800%: proof
OK, some late news just in. This story appeared in the Daily Express last Friday, and seems to be based on a report in Police Review. It appeared in the Express - a newspaper I could get obsessed by - under the simple headline, 800% (in big letters), going on to explain that "police struggle to cope with 800% rise in crimes committed by Romanians in UK."I say "explain" - what the story actually did was scare the living daylights out of its decent, white, homeowning, Anglo-Saxon core readership, which is the Express's job. "Senior police officers", it said, were "struggling to cope" with "an unprecedented rise in offences by the east Europeans." This sounds like an open and shut case: our once great nation is flooded with pickpocketing Romanian ne'er-do-wells and 800 is a big number.
It certainly is. What 800% actually means though is "eight times more," and the rise seems to be a comparison between crimes committed by Romanians before Romania joined the EU and now. In other words, if one Romanian committed a crime before Romanians were allowed to enter the country, and eight committed one this year, that would be an 800% increase. (In fact, it's gone up from 30 in 2006 to 339 in London specifically, which, if you take into account that there were presumably hardly any Romanians here in 2006, is not that astounding. Also, at no stage does the report tell us what kind of crimes these are.) Many of them are poor, that's why they're here, looking for low-paid jobs, not necessarily to commit crimes. The Express called it a "dramatic increase" and added colour to the story by stating that "migrant gangs began to flood into the UK following EU accession in January last year." Note the emotive choice of words: gangs, flood, even "accession", which is official terminology, has the useful ring of submission and acquiescence! This dovetails nicely into the recent horror story about pickpocketing children, trafficked in and controlled by "Fagin-style gangmasters". The Express purports to be shocked by the appalling treatment of these children, but not as shocked as it is by the notion that pockets are being picked. If they could call them "Gypsies" you know they would.
"One senior officer who asked not to be named" - handy! - said that forces across the UK are "struggling to cope." I'm sure they are. Perhaps because so many officers have been put back on the beat at Labour's behest to reassure readers of the Express and the Mail that there are more bobbies on our streets.
What's at issue here is not immigration itself, but the emotive and scaremongering way the subject is reported in certain newspapers, with tea-spilling headlines like "800%", all adding to the narrative that evil foreigners are coming to your house to eat your swans. It's surely not a coincidence that, according to a Google search, this story was only picked up by the Express and the Mail - and quoted in a Sun online forum where one of the enraged contributors has a non-ironic Al Murray avatar. It can also be found, reproduced word for word, on the site of a rather unsavoury political party, for which I won't provide a handy link - nor name them, for fear of this post ending up in a Google search for that party.
I'm currently reading Nick Davies' British press expose Flat Earth News, which I highly recommend. He reminds us: "The migration argument is complex ... It is particularly complex for the Mail and the Express, because they have been among the most vocal supporters of the creation of free markets; they continue to support the free flow across international borders of capital and services and goods, but not of labour - not if it means Africans, Gypsies and poor people turning up looking for work. As a result, their whole economic model collapses."
Crash!PS: Davies quotes a 2003 memo from a Sunday Express news editor, which instructed staff to "constantly stir things up. We must make the readers cross."
posted by Andrew Collins @ 12:38 PM
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7 Comments:
I'm a bit of a fan of http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/
for doing the thankless task of cataloging the fruitcake mail and express frontpages.
Oh and kudos on the stats, we'll make a science nerd out of you yet.
Spot on Andrew. Did you spot this story earlier in the week about a Daily Mail journalist touting for racist horror stories? Shouldn't be surprised, but it still seems shocking to be confronted with such blatant evil.
Also just about to start reading Flat Earth News when I've finished with The Damned Utd. Nearly launched in to a tirade today when an elderly women asked me something about the Maddy sighting.
Shouldn't let it bother me this much really but it is a nonsense.
Have a look at enemiesofreason.blogspot.com which highlights some of the greater excesses of the Mail and Express and also suggests that the Mail could be censoring its comments section so that it appears that all contributors agree with its rather suspect agenda.
I'm actually very alarmed at how racist the Express has become - almost every day they manage to twist the statistics to make it look like we're dealing with a foreign crimewave. Are they in the pay of the BNP or something?
Best one a couple of weeks ago was "a migrant is arrested every four minutes". Someone on Mailwatch dug out some numbers that showed this made foreigners in the UK slightly less likely to be arrested than British people, but the Express conveniently failed to mention this.
I often wonder if the journalists that write this crap actually believe it themselves, or if they just happen to know what buttons to push in order to sell papers to xenophobic middle-Englanders.
Was Princess Diana on the cover?
Jason H - Tooting
Don't have the latest Word magazine to hand but towards the end of David Quantick's (some say controversial) Morrissey review he makes a beautifully succint defence of immigration - something along the lines of it's all that stops this country from turning into a BNP led monarchist theme park.
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