Hiatus and thank you

I'm off now for a long holiday. Try not to forget about me, won't you?

Thank you to everyone for all the support, retweets, links and comments, not just this month, when things have been especially exciting, but all the time. Sorry if I haven't replied to everything but I have tried to, and I do appreciate everything. All the kindness that's been shown towards me has been very touching.

And now I'm fucking off for a bit. But I will be back. Oh, I'll be back.

Same again, please

If you remember this



from the other day, you'll remember that it was a story about extremist Muslims but packaged as one about all Muslims. As Tabloid Watch pointed out, implying that Islam4UK represents all Muslims is rubbish, and deliberately misleading. It's like saying the odious Stephen Green of Christian Voice represents all Christians.

Today's Express story, then, is pretty much exactly the same thing, repeated just in case you didn't see it last time.



There you have it - instead of a minaret plonked on the top of Nelson's Column, we've got a big mosque badly Photoshopped on to Buck House.

Notorious hate preacher Anjem Choudary is calling for the palace to be renamed Buckingham Masjid, the Arabic word for mosque.
The Mall, which approaches the palace, would become Masjid Road.

Well. It 'would' in the sense of 'it would if these nutters ever got into power, which they won't'.

Tory MP Philip Davies compared Choudary to the leader of the BNP, saying: “This man’s a complete idiot. He’s the Muslim equivalent to Nick Griffin. I’m all for free speech and people having the right to have their say but, equally, there are all these ridiculous laws the Government has introduced about inciting racial hatred. Quite clearly, that’s what he is doing.

Our Tory friend is right on one thing: Choudary is a complete idiot. But then I can't understand where he goes from there. He says there are 'ridiculous' laws about inciting racial hatred, but then says the 'Government' has introduced them - which is true if the 'Government' he's on about is the Conservative Government which introduced them in 1986. Publishing of material that incited racial hatred was made punishable under the law in 1994*, which again is before Labour came to power. Maybe he means the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 - but if so, how is Choudary inciting hate against another religion, or race, in what the Express has quoted?

Additionally: if these laws are 'ridiculous', and Philip Davies says this is what Choudary is doing, then what does he want? For him to be prosecuted under 'ridiculous' laws?

At least this time, though, this story and headline make it clear that Islam4UK are 'fanatics'. That's a step in the right direction for the Express. But you still have to wonder why they're following the antics of these most extreme Muslims and reporting every bonkers thing they come out with.

* Yes, I know. Surely the Express would be No 1 candidates to be hauled up under this?

Spotter's badge: Jesus_John

Naked women are bad. Unless they're on our site

When I first saw a Mail article decrying the presence of half-naked women on the front covers of Nuts magazine, I thought to myself: well, our friends at Dacre Towers have become a lot more feminist all of a sudden, haven't they? But I needn't have worried.

Today's Mail offers an interesting article up for its readers, about a mum who was annoyed by lads' mags on display in newsagents in full view of her children:

Nestled next to the football album - which was suddenly devoid of interest - was a copy of Nuts magazine, displayed at toddler head-height.
My boy's eyes were popping out of his head as he marvelled at the cover shot of two nubile girls in a steamy embrace, both completely nude but for a generous slick of lip gloss.

Yes... go on...

Their fake breasts bulged as they pawed at each other.

I see...

How do you explain pornography and lesbian fantasies to a five-year-old? The answer is, of course, you don't. But you have to say something, don't you?

Funnily enough, the Mail didn't have such a negative attitude towards bare skin on the front covers of magazines only a few days ago, when January Jones turned up on GQ magazine.



"Daily Mail reporter" drooled:

But just in case anyone was under the illusion there were any similarities between the 31-year-old former model turned actress and the fictional desperate housewife, a raunchy photoshoot in men's magazine GQ should pretty much put paid to that.

Tell us more...

January has certainly put Betty's strait-laced image to bed with the revealing shoot in which she poses semi-nude, and in a variety of raunchy poses for the US version of the men's magazine.
Gone are the wasp-waisted day gowns, and in it's place a leather jacket under which she appears to be braless on the magazine cover.

And if the poor mother whose toddler was exposed to the horrors of female nudity while out shopping were to look over her shoulder while she browsed the Mail's website, he might find a lot more to make his 'eyes pop out of his head'. For example:















As ever, Buff The Banana With Paul Dacre exposes the sex-obsessed heart of the Mail's website that aims to drag in casual masturbators with images that aren't a million miles away from the Nuts magazine cover.

So how popular are the BNP?

And are we any nearer to finding out after last week's Question Time?

If you read the BBC's Have Your Say, for example - and I don't recommend you do if you're in easy reach of breakable objects - you'd be forgiven for thinking that everyone in Britain (especially people who live in ENGLAND, NOT EU) welcomed Griffin's delightful presence as a fragrant rose among the thorns. This post at Speak You're Branes contains a startlingly brilliant comment from a HYSer:

In the famous book “to kill a mockingbird” Atticus Finch tells his kids, bravery is not a man with a gun in his hand, but someone who knows they are going to be beaten before they start, but still goes ahead. Nick Griffin knew he wouldn’t get a fair hearing and would be raked over the coals. But he went ahead and aired his views, that makes him brave in my eyes and thats why I am voting BNP next election

Yes, that's right. If you are in any way familiar with the book or film you might be forgiven for finding a comparison between Nick Griffin and Atticus Finch a sliver on the bewildering side. As ever with these matters - as I did the other day with a comment of tremendously convincing verisimilitude - you encounter Poe's Law. How can you tell whether it's a kosher nutjob or just a clever spoof? Tricky. I veer towards thinking the Finch comment is spectacularly ignorant and unknowingly ironic, but I could be wrong.

Alex makes a vital point about how the over-the-top reaction from the BNP supporters on HYS puts other discussions on there into focus:

It’s actually rather reassuring, to see a party almost unanimously inducing massive, racist erections in HYSers, when we know only a fraction of the population would ever actually vote for them. It’s almost as if they’re just a small group making a lot of noise, who the majority of us disagree with, but stay silent because we don’t think they’re worth bothering with.

It tells you a lot about how extremists can create a Wizard of Oz style representation of much more support than they really have. You'll see it often in web discussions on a variety of subjects, and this one is no different. If you read HYS every day you might be under the impression that no-one in the UK supports Labour, that everyone is obsessed with immigration, that everyone hates political correctness and longs for the days of the Black and White Minstrel Show, that everyone is 'fed up'.

Web-savvy folk, as we all are pretty much nowadays, know to take it all with a pinch of salt. The internet has made us all more sceptical, and that's a good thing. Your first experience of the internet might be a pop-up that tells you you've won a prize, or an email that tells you you've come into a Nigerian fortune, and you begin to learn that pretty much everyone is going to bullshit you. I think this is a good thing. It makes you on your guard. So that when you see a messageboard full of HYS types loving the attention for Nick Griffin, you don't think: "Oh my goodness. Everyone is suddenly in love with the BNP. What on earth has happened?" - you think: here we go then, an infiltration.

If that doesn't tell us how much support the BNP has, what about polls? The shock figure from the weeekend was that 22 per cent of voters were considering voting for the extremists. Really? Well, not quite. A couple of interesting things have come out of these figures, which were initially reported as showing a huge boost for the much-hated ultra-nationalists.

Firstly, as Lancaster Unity among others has pointed out, there have been claims by some at the BNP that they are actively taking part in YouGov, partly to skew polls and over-represent their support, but also to get some much-needed funds for BNP coffers.

