Showing posts with label Daily Express. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daily Express. Show all posts

Thursday, November 09, 2006

How the public thinks

One Steve Rose writes to Metro regarding Tony Blair's comments about capital punishment. (Roughly speaking, he's against it, but would rather not say so just now because his friend George is so looking forward to the lynching party, or 'Blair Forced To Admit: I Wouldn't Hang Saddam' as our friends in cloud-cuckoo land rendered it.)

'What right has Blair got to say that Britain is against capital punishment when we have not had a referendum on the matter. Those are his personal thoughts, not the countries.'

This is strikingly similar to a remark sent to the Daily Mail's website on the subject of flogging people.

'Why should it be that a handful of mindless MP's have the vote and not the general public on whether or not we introduce severe punishment of this sort? That is not democracy.'

This is an interesting way of thinking .If 'democracy' equates to 'referenda'; then since Britain doesn't have referenda and never has done, Britain isn't and never has been a democracy. The writers imagine a thing called 'Britain' or 'The General Public' which is separate from and opposed to a thing called 'the government' or 'a handful of mindless MPs' (bad). (There are currently 649 MPs so 'John from Surrey' must have unusually large hands.)

This is a very unhealthy way of thinking. It says that democracy is the only legitimate form of government; but it defines 'democracy' as doing 'the exact thing which the General Public in all areas and under all circumstances.' But any elected government on earth sometimes has to enact unpopular legislation. (Even if you decided that your guiding light was 'What the Majority wants' rather than 'What is right', you couldn't follow it, because The Majority frequently wants contradictory things.) So the only only legitimate form of government turns out to be a form of government which, in principle, can't ever exist. Which means, in short, that no government is ever legitimate, that you are free to say 'Who the hell does Tony Blair think he is, running my country just because he happens to be Prime Minister', or 'Why do we say that something is a law just because parliament happens to say that it is.' Start thinking like that, and you will end up saying 'Since 98% of Britain want Jews to be banned from wearing skull-caps; and since an arbitrary special interest group called the Government still permit them to do so, if I go up to a Rabbi, violently take his hat off, and stuff a prawn sandwich in his face for good measure, then I am acting Democratically, which is, by definition, right.'

It is not in itself very significant that two different green-inkers -- or more likely, two different sub-editors in a hurry -- came up with the same idea. It is interesting that both of them chose to use it as an argument for increasing the amount of brutality in the penal system. As we've seen, Tony Blair justifies repressive theories about crime and punishment on the grounds that he is expressing the opinions of The Public. He really should be careful of listening too carefully to the voice of the people: at lot of the time, it is calling for mob-rule and lynch-law.

Monday, November 06, 2006

News Priorities

The Independent:
"This Court has decided to sentence Saddam Hussein al-Majid to be hanged unti he is dead for crimes against humanity."

The Guardian:
Endgame for a dictator: Saddam sentence to hang

The Daily Telegraph:
Saddam death sentence sparks dancing on the strees of Baghadad

The Times:
"A final snarl, then he swaggered out."

Financial Times:
Saddam Hussien sentenced to hang

Daily Mail:
Defiance of the Tyrant

The Daily Mirror:
Saddamned To Hell!

The Sun:
Hang to rights!

The Daily Express:
Spies Cover Up Diana 'Murder'

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Oh dear. I just thought that there was something rather cute about discovering Daily Mail readers unselfconsciously drooling about corporal punishment. It would have been a bit like coming down to breakfast and finding a man in open-topped footwear ordering a plate of Alpen and a copy of the Guardian -- particularly if he himself didn't see the joke. I'm sorry if anyone got the impression that I had mistaken what was going on for an actual argument.

I suppose one could bash out a decent thousand words around 'This house believes that inflicting pain in the short term is no less humane than removing liberty in the long term.' We might wonder out loud whether society could have developed in such a way that traffic wardens issued tickets requiring the owners of badly parked cars to report to the police station and be beaten-up and where everyone thought that 'fines' were a bizarre idea. We might note rhetorically that in the early 1980s we decided that blowing teenager's limbs off on the Falkland Islands was the kind of violence we could happily put up with; but whacking their backsides on the Isle of Man wasn't. Before long someone would be saying 'Of course, there is no crime whatsoever in Malaysia' and 'I'd sooner have the slipper than detention any day' and I'd be forced to give them a clip-round-the-ear.

