a clever one at that. There's no need to smugly declare it's a trick because it's obvious to everyone in the entire world that it's a trick. We all know. You have not revealed something amazing. You have not descended from Mount Olympus disguised as a big orange porcupine. You have merely told us what we already know.

Now the hour-long programme on Channel 4 on Friday wasn't the most scintillating thing in the world I've ever seen, I'll give you that. But there were a couple of new tricks in there to keep you occupied, and something else: I think the whole point wasn't to try and convince you that he picked the numbers by the 'wisdom of crowds' bollocks. I have a feeling, and I could be wrong in this, that it was a tongue-in-cheek demonstration of the pointlessness of the 'wisdom of crowds'. You're meant to sit there and say "That couldn't possibly work" - because it couldn't. Confronted with that, how do you feel about crowdsourcing? Is it a valid way of reaching conclusions or is it just as much mumbo-jumbo as other management-speak gibberish? Maybe that's the point he was making. Whatever it was, he had that room of number-pickers fooled by a bit of sly misdirection - quite impressive.

So anyway, Brown's all right by me. It's a trick, we all know it's a trick, it's a bit of fun, enjoy it or don't. No need to be so bloody angsty about the whole thing. It makes bloggers look like arses. Now I'm not saying we're not, because I can be a tremendous arse quite a lot of the time, but Jesus Christ. Let's try and have a bit of fun, shall we? Why not! Might as well. Life is too short to be upset by magicians doing magic in the way magicians have always done magic.

Secondly, Mark Watson. Now I like Mark Watson as a stand-up comedian, I think he's very good. I saw him at a gig earlier this year and the audience was delighted (apart from the poor old duffer sitting next to me who thought he'd booked tickets to see Russell Watson, and left during the interval).

Those cider adverts, as we all know, are shit. There's no point pretending they're not because they are. But so what? The man's got to make a living. I don't dislike him for doing adverts per se. It's his prerogative to go and earn money in whatever way he likes. He's not ruining his artistic integrity by flogging a bit of cider on the side. Who cares? Well some people do, and have been extraordinarily snotty about the whole affair. I have to disagree with the idea that comedians are there as revealers of some wider truth. Some are, some aren't. If I pay a ticket, just make me fucking laugh. If you do it by discussing the wider world, then fine, if not, then I don't give a shit. Don't enrich my life; just make me piss myself. I don't want a bloody lecture.

The only slight sadness I have about it is a personal one: that when you like someone for doing something, and then they piss you off every single day during every bloody ad break you sit through, the pans on the scales begin to tip a bit - you see one great stand-up gig and 5,000 irritating adverts, and it's hard to balance that out. You begin to think: Please don't there be one of those awful Magners pear cider adverts, I'm going to cry. And then you think: I might just buy 5,000 cases of Brothers just to praise them for their (still pisspoor but) marginally less irritating commercials.

I mean, look at Lenny Henry. His adverts for those crap hotels are actually quite good. But he's a fucking terrible stand-up. Good adverts and shit comedy, or good comedy and shit adverts? I think we all know which one we'd rather be remembered for.

I think what I'm trying to say is: why must bloggers be such miserable bastards? I know, I know, I'm a fine one to talk...

The Anton Vowl blog list & awards

Yes! It's that time of the year again. It's party conference season and a time for me to shamelessly flog my dog-awful list of mates' blogs have a bit of fun and find out who are the best bloggers in Britain, according to my mates a big cross-section of the voting blogosphere. So I'm announcing the Anton Vowl list of the top 10 blogs. Sorry if you didn't have time to vote, or, being someone who doesn't read my blog, hear about it. But I can now present my list in full:

1. The Enemies of Reason
2. The Enemies of Reason
3. The Enemies of Reason
4. Inexplicably, John Redwood's Diary, somehow
5. The Enemies of Reason
6. The Enemies of Reason
7. The Enemies of Reason
8. The Enemies of Reason
9. The Enemies of Reason
10. The Enemies of Reason.

Now it might at first glance appear that the list is dominated by left-wing blogs written by me, but if we compare it to last year's list, we can see that in fact more left-wing blogs, such as Obnoxio The Clown, Harry's Place and Tory Bear, are making inroads into the blogosphere - so it's not as straightforward as once it was.

