Posts Tagged ‘Immigration’
BBC Breakfast turns migrants Channel crossing into a would-be snuff movie
Where were you when the BBC was on a boat in the English Channel watching migrants trying to stop their rubber dingy from sinking? You might have seen the BBC’s tweet and a short video of its report:
Simon Jones, our man on the scene (in a bigger, dryer boat), talked us through the drama on a “choppy” sea. The migrants were using a plastic container to try to bail out the boat. Faced with people in a “dangerous” situation, what did the man in the bigger, dryer, safer boat do? Yes: he shouted: “Are you ok?” That was after “spotting” (aka looking for and finding) the migrants half an hour earlier, and, presumably, staying close to them.
The BBC’s bloke went full sailing regatta and asked them, “Are you all right?” He then gave them a thumbs up. Not an old Roman Emperor’s signal for them to be spared death at the circus, but an attempt to get some kind of reaction. Jones then asked them where they were from?; “How many people” (on the boat?; under the boat?; fallen from the boat?); and “Where do you want to go?” Not one wag replied ‘Your house” or “Mars”, settling instead on Dover.
Stay tuned for when one boat carrying migrants is capsized by the wash from a TV crew’s launch, and a reporter can lower their voice and talk about a ‘tragedy’.
Posted: 11th, August 2020 | In: Key Posts, News, TV & Radio | Comment
Illegal immigrants rain on London
The body of a Kenya flight ‘stowaway’ has been “found” in a garden in Clapham, south London. The man fell off a Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi. The BBC says the “force of the body falling” dented paving slabs. To say nothing for the impact of the body landing on the patio.
“If it had been two seconds later,” says an eyewitness, “he would have landed on the common where there were hundreds of people – my kids were in the garden 15 minutes before [he fell]. I spoke to Heathrow. They said this happens once every five years.” In 2024, it might be best to remain indoors.
Thoughts, of course, are with the dead man, someone desperate enough to clamber inside the landing gear of a large commercial jet and take his chances. Although maybe he was already dead and someone else stowed him? Whatever the background, the tabloids keep things in perspective.
The Mail warns owners of £2m homes that immigrants might be targeting their properties:
The Sun warns sunbathers that there’s something worse than perverts with camera drones:
The man has yet to be identified.
Posted: 2nd, July 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True, Tabloids | Comment
How to make money from immigration without a boat
Who makes money from jailing asylum seekers? Of the UK’s 10 immigration removal facilities just one is run by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. G4S, Mitie, Serco and US-owned GEO Group operate the other nine. So there must be money in it, right? The Government’s Contracts Finder site reveals the value of contracts when they were awarded – but not all figures are shown. But by way of an example, in 2018 Mitie secured a 10-year deal worth £525m to escort immigration detainees on removal flights to detainees’ home countries and manage airport holding rooms, reporting centres and two short term holding facilities. Mitie declared itself “delighted” at the deal.
The Daily Beast looks at how outsourcing immigration to private companies in the US pays:
“In 2018 alone, for-profit immigration detention was a nearly $1 billion industry underwritten by taxpayers and beset by problems that include suicide, minimal oversight, and what immigration advocates say uncomfortably resembles slave labor.”
Of course, that’s not to say no problems existed when the state ran immigration centres. It’s useful to ask why the service was outsourced in the fist place. But profit margins seem very generous. In 2017, the Guardian noted a 20.7% profit margin at Brook House in 2016. Brook House at London’s Gatwick Airport is run by G4S. The same company runs Tinsley House, also in Gatwick. The margin was a whopping 41.5%.
The Beast adds:
Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn’t just policy; it’s big business. Yesica’s employer and jailer, the private prisons giant GEO Group, expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to President Trump’s campaign and inaugural.
GEO is involved in prison design and electronic tracking:
Pinning down the size and scope of the immigration prison industry is obscured by government secrecy. But the Daily Beast combed through ICE budget submissions and other public records to compile as comprehensive a list as possible of what for-profit prisons charge taxpayers to lock up a growing population, and how many people those facilities detain on average. The result: For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which The Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018.
Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people—meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that’s not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher.
Prison pays. Why shouldn’t it? Profits are not guaranteed. In 2015, profit margins for operators in the UK fells to between 5 and 7 per cent.
Richard Garside, director at the charity Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, takes a view: “If the state is going to detain someone, it should be under the auspices of state agencies, not the private sector.” Cynics would argue that Governments grew tired of botching immigration on their own so seduced private firms into the mess. The profits are compensation for reputation damage.
Posted: 3rd, January 2019 | In: Key Posts, Money, News | Comment
The Stansted 15 and the right to protest – don’t cheery pick your causes
Wind your neck back to March 28 2017. Fifteen protestors are attempting to prevent a plane chartered by the Home Office to deport illegal immigrants from leaving London’s Stansted airport. The plane is scheduled to drop its human cargo off in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana. Some of the activists have chained themselves to the plane’s front wheel. The plane never did take off. Predictably nicked, the group were charged with the crime of aggravated trespass. No biggie. The Crown Prosecution Service thought it not big enough and escalated the offence to one of “intentional disruption of services and endangerment at an aerodrome” – see: 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act; a law passed in response to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that carries anything up to a life sentence. The CPS says the protesters “placed themselves, the flight crew, airport personnel and police at serious risk of injury or even death due to their actions on the airfield”. All 15 have been found guilty of this larger offence.
Ella Whelan argues that the Stansted 15 “were not intent on harming anyone at the airport. All they wanted to do was stop the plane.” What of the people aboard the plane? Well:
One man on that plane was going to miss the birth of his daughter due to his deportation – and he has since been granted permission to remain in the UK. As we saw in the Windrush scandal, the government’s approach to immigration control is chaotic and cruel: several of the people on board the plane were being deported under the ‘deport first, appeal later’ policy, which was deemed illegal shortly after the Stansted 15’s action.
To date, 11 of the passengers who were to be deported “have now been given legal status in the UK”, reports Sky News. So the criminals did good, then. They helped people and prevented injustice. We should now help them.
The Guardian calls the 15’s treatment “chilling”. The New Statesman calls the verdict “a particularly cold blast in the increasingly chill wind blowing against public dissent in the UK”. But does your view on the Stansted 15 hinge on whether or not you believe in the right to peaceful protest or if you just support their cause? The Guardian gives much space over to the nature of Home Office deportations:
The protesters were highlighting a harsh and punitive system with which many are rightly and increasingly ill at ease. In June this year, Virgin airlines said it would no longer help deportations. Relying on charter flights (in several cases from an RAF base, following the Stansted protest) only veils the issue.