This also needs to be treated with caution. Who knows how many BNP types are really taking part in YouGov and whether they're having a significant impact? As we saw with the release of the BNP list the other week, 100,000 had been added to member numbers with the possible intention of overstating membership - they would appear to want to seem bigger than they really are. On the other hand, though, if that scenario were true then it could have the danger of misrepresenting BNP support and possibly creating a bandwagon effect by making them appear more popular and less marginalised. If such polls were skewed - and it's probably easier to do than hanging around shopping centres waiting for people with clipboards - then that might create a false impression. But at the moment all we have are claims by some BNP people to be trying to skew polls, and no evidence they have.

Secondly, as Sunny wrote at Liberal Conspiracy yesterday, the full details of the YouGov poll - beyond those happy headlines for the BNP - are a little less frightening:

Only 11% of the public have a favourable impression of the BNP. Positive feeling towards the BNP has in fact fallen over the last 10 months.
And the poll also vindicates the BBC for the way it handled Question Time, with a significant increase in the number of people (over 11%) saying the BBC was right to invite him.

So according to the very poll which initially led to stories claiming the BNP had a worrying level of support, support for the BNP has actually fallen. It's not surprising to note how that bit didn't get as many enormous headlines as the "22% of people might vote BNP" (although 15% say it's only a possibility) figures.

So how popular are the BNP really? It's hard to tell at the moment. The next time we know will be at election time. But in the meantime, it's important not to overstate the threat, while at the same time recognising it is there.

*update* Liberal Conspiracy has more and has asked YouGov for a response.

The smelly foreigners are coming!

...so says today's Mail, with a story headlined

Vile-smelling foreign ladybirds set to invade homes this winter

Oh no!

As winter approaches, households around the UK will be invaded by a sticky and foul-smelling invader.
Harlequin ladybirds first arrived in Britain from Asia in the summer of 2004 and quickly spread across England and into Wales. They have been spotted as far north as the Orkney Islands.
Now scientists say their numbers across the country have dramatically escalated.

Hey ho. Yes, foreigners... smelly... invading... you can see the kind of imagery they like when it comes to all stories, can't you? I wonder if these tales might give us an insight into the Mail's attitude towards other subjects like immigration. I've argued before that the Mail might not necessarily be opposed to immigration on any political grounds (however much I may suspect it is) and one hypothesis is that these stories fit a certain pattern and provoke a certain emotional reaction: you're being invaded, and you can't do anything about it, and no-one else can see what's going on! It's not just ladybirds, of course; there have even been stories about scary black squirrels invading in the past.

Back in August came another story about ladybirds, this time screaming about a 'population explosion' and an 'invasion'. The terminology sounds a bit familiar in that story as well, doesn't it? Though I think it's worth pointing out they were 'indigenous' British ladybirds and not those dirty furrin harlequins, so that was all right really.

Back in July the ladybird 'invasion' was also on the horizon, but another plague was terrifying Mail readers: scores of evil butterflies, coming over here, drinking our nectar (and almost certainly getting council houses). Again, look at the terminology: invasion! Yet what could be scary about a nice colourful butterfly...?

The invasion – which could be the largest ever – has been sparked by an abundance of plants the species feed on in their native North Africa.

Aaargh! Native North African immigrants! Who's going to think of the cabbage whites?

There was another ladybird 'plague' back in June, and at around the same time, more ramping-up of fears over those deadly flying immigrants!

The harlequin ladybird - an aggressive, toxic invader that has colonised Britain in just four years - is threatening more than 1,000 native species, scientists say.

And they're bloody well breeding like rabbits as well! Or like insects. But anyway. They're killing off 'our' ladybirds! Where are these terrors from? Have they come over with the butterflies from Africa?

The rise of the harlequin - which was introduced from Continental Europe as an 'environmentally friendly' pest controller - has stunned experts who say it is the fastest insect invasion in living memory.

See, we brought them over from Europe, thinking they'd help us out with jobs like plumbing pest control, but they soon overran us!

And if you look back in the archive to this time almost exactly a year ago, there was a very similar story about the blighters:

Plagues of KILLER ladybirds brought out by the October heatwave

Not just ladybirds. Not just foreign ladybirds. But KILLER foreign ladybirds. Now you know! Now you're scared! Now it's time to run to the hills!

It's all a bit of fun really, but it does illustrate a type of approach towards a Mail story: the emphasis on invasion; the fact that we're powerless to stop it; the foreign plague; the infection by aliens; the killing-off of the 'indigenous' population; the well-intentioned policies which have led to destruction.

It's perfectly possible, for the reasons I've outlined, that the Mail isn't anti these ladybirds, as it may well not be anti immigrants as a statement of policy. Perhaps there is something else going on: the creation of scare stories which imply a terrible threat (even though this supposed threat of imminent disaster carries on from year to year, without ever actually resulting in a catastrophe); neat little constructions that tap into the fear and paranoia part of the brain and give you a little thrill, a little jolt, while you're reading the paper.

Which is all very well. But when you're talking about human beings, rather than ladybirds, it's a little bit more serious.

Spotter's badge: MrChrisAddison

Winterval watch: Here we go!

I had been a bit concerned, given that it's getting towards the end of October. But here we are at last. Hooray! The first "Christmas is being called something else for fear of offending terrorists or something" quote is IN - and it's been found by the BBC, of all people.

The Bishop of Lichfield, the Rt Rev Jonathan Gledhill, said Christians should wear [crosses] at work and not be intimidated into putting them away.
He also criticised councils which tried to "rebrand Christmas" for fear of offending other religions.
Such decisions were made out of "sheer ignorance," he said.

As most people know, the sheer ignorance on display is from the Bishop of Lichfield, who has fallen for the tabloid-tripe-cum-urban-mythology surrounding 'Winterval' - a marketing campaign surrounding the winter months by Birmingham City Council several years ago, nothing to do with rebranding Christmas, but which has been repeated and embellished like a ruddy great Christmas tree ever since. "They're banning Christmas because it will upset people of other faiths and there's nothing we can do about it!" the screamsheets like to squawk. It's not just Christmas that starts earlier every year: the bullshit about Christmas being banned turns up before Bonfire Night almost every year nowadays, as well.

As I wrote last year back in September, these stories don't have to be true. A quick bit of fact-checking would expose them for the silliness they are - but obviously would negate the story, and so doesn't take place. And the result is that people like the Bishop of Lichfield - who really ought to know better - get hooked (or should that be crooked?) in.

Also at around this time of year people can be tempted to do the classic "Ooh look! He/she isn't wearing a poppy on television or walking in public! How dare they! The heartless bastard WANTS OUR BOYS TO DIE!" article. Or even, as the Daily Star did last year, the "You can't buy a poppy from these evil brown-skinnned newsagents because they all support terrorism, obviously" story. So those are others to look out for in the coming days.

Does the benefit system favour migrants?

It does according to the Daily Telegraph, who are just as capable of repeating BNP immigration myths while simultaneously distancing themselves from the extremists.

In a piece entitled 'Telegraph View' (I believe it's the leader column) published on Friday, there appears this line:

The white working class who live there are resentful of the way the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families: the long tail of this recession could whip up yet more support for the BNP, despite its leader's feeble performance on Question Time.

Let me just run that past you again:

The white working class who live there are resentful of the way the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families

Not 'appears to be' but 'is'. No evidence to back that assertion up. It just is. Skewed.

Now I know this is an opinion piece and as a piece of polemic is representing a particular point of view rather than an objective look at the facts. That's fine by me. But how is the benefit system "skewed towards immigrant families"?

The myths of queue-jumping have been exploded very clearly, time and time again. For example, one national newspaper in July this year covered a story which was headlined

Immigrants do not get housing priority, study shows

which had this quote:

The far-right [BNP] spread rumours in target seats that immigrants were given precedence in the queue for social housing accommodation.