Some rather churlish sorts will point out that dozens and dozens of blogs asked to be excluded from this list on the grounds that "It's a fucking carve-up, you potato-headed cunt" and "When blogs get the same number of votes, who breaks up the ties? Is it you? And what criteria do you use? And why should I give a shit about your fucking list anyway, you tedious cock-end?" but they are clearly in the minority because this year I received billions and billions of votes, which I hesitate to say I didn't count: I left that to people whose employment prospects depend on me, so they're entirely independent. Hope that clears everything up.

It's also this time of year when the "Anton Vowl Really Clever Writing Awards By Brilliant People" have been launched. The fact that I am a judge and my mates have sponsored categories obviously has nothing to do with my selection in the categories of "Most Clever Man", "Most Brilliant Person Ever" and "Most Handsome Blogger in Britain, Even If We Include Delingpole".

So I'll wait with bitten-down fingers to see if I'm in with a chance of winning something! Good luck everybody!

I have a feeling there won't be too many clickthroughs

But you never know!

Spotter: currybet

What do Mail readers think about the EDL?

The Mail don't skew everything, and very often their straight reportage is insightful - which is what makes it such a tragedy that they can't manage it all the time and resort to such low tactics when it comes to concocting stories they want you to read rather than ones you do. This article, for example, about the English Defence League, is a pretty good summary of what's been happening over the past few days with the EDL. I can't help thinking that's because it's by 'Daily Mail reporter' and has been pieced together by some diligent scribe from other national papers' coverage rather than just starting out with a target an aiming long-range salvoes at it, regardless of the facts.

Yesterday a commenter on my 'What do we call these scum' piece said there were 'non-white' people at the protests. I looked at the Mail's coverage, then, expecting a happy rainbow nation of faces united against the tyranny of Islamism - sadly, the photographers have clearly been complete bastards by deliberately leaving out all the hundreds of ethnic minority protesters who happily marched along with the English Defence League and deliberately taking pictures of growling nuts in England tops! Outrageous!

The sadness for me comes that after a rather good piece of news reporting from the Mail, there's a predictable response in the comments. You'll see that the worst-rated comment is this



while this also gets bombarded with red arrows



but this



and this



are considered worthy of praise by readers, and this



is voted up, despite being entirely factually wrong. What does that tell you?

It's sad that the Mail can execute accurate and interesting stories about touchy subjects without feeling the need to skew things over to a predetermined point of view. I say sad because it makes it seem all the more deliberate an act when they do, rather than being just the result of laziness. Clearly the ability exists to report things without blowing one side or the other out of all proportion; perhaps there isn't always the willingness.

There. And I managed to do a whole blog post on that story without resorting to the cheap, easy and juvenile tactic of comparing this

The dispute came as a Cabinet minister raised fears of a return to 1930s fascism, comparing modern Right-wing groups to Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts.

with this

If the Blackshirts movement had any need of justification, the Red Hooligans who savagely and systematically tried to wreck Sir Oswald Mosley's huge and magnificently successful meeting at Olympia last night would have supplied it.

from the Daily Mail of 1934. Oh bugger, I just did.

So what do we call these scum?

The English Defence League, I mean. I think it would be nice to think of a description that was suitably fair to them, and represented what their world-view accurately.

Some like John Denham call them 'right-wing', which is reasonable and not entirely inaccurate, but gets people upset. Generally those people on the right who aren't as right-wing as the English Defence League, but who nonetheless do go about spouting a load of cock that they might say. You know the kind of person I mean, who would say something like there are 'no border controls' in Britain but then criticise the BNP for its anti-immigration stances, but then also go on to call the BNP left-wing because of some of their economic policies. Because the reason anyone votes for the BNP is their economic policies, isn't it?

No, that won't do. I don't think we can settle with calling the English Defence League far-right or right-wing, because that simply annoys those people who are also on the right. And this isn't about lumping the likes of the idiotic Dale in with the unpleasant EDL because we don't happen to be on that side of the political fence; there's a big difference between Dale and the EDL. The EDL are cold, calculating, nasty and disgusting, whereas Dale is a twit who doesn't understand things properly. It's wrong to try and link together a dunce like him with the far more intelligent and dangerous types of the EDL, or their friends the BNP.