The flogging of criminals officially ended in England and Wales in 1948; in practice, it mostly went away after the Cadogan committee recommended it's abolition ten years earlier. Perhaps surprisingly, it had been abolished in the armed forces in the 19th century; even more surprisingly it hung around as a possible punishment for misbehaving prison inmates into the 1960s. But even in the 30s, it seems to have been primarily juveniles who were subjected to it; perhaps because the courts were inclined to regard them as naughty schoolboys rather than criminals. There was an attempt to reintroduce flogging in 1961, mainly remarkable because it was the only occasion when Mrs. Thatcher, who supported the idea, voted against the Conservative Party, who opposed it. Please note that I just resisted the temptation to use the phrase 'Conservative Party Whip.'

You really have to go back to the nineteenth century, if not the eighteenth, to find the lost Eden in which whipping was the normal punishment for criminals; or else look at liberal dystopias like Apartheid South Africa or modern day Singapore. The Mail readers who miss the good-old flogging days would be just as likely to lament a medieval Olden Times when we used to put shoplifters in the stocks. Before it was discovered that all dark-skinned people were terrorists, it was common enough to be told that those Arab-johnnies have got the right idea about chopping off the hands of thieves. It is therefore more than usually clear that 'bring back the cat' is not a political proposition, but a portmanteau icon representing a deferential, crime-free never-never land located before the Second World War. Even our beloved prime minister, who explicitly distances himself from what he calls the 'hang 'em and flog 'em brigade' thinks that the period before 1939 was relatively crime-free, and that the present high-crime rates are the result of specific social changes that have occurred since the war.

It was understandable that the people who voted in Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 might have regarded the Cane, the Birch, the Noose and Winston Churchill as a symbol of a lost world where everything was simple and secure, if occassionally painful. Most of them spent their teenaged years in a world where these things were a reality. (They also remembered a time before many Indians and Afro-Carribeans had settled in the UK.) But it's harder to see why the mythology of a post-Blitz loss of innocence persists at a time when no-one without a bus-pass can possibly remember the War.

If, having said all that, anyone still thinks the question is worth asking, then I would say that deliberately hurting naughty people is a good idea if you believe the following:

1: The sole or main purpose of courts is to deliver Justice.

2: The purpose of Justice is to restore a state of equilibrium by making a criminal suffer to a degree comparable to his victim. This process directly benefits the victim: if the criminal doesn't suffer, the victim is harmed. While it may have various utilitarian side-effects, the punishment of criminals is therefore an end in itself. (It follows that concept of 'rehabilitation' is a denial of natural justice. If a thief learns a trade while he is in jail, and as a result gives up stealing and spends the rest of his life earning an honest living then he has benefited from his crime and been rewarded for his wrongdoing – particularly if the victim doesn't also get free woodwork lessons.)

3: Therefore, the only or main purpose of prisons is to punish criminals by keeping them in disagreeable conditions for long periods.

4: In practice, prisons are comfortable, not to say luxurious institutions. Therefore in nearly all cases, 'natural justice' does not occur: a murderer who spends 30 years in a prison can be said to have 'got off scott free'. On a personal note, I should mention that I went to Bognor Regis on three occasions and Clacton on Sea twice, and that prison is not in fact very much like a holiday camp at all.

If you accept these superstitions, then whipping must indeed seem very attractive. It's the only thing a court can sentence someone to which is purely punitive; and therefore, delivers the maximum quantity of natural justice. If you don't, then it was a silly and pointless form of brutality for brutality's sake, to be regarded roughly at the same level as putting the brick on trial because it fell on the King's toe. Even to ask the question 'Could flogging ever have a place in the modern criminal justice system' is to move the discussion onto non-rational territory.

And so it goes on. A bread-shop in Birmingham has started calling their spicy anthropomorphic cookies 'ginger people'. Readers will be very surprised to learn that Angry Customer Darren Ellis thinks that this is 'political correctness gone mad.' Angry Store Manager Who Refuses To Be Named doesn't like the fact that he 'has to tell children they can't have a gingerbread man, they can only have a ginger person.' When was the last time you went into a cake shop and asked for 'one of those iced buns with a cherry on the top' only to be told 'we don't sell iced buns with a cherry on the top; come back in again and ask for a Belgian.'i

It's certainly something gone mad.

But this story was forced off the cover of Tuesday's Express by an even more important one..

VEIL SHOULD BE BANNED SAY 98%.

BRITONS gave overwhelming backing last night to a call for a ban on full-face Muslim veils.

Ninety-eight percent of Daily Express readers agreed that a restriction would help to safeguard racial harmony and improve communication.