Does that sound a bit like

the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families

to you? Because it does to me. Still, the newspaper (which you have by now correctly identified as the Daily Telegraph) carried on:

The IPPR found no evidence of queue jumping or abuse of the system by immigrants but warned that those perceptions were widespread in certain areas.

Yes, I wonder which nasty types have been creating such perceptions? I imagine the kind of people who would say that the benefits system favours migrants - people like the Daily Telegraph, in its leader column - the column which "is the opinion of the Daily Telegraph".

Does the system favour migrants? Well, a look back through the Telegraph's very own archive yields this article, which states quite clearly:

A policy that stops Eastern European migrant workers accessing most benefits for at least a year is to remain in place amid fears lifting the restriction will increase unemployment among Britons.

The continued existence of the worker registration scheme for European migrants would appear to suggest that, far from actively favouring migrants, the benefit system is actively skewed against them.

How you get from that to saying the system is skewed in favour of migrants I'm not too sure. But it's nice to know it's not just the tabloids who are capable of mixing it with BNP-style rhetoric while at the same time pointing at Griffin and saying: "Ooh, look at the bad man".

Spotter's badge: Malcolm Coles

Hmm... remember this?

Today's tabloids express mock outrage at the appearance of N*ck Gr*ff*n on the BBC Question Time programme. But they have short memories.

Here's today's Star:



Hang on, though. Isn't that the same newspaper that did this?



and this?



The Express, meanwhile, is also clutching its pearl necklace, claiming that the party is going to get taxpayer-funded broadcasts at the next election. Not a big lead on Griffin, because there's apparently another twist in the Diana saga (and as ever the stock image of her wearing a seatbelt, which would have saved her life in the crash, nutjob neenaw whoop-whoop conspiracy or no conspiracy)



But it's got those because it's gained votes. I wonder why? I wonder which newspapers are read by BNP supporters? Maybe ones that say stuff like this



or this?



or even this?



And not forgetting the all-time classic:



Not some. Not five hundred. Not even a thousand. Not half. Not three-quarters. No. ALL. IN BIG RED FUCKING LETTERS SO YOU'RE MADE CLEARLY AWARE THAT IT'S ALL.

Hey, and please let's not forget this:



I almost didn't include this!



Which is almost the same as this!



But no. The Express doesn't like the BNP. They just happen to share entirely the same views on immigration, but Griffin is bad, because... well. I haven't quite worked out why he's bad. Maybe he doesn't hate Muslims enough for their tastes?

The Mail have also had a bash, but as ever they're more concerned with attacking their nemesis the BBC than they are about hand-wringing over Griffin:



Having said which, I still think



it's worth making the point



that the Mail doesn't always steer so far away



from using content



which the BNP and 'bigot' N*ck Gr*ff*n



might completely agree with



and it's not long



before you might start thinking to yourself



are they really protesting a bit too much? And what's the difference, really, between the BNP bigots and the supposedly mainstream newspaper which claims to distance itself from them so much?



And you have to start thinking: do these newspapers which select certain types of images of ethnic minorities and use them again and again



really have such different views or agendas from the likes of the BNP?

It's all very well people blaming Labour, or the BBC, or whoever, for the 'rise' of the BNP. But if there has been a significant increase in BNP support - and it hasn't translated into votes yet, despite a severe recession and growing unemployment - perhaps that might have more to do with the legitimisation and absorption of their extreme views by newspapers creating scare story after scare story concerning race and immigration, often baseless stories created simply to scare? It's one thing going to a BNP meeting but it's quite another to hear exactly the same thing over the breakfast table from a publication which purports to report the facts.

But no. It's all the BBC's fault. Let's blame them.

Now let these idiots fade away

It's only been a week since Jan Moir's spectacularly stupid column, but she's tried her best to outdo it today with a spectacularly stupid 'apology' that's more 'je ne regrette rien' than 'mea culpa'.

And no, I'm not linking to it. She got the link-love last week, quite rightly, as everyone wanted to share around the awfulness of what she wrote. But not this week. Go and find it if you want - if you can bear the thought of her web traffic going up by one more number. Last week everyone read her shite, and she claimed few of us did; this week let no-one read her pisspoor excuse of a gritted-teeth apology, and she'll probably imagine the whole world has been delighted by her brilliant words.

But she'll fade away, if we let her, and we should. It's all dying down now. She'll carry on with the same old crap, time after time, but she won't get the attention she so clearly was delighted with. It's time to let her fade away into the mass of other tabloid columnists, some of whom will outdo her for stupidity, for bigotry, for insensitivity in the coming weeks and months. There will be times to call out others when they step over the line. And there will be a chance for the PCC to appear to be anything other than the Wizard of Oz, an impressive front with nothing backing it up. But we'll see whether they decide to have some courage, or wait for the dust to settle and accept the matter has been somehow 'resolved'. I have a fair idea what the answer is.

And farewell to Nick Griffin, too. He's had his week in the sun. People feared he might come across well on Question Time, that he might appear statesmanlike or intelligent and might be able to dodge the questions cleverly. Not really, from the glimpses I've seen so far. He looked shifty, edgy, not particularly bright, and came out with the kind of bigoted shite you'd expect - shite that's not a million miles away from what the tabloids have been printing this week with regard to population growth, of course, or what they regularly print about Muslims, but shite nonetheless. It wasn't a sparkling performance and now the mystique has gone down a little bit.

So it's time for him to fade away, as well. He's been given the 'oxygen of publicity' and he's looked like a fairly crap politician. It's what I'd always suspected. He's not some evil genius who's going to hypnotise the world; he's just a racist who is marginally more clever than most racists. That's all. Just because someone went to Cambridge it doesn't make them Erasmus. To the Oxbridge elites who run our newspapers - and yes, I'm looking at you, The Guardian - it might seem that way, but it isn't.

So let's let them fade away, Griffin and Moir both. They've had their say and now it's time to tell them, with all politeness and respect, to fuck right off. Because there are more important things to detain us between now and the next general election, wars being fought in our name, torture happening in our name. It's easier to focus on something personal, an arsehole like Moir or Griffin, and less easy to focus on something wider, more complex, more detailed; but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. But these two clowns have had their time and have detained us for long enough, I think.

What to watch instead of Question Time

There's been far too much publicity given to those 'indigenous folk' of the BNP this week, and I've been as guilty as anyone. I won't be watching Question Time tonight, though; it's the one thing I studiously avoid - even for a few seconds - on a Thursday night, such is the bubbling rage that wells up inside me as soon as I see Dimbleby's withered face and those poncey half-moon glasses. I saw half a minute recently while I was desperately hunting for the remote control and was sick into a bin. I loathe this fucking programme. And I'm not going to start watching the bloody thing because, well, you know, *that* man is on it. In future I am going to obscure his face with a black rectangle so you can't identify him.



Shit! I didn't mean like that, I meant like this:



There. He looks better already, almost like he's got a blindfold. All we need now is a cigarette in his mouth and his arms tied behind his back, and everything will be perfect!

Anyway, no more about Gr*ff*n. You're probably thinking that there'll be plenty of choice for the non-BNP viewer tonight, but I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken. In fact, ITV1 is doing its best to boost ratings for the world's most tedious debating programme by screening one of the few men in Britain it's easier to hate than der Gr*ff*nfuehrer: Piers Morgan interviewing Boris Becker. Jesus. One garbled attempt at the English language and a silly haircut... from a man interviewing Boris Becker.

Fuck that shit. What's Channel 4 got? Saw III. Not my sort of thing either. I watched a bit of the first one and it was gash. Besides, the creepy old puppetmaster would remind me too much of that man whose name I'm not going to mention. Five, meanwhile, has Blade, which if anything is even worse, albeit less gory - but the hero is black, I guess, which would piss off you-know-who. I'm guessing there's not a big Venn diagram between BNP supporters and Wesley Snipes fans.