So what's going on with the EDL and who are they? This article over at the BBC is a good guide. And look what it says about the motivation for the intimidation and violence:

They found common cause with other "soccer casuals" and "firms" associated with major clubs. The chatter concluded that this was a national problem and they had to put aside club rivalries.
Things really took off after the same Islamist group "converted" an 11-year-old boy in Birmingham city centre in June. That incident caused a minor tabloid furore - but a greater reaction on the net, particularly on websites and forums associated with football violence and far-right activity.

Ah, a tabloid furore. When and if the tabloids (and other newspapers) ever do defend themselves against accusations that their articles have any impact on events like violence, they'll always develop Teflon shoulders and claim that they're not doing anything wrong; they're just reporting the stories their readers want and it's not their fault. But what if it were? What if violence started happening against foreigners for no reason other than they're foreigners? And what if that happened at the same time as newspapers tried to imply that a small rise in foreign-born mothers was a 'boom' or that 1% of all children being called Mohammed was being deliberately concealed by the authorities? What if those same newspapers misrepresented a peaceful protest by Muslims and claimed they were hurling abuse at British soldiers? Wouldn't that be fuel for the racist fire? The newspapers just walk away whistling a merry tune. No, not us, they claim.

Is it simple enough to call the EDL racists, then? Well, they are as slippery and weasel-like as the BNP when it comes to definitions. It's similar, but I imagine that both the BNP and the EDL would be appalled to be linked to each other. I am guessing that all links between the organisations will be denied utterly and completely, and that any connections between the two will be swept under the carpet. That's what I'm guessing, given that Nick Griffin is aiming for the respectable chair at Question Time and has attempted in the past to tell his BNP legions not to look like skinheads. He doesn't want the rowdy, threatening elements of the EDL to be associated with him and his cosy job at Brussels. I wonder, though, how different they are?

Anyway, racist doesn't do it justice either. The EDL will no doubt claim they aren't racist. Some of their best friends are black, or something like that, except there won't be any black people involved in the EDL, naturally enough. They'll claim they're simply revolting against extremist Islamism in England, and just happen to be composed of white men up for a barney on a Saturday afternoon. They'll organise a protest outside a mosque - not an extremist mosque, just an ordinary mosque - on the 9-11 anniversary not as an inflammatory gesture but because they genuinely care about the future of England and want to take it away from Islamification. That sort of thing. Is calling them 'racist' or 'fascist' going to help them do anything other than be able to play the victim status on this?

I'd go for something like ultra-nationalist or extremist nationalist, if I had to choose a term for a fair description. And if I had less time, I'd simply call them scum, since that's what they are. I liked this quote from the BBC story:

"I've got a mate who's just come back from Afghanistan - he's in the Army - he's an Asian man," continues the bystander. "You're giving me a bad name as a white person."

Perhaps a better name might be 'English Disgrace League'. Because they are a disgrace, to Englishness, to being white, to everything they claim to love. They're the exact opposite of all the things to be proud of in this country. One day they might be going on Question Time with weasel words to try and justify their position. I'm not a no-platformer but I just ask it to be borne in mind just where these people come from and what they want - and how the newspapers are responsible, in part, for any violence that gets committed.

What's in a name?

This is my 1000th post on this blog. I know. I can't believe it either. Since I started writing this load of old knackers nearly two long years ago, we've seen a lot of things together. We've had some laughs, we've had some disappointments. We've had a few rows, we've made up again, we've had a lot of fun. At least, I've had a lot of fun. Anyway, the one thing that's stayed pretty much exactly the same all the way through is that newspapers write a load of old cock to fit their agendas - as Akela's guest post from earlier today shows very well.

Funnily enough this post isn't about my usual target, the Daily Mail. No, it's about a newspaper that used to be very different from the Mail - reasoned, considered, intelligent and yes, it was right-wing, but you could at least rely on the quality of the journalism and expected it didn't write a load of old bobbins to try and create some kind of knee-jerk reaction.

What a shame we have to write about the Telegraph like that in the past tense.

The story is the one you may have read elsewhere this week about baby names and the popularity of certain ones going up and other ones going down. Jack's still popular for boys - the poor things. Speaking as someone whose real name is so boringly dull that it's become a byword for banality, they're going to get quickly annoyed at school, when the teacher says "Jack!" and ten heads turn around, or when future partners say "Oh. Jack. I knew a Jack. He was an arsehole."