If this seems a bit familiar, that's because this is exactly the same story that they ran last Saturday: the same use of 'Briton' to mean 'Daily Express readers who could be bothered to shell out 50p on our premium rate phone-line'; the same insinuation that 'Muslims' and 'Britons' are two different sets of people; the same name-checking of Jack Straw.

The story continues on page 6 under the headline Why object to tackling extremism? (I can think of all sorts of answers to this question. 'Dunno. Who does object?' 'What does the wearing of funny clothes have to do with extremism?') But on the same page there is a separate, and much more disturbing story.

There is in Yorkshire a private Muslim school, imaginatively called The Institute of Islamic Education. It was recently visited by the schools inspectors, who gave it rather a bad write up. The Express lingers over this Offsted report for three columns, rehearsing such juicy details as:

Parts of the school building, including the dining room and boarders toilets, were dirty,

and

Teachers showed limited understand of pupils aptitudes and prior attainments

Surprisingly enough, the inspectors also thought that this religious school was placing too much emphasis on religion. Or, as the Express puts it:

Inspectors who visited the school, which stands just yards from the former home of 7/7 suicide bomber Sidique Khan concluded that the emphasis on Islamic teaching came at the expense of secular studies.

So why, despite this rather desperate attempt to link the story with terrorism is item illustrated with – see if you can guess – a picture of a woman wearing a niqab? Well, that's the clever bit. You will be aware that Mrs Alshah Azmi recently got herself into an altercation with her employers. She teachers English-as-a-second-language at a state school; her employers says that she can't do this wearing a veil because it means that the non-English-speaking kids can't see her lips; she says that she can teach perfectly well; she's taken them to a tribunal to settle the issue. If not for Jack Straw it's hard to believe that this trivial story would have been front page news for a week.

Surprisingly enough, this Muslim teacher has a father (Dr Mohammed Mulk) who is also a Muslim and a teacher. It has 'emerged', as these things do, that he a headteacher at the Yorkshire school with the dirty loos.

So, the non-story about the school report appears under the headline

Veiled protest woman in link to 'radical' school

There is a clever ambiguity in this Azmi is certainly a woman, and she sometimes wears a veil. This undoubtedly makes her a 'veiled woman'. She is protesting about the fact that she has been asked to take it off. This arguably makes her a 'protest woman'. So she could be called a 'Veiled protest-woman': a woman in a veil who is protesting about something. However, the lack of punctuation will cause many readers to suppose that she is also a 'veiled-protest woman', a woman who is wearing a veil in order to make a protest. The headline is implying that she is covering her face in order to make a political point; which is clearly not true.

The 'radical' bit is also rather fun. Despite the quotation marks, no-one appears to have described Dr. Mulik's school as 'radical'. The closest we come is a claim that the school forbids pupils from reading British newspapers or TV stations. But the word 'radical' is code for 'bad Muslim'. Earlier in the week we discovered that we may have to spy on Islamic students in case the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Union 'radicalises' them -- that is, turns them into terrorists. The Express wants us to think that the dirty toilet school is a school for terrorists (a terrorist once lived in a street near by, which proves it) even though no-one has actually said so.

So. A picture of a veil; a headline about a radical school which is linked, quite spuriously, with the London bombings, above a separate headline about extremists. The message is clear. Radicals, Muslims, veils, extremists, terrorists. They go together like cake shops and the political correctness brigade.

In between Veiled protest woman and Tackling extremists there are a few hundred words about the incredibly unimportant case of Miss Nadia Eweida, the airline employee who was asked to remove her cross and suspended from work when she refused. The interesting thing about this story is that it has become enmeshed in the racist narrative about veils. Jack Straw's original incendiary remarks were not about religion. He was ostensibly saying that face-covering was an intrinsically bad idea despite the fact that it was a religious symbol. But everyone seems to think that this is somehow related to the claim that Christian air-stewardesses and news-readers are being prevented from wearing their crosses because they are religious symbols.