Crap though Blade is, I'd prefer it to the horrendous battle of the brains as Fearne Cotton witters away to Paris Hilton on ITV2. Much like Jack Straw, Cotton must be glad to be on screen tonight with someone more vacuous and hateful than her. Maybe I'm too cynical. Maybe it'll be like Freud meeting Einstein or something. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Aha! Jaws is on ITV4. Now that's a bit more like it. A huge ugly beast, terrifying ordinary people, gobbling them up and shitting them out. A bit like the BNP, I grant you, but still worth a look. I could watch that film forever. Especially the bit where the man gets his eye ripped out. Great! Oh. We're back to one-eyed bloated corpses again, aren't we? Swiftly on, then. There's also Curb Your Enthusiasm on More4. Hooray! Finally, no need to be tempted to keep flicking over to see the pantomime on BBC1. And that's all to the good.

Actually, I might just go out tonight, come to think of it. The world will be a wonderful place - BNP scum will all be glued to the telly, cheering on their hero, so the streets will be a wonderful place to be, free of those shithouses. Maybe go out and enjoy the world, instead. A BNP-free world.

The annual 70m scare story

Today's Mail is all about fear - as most Mails are. You might have thought "WILL X AFFECT HOUSE PRICES?" was just a joke template Mail headline that Private Eye used, but no: today there's

Online crime maps 'could wipe thousands off house prices overnight'

and, of course, the immigration scare. There's something reassuring about coming across the POPULATION TO RISE AND NO-ONE IS DOING ANYTHING TO STOP IT AND THEY'RE ALL COMING OVER HERE story, and here it is:

Immigration to drive up Britain's population to 70million within 20 years

Ah, of course. The Mail runs this sort of story every few weeks, just in case you hadn't got the message hammered into your brain by now. Back in August they called a rise of two per cent in foreign-born mothers giving birth in Britain a 'migrant baby boom' and gave Amanda Platell full rein to imply that it wasn't 'people like us' who were procreating with a straightforwardly racist article.

Have a look back through the archive and you can read about "immigration to increase Britain's population by a third", "immigrant population to increase by TWO THIRDS", "Cut population by a third, say crowded Britons", "immigrants make up half Britain's population growth", "immigration and births to non-British mothers pushes Britain's population to record high", "immigrant population swells by 1.4million in five years as British-born residents dwindle", "immigration to trigger massive population boom"... and so on, and so on. That's just me searching for the word 'population'.

Almost exactly a year ago, Phil Woolas - definitively the most anti-immigration minister in Labour history, who regularly comes out with dog-whistles about how he is going to clamp down on immigrants - was labelled as 'hapless' by the Mail and the 70 million figure was touted. Woolas said in the story:

I am trying to reassure the people who are worried about speculation about increased population that they don't have to worry. The figure of 70 million is not a figure of my choosing, it is a figure speculated by others.'

So naturally the headline read

Hapless immigration minister repeats pledge to keep UK's population below 70 million

Hang on a minute. Look back to October 24, 2007 - exactly a year before that other piece - and there's another article on exactly the same subject, with exactly the same figure:

Britain's filling up with population set to hit more than 70 million by 2030

Is October 24th the "70 million" day? I looked back to October 2006 but couldn't find anything except for a thoroughly positive article about the introduction of a vaccine to protect against HPV with overwhelmingly positive comments calling it a 'breakthrough'... hmm I wonder whatever happened to that? Ah, wait a minute, the "70 million scare" story came in July of 2006:

Population 'could hit 70m unless we get a grip on immigration'

and included:

Lord Turner said the population would rise from 60million to 66million by the year 2050. But he predicted that if immigration went unchecked, the real figure would be 70million.

Every year a 70million scare story. And today's story has the same old scares, the same old shocks. And the same old distortion. It's never that the population will reach 70 million, and that might not necessarily be a bad thing with increased medical advances producing an ageing population which requires more young workers to pay taxes and keep the system going. No, it's always that immigration is going to be the one and only cause for an unnecessary rise. Today there's this:

Around 180,000 immigrants will arrive in this country every year, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) said.

And what you're wondering is: how many people will be leaving the country? Well you can keep on wondering, can't you, because it's not like the Mail's going to tell you that. It might give you some perspective on the story, mightn't it? And they certainly wouldn't want that.

But:

Every year 425,000 more people will be living in the UK...

meaning that, even if we assume 180,000 immigrants come in and no-one leaves - which of course isn't the case, but we'll assume it - immigration will only be responsible for 40% of the population rise. Yet it's the most important, almost only, factor mentioned in the Mail's story. Why might that be? And again, this is mentioned as if it's a fact:

When the immigrant baby boom is taken into account, migration will account for two thirds of population growth, the figures predicted.

Another clever bit of conjuring. It's almost claiming that children born in this country to foreign mothers are not British - which isn't a million miles away from what Gr*ff*n and chums might say, is it? And remember, that 'baby boom' is not a boom at all; it's a small rise. But let's call it a 'boom' to demonise the foreigns, shall we?

And yes, it's the same old faces being interviewed: Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, and Lord Turner. As they were in 2008. And 2007. And 2006. And maybe 2005, but I lost the will to live while I was wading around the Mail online archive. Still, put a big red ring round the second-last week in October for 2010: we'll be getting exactly the same story again. Maybe they'll push it up to 75 million for a bit of variety? We'll see.

*slight update* The BBC has its own take on the story here, which as you can see involves slightly more than just ringing round every anti-immigration voice they can find and saying "How bad do you think it will be?" The bit about British-born babies from foreign-born mothers being counted as immigration comes, surprisingly, from the ONS itself. Are British-born children of immigrants counted as immigrants? I find that a little odd.

Lying about immigration? Surely not

This is not about Nick Griffin. I've decided I'm not going to mention the smellyfaced cockwipe on here for a few days, so that I'm not accused of being obsessed with the vile bastard or giving him any undue credit. So although this is about immigration lies, this is not about the man whose entire raison d'etre is immigration lies - partly because everyone knows he lies about immigration, whereas they may give a little more credence to what a reporter in their daily paper says; and partly because he's a shit-stuffed hatemonger who is getting lots of attention already, which he's presumably delighted about. The despicable weaselly-voiced lie-vomiting Nazi. So from here on in, he's not going to turn up at all.

No, while Gr*ff*n is fairly open about his stance on immigration, and you can be fairly confident he'll come out with lies to back up his unsavoury views, our newspapers represent a position from which they claim to be looking at the facts objectively and merely revealing what's going on. Which would be fine if that was indeed what they did. But no. They look for outlandish stories that will outrage their readers; they look for statistics that can be warped into shape; they look to give their blue-rinse brigade a ride in the "They're all coming over here!" ghost train at the breakfast table.

So we had the story earlier this week of a man being allowed to stay in the country just because he's got a cat. Except of course you know that's not the case. The cat had nothing to do with it; it was merely a minor detail in the case which everyone involved in it insisted had no bearing on the final result. Strange, then, that it was only the Telegraph who decided to bring that rather important point to our attention, with other newspapers simply hacking away at the facts until what remained was what they wanted to write: BLOODY FOREIGNER COMES OVER HERE AND WE CAN'T KICK HIM OUT BECAUSE HE'S GOT A BLEEDING CAT! YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP... oh. You could.

Not that that stopped Littlejohn, of course, who based his entire argument about the piece in the Daily Mail and ignored all the details in (marginally) better quality publications which showed what the facts were. Sometimes I wonder if he reads past the headlines. Oh but so what, you're saying to yourself, everyone knows Littlejohn is a tedious little man who mysteriously wins Polemicist of the Year awards despite constantly lying about immigration, telling porkies about PC Britain and basically never checking his facts - Why should all this matter? Well:

Unfortunately, for the BNP, Stormfront and other racist website/forums where this story has appeared, it is now accepted as 'fact'.