The Maily Telegraph, though, doesn't care about the popularity of Jack. It's trying to whip up a bit of a frenzy about the popularity of the name Mohammed, resorting to ringing up a right-wing 'think tank' which has published a series of questionable papers about Islam in order to get some outrage. It's pretty pathetic journalism, the sort of toss you'd expect the Mail to come out with in its darkest hours, but now it's standard fare for the Telegraph.

If taken together the various different spellings of Mohammed make the name the second most common name in England and Wales - and by far the most popular in both London and the West Midlands.
Jack was the most chosen name for boys for the 13th year running but is being pushed hard by Mohammed and its various alternative spellings which are expected to reach the top spot soon.

Expected - by whom? Oh, that's left hanging in the air. Perhaps no-one expects it at all, but this is classical Mail territory - implying that something unthinkably awful - a foreign name being the most popular in Britain! - is going to happen, without any evidence that it's going to happen in the slightest. Time was when you'd expect better from the Tele, but no longer, I'm afraid.

What it shows is that a lot of parents are pretty unimaginative when it comes to names, and that particularly appears to be the case with Muslim parents when they have male children - that's all. There are probably cultural factors, like Jean-Paul being a popular name for the first-born male child in France, and so on. That's all. There's no need for anyone to worry that less than one per cent of babies are called Mohammed, nor that a similar amount are called Jack. Is there? Not unless you're an idiot. Or write for the Telegraph. In which case, you may be an idiot as well.

Let's not beat around the bush. The Telegraph cares about this not because of some demand for accuracy from the Office For National Statistics but because of an agenda. I'm not just idly saying this, by the way; I can prove it.

In their quest for accuracy in the naming of children and lumping together children's names, the Telegraph has roared about Mohammed, and the variant spellings of Muhammad, Mohamed, and so on. So why doesn't it care about variant spellings of other names? The Centre for Social Cohesion foams:

Douglas Murray, Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: “It’s pretty disingenuous to put out these different spellings. The names are pretty much spelled in the same way.”

It's pretty disingenuous for the Telegraph, then, not to mention that Isabella and Isabelle are 'pretty much spelled in the same way', isn't it? Because if we add them together, they make it the third most popular girls' name in Britain - maybe even more popular than the second-placed, if we include other names not listed in the top 100 because of political correctness or some such madness! For that's the claim the Telegraph makes:

Figures for five other alternative spellings - Muhammed (496), Mohamed (428), Mohamad (40), Muhamed (11) and Mohammod (10) - were later released to the Daily Telegraph.

Did you get other variant spellings of Isabelle or Isabella? No? Or how about all the different spellings of Evie, Eva, Eve and Ava, which when added together make it by far and away the most popular girls' name? Is there a shadowy conspiracy at the ONS not to put those names together, for fear of offending parents who have chosen a name with its roots *gasp* IN THE OLD TESTAMENT? No, of course there bloody well isn't, the names are separate because they're separate and it's fuck-all to do with anything but that.

Of course it doesn't. This is a story about nothing, the kind of nothing that shouldn't be made up into a story at all. It's a light frothy piece about the popularity of names, but the Telegraph has chosen to make it about the supposed rise of Mohammed, which is apparently going to be the most popular boys' name despite there not being any evidence for it, when all variant spellings are added together (and all variant spellings of Jack, Jake and even John aren't added together, of course), backed up by a quote from a notoriously flakey think-tank, to provoke the kind of knee-jerk Mailite outrage that once upon a time the Telegraph would balk at, for quality reasons alone.

Ah, how times change. Not only are there 10,000 more Mohammeds in Britain, there are also several thousand fewer Telegraph readers. Wonder how many non-Telegraph readers are called Mohammed? Now there's a thought...

The other blog

Don't worry, there'll be more tabloid-inspired nonsense in a bit, but in the meantime, some of you might not be aware that I've started up a new blogging project this week. It's called Farewell Prozac, it's fairly self-explanatory, and you can have a look at it here. Thanks to everyone who's sent kind messages and comments so far.

Agendas, idleness and collateral damage: A scout leader writes

This is a guest post by blogger Akela. Akela is a white, middle class, Christian, home owning, law abiding male scout leader and former cub leader. Everything the Daily Mail should love. He's also a left wing, Guardian reading, real ale swilling, vegetarian, public transport using (by choice), environmentalist, football loving, public sector worker who really REALLY hates the Daily Mail. He rants about pretty much everything at Akela's Diary.