This is a pretty important distinction. So far as I know, no-one has ever suggested that 'this is part of my religion' can be used as a get-out-of-jail-free card which over-rides all other considerations. If performing unnecessary surgery on children is a bad idea then it's a bad idea regardless of the fact that your religion may require it. But those of us who are reflexive liberals would only play the 'bad idea' card over very serious matters. 'This is cruel and abusive' might be sufficient grounds to stop someone from practising their faith; 'This seems a bit strange to the rest of us' isn't. This is why, on the whole, we don't worry about Jews lopping bits off baby boys (seems a bit strange to those us us who were never snipped) but do worry a great deal about Somali traditions of 'circumcising' girls (intrinsically cruel). There will, of course, be borderline cases and grey areas. That's what the House of Lords is for

The French and the Dutch have made moves towards banning the public wearing of headscarfs because they are religious symbols even if the headwear itself is unexceptionable. (How this works in practice I don't know: could I argue in court that I was not wearing a bowler to represent my allegiance to the orangeman course but simply because I was an upper-class twit?) Jack Straw wants us to believe he has no problem with turbans, headscarfs or rosaries but would have objected to face-covering just as strongly if there had been a community of secular circus-clowns in his constituency. However, the fact the 'crucifix' story is being invoked alongside the 'veil' narrative shows that this is not how the Sun and the Express see it. 'They can wear their turbans and headscarfs,' they argue – 'So why can't we wear our crosses?' When they talk about 'the veil', they are talking about what they see as a symbol of Muslim-ness; and it's that they want to prohibit by law.

Why can't the politicians see that every time they say 'We should have a sensible debate about veils' a large proportion of the electorate will hear 'Muslims are terrorists with dirty lavatories'? What we need right now is not a debate, sensible or otherwise. We need Tony Blair and Jack Straw to stand up and say, very loudly 'Muslims are Britons. Muslim Britons sometimes dress in a way that some other Britons aren't used to. Just like some Britons wear kilts and some Britons have their tongues pierced. And if you find kilts, pierced tongues and veils a bit strange, then that's your problem, and you should try to get over it.' Why is that so hard?

The question in today's phone-in poll is 'Is Labour wrecking our great British army?' I can't wait to find out there answer to that one. Pass me a gingerperson.



iYou don't think that the confectioner had perhaps made biscuits in two shapes and made up a price tag marked 'ginger people' because he couldn't be bothered to write 'gingerbread men and gingerbread women', do you?

Friday, October 13, 2006

What Not To Wear

On Saturday October 8th, the Sun ran the headline

HOUNDED OUT
Hero soldiers' home wrecked by Muslims.

The substance of the story was that a house earmarked for servicemen returning from Afghanistan had been vandalized. The Sun drew the conclusion that the vandals were Muslims, although their only actual evidence was a quote from an un-named source and a non-committal quote from the police. ('One line of inquiry' is that the attack was racially motivated.)

Underneath this front-page story was a four column strip. On the left was a picture of a woman wearing a burkha. (This picture was approximately three times as large as the photo of the vandalized house.) In the middle was a caption which reads THE BIG BURKHA DEBATE – PAGES 6 and 7. And on the right was a photograph of Labour MP Jack Straw.

Elsewhere in the paper, you could read about Muslim cabbie's guide dog ban.

On 10th October, the front page of the Sun featured another picture of a woman in a burkha. This time, the headline was HIDDEN DANGER. The previous day, a Sun reporter had caught a plane to Paris wearing a niqab. Customs inspectors didn't ask her to raise her veil to check that her face matched her passport picture, although regulations say that they should have donei. This is chilling, apparently. 'I hope this is an oversight, and not political correctness' says the inevitable Tory MP. If you read the 'full story' on page 9, you would also have learned about a terror suspect (unnamed) who, it is claimed (we aren't told by who) tried to escape capture by disguising himself with a burkha. And who should be at the top of column 1 but Labour MP Jack Straw?

So, images of veiled women are being placed alongside stories about Muslim yobs and vandals; stories are dredged up in which burkhas are tangentially associated with terrorism. Anyone looking at Saturday's paper would have taken in the words Hounded Out -- Hero soldiers' home wrecked by Muslims -- The Big Burhka Debate in a single glance. The vandalism story is printed in a frame; and the 'burka' caption overlaps that frame: quite clearly, we are being invited to forge a mental link between the two stories. Muslims are dangerous and frightening. Muslims are alien. Muslims are chilling. And wherever there are stories about dangerous, frightening, chilling, alien Muslims there will be a little picture of a woman in a veil. The Sun has made veils into a hieroglyphii which means 'Muslims are scary'. And alongside this icon of Islamophobia there is always a picture of Labour MP Jack Straw.

Interestingly enough, the HIDDEN DANGER story only takes up about 1/3 of Monday's front page. The other 2/3 are given over to a promotion for something called Page 3 Idol. ('Turn to page 3', the caption very logically advises.) Female Sun readers are being invited to send nude photographs of themselves to the paper. Male readers will then vote for the picture they like the best, and the winner will be offered a job as a model. You couldn't, as I believe someone once said, make it up. This is illustrated, naturally, by a picture of a lady with no clothes on. (Page 3 itself has a total of 14 tits on it, which must be some kind of record.) So, when we look at Monday's front page, what we actually see is a small picture of a dark skinned lady wearing a veil, underneath a large picture of a light skinned lady wearing nothing at all. The message is clear: totally covering yourself up is 'chilling' and 'dangerous', whereas stripping naked, having your picture taken and sending it to a national newspaper so that strangers can masturbate over it is perfectly normal.

