Today's Daily Express:
Do you think Richard Desmond, the owner of these two rags, is trying to telling us something?
Anton at Enemies of Reason has blogged about the Express' front page. He says:
Leave aside that we're all 'ethnics' of one mongrel sort or another; this makes it quite clear what's going on. There are whites and there are 'ethnics'. How much more explicit does it have to be before we start calling it what it is?
As Anton points out, the Express illustrate this 'vile story' with this image of Muslim women:
Yet the article, based on population forecasts from the University of Leeds about what might happen in 2051, clearly says:
The White British and Irish ethnic groupings are expected to grow very slowly, while the Other White category is projected to grow the fastest, driven by immigration from Europe, the US and Australasia.
Funny how the don't use pictures of French, American or Australian women, isn't it?
In the last week we've had 'Muslims force pool cover-up', 'Now asylum if you're gay' and now this.
Maybe they should change their claim to the World's Nastiest Newspaper.
As for the Star, the story of Abdi and Sayrug Nur, who are unemployed and have seven children, has been doing the rounds for a few days, since the family moved into a house Kensington which the papers claim is worth £2m. The Sun, Mail and Mirror have all written about it.
Yet the Star is claiming sole responsibility for having the family 'booted out':
Ministers last night vowed to kick out a family on benefits from a £2million home after a hard-hitting Daily Star campaign.
Your favourite newspaper intervened to stop Somali spongers Abdi and Sayrug Nur continuing to milk the system.
Alas, a few sentences later:
We demanded answers from the Department for Work and Pensions and they have agreed to evict the family.
Officials said they would remove the Nurs when the new rules come into force next April.
So the Nurs will apparently be moved when the rules change next April. Funny the Star did say that it would be in nine months time when it probably would have happened without the Star's 'hard-hitting campaign' anyway.
And look again at the headline '£2m asylum scrounger'. £2m represents the value of the house they live in, so he hasn't 'scrounged' £2m. The papers are up-in-arms about the £2,000 a week the local council is paying for the house - but that goes straight to the owners, so he doesn't get that either. (The Mail claims the rent had been £1,050 per week, but this was raised to £2,000, the maximum available under housing benefit rules, but there's little anger directed at the owners of the house.)
Also 'asylum'. Nur sought asylum in the UK in 1999 after working for the Red Cross in Somalia. It was granted and so now he is a refugee. But the Star and its ilk want to associate 'asylum' with 'scrounging' and so continue to label him as that.
And clearly the Desmond papers want to continue to demonise Muslims, foreigners, immigrants, 'ethnics' for their own miserable ends.
(Jonathan has also written about the Express front page here)
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It gets worse (if that were possible) once you get to the inside pages. The Express has a table - illustrated with the photo of Muslim women despite that the fact that Islam is a religion rather than an ethnic group - headed "How Ethnic Numbers Are Set To Rocket".
ReplyDeleteThe figures actually show that the biggest increase will be among white people. In fact, the increase in the white population will be almost as large as the increase in all the other ethnic groups put together, so the "overcrowding" predicted by MigrationWatch isn't really down to the "ethnics" at all.
The Express also has a phone poll asking readers to answer Yes or No to the question "Has immigration ruined Britain?"
It's leader column notes that, although some immigrants make a big contribution to British Life "and are now over-represented in the professions" (how very dare they!), "others, alas, have high rates of welfare dependency and criminality". Unlike white people, obviously.
It also laments that people were branded as racists back in the seventies when they "correctly" pointed out that immigrants were "taking over" their areas.
Over in The Star there's a leader column headlined "No more... We're full", a nice follow-up to last week's "No room for gays".
I wonder what Richard Desmond's forebears, who came to London fleeing anti-semitic persecution and faced all manner of racism and abuse from "native" Britons, would make of it all...
So in other words we have someone who worked for the ICRC who, consequently, was forced to leave his country to leave his country. He was found accommodation bi g enough for his family which he will have to leave because of some rules change and the public purse is being ripped off by the landlord. And the best the Star can do is to smear him and lie to its readers about its actions. Great.
ReplyDeleteSeeing this racist drivel - and I really don't think there's anything else you can call it - really worries me. Particularly when you consider it alongside some of the hateful outpourings that the government is soliciting as part of their process of softening people up for cuts, and seems quite happy to allow to remain on their websites.