Slugger O’Toole notes:
Over 300 public figures have signed the open letter including much of the Labour front bench, filmmaker Ken Loach, activist Owen Jones and writer Naomi Klein. It calls for the Stansted 15 to be spared prison and calls on “the UK government to end its inhumane hostile environment policies and to end its barely legal and shameful practice of deportation charter flights.”
That’s Owen Jones who tweeted: “The right to free speech does not give you a right to a platform.” That’s the New Statesman that told us of a “Kosher Conspiracy”. That’s Ken Loache who backs the censorious BDS movement. That’s the Guardian in which you can read the inane argument “No platforming is not a threat to free speech, it is only a threat to hate speech.” Championing free speech and free expression is something we should all support – but let’s not only do it when we agree with the persecuted and support popular ideas.
‘Racists’ force Arsenal star Ozil to quit Germany team
In news to hearten online trolls and bigots, Arsenal footballer Mesut Ozil intends to stop playing for Germany. Ozil, part of the German side that won the 2014 World Cup winner, says a combination of online harassment and the asinine behaviour of the German Football Association (DFB) means he “no longer want to wear the German national team shirt”.
The attacks are not all related to Ozil’s performances for Germany, which have been mixed. In May he was criticised after being photographed with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan inLondon. Ozil and Manchester City’s German international Ilkay Gundogan are of Turkish descent. Both were invited to meet Turkey’s authoritarian leader who used photographs of him and the footballers to boost his governing AK Party in the build-up to elections in the country. Well over a million people in Germany with a Turkish background are eligible to vote in the election, which Erdogan won (natch.).
Ozil said he would have been “disrespecting his ancestors’ roots” had he not agreed to be meet Erdogan. Gündoğan, who like Ozil holds German and Turkish passports, presented Erdogan with the signed shirt bearing the legend: “To my president, with my respects.”
The background is relevant:
World Cup winner Özil was awarded an “integration” prize by the Hubert Burda Media group in 2010. That year the president of Germany’s football association (DFB) had complained about politicising football after Merkel made an unscheduled visit to the Germany changing room following a 3-0 win over Turkey. Photographs of the German chancellor were distributed by the government to the press afterwards.
So much for the politics and football. Incidentally, the above segment is taken from the Guardian, the paper in which a writer looked at the England World Cup team and opined: “If this team represents anyone, it’s the 48 per cent of Remainers.” This is because the England squad for Russia featured “11 players of colour”. That’s good thing, you see, because in the eyes of the knowing and enlightened being “too white”, an accusation levelled at the Russia team, is a bad thing. You were watching the football; they were studying the ethnic and racial make up of the team. Germany is not so far removed from the UK when it comes to the weak game of identity politics.
DFB chief Reinhard Grindel goes on the record: “The DFB of course respects the special situation for our players with migrant backgrounds, but football and the DFB stands for values that Mr Erdoğan does not sufficiently respect.” So much for not politicising football.
Ozil repsonds on Twitter:
“For me, having a picture with President Erdoğan wasn’t about politics or elections, it was about me respecting the highest office of my family’s country.
“My job is a football player and not a politician, and our meeting was not an endorsement of any policies. The treatment I have received from the DFB and many others makes me no longer want to wear the German national team shirt. I feel unwanted and think what I have achieved since my international debut in 2009 has been forgotten…
“People with racially discriminative backgrounds should not be allowed to work in the largest football federation in the world that has players from dual‑heritage families. Attitudes like theirs simply do not reflect the players they supposedly represent. In the eyes of Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win but I am an immigrant when we lose.
“It is with a heavy heart and after much consideration that because of recent events I will no longer be playing for Germany at international level whilst I have this feeling of racism and disrespect. I used to wear the German shirt with such pride and excitement, but now I don’t. I feel unwanted and think that what I have achieved since my international debut in 2009 has been forgotten.
“I am disappointed but not surprised by [Grindel’s] actions,” the 29-year-old added. “But when high-ranking DFB officials disrespect my Turkish roots and selfishly turn me into political propaganda, then enough is enough.”
“The 29-year-old added that he had received abuse online, and claimed he was racially abused by a supporter after the match against Sweden.
“A German fan told me after the game, ‘Özil, fuck off you Turkish shit, piss off you Turkish pig.’ I don’t want to even discuss the hate mail, threatening phone calls and comments on social media that my family and I have received.
“They all represent a Germany of the past, a Germany that I am not proud of. I am confident that many proud Germans who embrace an open society would agree with me.”
Good for him.
Posted: 23rd, July 2018 | In: Arsenal, Key Posts, Sports | Comment
Nigel Farage duped by anti-refugee photshop
Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP and now LBC radio opinion jock, says the photo above is an “insult” to “victims of sexual abuse and rape in Malmo”. He adds for good measure: “These people are sick.” Which people is a little unclear when it’s pointed out that the photo is clearly a fake to all but the most monocular tweeters and was taken in Saskatoon, Canada, back in September 2015.
In 2017, a Syrian refugee told local media about her plight: “We lived five years within the war there, so it’s too hard for us to talk again. It’s always the same story. People die every day by different ways, but they die every day.”
Also in 2017, the BBC did a “reality check” in claims that Malmo is the “rape capital of Europe”.
The BBC:
Reality Check verdict: Malmo, along with other urban centres in Sweden, has one of the highest levels of reported rapes in proportion to population in the EU, mainly due to the strictness of Swedish laws and how rape is recorded in the country.
The rate of reported rapes in Malmo has not dramatically risen in recent years and has in fact declined from its peak in 2010, before the recent large increases in refugees.
It is not possible to connect crimes to the ethnicity of the perpetrators as such data is not published.
In 2017, Donald Trump told an audience:
Here’s the bottom line: We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. (Applause.) You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden? Who would believe this? Sweden? They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.
And what of the alleged victim’s identity? The Local noted:
The number of rapes reported to authorities in Sweden increased by 10 percent in 2017, according to new preliminary figures from the country’s National Council on Crime Prevention (Brå)…
The number of sex crimes reported in Sweden increased by eight percent (1,600 reports), with the number of reported rapes in particular increasing by 10 percent – 663 reported rapes more than 2016 and reaching a total of 7,230.
What can we learn from the stats?
Mid Sweden University Criminologist Teresa Silva told The Local that the statistics should be treated with care.
“We always have to be careful with analyzing reported crimes. We don’t know from the reported crime statistics whether the crime has actually occurred more, or if it’s just that people report it more. They are always tricky, you have to think beyond the statistics themselves. Years ago these kind of crimes, sex crimes, were not spoken about and had stigma attached to them.”