Guess what - racists care even less about the truth than Littlejohn. Once it's appeared in a national newspaper, though, they can use it as 'evidence' to back up their hatred, for there's still a degree of trust (albeit rapidly diminishing) in what people see on the printed page, as opposed to what's been typed onto a computer scren. Was it really a surprise that the horrific English Defence League used a video composed almost entirely of Daily Mail and Daily Express stories for its recent campaigning? Does it matter when newspapers get it wrong with agenda-driven rubbish? Yes. Yes it does, when it's giving racists, and violent racists at that, justification for their hatred.

And so to yesterday, and this marvellous sentence from Five Chinese Crackers:

Using the magic words, "according to the Daily Express," which is about on a par with saying, "according to that bloke swinging a plastic bag and shouting Bible verses in French next to Victoria Station," in terms of reliability, the Mail regales us with the same flipping figures I looked at way back in March...

Have a look at the post to see how the papers make the immigration figures misleading, and you can see for yourself what they're trying to do. MigrationWatch are the people sticking the coke in the furnace, but the Mail and Express know what they're doing. And when they don't have a new immigration story to lie about, like the man and his bloody cat, they simply regurgitate exactly what they wrote several months ago.

But why now? Look, I promised I wouldn't mention him again, but it's just that there's a certain arsehole appearing on a certain outdated politics programme on Thursday night, and to coincide with that, the most anti-immigration screamsheets are trying to do two things: firstly, to say that they are distancing themselves from him; secondly, to say that they are repeating his arguments word for word, then having thousands of rabid commenters turning up on the stories saying "I WANT TO VOTE FOR SOMEONE WHO'S GOING TO SAVE BRITAIN, LOVELY OLD NICK'S GOT MY VOTE AND NO MISTAKE!" - do you know, I just wish they'd come out, and be honest, and say: "Yes, we're only a fag-paper away from Griffin, what of it? We sell loads of papers based on absolute bollocks and lies about immigration, and our readers love it, because they're racist too. And what the fuck are you going to do about it?"

But no, they have to go through the same pantomime every time. We're not racist, but... here's some racism.

Meanwhile, today's Express carries yet another immigration scare story, this time about 40,000 'illegal immigrants' who have gone 'missing'. The files date from 2003 and many are not 'missing' but simply 'not here any more' or 'not traceable because they're here illegally and perhaps understandably don't want to draw attention to themselves'. It's not a new story - you'll remember that back in April, Boris Johnson called for an amnesty on illegal immigrants. But it's a story about immigration, which implies there's chaos, and THOUSANDS OF 'EM, and every week is immigration week at the Express - and luckily enough our friend at MigrationWatch was contactable, now there's a relief:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the population think tank Migrationwatch, described the revelation as “Yet another skeleton in the Home Office cupboard.” He said: “This is symptomatic of the utter chaos in the asylum and immigration system during the past 10 years. Nobody in the private sector would get away with such a performance.”

'Population think tank' - yes, of course it is. Not a pressure group which attacks everything to do with immigration, no sir.

Of course, all these stories come from the same newspapers which do the tango with a certain fat one-eyed politician who shall not be named, but which then claim only to have brushed against him on their way to the toilet. And then they dismiss him and attack him in the strongest possible terms, with a nod and a wink to his supporters, who flock to their publications in droves.

Nick Griffin's weaselly voice

No doubting what's going to be the star of Question Time this week - Nick Griffin's weaselly voice.

I have to admit I hadn't really heard it very much until earlier today, when he popped up on the radio to whine about how the BNP are 'non-PC' (that's 'non-PC' in the sense of 'actually being racist', I think) and why it was well within their rights to use images of Winston Churchill and a (Polish!*) Spitfire in their election communications.

I've said before how I don't think there's anything to fear from Griffin being invited onto Question Time - and, as I wrote earlier, the BNP love to be victims. The Griffinfuehrer would love to walk into the QT studios covered in freshly-chucked eggs and claim that 'the Left' was trying to silence debate. He loves playing the victim as much as all racists do and will make the most of anyone trying to physically stop him from attending the broadcast. That in turn will bring even more attention to the debate - which, let's remember, is Question Time; not Griffin Time - whereas it would be better for it to slip by, as every other episode of the programme generally does, rather than it being a big deal.**

And when I heard him on the radio earlier, I thought: hang on a minute. He sounds rubbish. Not just the content of what he says - that's objectionable enough, of course, but I had expected that - but there was something inherently ridiculous about the way he sounded. It's like those days when Gerry Adams was on telly and the pointless broadcasting rules (let's not forget the right can 'silence debate' just as stupidly as the left) make him look like someone out of a 1970s dubbed martial arts film, albeit beardy and Irish. When you finally heard his real voice you thought to yourself: Oh, how dull.

And it's similar with Griffin. The BNP thrives on a bit of mystique, if you can call it that. They love not just being victims but also the idea that they're a bit naughty. Do you know what I mean? It's the 'No-one likes us, we don't care' attitude. But once their leader turns out to be a whiney twerp who sounds like a very tiny moped over-revving at traffic lights to try and overtake a milk float - the only other public figure I can think of with such a laughably terrible voice is Mike Tyson, but his job was never to present political statements - some of that toughness and mystique will fade away.

Griffin's nothing special. Sure, he's private-school educated, went to Cambridge and had a clever idea to try and mask the BNP's inherent racism and cruel streak for minorities with a load of specious waffle about disenfranchised working classes - but I can't help wondering if keeping him out of the limelight has done the BNP a bit of a favour. All the enormous potholes in his logic notwithstanding, his presentation is pretty pisspoor. His weaselly voice makes everything he says sound like a rather irate mosquito bubbling with rage, not an insightful politician trying to speak for anyone other than himself.

Will this all backfire, and Griffin produce a sparkling display of rhetoric that will delight the QT audience, and the wider TV audience? I doubt it. Probably what will happen is that there'll be a bit of disruption before, maybe even during, and possibly after. Griffin wants that. He wants to get the headlines for being the stoical defender of free speech, attacked by all sides - because the truth is that he's a whiney bastard, a racist and a fool, who looks like an idiot and sounds like an idiot. It's great to protest about him, but let's not give him what he wants. The public can see him for who he is - and what he is.

* The Griffinmeister later claimed this was a deliberate move to celebrate the role of Polish pilots in the Second World War. Which is of course absolute toss.
** "Aha!" you might well say. "Then why are you writing this? Won't your impenetrably dull blog contribute to a sense of anticipation about the tubby bigot's appearance on Thursday night?" - to which I say, I can see where you're coming from on this one, but no. So much noise is already being created about this matter, and I think a lot of it is needlessly panicky; that awful turd turning up on the QT panel isn't going to be the end of the world, and we mustn't get ourselves into a tizzy about it. Chill out. Think of some nice images. Kittens. Puppies. Racists dying in horrific accidents. See? You're feeling better already.

The real victims

Aggressors often like to be seen as victims. Pop down to your local magistrates' or crown court and you'll hear a dozen sob stories that supposedly excuse punching someone outside a kebab shop, breaking into a house or terrorising an ex-partner. It's good to be the victim, because that makes all blame dissolve away into the air. It means that what you did wrong can be excused, because you've been on the sharp end yourself - so it wasn't your fault you smashed a pint glass into a complete stranger's face, or whatever.

We'll hear the BNP bleating today, or whenever their latest membership list is released (update - I understand it's up now, though I won't link there, as I believe that's a no-no. But you know where to go). They'll complain about how they're the victims. They'll complain about how they're being targeted by the PCgonemad powers-that-be. They'll sniffle into their swasticka handerchieves about how - blub - they're only trying to be part of a democratic party that's standing up for the - sniff - indigenous population. Chokes you up, doesn't it?