It all started on Sunday when as I munched on my muesli I surfed through the Sunday scream sheets and I stumbled across this. It would seem, from the headline that scouts were being banned from using pen knives. And my first thought was, “yeah right,” on the basis that firstly it was in the Mail and second, as a scout leader, I get any important rule changes like this cascaded to me pretty quickly. So I read on to discover that apparently

The Scout Association is advising boys* and their parents that they should not bring knives to camp – despite it being legal for anyone to carry a foldable non locking blade in public as long as long as it is shorter than 3 inches.

Eh? What the hell was going on? There was nothing on the website, there was nothing on any recent emails, where was this all coming from?

in a recent edition of their official in-house magazine, Scouting, they are advised that neither they nor their parents should bring penknives to camp.

Now this rang a bell, I’d read something about knife law in scouting some months ago, so had a rummage under the bed and found the relevant article. Now I wont just cut and paste (more on cut and pasting later) wholesale, I shall simply leave you to compare what the Mail selectively quoted from that article, with what the whole article actually says (you’ll need to scroll to page 50). As you can see all it is is clarification of what Britain’s complex knife laws allow and recommendations as to how to put that into practice. And that boils down to stay within the law and only use them when appropriate. Now I ask you, is that really so controversial?

So far just a piss poor bit of research. It got worse though, as on Monday the Scouts Chief Commissioner made a statement on the scouts' website in reaction to the story, in particular he said

A Mail on Sunday journalist approached us on Friday having read the latest guidance we issued in Scouting Magazine/online in December 08 and April 09 on advising Scouts on the situations in which they can use a knife as part of normal Scout Activities. He was looking to make the story into "Scouts Ban knives shocker". The media team took them through the facts and sent them links to our various documents and magazine articles giving him the following info,

- The Rules changed about wearing knives with uniform in 1968
- We have issued regular guidance to the Movement on this matter ever since 1968 e.g. early 1980's , 1996, 2008 and 2009 (the latest being the magazine article in April/May)
- We need to support leaders with information to help them support young people

Despite making these facts available the Mail on Sunday published the piece, They used a few selective statements and quotes some out of context..

Yes, it would seem that despite being told directly what the situation was the Mail decided to go ahead and publish this story anyway to make the scouts look bloody stupid, wet and generally part of the ‘elf and safety/political correctness gone mad' crap that they churn out ad infinitum.

And they have form for this as well. I was ready to put my fist through the monitor at the distortions they published in 2007 over the “sun rise” camp on Brownsea Island. On that occasion the situation was that a camp was held on a remote island with limited cooking facilities for 300 kids from 150 countries including every religion and culture you can imagine including Jews and Muslims (no pork) Hindus (no beef), Buddhists (vegetarian) and many that you probably can’t all with their own variations. Given this the organisers went for a vegetarian menu for simplicity. The Mail naturally span this in to “scouts ban bangers, political correctness gone mad”. Rather than report on kids from all round the world living peacefully together.

Spinning outright lies about scouts fits perfectly with the whole “why oh why can’t it be the 1950’s again” agenda of the Mail which is itself made up of its various prejudices, prejudice against anything not white middle class and Christian with nice little women who know their limits and Dixon of Dock fucking Green on every street corner cuffing cheeky young scamps round the ear. Which is of course what the 1950’s were like. Apparently. You see in this world we should wear pointy hats, shorts and sharpen sticks with not a girl in sight. My lot will be going canoeing, go karting and to the ballet this term. Times change and the Mail does not like it one bit.

They could have written something positive this weekend. An explorer scout called Lucie Jones looks like she’ll be a big star on X Factor (not my thing personally but still positive). They could have written about the centenary celebrations of our sister organisation the Girl Guides, but they ignored it. Instead the scouts just became canon fodder for their constant crappy agenda.

Yet what are we to make of the rest of the press? Indeed in particular the broad sheets and how they responded to this? Did they see a story and decide to check the facts? Do a spot of research? Pick up the fucking phone and speak to someone? Did they?

Did they bollocks.

No instead every single one of them simply lifted it straight from the Mail (although in fairness the Indie, The Mirror and The Sun pulled theirs after being contacted by Scouts press office). At least the Guardian made some vague attempt to put it in their own words. Not so others who seem to have discovered the copy and paste function. Worst of the lot in this insipid bout of utter bone idleness was, I’m afraid to say, the Times. Yup The Times, I may not agree with all their politics by had at least credited them with some decent journalism. Clearly I was mistaken. Let’s play spot the difference shall we?