“So what do these stats not tell us? Detailed characteristics of the victims for example – we don’t know their demographic and social profile, or if more immigrants are reporting these crimes after becoming more integrated in Sweden and aware that they can report them.”
Police do not record the ethnicity of either criminals or victims. But there is a problem. How bad is it and how much of it is down to refugees? In January 2018, The Times wrote:
Statistics published last week revealed the percentage of women who reported being victims of sex crimes rose from 1.4% in 2012 to 4.1% in 2016. In 2014 a study on the geography of outdoor rape in Stockholm found two-thirds of the suspects were non-Swedish citizens.
“Our government declared itself the world’s first feminist government, yet they have quietly abandoned women,” [Paulina] Neuding said. “There is mounting evidence that large-scale migration of men from extremely patriarchal cultures is limiting women’s freedom.”
And the police? In January 2016, Swedish police and media were accused of covering up a spate of sexual offences involving young migrants at We Are Sthlm, a free summer youth festival in Stockholm. When truth gets censored and mangled, you only see what you want to see. Andrew Brown notes:
…the Stockholm police failed to report the sex assaults at the festival for fear of worsening ethnic tensions. And it was understood by all parties that this would lead to an electoral advantage for the Sweden Democrats…
So teenage girls were systematically assaulted and robbed by gangs of young foreign men because too many powerful people found their suffering was inconvenient. The result of this cover-up will be far more damaging than the truth could have been.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 15th, July 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Hitler blinks: Trumps revokes child abusing immigration policy
Looks like ‘Hitler’ had a rethink. President Donald Trump has rescinded a policy that separates children from their undocumented parents in migrant detentions. The outcry was understandable over children being isolated in “cages” and “tender age shelters” while their parents were jailed and prosecuted for illegal border-crossing. US immigration officials tell us 2,342 children were separated from 2,206 parents between 5 May and 9 June.
“It’s about keeping families together,” said Mr Trump as he put his big felt tip to the latest decree. “I did not like the sight of families being separated.” The “zero tolerance policy” of criminally prosecuting anyone who crosses the border illegally remains.”I think anybody with a heart would feel very strongly about it,” he added. “We don’t like to see families separated.”
We especially don’t like to seem them split up by uniformed men and women on the telly. This was cruelty manifest. The pressure built and Tump blinked.
And what of the view we’ve seen? Brendan O’Neill watched TV anchor Rachel Maddow shed a tear as she told her MSNBC views of children in tender-age shelters in South Texas:
Maddow began to weep. She turned away from the cameras and asked her producers to flash up some graphics while she regained her composure. Cue an outburst of social-media solidarity. ‘I’m weeping too’, virtually everyone said, for what’s the point in weeping these days if you don’t tell everyone about it? The unrecorded tear is a wasted tear in our narcissistic era.
…Ms Maddow and the army of online emotionalists who live-tweeted their weeping alongside hers somehow managed to maintain eyes as dry as the Sahara during far worse things done by previous administrations.
Where were their sobs when Obama and Clinton’s misadventure in Libya not only killed… 27 women and children but also contributed to the destabilisation of Libya and to the exodus of more than 600,000 Libyans? … Why didn’t they cry when Obama ramped up the deportation of Haitians in 2016? ‘Natasha Joseph’s almond-shaped eyes brim with tears as she cradles her pregnant belly’, started one report about a Haitian woman who was thrown out of the US while her husband was imprisoned in Arizona. Her husband would not witness the birth of their child. Shattered Haitian families don’t deserve public weeping, it seems. Because the shattering was done by politicians these people admire.
So what to do? If in doubt, troll the opposition:
Don’t worry, the Republicans, and your President, will fix it! pic.twitter.com/xsbuPzXbHj
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2018
The children deserve compassion. The oneupmanship is nasty. It’s not the Holocaust. Right? Michael Hayden, a retired Air Force general who ran the National Security Agency as well as the CIA, is no historian:
Other governments have separated mothers and children pic.twitter.com/tvlBkGjT0h
— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) June 16, 2018
The story is worked into a frenzy. Swathes of people are monstered. Fact are blurred. Idiocy prevails. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an architect of the “zero tolerance” policy, told us why Hayden is wrong. “It’s a real exaggeration,” says Sessions said on Fox News, “because in Nazi Germany they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.”
Did anyone in the US study history?
But the Nazi analogy is apposite, right? MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says the Trump administration is “just like the Nazis”.
To miss the parallels in what our government is doing today, you would have to be blind. It’s there in the way that Donald Trump invokes the boogeyman of MS-13 to justify the imprisonment of children too young to tie their shoes. It’s there in the stories of detainees who have no idea where Homeland Security has taken their children, and have no way of finding out.
Yes, our government is only rounding up human beings, not executing them or burying them in mass graves. But the roots of that evil are there — they have, to an extent, always been there. Does it need to flower into something truly monstrous before we recognize it for what it really is? Hitler also did things by degrees, nipping away at freedoms and piling one small indignity on top of another. That has been the strategy of the Trump administration: first racial insults, then stepped-up enforcement, then the wall, then the cage.
The cage? The Washington Post and National Public Radioset out to find the child cages. They found none.
Meanwhile… immigration. What are you going to do about it? “They could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” the president said on Monday. “So we want a safe country, and it starts with the borders. And that’s the way it is.”
The New York Times said this year: “Some migrants have admitted they brought their children… because they believed it would cause authorities to release them from custody sooner… Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.”
What to do?
Posted: 21st, June 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Spider-Man of Paris Mamoudou Gassama wins French citizenship
Mamoudou Gassama, 22, saw a four-year-old child hanging from a fourth-floor balcony. So he scaled the building to rescue him. It was 8pm on Saturday in northern Paris.
Les héros ne portent pas de cap. 👏👏 #Paris pic.twitter.com/QrOn3YB4Q7
— •NubiΔΠ• (@Adil__Brown) May 27, 2018
“Luckily, there was someone who was physically fit and who had the courage to go and get the child,” a fire service spokesman said. “I saw all these people shouting, and cars sounding their horns. I climbed up like that and, thank God, I saved the child,” says Gassama. “I felt afraid when I saved the child … [when] we went into the living room, I started to shake, I could hardly stand up, I had to sit down.”
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, hailed the “Spider-Man of the 18th”, referring to the Paris district where the rescue to place. “He explained to me that he had arrived from Mali a few months ago dreaming of building his life here,” she says. “I told him that his heroic act is an example to all citizens and that the city of Paris will obviously be very keen to support him in his efforts to settle in France.”