No. Of course not. They are members of a racist party, set up by racists, run by racists, with racism as it's reason for existing. They exist to hate. They're not the victims in this by any stretch of the imagination, so let's be absolutely sure that not a crumb of sympathy is reserved for them. Yes, membership of a political party - even a racist one - shouldn't stop you from doing almost any job you like, but there are some professions where it's clearly stupid, and against your contract of employment, and should get you fired, and it's your own dumb fault. You'll forgive me if I don't pat you on the head and say "There there" while you're escorted out of reception with a bin-bag in your hand.

Last time, you'll recall, the BNP clarion call was that they were going to be targeted for violence. Members with families were worried about their children's safety now their addresses had been revealed. Those who leaked the list would have blood on their hands, it was asserted. But it didn't happen. There was no wave of violence against BNP members. And it's worth remembering that this time.

The real victims of racism are those who suffer racist attacks - and it doesn't matter which way round that is. Before you cry about the BNP and their membership list, remember Mohammed Al-Majed, killed for being a different colour, whose attackers were convicted yesterday. Remember that racist attacks happen all the time, against Jewish people or Asian people and every kind of people - and yes, against white people too.

What you'll notice in the comments under that Blackburn race attack story is a desperate scramble to make white people the victims of the story, the victims of some PC campaign by the local paper concerned. People tell of stories they've heard of white people being racially attacked and it not turning up in the paper - well I'm pretty sure the paper or the police don't have an agenda to hush up shocking crimes just because they were committed by the 'wrong' people. But that's the paranoia, the search for victimhood. As one commenter rightly puts it:

Am i missing something here????
it was a young asian male that was attacked, it was that same asian that suffered a broken arm and broken rib, it was that young lad that had to have surgery due to the afflictions from White men so how did white people become the victim as a result of this article??? As Paul Cockerton has explained similar articles in the past when the victim has been white and attacker has been asian have been published without the facility to comment on them because the perpetrator has been caught and legal proceedng commenced. therefore white criminals are not being caught as easily and justice to asians not being served as efficiently as to the white people. What does that say about the police, the community and moreover the people that are posting racial hatred above??? Are there really more asian criminals walking the streets than white criminals???

There are many reasonable comments on there, but also comments stating that isn't the case at all, that there's a big conspiracy against white people, and the usual thinly veiled racism. People just can't help themselves. I don't doubt there are racists who target white people; I disagree that there's a big conspiracy involving the media and the police to keep quiet about it.

People want to be victims. The BNP want to be victims. Racists want to be victims. Not victims like Mohammed Al-Majed, of course; but victims of a conspiracy, of unfairness. Racists love to feel like strangers in their own land; they luxuriate in victimhood and imagine that the whole world is out to get them, that there are no-go areas everywhere, that 'tolerance' has led to spiralling anti-white crime, that immigrants get first in the housing queue and get handed out benefits and jobs. But they're wrong. And they have to be called out.

The release of the BNP list doesn't make anyone a victim. The real victims are those who suffer at the hands of racism, not the racists.

The cargo-cult PCC

The PCC is constructed in such a way that it looks like a regulatory body for the press. It's got letterheaded notepaper and a website and everything. It's even called "the Press Complaints Commission", which might lead some people to think it has something to do with responding to complaints about the press.

What people are becoming increasingly aware of, though, in the wake of the Jan Moir story and its record-breaking volume of complaints, is that it's a bit cargo-cult: it looks like a rough approximation of a regulatory body, and it's quite a good job, but it's never going to do what you want it to do. Hoping for the Press Complaints Commission to investigate press complaints? You might as well sit in a bamboo control tower with coconut earphones waiting for a plane to land on your rubble airstrip. It ain't going to happen.

It's worth looking back re-reading the experience of one person who complained to the PCC to try and sort out what they had seen as a gross inaccuracy. You might not be startled to learn that despite their meticulous case and best of intentions, the newspaper concerned - and you won't be bowled over to know its identity - managed to weasel out of it: specifically, by saying that readers would understand the columnist in question - and you won't be amazed to know who it was - was not stating a fact when they wrote "The fact is".

The PCC has announced that it will politely ask the Daily Mail to make a response to the 21,000 complaints over the Jan Moir atrocity. Yes, that's right, regarding the most complained about newspaper article in history, it's going to ask the Mail to have a free hit at defending itself.

Well, that's jolly tough of them, isn't it? As Sunder Katwala says:

The tone of that offer to write to the Daily Mail is rather deferential - in the "is there anything else you would like to say to us today, Mr Dacre" style of the 1950s television interviewer.

And what punishments await if they don't respond? A stamped foot? A kicked doorstop? A mumbled "Well that's not very sporting, is it?" Or even - and this is probably a censure so great that it won't come to pass - a letter written in a slightly harsh tone, saying that it's not entirely right that they've done what they've done.

Sarah Ditum points out that this is progress, of a sort:

One of the problems with the PCC is its institutionalised refusal to look on accuracy as a responsibility held by newspapers to all their readers, rather than a duty they only have towards the people they choose to write about. That means that the PCC has previously been able to ignore any complaints from a third party, and avoid adjudicating on matters (like Moir’s Gately column) when the harm and offence caused spreads much wider than the direct subjects of the piece.

The only thing to hope is that the 'third-party complaints aren't allowed' policy is now jettisoned by the PCC as going completely against the spirit of genuine self-regulation, but I'm not sure even that is certain. All they are saying is that they'll do it on this occasion. They don't even seem to think that it's a bad policy in the first place. What if a person with no relatives dies and has appalling inaccuracies written about them - is there really no justifiable way that readers who may have been offended by such bad journalism should have their complaints dealt with? Why shouldn't general readers be included in the list of people who can complain, as they are with Ofcom?

Now don't imagine for a moment I'm all for huge censorship of the press. But wanting newspapers to be accurate isn't anti-free speech. There's a difference between saying "I may not like what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it" and "I may not like what you say, particularly when you tell lies about people who aren't rich enough to seek redress through the courts and ruin their lives, but I know that you're trying your best, so we'll let it slide." And please. Jan Moir is hardly Camille Desmoulins. It's not like writing nasty stuff about recently dead pop stars is some kind of search for democratic freedom - indeed, that's precisely why the piece upset so many from right across the political spectrum; it was the sheer superfluousness of it that made it a hundred times worse.

Accuracy is important. Newspapers' opinions do still carry a lot of weight, sadly enough. And it's perfectly possible for polemicists to get all worked up about all kinds of things without having to resort to getting it wrong, or failing to check their facts. Having to be accurate would make the press better, not less free. This isn't about sacking people when they get it wrong; it's about whether it's right to offend thousands of people not in a life-or-death struggle but in a casually horrible article about a dead person who's not around any more to defend themselves. It's about there being some form of redress and some form of regulation over the press, not just a procedure set up by the press itself which allows the escape hatch of a microscopic correction on page 94.

But still, the PCC creaks along. You can't see the matchsticks and Blu-Tack holding it all together, but you just get the suspicion that something isn't quite right. It still looks like a regulatory body, and it's trying - under intense scrutiny - to behave kind of like a regulatory body might do; but there's no suggestion that the Moir case has brought about any soul-searching or questions about whether they're really doing a good job or not. They'll just keep their heads down and hope they can carry on with business as usual once this business has all died down. They might well be right - unless enough people notice, enough people care, and enough people do something to stop them.

BNP handwashing

The Daily Mail and Melanie Phillips have always attempted to distance themselves from the BNP. And today's article by Phillips isn't the first time that she has tried to wash her hands of any connection between her constant anti-Islam columns and the anti-Islam views expressed by people like the BNP.