Meanwhile, the Daily Express has had one of its famous phone-in-polls in which it has turned out that 97% of readers think that Muslim women should uncover themselves -- though not, presumably, to the extent that Sun readers are going to -- because it would 'safeguard racial harmony'. In order to further safeguard racial harmony, the Express reported these findings under the headline BAN THE VEIL! The accompanying text is vintage Daily Express stuff:

CONCERNED Britons gave massive backing last night to calls for Muslim women to ditch the veil.

An astonishing 97 per cent of Daily Express readers agreed that a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony.

Our exclusive poll came a day after Leader of the Commons Jack Straw spoke out against the veils.

Note how 'Britons' are contrasted with 'Muslims' in the first line, and that 'ditch the veil' (choose to stop wearing it) in line 1 slides into 'ban' (prohibit it by law) in line 2. Observe the presentation of the story: 97% of readers 'gave backing' and 'agreed' to the idea of 'a ban': even though no ban has been proposed and there is nothing to back. And once again, it is all associated with Labour MP Jack Straw. It is literally true that he 'spoke out' against veils in the sense that he remarked that he would rather talk to people whose faces he could see. He quite explicitly didn't call for any kind of ban. But the trajectory of the opening paragraph goes 'Ban the veil – ditch the veil – a ban -- Jack Straw.'

Jack Straw knew what he was doing. New Labour is the political wing of the middle classes. Every New Labour speech goes out of its way to praise the car-driving home-owning hardwor kingfamily. These are the votes which win elections. White – people who read papers in which lapsed Anglicans from England are 'us' and dark skinned Muslims are 'them'. Paranoid – people who feel that their way of life is under threat from gypsies, gays, terrorists, asylum seekers, the political correctness brigade, Europe, foreigners in general. Four million of them pay money to read the paranoid fantasies of Richard Desmond and Rupert Murdoch on a daily basis. Ten days ago the average Sun readers didn't remember Jack Straw's name, let alone his job title. But for a week, they have had his face in front of them every day, linked with stories about Hidden Danger and Banning the Veil. What he actually said no longer matters, any more than it ever mattered exactly which river it was that Aeneas had seen frothing with much blood. Straw wasn't presenting an argument, but positioning himself. He has brilliantly associated himself with the paranoid middle-class. The people whose votes he most needs now think of him as 'That fellow who spoke up for ordinary White people and against chilling Muslim yobs who sneak through customs and vandalize guide-dogs.' And this, unless he is very stupid indeed, was precisely what he knew would happen.

I live in Bristol. Burkhas are quite rare, although there are increasing numbers of Somali women whose robes cover the whole of their body except their faces. (I think that they look very attractive and exotic.) Headscarves are so common that I no longer notice them. I admit that, when I see a black hat and ringlets, I still think 'Jew' before I think 'man'; but when I see a headscarf, I no longer think 'Muslim woman' or 'religious woman' or 'Asian woman' but just 'woman'.

When I first moved to Bristol the man in my local corner shop had a West Country Accent. If you want to buy a pint of milk after half past ten, the person who sells it to you will be an Asian: it's a stereotype, but it's true. 'What's a Pakistani man doing with a West Country accent' I said to myself. 'Everyone knows that Pakistanis have South London accents.' Since then, I have noticed that some teenagers combine Brizzle dialect with British Asian, even when their vowels are RP. 'Where's Rashid to, innit?' White kids are also picking up the 'innit' habit, which seems itself to be a bit of cockney dialect pressed into service to represent a Punjabi tag word. I find this aesthetically displeasing. The whole purpose of teenage slang is to irritate people over 30. That is what 'assimilation' means. You spend decades worrying about the fact that New York has been overrun by Italians who don't speaka the lingo proper, and then wake up to discover that Pizza is a classic American dish. I shouldn't be surprised if next year, white teenagers decide it's fashionable to cover up their faces. If it irritates Jack Straw, I may start doing it myself.






i Private Eye points out that the story is not attributed to Anila Baig, the dark-skinned journalism who carried out the stunt, but is claimed as an exclusive by light skinned Julie Moult.

ii Actually, the icon is a partial photograph: the paper tends to show a narrow strip of two eyes looking out from a slit, rather than the whole head. The papers' layout therefore distances the woman more than the actual veil does.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Today:

24 SUSPECTS ALL BRITISH

This time last year:

BOMBERS ARE ALL SPONGING ASYLUM SEEKERS

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Page 1

The ultimate outrage by a British Government.

