The more things change…
You’ve probably noticed a bit of a surge in far right activity over the last couple of years. It might feel as if something that was deeply buried in the nation’s psyche has suddenly slithered into the open. I’ve seen quite a few people on twitter lamenting what we’ve lost since 2012, when the Olympic opening ceremony said so much about our togetherness as a nation and the strengths to be found in our diversity.
I can sympathise with them, up to a point. It must be odd to switch on the radio and hear someone going unchallenged as they defend Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as some champion of free speech rather than admit he’s a disgraceful pariah, or switch on the TV to see an actual out-in-the-open white supremacist like Steve Bannon interviewed just like that, as if he was normal. I’d imagine it might be shocking to open the papers just yesterday morning and see the man who was the actual Foreign Secretary until a few weeks ago make racist remarks about women wearing face veils.
But only if you really haven’t been paying attention. For at least a decade.
Boris Johnson’s tendency to make offensive remarks notwithstanding, for some time, the British establishment as represented by the press, the government and the various bodies that attempt to influence them, have been quite openly racist.
And for the whole time, while we were being bombarded with the message that it’s not racist to talk about immigration, that some people have very legitimate concerns, the people bombarding us were actually laying the ground for what we’re seeing now. Right under our noses.
Back in 2006, I started a blog to look at some of the bad arguments and faulty logic I’d been noticing in the media.
The biggest shock when I started — and I fully admit I’d been a little naive here — was realising I wasn’t looking at bad arguments made in good faith, but bad faith tricks and lies. It’s not all euphemism and dog-whistles. It’s often flat out, open racism.
For years the right-wing press has pushed scare stories based on the number of ethnic minorities in the country. Now, this might come as a shock, but if you’re objecting to the presence of people in a place on the basis of their race, that’s kinda racist.
The most prominent example of these I can remember is the 2010 Daily Express front page story ‘1 In 5 Will Be Ethnics’. It even uses the racists’ preferred term for ethnic minorities right there in the headline.
The story is based on a study by Leeds University that says the UK’s ethnic minority population will reach 20% by 2020 (which, obviously, doesn’t refer to people as ‘ethnics’).
The paper included an editorial on the same day headlined ‘Our multi-racial society now needs time to adjust’, which argues for a halt to immigration while we adjust to the number of black and brown people in the country. Here’s a quote:
The transition to a multi-racial society has happened remarkably quickly and without the permission of the public being sought by the political elite.
Not multi-cultural. Multi-racial. The problem is race. The Express said the quiet bit out loud.
In the same year as the Express’s ‘ethnics’ story, Professor David Coleman, co-founder of the ‘think-tank’ Migration Watch, produced a report suggesting that people who identify themselves as White British on the census might not be an overall majority by 2066. The papers loved it.
The Daily Mail covered it twice in the space of three weeks, with ‘White Britons to become minority by 2066’ and ‘By 2066, white Britons ‘will be outnumbered’ if immigration continues at current rates’.
The Daily Telegraph covered it in ‘White Britons to become minority by 2066’. And of course, the Express picked it up, with ‘White Britons ‘a minority by 2066’’.
That wouldn’t be unusual, though, would it? It’s legitimate to report the findings of an academic report after all. But would you expect the papers to continue to cover an academic study, over several years, again and again?
The Telegraph had a second pop in 2013, with ‘White Britons ‘will be minority’ by 2066, says professor’. The Express did too, with ‘Migrants change UK forever: White Britons ‘will be in minority by 2066’’ and a third later in the same week, mentioning it in ‘White Britons abandon ethnic minority areas’.
The Mail had a third bite of the cherry in 2013, with ‘Changing face of Britain: How UK could overtake the United States as the West’s most ethnically diverse nation by 2050' (don’t be fooled by the ‘2050’ in the headline, it’s the same report). In May 2016, the paper decided to let Professor Coleman himself have a go, with ‘RIP this Britain: With academic objectivity, Oxford Professor and population expert DAVID COLEMAN says white Britons could be in the minority by the 2060s — or sooner’ — just in time for the Brexit referendum.