I've pointed out before how Phillips's rhetoric is almost indistinguishable from the drivel peddled by Geert Wilders; yet she attempted to call the BNP 'odious' before in an article which has mysteriously disappeared off the Mail's online archive - possibly because it was swamped with hundreds of pro-BNP comments, some claiming that Phillips herself was in no position to attack the party.

Phillips, of course, is as hated by the BNP as anyone else from a 'non-indigenous' ethnic background and if you should dare to wade into the Stormfront messageboard (and I don't recommend it just after breakfast) regarding that first article you'll see vile filth like this, under the headline "Jew attacks BNP":

The odious BNP is only gaining ground because voters feel so utterly betrayed.
No they are gaining ground, because you are a Jew, and people can see through your lies. They are fed up of this government treating them like second class citizens in their own country, being brushed aside for the Muzzie or Negro. Finally the sheep are waking up, and you Melanie Phillips should apologise... for being a Jew.
You are a traitor to this country, and a traitor to the White Race. I shall add you to the list Melanie ;)

Awful. Today's piece from Phillips is basically the same argument in slightly different words - essentially the BNP are gaining ground because the PC Government refuses to tackle Muslim extremism:

But that is not the reason for his appeal. Those who support him do not in the main do so because they are racially prejudiced. It is because he also opposes mass immigration, Islamisation and the loss of sovereignty to the EU.
These are all legitimate concerns which are widely held by people who fear the loss of Britain's historic identity - but which are stigmatised as beyond the pale by an intelligentsia which considers any such expression of nationalistic sentiment to be a form of racism.

I don't know whether Phillips thinks that people who are going to 'add her to a list' for being Jewish are really expressing legitimate concerns about immigration which are denied to them by a liberal intelligentsia. What do you think? I always look for the simplest answer - that people are racist because they're racist, and that racism is racism because it's racism. Sure, you can dress it up any way you like, but it's still racism.

According to Phillips, if you call racism racism then you're only making it worse. What shall we call it then? Parsnips? People are being parsnips because they hate immigrants. There. Is that better somehow? No, I didn't think so.

Melanie again:

Such distinctions should fool no one. The BNP is hostile not merely to Islamic supremacists but to all Muslims, including those who threaten no one's way of life.

What is the difference between extremist Muslims and ordinary Muslims though? Not a great deal, if you're Melanie Phillips:

The problem, however, is that it doesn't understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has 'hijacked' and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

*

As Rhetorically Speaking points out:

It's a really rather important distinction for Phillips to create because she has herself been a regular proponent of the idea that radical Islamists are trying to turn Britain into an Islamic nation under Sharia law.
Furthermore, Phillips has proven rather careless in drawing a line between mainstream UK Muslims and the supposed radical plots of a minority - either blaming the mainstream for failing to respond to her personal conspiracy theories, or failing to mention the majority mainstream at all.

This happens from time to time. The Mail often attempts to draw a line in the sand, despite its frequent attacks on Islam and moderate Muslims from news reports and commentators alike, that it is nothing to do with the rise of the BNP. Which may be true, but if you do venture onto BNP forums you'll find one newspaper above all others which is constantly linked to as evidence of immigration madness and Muslims taking over Britain - the Daily Mail. More so even than the Express, whose appalling front pages have recently taken a turn for the comically racist:



Now the Mail might like to think that that's just an accident. It might use the sophistry of Phillips to claim that the problem is a real one about Islamisation, not dealt with by a PC Government too afraid to upset Muslims, leading to resentment and, as she has previously put it, a choice between "national suicide or being called a racist", and that the BNP is garnering support because of that. But what if that's wrong? What if the BNP is attracting more supporters because its ideas, through friendly newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express, have become more mainstream and acceptable? What if those newspapers, much as they claim to distance themselves from the racists, are actually helping them to grow, by misrepresenting immigration, misrepresenting the threat of Islam, ramping up the fears about Britain, questioning the Britishness of second-generation immigrants, and so on? What if that were true?

Is it a coincidence that the most pro-BNP comments on this story about the BNP's apperance on Question Time get hundreds of approvals? Is it a coincidence that in the story itself, the Mail never dares question Nick Griffin's assertion that plenty of people from ethnic minority backgrounds are backing a racist party with a whites-only constitution? Is it a coincidence that one week ago, the Mail lambasted the BBC for allowing the BNP's disgusting views to be aired without question, yet does exactly that in this story?

The Mail and Melanie can wash their hands of it all they like. But deep down they must know.

* That's from the July 8 article about 'sleepwalking into Islamisation' which has since been removed from the Mail's online archive. Why they took it down, you'll have to ask them, but happily enough there's a copy on a dedicated website.

They don't get it

By now we all know Jan Moir doesn't get it, but there are a few its that she doesn't get. She doesn't get it that she did something wrong. She doesn't get it that people were revolted by her article. She doesn't get it that people were so appalled that they wanted to complain. She doesn't get it that while the thousands of complaints aimed at the BBC in the wake of 'Sachsgate' had to be fielded by the corporation, egged on by the Daily Mail (including her), the PCC could possibly ignore all the complaints about her awfulness and inaccuracy because of the way it's structured; and that this makes newspapers look less accountable than the BBC, particularly when she issues the equivalent of a 'meh' as a response to the shit-storm she's found herself in. She doesn't get it that the reaction to her atrocity of a column was a spontaneous response which snowballed through genuine disgust among people on the traditional 'left' and 'right' who think what she wrote was horrific, and not all a big liberal-left blogging conspiracy against her which was 'orchestrated'.

It's not just Jan who doesn't get a lot of its. A lot of people don't get a lot of its. But we should forgive them their ignorance, their lack of understanding of these new social media phenomena. They have been brought up in a didactic world of media, where newspapers tell you what to think and why to think it; not in a world where readers give back as good as they get, want to correct inaccuracies and don't stand for being lied to.

In the good old days of print, there were newspaper pages, and if you disagreed, you had to lump it. You could write a letter to the editor, who would do the equivalent of patting you on the head and telling you to fuck off, and that was that. These were times when content was one way, when the reader was very much a passive part of the experience. There wasn't the opportunity to look up the facts for yourself, to check blogs and websites for background information and contradictory opinions. You were pretty much stuck with what you were told. And if you didn't like it, well you knew where you could go: to another newspaper, who told you slightly different things, but ones which might be a little more to your taste.

Some news outlets do get it, I think. Some understand that the world isn't made up entirely of reactionary types, and that people you wouldn't expect to be can be surprisingly liberal when it comes to certain types of stories. Some newspapers try to write for readers, not for themselves. They don't think "What's our angle on X, Y and Z?" but "What will our readers think of this?" - but not all. Those who do might survive the dark times ahead; those who refuse are going to look increasingly stupid in a world where readers are increasingly informed from elsewhere, able to challenge and unwilling to be spoonfed.

There is no 'orchestration', no big celebrity Twitter conspiracy to make Jan Moir cry. You have to remember that if she didn't write such a thunderingly shit article in the first place, there couldn't have possibly been such a reaction. There might not have been any reaction at all. And yes, there have been others - I'm looking at you, Littlejohn, though your time will come, one glorious day - who have written the same kind of thing, or worse, and got away without the same level of criticism. But it seems now there are some of us who have had enough of the mainstream media telling us what to think, lying to us, giving the news for bigots instead of the news for everyone. It's not like I want the Daily Mail to stop existing; I just wish it was good. I don't even mind it being right-wing, so long as it's right-wing and accurate, and with as little poisonous hatred directed at recently dead people as possible. But even that seems too much to ask.