Gassama has now been to meet the President of France, who presented the hero an award and French citizenship.
Right-wing tabloids use Piers Morgan’s impotent tool to bash Diane Abbott
As the Government inches towards its removal targets for people unsuited to their environment – farewell, Amber Rudd – the Press look around for the next scalp. They spot Diane Abbott, the Labour shadow home secretary. The Sun thunders “DIANE DISASTER “, zooming in on Abbott’s “car-crash interview” with TV’s Piers Morgan. Lest the paper’s position be unclear, it adds: “The disastrous interview came after the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary.”
Says the Sun:
Pressed on the [illegal immigration] issue, Ms Abbott refused EIGHT times to lay out exactly what her solution would be if she got into power.
As ever, the non-event on mid-morning telly between Paxman-lite and Blinky hits Twitter:
Viewers watching will make their own mind up about what you were trying to do. As for me I will keep campaigning for justice, not treating the #Windrush generation and others who have a right to be here as if they were illegal.
— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) April 30, 2018
The Mail analyses the facts.
Diane Abbott refuses SIX TIMES to say what SHE would do with illegal immigrants in her latest car crash interview
We know journalists are rubbish at sums but surely the Sun and Mail can decide if Morgan repeated himself 6 or 8 times? (The Mirror says it’s 6.) You can watch the video of the chat if you can stand it – but you might wonder if repeating the same line of questioning is more vainglorious balls than an actual attempt to get an answer. But the poor questioning and the non-answer gets the headlines – no fewer than three times on the Daily Express website:
STORY 1: “What is Labour immigration policy? Piers Morgan frustrated as Diane Abbott fails to answer”
STORY 2: “‘You couldn’t give me a straight answer’ Morgan hits back at Abbott after fiery TV clash”
STORY 3: “Piers Morgan Twitter: Good Morning Britain star continues HEATED debate with Diane Abbott”
Good to see the country finally having a sensible debate on immigration – not.
Oh, go on, here it is.
Diane Abbott repeatedly refuses to say what should happen to illegal migrants in car-crash interview with Piers Morgan. https://t.co/f7ayYJ9Gna pic.twitter.com/PjG1MWM18F
— Ben (@Jamin2g) April 30, 2018
Posted: 30th, April 2018 | In: News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Andrew Sullivan: The Issue That Could Lose the Next Election for Democrats.
Andrew Sullivan spots a trend: The Issue That Could Lose the Next Election for Democrats.
“I don’t believe it’s disputable at this point that the most potent issue behind the rise of the far right in America and Europe is mass immigration. It’s a core reason that Trump is now president; it’s why the AfD is now the third-biggest party in the German, yes, German, parliament; it’s why Austria’s new chancellor won by co-opting much of the far right’s agenda on immigration; it’s why Britain is attempting (and currently failing) to leave the EU; it’s why Marine Le Pen won a record number of votes for her party in France this spring.
“A critical moment, in retrospect, came with Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to import over a million Syrian refugees into the heart of Europe. . . . This is, to be blunt, political suicide. The Democrats’ current position seems to be that the Dreamer parents who broke the law are near heroes, indistinguishable from the children they brought with them; and their rhetoric is very hard to distinguish, certainly for most swing voters, from a belief in open borders. In fact, the Democrats increasingly seem to suggest that any kind of distinction between citizens and noncitizens is somehow racist.”
If you keep ignoring the demos or monstering them as thick bigots, the demos is going to take it’s chance to vote you out…
Posted: 24th, October 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment
Hani Khalaf: Hyde Park killer and the problem with immigrants
In today’s Daily Express, it’s another game of join the dots, of which there are just two. Page 5 tells readers of an “illegal immigrant” called Hani Khalaf. He’s been handed a 26-year prison sentence for murdering Jairo Medina, beating the man to death in London’s Hyde Park.
Khalaf, an Egyptian national, arrived in the UK in the back of lorry back in 2014, posing as a Syrian asylum seeker.
Judge Wendy Joseph QC tells the court:
“It is clear that Hani Khalaf, having absconded, came to the attention of authorities on at least six occasions. On each, he was re-bailed because they could not make arrangements for securing his deportation in a reasonable amount of time.”
The news is part of a page given over to immigration stories.
Immigration Special.
The phone poll on the same page asks: “Is Britain still letting in too many migrants?”
The story of how Hani Khalaf was free to murder is troubling. Why was a man in the country illegally not dealt with by the authorities? Joseph makes the valid point that Khalaf had no way of “lawfully maintaining himself”. How can man in the country illegally keep the rules?
So much for the Express. But how do the other paper report on the story?
The Daily Telegraph leads with the killer’s legal status:
Illegal immigrant murdered man in Hyde Park after Home Office repeatedly failed to deport him
It tells readers that the victim, a carer by profession, was born in Colombia. He was a Colombian national. The Express omits that fact. The Express also doesn’t say that Mr Medina, a migrant, has, according to his sister, won an award in 2015 for his “service to care in London”.
The paper adds:
The day before he [Khalaf] met Mr Medina, he was arrested for shoplifting in Regent Street and gave police the false name he had previously given to immigration officials.
He appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court and was bailed hours before the killing.
On August 11, Khalaf met Mr Medina in Hyde Park, where the victim had gone hoping to have sex with a younger man, the court heard.
Khalaf murdered and robbed Mr Medina. The judge ruled that it was a “murder for gain”.
Over in the London Evening Standard, the killer’s status is is once more the leading fact:
Illegal immigrant jailed for beating carer Jairo Medina to death in London’s Hyde Park
It was only good police work that saw Khalaf arrested:
Khalaf was arrested on August 16 for fare evasion and told police he was Hanni Hassan and later gave the name Khalaf, prosecutor Oliver Glasgow QC said.
Then on August 18, he was arrested again for shoplifting and taken to Charing Cross police station, where an “eagle-eyed” police officer recognised him from CCTV as the suspect seen with Mr Medina on the night of his death.
The BBC delivers the headline:
“Illegal immigrant jailed for Hyde Park murder”
And in the Guardian? Well, this is the headline:
It’s story begins:
A homeless man has been jailed for at least 26 years for murdering a “kind and peace-loving” carer…
To the Guardian, it is not Khalaf’s illegality that matters most. “Homeless man jailed for Hyde Park murder,” says the headline. Its report carries not a single mention of the words “migrant”, “illegal immigrant” or “immigrant”.
