Refugee Whizz

‘IF you have noticed that the Express is unusually shy this morning about bashing immigrants, there is a reason – but you’ll have to read a different paper to discover it.

Why the long face, Mr Moxon?

It turns out that Steve Moxon, the paper’s champion and the civil servant who revealed that thousands of East Europeans were being let into Britain without the proper checks, is not quite the unimpeachable witness the paper thought he was.

The Mail reveals that the aforementioned Mr Moxon sent a series of anti-Muslim e-mails to the BBC Panorama programme, in one of which he argued that Osama Bin Laden would ‘eventually have to be silenced by nuclear weapons’.

‘While the civil servant claimed he ‘could not recall’ precisely what he wrote,’ the paper says, ‘he did not deny suggesting that fundamentalists should be ‘nuked’.’

Of course, this revelation provides the Mail with something of a problem – it hates immigration almost as much as it hates the Express, which it hates almost as much as the Labour party.

But even it struggles with the notion of dropping nuclear bombs willy-nilly on Saudi Arabia and other areas of the Middle East and North Africa.

Accordingly, the paper decides the revelations about Mr Moxon are examples of Labour’s ‘black propaganda’, suggesting that the party is seizing on them to cast doubt on his motives for revealing the immigration anomaly.

However, the Express is having none of it, opting not even to let its readers know that their champion isn’t exactly the white knight he had been presented as.

Instead, it castigates Tony Blair for not meeting the man whose ‘brave and important’ disclosures revealed the immigration control scandal in Sheffield.

‘You might think that a government that came to power preaching openness and transparency would applaud a man who reveals malfunction and dishonesty in the state system,’ it says.

‘You might think a whistleblower deserves a conversation and a handshake.’

You might think that Express readers deserve to know the truth about Mr Moxon.

You might also think that Express readers deserve something better than a daily diet of xenophobic bile.

Apparently, you’d be wrong.’

Posted: 11th, March 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink