Mail buries story that Britain isn't worst place in Europe to live

A couple of weeks ago, the media was giving a quite staggering amount of coverage to a uSwitch press release which made out Britain was the worst place in Europe to live. It was based on some highly selective criteria and omitted 80% of the countries in Europe, but that didn't stop the Mail running it as the lead story on its website and Littlejohn repeating the nonsense a few days later.

It was a prime example of churnalism, and gained uSwitch a lot of free publicity.

Today another survey, this time the Legatum Institute's 2009 Prosperity Index. This one covers 104 countries from all over the world and takes into account:

data on economic growth with ratings for democracy, social provision, happiness and quality of life.

And the result?

Britain is ranked 12th overall. Ahead of Spain, France and Germany, which were higher in the dubious uSwitch list.

So surely the Mail will be saying this is a good sign that Britain isn't such a bad place to live after all? Not a bit of it:

Britain has failed to make it into the top ten of a list of the world's most successful countries

The Mail is just never satisfied. Despite the fact Britain rose from 17th in 2007 and 14th in 2008, the original headline on the website referred to 'unhappy UK'. If it goes up to tenth next year, the Mail will probably complain it's not in the top five.

But what is striking is that this list hasn't had anything like the prominence on the Mail website as the uSwitch one, and is buried on page 28 of the paper. Chances are, Littlejohn won't mention it in his column on Friday either.

Why? Because it doesn't fit their agenda that everything in Britain is crap (and it's all the fault of those immigrants).