The Express and Guardian both massage the facts to fit an agenda. Neither is helpful.
Posted: 25th, August 2017 | In: Broadsheets, News, Tabloids | Comment
Daily Mail readers confused by EU borders news
The Daily Mail is upset that the European Union has imposed “tough” security checks at airports causing British families to “suffer most”. Maybe the EU wonks hard that we Britishers like to queue?
As the Mail grumbles and moans about beefed-up security at airport in the EU zone, we hark back to a time when the same paper was grumbling about slack security at airport in the EU zone:
When the UK’s Border Force closed gates at Stansted Airport, causing 5,000 people to queue at Passport Control at midnight – “Children were crying and tempers flared”and “holidaymakers battled” – the Mail published the story on page 10.
The Express is just as confused:
Such are the facts.
After Grenfell: 600 deathtraps, party political boomerangs and another lousy inquiry
News is that Grenfell Tower was not the only building swaddled in flammable cladding. The Sun leads with “600 Fire Traps”. It sees “thousands of families living in fear” that what happened in North Kensington could happen to their home. Eleven building in eight local authorities have been tested by the Government so far, including those, says the paper, in the London borough of Camden, which just happens to be a council under Labour control. So much for the narrative about only people in jeans, double-vent jackets and brogues placing the poor in danger. The Sun is happy to point out when a horror comes along and upsets all the pieces on the board, playing party politics with the dead is a campaigning boomerang.
Theresa May does not murder children. Jeremy Corbyn does not value life more or less than other party leaders. Using the dead for a political campaign is sick. I’m sure among the enlightened and knowing screaming about justice for Grenfell and Tory child killers it’s a monumental order of self-restraint not to revisit Guy Fawkes’ old plot.
On page 5, the Sun tells us of the 4,800 residents in five Camden council tower blocks who can’t sleep for fear of a blaze. The “killer cladding” was installed by Rydon, the same company that worked on Grenfell Tower.
Over in the Mirror, the front-page news is also of thousands more people “living in deathtraps”. We hear from Labour’s Harriet Harman, who calls the news “chilling”. It too mentions Camden Council, and looks at the Rivers Apartments in Tottenham, London, where the building is wrapped in the same “lethal material” as Grenfell. In Camden, the council has ordered the cladding on the Chalcots Estate to be stripped immediately. The paper does not mention that Camden Council is under Labour control. It does, however, remind readers that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is under Tory control, and that its hapless leader has resigned.
In the Express, Grenfell and cladding becomes something to do with illegal immigration. Ross Clark agrees that any illegal immigrants who survived Grenfell Tower should not be prosecuted but his bleeding heart swiftly dries like camel spit. No-one wants to be an illegal immigrant, dead or both. But he tells us that illegal immigration is a health and safety issue because lots of them live in sub-let council flats. Presumably, the way around this is to flush them out with random spot-cheques and drills. All for their own good, of course. The Grenfell Towers disaster, he notes, “might not have been caused by overcrowding” – no might about it, Ross, it wasn’t – “but unless we investigate properly the living conditions there, then sooner or later we are going to have similar tragedies caused by having people crammed into unsuitable housing.”
As the Express looks to rehousing the poor and displaced in better accommodation – i.e. a prison before deportation – the Mail sees the “GREAT EVACUATION”, saying that thousands of tenants in the 600 infected towers may have to move out.
Of course, the exact cause of the inferno that destroyed Grenfell Tower on 14 June remains to be discovered. But, yes, you’d want to move out if you lived in a tower block with questionable safety standards.
So they move out into temporary accommodation, the contractors move in, the council wonks say “lessons have been learned” and thank sheer luck that Grenfell never happened on their patch – and then what?
Right now the feeling is not that we need more legislation, but that building companies and clockwork councils need to better observe rules already in place. They should employ more common sense and gut-feeling in jobs that have been reduced to box-ticking. A disaster on this scale could have been prevented had people in power listened to the warnings. The cladding changed the building. But who was looking into how cladding affected fire risk and fire control? Nothing exits in isolation. In focusing on the cladding, the councils are not considering the bigger picture: who oversees the whole thing not just the micro-management? Who wasn’t listening to Grenfell Tower’s residents when they campaigned long and hard for their Tenant Management Organisation to address their concerns? Instinct and local knowledge were ignored. Removing faddish and dangerous cladding won’t alter that.
And then there’s the ubiquitous inquiry. Over the need for quick action and addressing the concerns of people who live in their flats and know them best, politicians franchise action to a body not accountable to the public. And nothing changes.
Posted: 23rd, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
Brexit the Daily Express and the 55 Tufton Street gang
So keen are migrant workers to pay UK taxes, the Daily Express says “more than 1 million citizen” of them will “rush in” before the country leaves the European Union.
Well, maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.
The headline figure is the opinion of Richard Tice, billed as “co-chairman of the Leave Means Leave campaign”. Why there should be a campaign to implement something decided by a free and legal vote is off. And how Tice came to be the voice for it is not investigated.
But it’s exists. And the Express is all ears, keen to support Tice’s views and guesstimates on its front page. Indeed, this is the third time this January Mr Tice’s views have reached Express readers.
Who is he? What is Leave Means Leave? The Express doesn’t say much about the group based at 55 Tufton Street, London. The Independent has a little, reporting on February 10 2016:
The address where Eurosceptics and climate change sceptics rub shoulders – The offices of 55 Tufton Street in Westminister [sic] are home to no fewer than eight right-of-centre organisations
After the clanger in the headline, the Indy has some insight on goings on at 55 Tufton Street.
But this low-profile four-storey block, a stone’s throw from Parliament, is home to no fewer than eight right-of-centre organisations dedicated to pulling Britain out of Europe and undermining the battle to curb global warming.
We get some names, most of which the Daily Express seems to have on speed dial:
The former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson is one of the key figures at 55 Tufton Street, after he moved his climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation to the premises.
This puts the foundation in the same building as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the bullishly effective low-tax pressure group…
We’re told that 55 Tufton Street is owned by Richard Smith. Who is he?
Richard Smith is probably best known for flying David Cameron to his home in Shobdon, Herefordshire in 2007 – shortly after the then leader of the Opposition proposed taxes on unnecessary flights… His company, HR Smith Group, owns number 55 Tufton Street… He is also a trustee of the Politics and Economics Research Trust, the charitable arm of the Taxpayers Alliance.
At the time of writing, the Indy said you could find the following organisations at 55 Tufton Street: Global Warming Policy Foundation, Global Vision, The European Foundation, Civitas, Taxpayers’ Alliance, Business for Britain, Big Brother Watch and UK2020.