NOW THEY CAN STEAL OUR HOMES

Sinister new powers allowing the State to confiscate family homes were unveiled by ministers yesterday as Labour's socialist instincts came to the fore.

The government abandoned any pretence of being reconciled to private property or the rights of individuals to run their own affairs. New Whitehall guidelines set out powers for town hall officials to seize homes for seven years if they are left empty for just six months.

Furniture and heirlooms will be grabbed as well under plans drawn up by shamed Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

Today the Daily Express begins a new crusade to defend householders rights by demanding: "Hands off our homes."


Page 5

Terrorists kill 163 in train bomb massacre

Monday, July 03, 2006

Oh, for goodness sake...

The word which Jonathan Ross said to David Cameron was not especially rude, certainly not by the standards of anyone under 35. The activity represented by that word is not "lewd and obscene" by the standards of anyone at all. Most people would regard it at the same level as the other shocking and obscene word beginning with the letter W that Ross used in the same interview: "having a wee". A perfectly ordinary word to refer to a perfectly ordinary thing. Of course you'd be embarrassed to be caught doing it in public. (In that respect it's a lot like reading the Daily Mail.) But it doesn't make you short-sighted or drive you mad. (In that respect, it isn't.)

Satirists, like court jesters deflate pompous people. That's their job. One way of doing that is to imagine them performing private bodily functions. Didn't Winston Churchill overcome stage fright by imagining that his audience were all sitting on the lavatory? But mixed in with the anglo-saxon language, Mr. Ross was actually making two quite good political jokes. First, he insinuated that Mrs Thatcher was popular because Conservative men found her sexy. This isn't true, any more than it is true that John Major wore his underpants outside his trousers. But it's funny because we feel that Mrs Thatcher's huge popularity requires some kind of explanation; and because we can imagine that middle-class ex-public school men liked to be ordered around by a deep-voiced woman who thumped them with her handbag. You can't watch that footage of William Hague making his first political speech at the age of 14 without thinking that something weird is going on. But the joke is that Ross asks the question directly – were you ever sexually interested in Mrs Thatcher? Having embarrassed his victim by saying out loud what everyone has sometimes thought; Ross asked an unrelated question and received an evasive answer. So he repeated the previous question using much ruder language, adding "See, I'm just like Jeremy Paxman." Any fool could see that he was now making a joke against himself ("I'm the sort of person who would ask a rude question like that?") and against political interviewers" ("I'm going to repeat the same silly question over and over again.")

So how is it that when the Daily Mail affects to be very, very shocked by this lewd and obscene language both the Tory party and the BBC nod their heads sagely and pretend that it is a very serious matter. Should politicians go on programmes where they might be asked lewd and obscene questions? Should the BBC pay nineteen million pounds a year to someone who asks such lewd and obscene questions? Or are the BBC perfectly free to transmit lewd and obscene programmes -- even though of course I myself didn't watch it. Why did they not have the guts to say "Oh, shut up you stupid, humourless, holier-than-thou, frigid, late-Victorian, prudish, priggish, puritan."

The answer to the question "Why did a serious politician appear on this man's show" is presumably the same as the answer to the question "Why do the BBC pay this man £19,000,000?" -- because his viewing figures are nothing short of obscene.

Were we really so innocent that we missed the main point? The Mail, by pretending that it didn't know what masturbation was, managed to get us to file the programme under "The interview where Jonathan Ross made a rude suggestion to an M.P." This cleverly deflected attention from the fact that Ross also asked a perfectly serious question about Conservative drug policy. By responding weakly and evasively to Ross's perfectly valid points, David Cameron came across on prime time TV as a complete wanker.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Notes from a parallel universe

Ten things I learned by reading the Daily Express

1: Princess Diana Was Murdered. And somebody is responsible!

On August 31st 1997, the car in which Diana, Princess of Wales was a passenger crashed into a concrete pillar at 110 mph. The Princess was not wearing a seatbelt. The driver was drunk. So what could possibly have caused her death? For nine years, the Daily Express has been trying to solve this mystery. A few months ago, it proposed the theory that she was poisoned.

On Monday, May 8th the paper announced a new breakthrough.