This last version finds room for a plug for Vote Leave, which is a lovely *ahem* coincidence.
The Sun also ran the story in 2013, in ‘The Ethnic Majority’. It covered it in 2010 too, but that version seems to have disappeared.
(Hugh Muir looked at the whole phenomenon in 2013, in ‘So, who is behind these immigration reports?’ If you want to have a look).
This is a lot of coverage for one study (used in one instance to influence a public vote). And there are loads of other stories ‘expressing concern about the rate of change’, nudge, nudge.
These all go alongside the anti-immigrant coverage, the anti-muslim coverage, the anti-eastern European coverage or the anti asylum seeker coverage that appears in an absolute deluge in our press, every day.
In 2007, for fun, I once searched the Mail website for anti immigration stories over the previous seven days. There had been 24 stories in one week.
Now, the thing about a lot of tabloid coverage about immigration, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that a vast amount of it just isn’t true. I don’t want to keep you for too long with loads of examples, so here’s my favourite.
In 2007, official figures were released for how many Romanians and Bulgarians had registered for a permit to work in the UK in the first three months since joining the EU. Some jobs required special permissions, which were recorded in the stats. They included 55 people who had registered as ‘circus artiste’.
The Daily Mail reported this with the headline ‘120 immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria arrive in Britain every day to be circus stars’.
Nowhere does the article make it clear that the real number of circus artistes is 55.
The ‘120 a day’ figure it actually uses is for the total number of everyone who applied for a permit, including people whose applications are still being considered, and including people whose applications were rejected, divided by the number of days in three months. The article pretends that all these people have already arrived in the UK (when of course, they may never have come at all), hints that we’re talking about five months instead of three, and of course claims the biggest number are saying they’re ‘circus stars’.
Pretty much none of this is true.
The papers do this sort of thing all the time. Whether its pretending to be circus stars, eating swans, banning Christmas, changing the words to nursery rhymes, forcing kids to pray to Allah, or whatever else you can imagine, the tabloids can be relied upon to make up some nonsense about immigrants and ethnic minorities. It’s relentless.
And its not just the tabloids. The Times had a front page story about Muslim foster parents that turned out to be absolute nonsense just last year.
The only unusual thing about that one is that complaints about the story were upheld.
The right-wing papers don’t always have to distort things for themselves. There are any number of opaquely-funded organisations that can provide research for the papers to report on safe in the knowledge that they’ll never have to face a complaint. Nobody can complain about the accuracy of something if you’ve merely reported what someone else said.
The biggest ‘think tank’ in terms of tabloid coverage in the period I was blogging was Migration Watch. They seemed to be around even more than the Taxpayer’s Alliance.
I don’t want to go into their output in too much detail. It’s enough to say it wasn’t that great.
My favourite example — they tried to argue that the level of immigration to the UK is unusually high and not the result of a worldwide phenomenon by using figures that show the UK has around the EU average proportion of immigrants, and actually has a much lower percentage than other English speaking countries like the US and Australia.
So yeah, not that great.
As you’d imagine, the far right love all this stuff. These articles get shared, copied and referenced all over the place, from Stormfront to the Daily Stormer, and the BNP openly praised the Express on its website back before they embarrassingly imploded.
In 2009, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s fledgling EDL produced a recruitment video. It was as you’d expect, stirring music overlaid with rubbish crusader imagery. These images, though, were intercut with 22 images of headlines from UK newspapers, like ‘Will Britain one day be Muslim’ from the Mail, ‘MUSLIM SCHOOLS BAN OUR CULTURE’ from the Express, and ‘We want to offer Sharia Law in Britain’ from the Telegraph. As you’d imagine, not all of these were strictly true.