Exhibit A The Mail

Exhibit B The Times

Oh I’m sorry, did I get those the wrong way round? Sorry, it’s just I can’t tell the sodding difference. If one of my scouts had been as bone fucking idle as that I would happily kick their arse, where as journalists right across the country get paid for this crock of shit.

Arseholes.

*And another thing, if I have to tell one more person, be it journalist, parent or random punters that girls can be scouts (and beavers, cubs and explorers as well) then I’ll happily strangle them with by bear hands. And yes that does go against the scout promise and law, and I don’t care either!

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.

Wrestling, football and immigration

This thoughtful post by Left Outside on the coverage given to immigration in the papers has got me thinking. At times in the past I've thought of the press as deliberately giving their readers a scare, like a rollercoaster ride or a Ghost Train, tapping into that primitive fight-or-flight part that makes you pleased to have the adrenalin pumping around your bloodstream: Whoooh look, the bogeyman! And you run away and hide behind the settee, then are relieved to find out that everything's OK, that your Muslim neighbours aren't plotting to bomb your house, that thousands of Poles haven't yet streamed into your street, that life isn't as scary as you might have been led to believe.

I wonder if there isn't something different going on, though. It struck me while watching England's tedious football friendly against Slovenia yesterday that commentators are more often than not pretty nonsensically partisan when the national team's in action - or even when 'our' club sides are taking on Johnny Foreigner in the Champions League or whatever. We have eyes and we can see when fouls are committed and when players take to the ground like a sack of spuds that's been dumped off the back of a van - yet the commentators try and tell us that we haven't seen what we've seen. When Wayne Rooney, for example, kicks another player in the shins, we're expected to believe that he hasn't done it; or when one of 'our' lads goes stacking into the turf at a great rate of knots under a powder-puff challenge we're expected to think that it hasn't happened.

Partisan commentators want us to think in terms of heroes and villains. We can't have the narrative being one in which both England and opposition players are equally capable of searing fouls or dirty cheating dives; it has to be implied that those 'continental' shysters are somehow more naughty at cheating than our brave battlers - that our boys get stuck in and play honestly, whereas the sly tricksters from overseas are always trying to con the ref with feigning injury and plummeting to the ground, things that 'we' would never do. (It's even more bizarre to see this kind of commentary played out on those occasions when an English team made up of immigrants - French, Spanish, Ivory Coast, whatever - takes on an Italian, or French, or Spanish team made up of immigrants. Of course English boys would never feign injury or dive or cheat or foul - and neither would our adopted heroes!)

I was thinking at the time of why football commentators frequently spin these silly narratives about matches, when the fans can see in very stark terms that that isn't what's going on. They can see English players cheat, dive and foul all game long, and they know it's happening. Sure, they roar their disapproval when the other side do it, but that's the way it is. That's the part you have to play. I don't know whether it makes as much sense for commentators to make out that English players are always angels and those foreign types are always out to cheat their way to victory, since they're meant to be telling you what's happening rather than what you'd like to be happening - but then maybe that is their role?

Maybe if you just saw it with your eyes you wouldn't be as patriotic about it? Maybe if you didn't have the bellowing voice of Peter Drury, John Motson or whoever telling you that we're getting a raw deal because we're playing fair you wouldn't enjoy it as much? I don't know. All I do know is that England have cheated as well as the best of them down the years - v Cameroon in Italia 90, v Argentina in 2002. Sometimes you get away with it and sometimes you don't, but I think everyone does it.

And then I thought about wrestling. The world of wrestling has always (in this country at least) been divided into 'blue-eyes' and 'heels', those characters you're there to cheer for and those you're meant to boo to the rafters (especially when they're cheating behind the referee's back!), and the lines are fairly delineated. It's important for the theatre of the whole thing, and it doesn't work otherwise. Just a couple of blokes chucking each other around a ring isn't as entertaining as one guy who's going to try and cheat his way to victory, conning the oblivious referee who always happens to be looking the wrong way in the process, fighting against someone else who's going to play fair. That's the set-up, and that's how you react as a participant in the theatre, as a ringside spectator: roaring your disapproval at the unfairness of it all.