DIANA DEATH: TRUTH AT LAST
Princess's body was illegally embalmed to cover up pregnancy.

It is worth spending five minutes studying this report, because it provides an excellent seminar on how to create a Daily Express 'news' story.

a: Start with a headline which suggests that something Very Important has happened.

'Diana’s Death: Truth at Last' suggests that the Express has discovered the real circumstances of Diana's death. If this were true (and if it differed from the official story that she died in a car crash) then this would be certainly be one of the most sensational news 'scoops' of all time.

b: Then print a sub-headline which reveals that the news is not quite as exciting as the headline promised.

It turns out that the Express has not discovered the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the death of Princess Di. It has merely discovered one additional fact about what happened to her mortal remains. The sub-headline makes four separate allegations, any one of which would represent a moderately sensational discovery:

a: the Princess was embalmed;

b: this embalming was illegal;

c: the Princess was pregnant at the time of her death;

d: she was embalmed because someone wanted to conceal this.

However, it is going to turn out that none of these is the new 'truth' that the Express claims to have discovered.

c: Make sure that the first paragraph of the story is literally true.

So:

Dramatic new evidence emerged last night that the body of Diana, Princess of Wales was embalmed on the orders of panicking British officials. The controversial process, which broke French law, was carried out just two hours before she was flown back to Britain.

As we will see, all the facts in this paragraph are (if we can trust the Express's sources) quite correct. But anyone reading it would naturally assume that what the headline is claiming to have discovered is the fact that Diana's body was embalmed when under French law this should not have happened until any autopsy had been completed. The revelation that the body of such a high profile celebrity was treated irregularly would, indeed, be a fairly big scandal. However, this is still not the new fact that the headline promised us.

d: Reveal the substance of the story gradually. Bury any actual facts you may have on page 5

In fact, everybody who has been following this story already knew that Diana's body had been embalmed. Page 5 of today’s paper reproduces a headline from nearly two years ago, which had asked: 'Why was Diana's body embalmed....just what are they trying to hide?' So what is today’s news?

The Daily Express has learned that hurried discussions between British and French officials were held to make sure that embalming went ahead before the Princess’s body was flown home. It had always been understood that Diana’s body had been embalmed in the chaotic hour immediately after her death.
So, what has been revealed 'at last' is not 'someone interfered with the Royal Corpse’ but 'someone interfered with the Royal Corpse seven hours later than we thought' or possibly 'English and French officials talked to each other before they interfered with the Royal Corpse.' This new data leads the Express to infer that the officials who gave the order must have had some reason to want the body to return to Britain only in an embalmed state, and that they can only have decided this at the last minute. So the story as stated in paragraph 1 is literally true: the Express does indeed claim to have evidence that Diana’s body 'was embalmed on the orders of panicking British officials.' It’s just that what they are announcing is not 'she was embalmed' but 'the people who ordered her to be embalmed were panicking at the time'.

e: If you don’t actually have any story at all try not to reveal this until the end of the item.

Even the evidence for the panicky-ness of the officials is not especially solid: we can only discover that 'sources close to the investigation' say that the remains were embalmed seven hours after Diana died; and that 'a source' thinks that this revelation 'will increase the pressure on Lord Stevens to clarify what happened that night.'

The 'pregnancy' aspect of the story is even shakier. We are told that unspecified 'experts' say that the process of embalming a body 'corrupts pregnancy tests which may give a false positive reading.' Again 'experts' apparently believe that embalming fluid corrupts DNA tests.

...so the identity of the father of any baby Diana might have been carrying could never be verified.
This is an extraordinarily audacious aside. The main headline claims that Diana was embalmed in order to cover-up the fact that she was pregnant. It turns out that someone unspecified thinks that embalming would ensure that 'the identity of the father of any baby that Diana might have been carrying' could not be discovered. And note the bet-hedging. If she was only slightly pregnant, then the embalming fluid would make it impossible to do a pregnancy test; but if she was very pregnant, then the embalming fluid would make it impossible to find out who the baby's dodi was.

The question which occurred to the paper when they broke this story in 2004 was 'What are they trying to hide?' A number of more relevant questions occur to me. For example: is it physically possible to do a pregnancy test on a stiff? Would such a test be carried out on the remains of a road accident victim? Are there any health and safety laws about whether unpickled bodies can be carried on aeroplanes? And why would British officials, panicking or otherwise, care whether or not Diana was pregnant -- given that, at the time of her death, she had no constitutional position?