You may well wonder why London-based think tanks carry so much weight in the media? If their thoughts trigger debate, we should know more about how their treatises came to be.
Richard North claims:
…55 Tufton Street is a nest of vipers. It harbours groups which form a nexus of influence which dominates the fringes of right-wing Conservatism. And it provides the spiritual home of those who believe they are entitled to run the “leave” campaign.
Adding:
…the referendum is an opportunity to rethink how we do political research in this country, working towards the idea of virtual think-ranks, freed from the stultifying grip of the Tufton Street Gang, and the intellectual constraints that it brings.
So to the Express‘ story, which does little more than repeat Mr Trice’s claims. Over pages 4 and 5, we get “Fears over EU migration in run-up top Brexit”. Tice says we could “easily see one million to 1.25 million extra EU migrants move to Britain” if “freedom of movement for EU citizens continues over the next two years”.
Will these “rushing” foreigners be allowed to hold British passports or continue to work here after the country leaves the EU? Dunno. How much will they pay in tax? Dunno. Will all the jobs they do be low-paid? Dunno.
Few facts, then. But the Express has heard enough. “Mr Tice says that estimate is a conservative one based on National Insurance registrations,” it reports. One million could be millions of rushing foreigners.
Tice’s guess ‘does not take into account the extra pull factor of Britain’s looming departure from the EU, making this the “last chance saloon” for people to secure better prospects offered in the UK than elsewhere in the bloc”.
How many will see it as their last chance to leave the UK and secure better prospects in the bloc? Dunno.
Lest readers still not have got the message that foreigners are to be feared, the Express presses f7 and conjures up one of its other sources of fact: MigrationWatchm, an outfit not hymned for its love of immigration.
Have loaded the argument the Express invites readers to vote in a premium-rate phone line poll which asks, “Should Britain act NOW to control immigration.”
Vote now and vote often.
Posted: 24th, January 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
Britain builds a wall in France to keep them out
CNN reports that the UK is to build a ‘big new wall’ in Calais to stop migrants.
The four-meter (13 foot) high wall is part of a £17 million ($23 million) deal struck between Britain and France earlier this year to try to block migrants from crossing the English Channel.
Donald Trump is wrong: you need to build the wall inside Mexico.
“We’ve done the fence. Now we’re doing a wall,” British Immigration Minister Robert Goodwill announced at a government hearing on Tuesday.
It’s all about ambition. But we’d like to see a traditional dry-stone wall. British walls for British wallers!
PS: With any leftover bricks, we can shore up the Chunnel.
PPS: If the would-be Britishers can jump it in a photogenic fashion, they’re in. There’s a TV show in this. Call me Channel 4, I have ideas:
The Jungle: reducing refugees to hapless saints
The Jungle refugee camp in Calais is troubling Stella Creasy MP. She writes in The Guardian:
As signatories to the 1951 refugee convention, Britain should share responsibility for helping more people, not just in camps in poorer nations but across Europe too. That means providing more legal safe routes to sanctuary and funding the administrative mechanisms for people to access them.
France is a safe haven for refugees. A refugee has been forced to leave their home by fear. Creasy’s lament scratches the notion of sovereignty. Where does the UK’s powers and and the EU’s power begin? Is a democratic state allowed to say who lives in its country?
If we are for allowing people to live and work in the UK, we should debate it. Creasy writes:
We can’t abandon refugee children – and that includes us, the politicians…
Why wouldn’t it include politicians, the people we elect to make decisions? Who made them something other than us, the mere humans who vote for them?
Refugee camps are not a long-term solution. But demolishing them or hoping other countries will deal with the problem because it isn’t happening on our soil isn’t a sustainable or honourable response.
Instead of meaningful debate about human freedom, the issue is reduced to infantalized virtue signalling over who cares most for the refugees, portrayed either as hapless and saintly or criminal and dangerous.
Time to treat them as adults.
Remain supporting media joins UKIP in spreading fear over migrants
Having warned against a vote for Leave in the EU Referendum, the Mirror titles are in a dither. Do they: a) ignore the whole thing; b) try to beat UK leader Nigel Farage at his own game by whipping up fears over immigration, and in so doing connect with the paper’s readership whose vote for Labour was once a given?
The Sunday Mirror just goes with a):
The Sunday People opts for b):
Congratulations to Wales, which voted out of the EU and stayed in the Euros (source for joke: all papers). But what about those half a million desperate “migrants”? Well, the People seems unsure who they are: are they migrants or EU workers? And what of the number? A clue to how speculative it is comes in a further headline:
Brexit to cause immigration surge as 500,000 East Europeans ‘will rush in before borders close’
The inverted commas means it’s untrue. Fact is now opinion. Whose opinion becomes clear – and no, it’s not the Daily Express leader writer’s:
The warning was issued by former minister Phil Woolas who said ‘those who wanted to halt immigration will, perversely, cause the opposite’
Woolas is a former Labour MP. He says:
“Every time the UK Government announces a cap on immigration, thousands rush in before the deadline. Would-be immigrants see that the door is about to slam. So they bring forward their plans and a last-minute rush heads for the UK. In the Home Office, they call it the fire sale.”
So the paper’s headline figure is a guess based on the opinion of a former Labour MP. And what do we know of him? Well, the BBC reported in 2010:
Former Labour MP Phil Woolas has admitted defeat in his battle to overturn a court ruling which stripped him of his Commons seat. “It is the end of the road – I am out,” the former immigration minister said as he left the High Court. It means a by-election in his Oldham East and Saddleworth is likely soon. Mr Woolas narrowly won the seat in May but the result was declared void by an election court which ruled he had lied about his Lib Dem rival.
The specially convened election court ruled that comments in campaign material suggesting Lib Dem candidate Elwyn Watkins had tried to “woo” the votes of Muslim extremists, clearly amounted to an attack on his personal character and conduct. The court ruled he was guilty of breaching the Representation of the People Act 1983 and barred him from standing for elected office for three years, as well as fining him £5,000.
What the former Labour immigration minister says is now front-page news.
Posted: 26th, June 2016 | In: Key Posts, Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
Naked Cuban arrested trying to flee US
To Miami International Airport, Florida, where a naked Ricardo Nogales, 47, is being arrested on a breach of security charge after he jumped the perimeter fence and entered the restricted airfield area.