A friend of mine once told a story of going to all-in wrestling as a child, when it was at its peak of popularity, and seeing two guys going at each other like they really hated each other in the ring, like there was a real feud going on between them. Then being shocked and disappointed afterwards to see them laughing at joking at the bar. All that anger he'd screamed from the audience seemed entirely wasted.

Which brings me to the newspapers and to immigration. The story they tell is no more real than the one the football commentators would have you believe, and no more real than the tableaux acted out in the wrestling ring. But it presses the same buttons. Not those that spark fear, so much, but those which prompt outrage; those which make you demand justice against a lack of fairness.

Immigration stories are, as Left Outside points out, fairly commonly fitting into a template of sorts. Generally we are led to believe that we are being overwhelmed by too many immigrants, that those immigrants are stealing British jobs, that if they aren't doing that they're going to the front of the housing queue and siphoning off benefits from what our friends at the BNP would call the 'indigenous' population, that whatever they're doing that some of them are here to commit murder in the name of their savage religion; and, above all, that it's all either (a) tacitly accepted by the Government in order to bring in cheap labour or even (b) actively encouraged because for some reason they think that all immigrants/Muslims/whatever will vote in their favour.

That's where the rage comes from. The referee's looking the wrong way! He's been conned by the heels! He's been deceived by those chippy foreigners! And there's nothing we can do about it except holler from the stands!

Except it's not true. I've said many times before that I don't know whether people really care whether these immigration stories are true or not. What they want is that chance to rant, to roar, to shout and scream about what they reckon is unfair.

Which would be fine if the Mail and Express and the others marketed their stories as being like wrestling - you know and I know what's going on, but let's just enjoy ourselves in the heat of the rage for a half-hour or so. But they don't: they market themselves as the tellers of truths and the people who reveal what is really going on. That's where the difference comes. You can scoff at a bit of biased football commentary and think, ah well, I guess it's all about creating a bit of heat and light; and you can shrug your shoulders at a bit of wrestling - it's a bit of fun, and the outrage quickly dies down.

But telling lies about immigrants is something entirely different. It creates that feeling of rage, gets the hackles up and creates a splutter for the spectators, in this case your readers. But it's fundamentally dishonest, and unfair, and needs to be dismantled. If you want to get angry over something, get angry over a football match, or over some real injustices. Because this kind of lying leads to aggression, to hatred, to prejudice and in extreme cases to violence. And it's not a bit of fun; it's deadly serious.

She's back at last

Thank goodness.

Sometimes you know something's wrong, but you can't work out what. I've been feeling that way over the past few months when looking at the front page of the Daily Express. Yes, there have been lies about immigration. Yes, there have been pointless stories boosting OK! magazine. Yes, there have been dreadful health stories about what does and doesn't cause cancer this minute.

But something was missing. Or rather, someone. Time was when you couldn't walk past a newsagents or those clear plastic bins outside petrol stations without seeing some utter gumph about the supposed conspiracy to kill Our Queen Of Hearts by making her chauffeur get really pissed and then drive into a concrete post a mysterious Fiat Uno - the car of choice for all shadowy international assassins - using a creepy Scooby-Doo-style weapon that made the crash occur.

It's been so quiet on that front lately, and regrettably so. So imagine my delight when I saw yesterday's Express!



Hooray! Diana at last. Diana's back on the front of the Express, where she belongs, alongside a new cockamamey theory about why she died and how it was all some big conspiracy. All is right with the world and we can relax safe in the knowledge that everything is in place. It's reassuring seeing Diana on the front of the Express - you can breathe a sigh of relief and think to yourself: well, whatever else happens, they're still peddling that strand of utter bollocks.

Ironically enough, of course, the picture shows her putting on a seatbelt, which would have saved her life on that fateful night - scary Fiat Uno or not - had she remembered to do it.

Rape victims and the papers

We all know the name Jaycee Lee Dugard, as we did Elisabeth Fritzl, thanks to the media who have ensured the cases have been highlighted, sensationalised and removed from all the dignity and solemnity that you might expect for victims of repeated sexual assault. There are a few things going on with these stories and their treatment so I thought it might be worthwhile having a look at them, and comparing them with the treatment of Katie Price, who this week has said in an interview with OK! magazine that she has been raped on two occasions.