I may be a naive fool, and I probably am, but I think the public aren't idiots. We know when we're being sold a pup, and when well-paid writers are being so unpleasant that you have to turn around and say: Actually, you're entirely wrong, and misleading, and you don't represent me, and you probably don't represent most people's views either.

It's easy for the Mail to go back into its shell, write a pathetic article about Twitter 'celebrities' having a go at Philip Schofield's haircut and Stephen Fry's nose and think everything will blow over and they can get back to sticking the boot in on Monday morning. Because it's not even like there's been a watershed, or anything's changed. This has been coming for a long time. Not just with the Mail, though it's the consistently worst offender, but with our press - they write for us, so they should do a better job of it. Want to know why people aren't buying newspapers any more? Because there's so little worth reading, so much of the time. The dog days are over. There's no point in thinking you can keep getting away with the prejudice, the hatred, the distortion, because you can't. It's not a big liberal conspiracy: everyone wants newspapers to be better. It's whether they want to be better, and thrive, or whether they think they're there only to push a narrow agenda, and die.

It will be interesting to see how long it does take for them to 'get it'.

The war on vaccines continues

I'm no vaccine evangelist. They have caused health problems in the past and I'm sure they will do so again in the future; but the odds are stacked in favour of having them. You can see from this delightful visual representation of the safety of the American HPV vaccine how the risks of having it compare to not having it, and how much more likely you are to die in other freak events than from having the jab.

That's not to say that all vaccines are safe forever, of course not. But given that I'm no scientist, what I'm more interested in is how people's perception of vaccines has been altered by what they might have read in the press recently. You'll remember that the Express, wrongly, said this:



and later retracted it after the professor involved stated quite categorically they hadn't said anything of the sort. There was an apology but it was tucked away neatly inside; the original scare story was splashed onto the front page in 130-point print. Which one do you think more people took notice of?

It's not just the Express, of course, who like to demonise vaccines - they're pretty much alongside Muslims and single mums in the tabloid ghost train. Paul Dacre a few months ago told a parliamentary committee that his newspaper hadn't been involved in scaremongering over MMR, but that's hard to reconcile with the coverage his newspaper gave to the vaccine. Was it really investigative journalism trying to uncover the truth, or was there a line that was crossed to try and ramp up the fear, in a way that, say, Private Eye didn't, even though they pursued the MMR issue for over a year?

It's not so much one story in particular - appalling though that Sunday Express effort was - but it's a relentless pounding of the issue, from one side only. I think that's ok if you know that someone is taking a particular stance on something, but when it's a newspaper which purports to be looking at stories objectively and reporting facts, then something begins to smell quite badly. These recent newspaper headlines:

JAB 'AS BAD AS THE CANCER'
NORMAL FLU JABS 'DOUBLE THE RISK OF CATCHING SWINE BUG'
CHAOS OVER CANCER JAB FOR GIRLS
HEALTH TRUST CLAIMS CERVICAL CANCER JAB GIRL COULD HAVE DIED FROM UNDERLYING MEDICAL CONDITION
CANCER VACCINE PROGRAMME IN CHAOS AFTER DEATH OF GIRL, 14, HOURS AFTER HAVING JAB

add to a snowballing of concern and panic over HPV in particular but jabs in general. I can understand why there is concern over the swift introduction of the swine flu vaccine, but what I do wish is that newspapers would give real information, rather than just licking their lips at the panic-porn aspect and ramping up the fear rather than sticking to what is true and what isn't.

So we come to today's Mail on Sunday, and this story about the swine flu vaccine being added to other childhood vaccinations.

The swine flu vaccine will be given to children at the same time as routine jabs – despite the fact there is no evidence the combination is safe.

There's also 'no evidence' the combination of the swine flu vaccine and a banana is safe, or half a pint of bitter, or a lump of coal, or... do you see what I mean? That's a distinctly odd way of putting it - unless you're attempting to portray the combination as potentially unsafe - but there's no evidence for that either.

There are fears that children will be at risk of unknown side effects because safety trials into using the jabs together have yet to be carried out.

The plan has also added to concerns about ‘overloading’ young immune systems with multiple inoculations.

Well, so long as they quote anyone other than Dr Richard Halvorsen then I'll be concerned. Anyone but him, really. He seems, unfortunately, to be a bit of a rent-a-quote on anything to do with vaccines, despite his theories not having any published science behind them. He's the Tax Payers Alliance of health stories - if you're pushed for time, you're desperate for a quote and you haven't found anyone else to back up your argument, he's just a phone call away.

But I'm sure the Mail will have found someone else to come forward with these fears, won't they. It won't just be Halvorsen, a GP who is proud to say he's trained in homoeopathy and acupuncture, will it?

GP Dr Richard Halvorsen, medical director of the Babyjabs clinic in Central London, said last night: ‘There is not a shred of evidence about the potential effects of combining all these childhood jabs with the swine flu vaccine. They simply have not had time to carry out tests.’

Oh. I see.

There's also a quote from JABS, who are the other go-to guys on vaccinations (when you want a negative story), and a slither of rebuttal from the Government bolted on to the end of the story:

The Department of Health said last night: ‘It is irresponsible to suggest the UK would use a vaccine without careful consideration of safety issues'

Pissing in the wind there, my friend, whoever you are. Responsibility doesn't come high up the list of attributes for a health reporter nowadays - it's all about the scares.

What interests me is the fear displayed in the comments section underneath the article. Now I know that comments aren't always the best place to find a genuine cross-section of views, but some of these are quite enlightening to understand where people are coming from. Particularly this one:

swine flue has paralysed people, its killed them, it has not been tested and it is potentially dangerous, there is no dangerous flue, who says so WHOworld health organisation so why are they pushing on us a deadly vacine when the guy who designed the vaccine the top expert says ITS POTENTIALLY MORE DEADLY THAN THE FLUE ITSELF. THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO US IN A DESPERATE MEASURE TO GET MONEY TO BIG PHARMA, A LOT OF PEOPLE (JUST LIKE IN THE 70s)oh didnt you know this happened before, in the 70s lots of people were killed and paralysed. take ths shot give it to you kids it s the
SQUALENE IN THE VACCINE MAY GIVE YOU GULF WAR SYNDROME. WHICH MEANS IT MAY BE LIKE BEING INJECTED DIRECTLY WITH AIDS. WHY WERE 70% OF THE POPULATION OF SOME AFRICAN STATES WITH AIDS AFTER UN INOCULATION PROGRAMS THROUGH POLIO VACCINES IN THE 90S WHEN NO ONE IN EUROPE HAS AIDS JUST IN AFRICA. THINK ABOUT IT.

- liam, belfast, 18/10/2009 0:22

I want to focus on one particular thing this person says - let's ignore the Big Pharma stuff and the capital letters. He quite confidently states that "the guy who designed the vaccine, the top expert, says it's potentially more deadly than the flu itself". Now you know, and I know, where he got that titbit from - the front page of the Sunday Express the other week.

That's how something inaccurate can become accepted as fact, and how a weaselly retraction makes no difference when you've splashed a misleading headline onto your front page. Once it's out there, people will see it as fact. It's a good reason to be careful about what you write, if you work for a national newspaper - it implies a bit of responsibility and integrity might be required for the job. Somewhere along the line, a few people have forgotten about that, and that's a sadness.

Liam's comment, by the way, is voted enthusiastically into the positive by fellow readers of the story. I don't know what that says about Mail readers and their attitudes towards vaccinations, or whether the story has attracted anti-vaxx people like bluebottles to a freshly-minted turd.

But what bothers me is that if, one day, a vaccine causes genuine health concerns, how are we going to know? All this crying wolf will make some people sceptical of everything to do with vaccines, and others unable to tell when something's really serious. But that is the environment our press has created.