ReplyDeleteIt really shows up how much the demonisation of immigrants and the less well off has taken hold in at least a portion of the population. While I don't think - yet - that any serious politician is going to react to some of the most shocking ideas (sterilisation of people on benefits, anyone?), it's not pleasant at all.
I know some will disagree, but terms like "ethnics", "gays", "muslims" are all subtle ways of dehumanisation; take away words like "citizen" or "people" as those descriptions do, and you're on the way to creating your chosen class of untermensch.
With papers like the Express stoking the flames of hate and intolerance, I think there's a very real danger that, should we have another serious terrorist attack in this country, we won't have to wait too long after it for our own version of krystallnacht.
That might seem alarmist to some, but this demonisation does have consequences, and I honestly don't think they're going to be pleasant ones.
Has anyone ever asked Richard Desmond to appear on Who Do You Think You Are? His genealogy is certainly, um, 'ethnic' enough...
ReplyDelete'Ethnics, asylum seekers, immigrants,' all interchangeable. Even if those 'asylum seekers' are Italian-speaking and pointing expensive cameras at Big Ben (overheard by a friend) or a group of young people (of admitedly foreign appearance) hanging around the local uni, which I took to be students but the two behind me decided must be asylum seekers. Which is why people over-estimate the numbers of 'Ethnics, asylum seekers, immigrants'
ReplyDeleteSpookily enough, I tried to post a comment on the Mail's website pointing out that the person who was clearly benefiting from the £2000 per week rental was the buy-to-let lanlord who had persuaded the council to let the property at top rates, and asking why their concern was in respect of the tenant. It didn't get printed.
ReplyDeleteThe Express and the Star have achieved something I never thought possible these last few days: they've made the Mail look truly moderate. Horrid, horrid stuff. Keep up the good work deconstructing this inflammatory, hateful bullshit. We need you now more than ever :)
ReplyDeleteHow are such headlines not incitement to cause racial hatred? As a Citizen if I were to spout out this putrid racist bile I would be arrested and charged with hate crime, Orwellian term and scary as hell, yet a newspaper can print total lies and our boys in blue aren't there kicking the editors door down. Incredible democracy we live in. Not!
ReplyDeleteNot that I want to distract from the blatant racism and xenophobia in these papers, but perhaps the biggest misconception which a hell of a lot of star and express readers seem to fall for is the very price of the paper!
ReplyDeleteThe star usually gives out a money off voucher for the express...as stated on ther front page "get 2 great papers for the price of one".
Now, taking 10/15p off the express takes it down to 20p...which is the same price as the star, but not, as the star implies, free. Surely the readers can do the maths and see that 2 papers are costing them 40p, which is more expensive than the express without the voucher, in otherwords NOT "2 for the price of one".
In Scotland we don't have such an offer right now as the express has been 20p up here for the last week or 2 (often advertised by a large banner ad on the front page), probably to try and boost sales (thier front pages up here are not quite as racist), but as I work in q newsagent I can see at the end of the day we're still sending back just as many unwanted express' (and thankfully an increasing number of mails and stars too)! Makes me feel a little better about humanity, at least until I see the comments sections on thier sites...
Please keep up the great work on here...we need these kind of sites in this day and age!
If the papers really do think that there is something wrong with he housing benefit system why don't they carry out proper investigations and publishing the findings without trying to tie it in with the issue of asylm seekers.
ReplyDeleteWhilst there is an upper limit for how much housing benefit can be claimed, any council can step in and refuse to pay rent charges they believe are excessive. Why have councils not used these powers.
Equally most of these right wing papers were big supporters of the Tory policy of selling off council houses in the 80's which has now resulted in a situation where there is very little affordable public housing in places like London.
Outrageous, they should be prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred with the maximum penalties allowable by law.
ReplyDeleteWe're all "ethnics" anyway! If you want to help screw up their statistics, I suggest you tick "other" and then write "white African" -60,000yrs since all our ancestors left the Rift Valley in eastern Africa is like a week in evolutionary time.
I refuse 'British' identity, I am simply human. To hell with nationality.
White African. I like it! Might try it next time. Or even, 'stardust', as, you know, we are all made of stars.
ReplyDeleteThe DWP or council cannot 'evict' or 'boot out' anyone. All they can do is stop paying the rent to the landlord (and by the proper legal procedure.) It is then up to the landlord whether to bring possession proceedings if the rent is not paid by other means.
ReplyDeleteOf course this doesn't quite have the same impact of punishing and humiliating the 'ethnics', or the images of physical force against them.