Miami-Dade Police says Nogales is a Cuban national. He’s also unemployed. He said he jumped the fence because he wanted to go back to Cuba.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump…about that fence…
Posted: 16th, May 2016 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Daily Star stirs fear of migrant perverts and filthy idiots abroad
The Daily Star once supported the EDL. The paper today brings news that “MIGRANT PERVERTS” are a “THREAT TO UK GIRLS”.
Surely more perverts means more customers for the Daily Star (see more on the paper’s Page 3) and the paper’s owner Richard Desmond’s porn TV stations, on which you can watch such wholesome films as Jim Slip’s Euro 18s and A Filthy Idiot Abroad.
(Mr Desmond also owns the Express which leads with news that more migrants “WILL LEAD TO MORE SEX ATTACKS”.)
So much for the foreign pervs. What of the news?
Matthew Young writes:
“Women in Britain have been warned they could be targeted by immigrants arriving from the Middle East.”
Well, they could be. They could also not be.
Criminal gangs carried out sex attacks in four cities across Germany on New Year’s Eve, assaulting and robbing 150 women.
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Posted: 8th, January 2016 | In: Reviews, Tabloids | Comments (2)
Radio France changes pro-migrant headline after Paris massacre
Hindsight at wok in the French media, where the website of State-owned Radio France has rewritten its opinion on terrorism and migration.
The original headline on the September 14 story ran: “Refugees: the fantasy of terrorist infiltration.”
Scores of innocent people are murdered in Paris. One of the murderers, Syrian Ahmed Almuhamed, 25, reportedly posed as a migrant when he arrived in Leros, Greece.
The Radio France headline now declares: “Terrorists among the migrants?”
It’s no longer a fantasy dreamt up by the far-Right. Although it is still a question.
Panic: Europe runs out of Jews to murder and Prince Charles explains all
Belgium justice minister, Koen Greens, has discovered a problem: allowing terrorists take out frustration on Jews is ok until you run out of Jews. He says:
“It’s no longer synagogues or the Jewish museums or police stations, it’s mass gatherings and public places.”
Belgium justice min discovers 1 problem w/ letting terrorists take out frustration on Jews: you run out of Jews.
In other news, suspected Paris attacker Salah Abdelslam is at large. a huge sweep in Belgian has resulted in the arrests of 16 suspects in 19 raids.
And the Sun has a poll as front-page news:
Really?
NEARLY one in five British Muslims has some sympathy with those who have fled the UK to fight for IS in Syria. The number among young Muslims aged 18-34 is even higher at one in four.
The figures emerged in our exclusive poll conducted after the Paris atrocities led by French and Belgian jihadis returning from the war zone.
Prominent Muslims said the poll was a wake-up call.
Labour London Mayor hopeful Sadiq Khan tells The Sun today: “It is clear that Britain needs to take its head out of the sand and act to tackle extremism and radicalisation at home. Tackling extremism is a challenge for everyone but I believe British Muslims have a special role to play.”
In dangerous times the marginalised pull on the cloak of statesmanship. UK Independence Party Leader Nigel has been talking:
“We have a fifth column that we have welcomed into our country. And what makes me really angry is that the European Union’s common asylum policy is taking a bad situation and making it even worse.
“The thing that makes me angry about what happened in Paris is frankly the fact that it was so utterly and entirely predictable,” said Farage. “I think we’ve reached a point where we have to admit to ourselves, in Britain and France and much of the rest of Europe, that mass immigration and multicultural division has for now been a failure.”
“We have to be frank, every single one of those killers beleived they were doing what they were doing in the name of Islam. And our weakness, the weakness of our leaders, has actually allowed in our country, the creation of a parallel society.”
“A blind eye turned to polygamy, to forced marriage. Now 80% of Muslim marriages are completely outside and unregistered from British law.”
“When I hear there are 400 fresh jihadi fighters, fresh back – battle-scarred veterans from Syria…”
“This dream of the free movement of people, this dream for others of the Schengen area. It hasn’t just meant the free movement of people, it has meant the free movement of Kalashnikov rifles. It has meant the free movement of terrorists, and it has meant the free movement of jihadists.”
“It is time that democratic groups in Britain and right across Europe stood up and fought and gained and strength, and say an end to this! We want back border controls, we want back national security.”
As Tim Blair notes, the mood is changing.
Several weeks after a France Inter headline dismissed as a right-wing fantasy the idea that terrorists could be among Europe’s refugees, the same story’s headline – and part of the story itself – has been re-written:
Now.
Don’t panic!
But the real reason for all this fear and murder is not religion. It’s not nihilists seeking reason in death. No. As Prince Charles says, it’s climate change:
Mad Syrians and dogs go out in the noon-day sun. Says Charles, a man whose resources remain bountiful:
“We’re seeing a classic case of not dealing with the problem. It sounds awful to say, but some of us were saying 20 something years ago that if we didn’t tackle these issues you would see ever greater conflict over scarce resources and ever greater difficulties over drought.
“There’s very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.”
Charles has lots of land. Maybe these people can come and farm it?
Daily Express immigration scare story: they cost ‘YOU’ £36,000 a year
The Daily Express has some immigration news. Always useful to hear what the Express thinks about the issue. But it doesn’t think. It merely states facts:
Every illegal immigrant costs YOU £36K a year: The cost of migrant centres revealed
Incidentally, the Express has previously told us:
Migrant beggars are raking in up to £36,000 a year from gullible kind-hearted Brits
The story was based on the words of a single copper and some creative maths:
In Nottingham, Police Sergeant Huw Jones said: “We have heard of several people who have boasted of earning up to £700 a week.”
But not one he identified in the paper – let alone one who earned £50,000 before tax, as the Express put it.
The paper then warned / promised:
The problem is set to get worse when our borders are flung open to tens of thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians in just over a fortnight’s time.
So to today’s £36,000 story on kind-hearted Brits and those nefarious foreign spongers.
Rebecca Perring writes:
Undocumented workers facing deportation are languishing in detention for months and even years – which costs the public purse a staggering £164.4 million…
That figure is from a Government report not cited in the paper.
In 2013/14 the total cost of running the Immigration Detention Estate was £164.4m. This includes all costs, including running costs, rent, depreciation and other costs, for all Immigration Removal Centres, Short Term Holding Facilities and amounts paid for spaces in the main prisons estate.
And some how that works out at £36,000 for each and every one of us.
But come on, guys, it’s getting cheaper:
Such are the facts…
Hurrah for the migrants: Daily Mail cheers for murderous, scrounging asylum-seeking scum
The Daily Mail is overjoyed that migrants have reached the “promised land”.
Daily Mail readers might be tad confused by this take on the news. For years the Mail has told its readers that migrants, immigrants and asylum-seekers are bad news.