First, what links the cases is that they took place outside the UK - and our favourite newspapers, usually forced to keep victims anonymous, can't help themselves. Because they can reveal all about the victims' identities, they do. Because they can reveal all the details without denying someone the right to a fair trial, they do. Because there's a detachment of distance between them and the events, it seems that things like compassion go flying out of the window.

Even despite that, I was a bit gobsmacked to see this on the front page of the Mail the other day:



"Girl fathered by monster". A blurred image of the back of someone's head. Why go to the trouble of showing them, if you're going to blur it? Why not just print their face, their address, their shoe size, everything? But no. There's a veneer of respectability involved; there's the titillation of the "monster" and the incest while pretending to be sensitive about identifying the children involved. The Mail, and others, have been happy to use the names of the children. And you get the feeling they will probably never be left alone:

The two girls are coming to terms with the news that Garrido was not the 'perfect father'.
Jaycee is revealing 'bit by bit' to the girls how he snatched her at a bus stop while she was on her way to school aged 11 and kept her prisoner for 18 years.
She is telling how she pretended to be Garrido's wife and brought them up as his daughters to ensure they all survived. "This is going to take years of therapy," said Jaycee's stepfather.

It's a horrible story, but you have to wonder: what benefit is there to anyone in knowing any of this? Not just the names, but the details? Is this just descending into a bit of a point-and-leer freakshow, rather than the distressing crime it really is? And are the newspapers really helping or just making it worse?

Hadley Freeman in today's Guardian writes:

How should newspapers refer to a victim of kidnap? Heaven knows in these modern days the question of appropriate nomenclature seems to get more complicated – and my hat is tipped to the female actor v actress debate that so exercised Guardian readers recently – but the aversion some newspapers in this country felt towards the term "kidnap victim", or even just "victim", when reporting the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard last week was notable. Even more surprising was the term that is apparently more acceptable, more au courant: sex slave.

Last week the Daily Mail and, less predictably, the Times used this term in their headlines about the case, while the tabloids, of course, pledged their support to the term, too. London's Evening Standard slapped it on their familiar billboards all over town, which managed almost to neuter the term through prosaic repetition. But then, "kidnap victim" does lack an illicit erotic kick, don't you find?

I have to admit it's a pretty unpleasant term, sex slave, as it's one that can be used in a consensual context far removed from the awfulness of these crimes. Rape slave might be a bit more near the truth of it, though I'm not sure even about that. But why use anything like that at all? We're all adults; we all understand what has happened if a woman has been held captive for years by a sex offender who has fathered children with her. We don't need the endless details being spilled out - or do we? And if we do, how does it help any of us to know them? What do we learn? Or is it just satisfying a prurience, a curiosity? And if so, is that right?

There's an attitude towards victims of sex crimes that goes beyond the simple gawking at Fritzl or Dugard, who hopefully will be able one day to be able to live relatively normal lives. Perhaps, like Sabine Dardenne, the victim of Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux, there will be the chance to come to terms with what has happened and even find a way to use the media in a positive way to express themselves. We can hope. But what of others who break their silence over sex crimes? What if they happen to be celebrities?

It's quite obvious the story of Katie Price has appeared so prominently in the Star and Express





because the interview is an exclusive in OK! magazine



in which she says she has been raped more than once. It's a big admission for someone to make when you bear in mind the seriousness of the crimes and it would be difficult for anyone to imagine it as a cynical ploy for media manipulation. I say 'difficult' because it's certainly not impossible, as these comments from Mail readers on their version of the story. Sometimes you have to think - as I did last week when my local paper bewilderingly asked readers to 'have their say' on a man who had committed suicide and allowed through all sorts of unpleasantness, including "I'm glad he jumped" and "Where were his family?" - and ask yourself what benefit comments on stories like that actually produce, other than some web traffic? What can you really add to a story about rape or suicide without opening the sluice gates and seeing a raging flow of effluent heading towards you, or at the very least crushing insensitivity?

These are the top rated comments. Please note that as the Mail itself says they have all been moderated in advance:



The worst rated are even more startling:



"Rape is a bad thing" - NO, VOTE IT DOWN! It makes for fairly unpleasant reading, how anything approaching sensitivity is dismissed instantly whereas anything shrill and hateful is given glowing approval. Is that just the way the world of internet commenting is, with the spiteful and nasty winning out over the reasoned and sensible? I hope not.

I also kind of hope that doesn't sum up the British public's view towards these subjects, but you have to wonder.