And, of course, Anders Breivik’s manifesto infamously quotes Melanie Phillips approvingly.
But the far right hasn’t always had to rely on their own networks to disseminate their approval for what appears in our press.
Around 2008, the Telegraph launched a blogging service that allowed members of the public to set up their own blog, complete with Telegraph branding. It was quickly taken advantage of by Richard Barnbrook, the comedy bumbling racist that somehow got elected to the London Assembly for the BNP.
He used it to do things like exaggerate the number of murders in his constituency, and call for the Notting Hill Carnival to be banned, ‘until the African Caribbean community learns to control its violent and aggressive young men,’ under a respectable daily newspaper’s branding. He also parroted stuff he’d read in the right-wing press, going as far as lifting paragraphs wholesale from Melanie Phillips columns.
Barnbrook ended up getting suspended from the London Assembly for exaggerating the number of murders in his constituency, but the Telegraph didn’t seem to think he should be booted from the platform.
So what’s the point of saying all this? You might think it’s all a bit, ‘Well done, granddad, you noticed some things. Have a lolly,’ and you’d probably be right. I would like a lolly.
But the problem is, where we are now isn’t fixable with a few easy changes to take us back to 2012. Even 2012 isn’t that great, with that opening ceremony being criticised in the pages of the Daily Mail for daring to show a happy, middle-class mixed race family:
But it was the absurdly unrealistic scene — and indeed one that would spring from the kind of nonsensical targets and equality quotas we see in the NHS — showing a mixed-race middle-class family in a detached new-build surburban home, which was most symptomatic of the polically correct agenda in modern Britain.
(Although — to 2012’s credit — it was later deleted).
I could end this with a ‘where are they now’ montage, like the end of the Breakfast Club. Andrew Green of Migration Watch is now Sir Andrew Green, pushing his ‘legitimate concerns’ in the House of Lords. Richard Barnbrook is in the bin, but the guy giving him a platform is Milo Yiannoppolous, infamous alt-right twat and friend to neo-nazis, who appeared earlier in the year at an event where Stephen Yaxley-Lennon began to reposition himself as some kind of champion of free speech alongside sundry other alt-right plonkers.
The author of that Mail story about Romanians and Bulgarians, and the ‘Special Report’ about how there might be too many black and brown people by 2066 I mentioned above, James Slack, is now the 10 Downing Street Press Secretary.
He and Theresa May share an affinity for nonsense stories about asylum seekers. Remember in 2009 when Theresa May was laughed at for saying an asylum seeker had been allowed to stay in the country because he had a cat? That was one of the stories that appeared a couple of months before in James Slack’s reasonable and measured front page article ‘Human Right to Sponge off UK’.
I mean, if you’re wondering how the ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants and the government taking the National Front’s approach to deporting black UK citizens might slot together with the tabloids, you don’t have to look that far. Various governments have been tripping over themselves for years to parrot the tabloids about ‘legitimate concerns’.
The shadowy billionaires and oligarchs that seem to be funding attempts at a far right push, breaking laws about campaign funding, creating fake news websites and promoting Yaxley-Lennon as some kind of champion of freedom of speech or whatever, couldn’t have done any of that if the UK was not already deeply sympathetic to these ideas.
The far-right attacking the police and left wing bookshops, the white supremacists being interviewed as if they’re normal, the Brexit vote and Donald Trump — they didn’t just come out of nowhere.
But as for what to do about, you know *gestures at everything*, I don’t know. It’s all so grim. The far right are growing as a threat. And the people who should be holding those responsible to account are either just not, or are actually the people involved.
There is no easy way to turn things back. Infowars being banned from several platforms is a good start, and campaigns like Stop Funding Hate are a great way of putting pressure on advertisers to starve some sources of support. But much like it did when I decided to stop blogging, it all feels a bit like spitting into the ocean.
I mean, I’m just some bloke. What can I do?
And where’s my lolly?