The Scottish Daily Mail corrected an article after a complaint from the Scottish Refugee Council:
In an article headlined: “Crisis as Asylum Seekers target Scotland” we stated that asylum seekers were ‘targeting’ Scotland. We now accept that asylum seekers are dispersed by the UK Border Agency on a ‘no choice’ basis and would not be able to choose to live in Scotland. With the current rate of asylum applicants to the UK well within the average rate of the past ten years, we also accept that it is misleading to categorise this as a ‘crisis’. We are happy to clarify the position and apologise for the error.
There were 4000 foreign-born rapists in the Mail’s Britain:
The scary headline was undone by the facts:
Nearly 4,000 foreign murderers, rapists and other criminals are roaming the streets, free to commit more crimes.
You say shoplifter, banned driver or fare dodger – the Mail says ‘rapist‘.
Allan Mallinson asked Mail readers a question more loaded than George Bush at a frat house:
Jeremy Swain, chief executive of the homelessness charity Thames Reach, wrote to the PCC about the Mail’s news of wandering foreigners getting a free wash at the expense of our ‘heroes’:
…the article suggests ‘the civilian shelters were full of Somalis and Poles’. This is inaccurate as whilst many people from overseas end up sleeping rough, they cannot access homeless hostel bed spaces as they have no rights to the benefits which would pay their rent. Quite simply, unless someone has paid national insurance contributions for over a year, they won’t be found accommodation in hostels and other ways of helping them are being sought within the homelessness sector. Hostels are not ‘full of Somalis and Poles’ as the article’s author states. Indeed they make up a very tiny minority of the hostel population.
There’s been apologising from the Scottish Daily Mail:
In December the Mail reported that over £5 million was being spent on last-ditch legal bids – judicial reviews – by asylum seekers to remain in Scotland. We are happy to make clear that this figure reflects the combined sums spent on advice and assistance (£3.5 million), assistance by way of representation (£1 million), and legal aid (£0.6 million) to asylum seekers and immigrants. The cost of legal aid work on judicial reviews falls within the latter figure. We apologise if readers were misled by our original story.
The Mail’s Richard Littlejohn said illegal immigrants and asylum seekers were the same thing:
From time to time I may have written about both asylum seekers and wheelie bins. But never before in the same sentence. Until now… Six illegal immigrants have been detained by a border patrol in Calais. The four men and two women, all from Vietnam, were discovered hiding in a consignment of wheelie bins bound for Britain…
Whoops!
Maybe Richard Littlejohn made handwritten notes he couldn’t read? He once opined:
Gloucester City Council is sending out census forms in no fewer than 56 different languages …why waste time and public money printing leaflets in 56 different languages, many of them scribble?
…any Afghan climbing off the back of a lorry in Dover goes automatically to the top of the housing list.
Really? No. Of course not.
And the Mail’s star columnist again:
A couple of months ago, after a Mayfair jewellery heist, I joked that it was heartening to see good old British blaggers making a comeback. For too long, they had been beaten at their own game by Eastern European gangs who I suggested carried out ‘most of the robberies in this country’. It seems I did the chaps a disservice. While Eastern European gangs have been responsible for many high-end jewel robberies across the Continent, our home grown villains are holding their own over here. If I have inadvertently offended any Balkan gangster, or local blagger come to that, as well as the vigilant reader who complained, I apologise unreservedly for any confusion which may have been caused.
To counter the dire reporting the Mail emplyed its own in-house immigrant in the shape of Australian-born Amanda Platell. She would champion the new arrivals seeking a better life in the UK. Or not:
Sadly, though, it is not the indigenous middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying population that’s exploding… it’s not so much a baby boom we’re experiencing as a benefits boom. Middle Britain, stand ready to empty your wallets.
More Mail errors followed:
This article has been amended. It previously contained a graphic that correctly listed the latest annual number of non-EU nationals admitted to each of ten European countries. However, a second table was wrongly headed “Non EU citizens to each square kilometre” instead of “Number of people to each square kilometre”. We are happy to correct this point.
So many errors being made about foreigners living in the UK. Cynics would argue that it indicates an agenda.
But surely the Mail is just sticking to the facts:
For at this time when our public services are strained beyond endurance, it means Britain must now, in a dramatic reversal of policy, give a home to all gay asylum-seekers who are prevented from displaying their sexuality openly in their home countries.
Where are we to draw the line? This is all about numbers and a small island’s ability to absorb an ever-increasing population.
At least the Mail knows its readers. At the end of the story “Migrant found dead in the back of a lorry as it prepares to enter Channel Tunnel”, the Mail approved such a comments as these:
one down, millions to go
– crackers, yorkshire, 31/10/2009 2:42Good news. One less to worry about!
– keith jones, porthcawl, south wales, 30/10/2009 22:13Shame but I would be a hypocrit if I said I was sorry!
– Nanny B, West Sussex, 30/10/2009 17:42
And you migrants who do make it here alive should know that it will take generations before the Mail considers you British. Steve Doughty and James Slacker wrote:
However although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign-born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second- or third-generation immigrants.
Bit never mind all that because a couple of dead Syrian children had their photos taken on a Turkish beach and the Mail came to realise that only utter bastards would laugh, mock and monster the desperate.
Abdul Rahman Haroun for Team GB: Imigrant walks 31 miles through Channel Tunnel
Good news for Team GB and the Olympic effort: a 40-year-old Sudanese man immigrant walked the length of the 31-mile Channel tunnel. He dodged cameras and trains as he walked on gantries between Calais and Cheriton.
Abdul Rahman Haroun, for it is he, scaled four security fences and evaded private security guards.
The UK rewarded Mr Haroun’s skill by arresting him. He ischarged with causing an obstruction to an engine or carriage using the railway under the Malicious Damage Act 1861, which carries a maximum two-year prison sentence.
He appeared by videolink at Medway magistrates’ court last night and was remanded into immigration detention. He did not make a plea and was ordered to appear at Canterbury crown court on August 24.
Forget Tebbit’s cricket test: foreigners take the white van penis challenge
When you see a dity car do you feel you impelled to draw a penis on it? If you do you might well be British.
Christopher Hooton writes:
Britons most likely to draw a penis on dirty cars, absurd study finds
Show a man a dirty car and we’ll find out whether he’s British or not. Never mind Norman Tebbit’s cricket prober or ctizenship exams, just wheel out a filthy Ford Transit and observe. (If instead of graffitifying it they offer to clean the thing for a fiver, they’re most likely foreign.)
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