Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Lying about immigration? Surely not

This is not about Nick Griffin. I've decided I'm not going to mention the smellyfaced cockwipe on here for a few days, so that I'm not accused of being obsessed with the vile bastard or giving him any undue credit. So although this is about immigration lies, this is not about the man whose entire raison d'etre is immigration lies - partly because everyone knows he lies about immigration, whereas they may give a little more credence to what a reporter in their daily paper says; and partly because he's a shit-stuffed hatemonger who is getting lots of attention already, which he's presumably delighted about. The despicable weaselly-voiced lie-vomiting Nazi. So from here on in, he's not going to turn up at all.

No, while Gr*ff*n is fairly open about his stance on immigration, and you can be fairly confident he'll come out with lies to back up his unsavoury views, our newspapers represent a position from which they claim to be looking at the facts objectively and merely revealing what's going on. Which would be fine if that was indeed what they did. But no. They look for outlandish stories that will outrage their readers; they look for statistics that can be warped into shape; they look to give their blue-rinse brigade a ride in the "They're all coming over here!" ghost train at the breakfast table.

So we had the story earlier this week of a man being allowed to stay in the country just because he's got a cat. Except of course you know that's not the case. The cat had nothing to do with it; it was merely a minor detail in the case which everyone involved in it insisted had no bearing on the final result. Strange, then, that it was only the Telegraph who decided to bring that rather important point to our attention, with other newspapers simply hacking away at the facts until what remained was what they wanted to write: BLOODY FOREIGNER COMES OVER HERE AND WE CAN'T KICK HIM OUT BECAUSE HE'S GOT A BLEEDING CAT! YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP... oh. You could.

Not that that stopped Littlejohn, of course, who based his entire argument about the piece in the Daily Mail and ignored all the details in (marginally) better quality publications which showed what the facts were. Sometimes I wonder if he reads past the headlines. Oh but so what, you're saying to yourself, everyone knows Littlejohn is a tedious little man who mysteriously wins Polemicist of the Year awards despite constantly lying about immigration, telling porkies about PC Britain and basically never checking his facts - Why should all this matter? Well:

Unfortunately, for the BNP, Stormfront and other racist website/forums where this story has appeared, it is now accepted as 'fact'.

Guess what - racists care even less about the truth than Littlejohn. Once it's appeared in a national newspaper, though, they can use it as 'evidence' to back up their hatred, for there's still a degree of trust (albeit rapidly diminishing) in what people see on the printed page, as opposed to what's been typed onto a computer scren. Was it really a surprise that the horrific English Defence League used a video composed almost entirely of Daily Mail and Daily Express stories for its recent campaigning? Does it matter when newspapers get it wrong with agenda-driven rubbish? Yes. Yes it does, when it's giving racists, and violent racists at that, justification for their hatred.

And so to yesterday, and this marvellous sentence from Five Chinese Crackers:

Using the magic words, "according to the Daily Express," which is about on a par with saying, "according to that bloke swinging a plastic bag and shouting Bible verses in French next to Victoria Station," in terms of reliability, the Mail regales us with the same flipping figures I looked at way back in March...

Have a look at the post to see how the papers make the immigration figures misleading, and you can see for yourself what they're trying to do. MigrationWatch are the people sticking the coke in the furnace, but the Mail and Express know what they're doing. And when they don't have a new immigration story to lie about, like the man and his bloody cat, they simply regurgitate exactly what they wrote several months ago.

But why now? Look, I promised I wouldn't mention him again, but it's just that there's a certain arsehole appearing on a certain outdated politics programme on Thursday night, and to coincide with that, the most anti-immigration screamsheets are trying to do two things: firstly, to say that they are distancing themselves from him; secondly, to say that they are repeating his arguments word for word, then having thousands of rabid commenters turning up on the stories saying "I WANT TO VOTE FOR SOMEONE WHO'S GOING TO SAVE BRITAIN, LOVELY OLD NICK'S GOT MY VOTE AND NO MISTAKE!" - do you know, I just wish they'd come out, and be honest, and say: "Yes, we're only a fag-paper away from Griffin, what of it? We sell loads of papers based on absolute bollocks and lies about immigration, and our readers love it, because they're racist too. And what the fuck are you going to do about it?"

But no, they have to go through the same pantomime every time. We're not racist, but... here's some racism.

Meanwhile, today's Express carries yet another immigration scare story, this time about 40,000 'illegal immigrants' who have gone 'missing'. The files date from 2003 and many are not 'missing' but simply 'not here any more' or 'not traceable because they're here illegally and perhaps understandably don't want to draw attention to themselves'. It's not a new story - you'll remember that back in April, Boris Johnson called for an amnesty on illegal immigrants. But it's a story about immigration, which implies there's chaos, and THOUSANDS OF 'EM, and every week is immigration week at the Express - and luckily enough our friend at MigrationWatch was contactable, now there's a relief:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the population think tank Migrationwatch, described the revelation as “Yet another skeleton in the Home Office cupboard.” He said: “This is symptomatic of the utter chaos in the asylum and immigration system during the past 10 years. Nobody in the private sector would get away with such a performance.”

'Population think tank' - yes, of course it is. Not a pressure group which attacks everything to do with immigration, no sir.

Of course, all these stories come from the same newspapers which do the tango with a certain fat one-eyed politician who shall not be named, but which then claim only to have brushed against him on their way to the toilet. And then they dismiss him and attack him in the strongest possible terms, with a nod and a wink to his supporters, who flock to their publications in droves.