The ongoing Diana saga provides a particularly clear illustration of the way in which the Daily Express constructs it's narratives. The text of the news item describes fairly un-sensational events which, so far as I can tell, really happened in the real world. But this text is surrounded by headlines, sub-headlines, cartoons, captions, phone-in polls, readers letters, and op-ed columns -- all of which tell a completely different, and much more dramatic story. On Planet Earth one un-named source says that there is a discrepancy about the time at which a body was embalmed; one or more unnamed experts say that formaldehyde interferes with pregnancy and DNA tests. Oh, and a 'a senior French policeman claims he saw medical papers showing that Diana was pregnant.' But on Planet Daily Express, this has transmogrified into 'Princess's Body was embalmed to cover up her pregnancy.'


2: How to stay eternally young

It's Wednesday, and someone has discovered the Philosopher's Stone. Or the Fountain of Eternal Youth. Or something.

EASY WAY TO ADD 5 YEARS TO YOUR LIFE:
New health secret revealed.

Unfortunately, this new health secret has only been revealed on Planet Daily Express. On Planet Earth 'ground breaking new research' has discovered that exercise is good for you. Astonishingly, it may also help if you quit smoking and eat more fruit and veg.


3: Everyone is incredibly rich

On May 12th, the reality-based community was preoccupied with the report into the July 7th bombings. But on Planet Daily Express, something even more important had happened.

A marketing research company has discovered that people in Britain have an awful lot of money and that they spend it on stuff. Men spend 110% more on clothes 'in real terms' than they did in 1995; and we all spend 21% more on furniture 'taking inflation into account'. Consumer spending is now £37,000 per household in Britain, which amounts to a trillion a year across the whole country. (A trillion is a million million, apparently. Whatever happened to our good old British billions?) Given that the average salary is around £20K, an annual spend of £37K can probably be translated as 'In many households, both partners work, and people are really crap at saving'. On the other hand, the biggest increase in expenditure comes from mortgages ('up 51%'); so it may be that 'people spend more money' equates to 'mortgage rates are very high'. But this is not the spin which the Worlds Greatest Newspaper (And Proud of It) puts on the figures.

GOOD TIME BRITONS IN £1TRILLION SPENDING SPREE.
And it's all generated by sheer hard work.

I don't know how the Express thinks that we might have got our hands on a £1,000,000,000,000 apart from by working. Robbed the Tower of London, perhaps, or won the lottery during a roll-over week. Or--just possibly--Britons earned their trillion quid by buying property at the right time and sitting on it. On Tuesday, the Express ran a separate front page story about how over-inflated UK property prices have become, and how it is impossible for people on modest incomes to buy houses -- or, as they put it

NEW BOOM IN HOUSE SALES:
The market is already up by a third this year.

A new property bonanza is underway....and that is welcome news for home-owners bombarded with dire warnings of an impending housing crash....
Er...whether or not you regard this news as ‘welcome’ rather depends on whether you already own one of the 'three bedroom semis' that are now worth £200,000 or whether you are hoping that one day you might be able to buy one.

However, it's the 'sheer hard work' which is the point of the Friday story. I would have supposed that any consumer spending boom would apply to single people as much as to married ones: indeed, I thought that gay men were widely thought to have an exceptionally high disposable income. But in fact, the one trillion pounds is coming from only one sector of the population:

Britons have pushed their spending beyond the £1trillion barrier for the first time in pursuit of a good time. The extra money is being created by families' sheer hard work -- and it is being spent on holidays and luxury purchases.
Now, in the lexicon of the Daily Express (and, not un-coincidentally, of Mr Tony Blair) 'hard-working family' is a code word. It means 'good person', 'normal person'; 'one of us' as opposed to 'one of them'. The Express has cleverly avoided using that precise phrase, but it is clear that they have taken a boring set of economic figures and transmuted them into a Calvinist affirmation that 'we' are rich because 'we' deserve to be rich. 'We' have created a zillion pounds by sheer hard work; and 'we' have been rewarded with lots of nice things like electronics, clothes, holidays, houses and (we'll come back to this later) gardens. The implication must be that if you don't have a £200,000 semi and don't go on three holidays a year then you are not 'hard-working', not a' family', not a 'Briton' -- not one of 'us'.

The idea that a 'a trillion pounds has been spent' means the same as 'a trillion pounds has been created' implies a rather shaky grasp of economics.

4: Scotland is Not Part of Britain

The people who have earned a trillion pounds by their hard work are 'Britons'. The Daily Express takes Britain very seriously. The week’s most important event was the decision by Heinz foods to close the factory in Birmingham that makes H.P Sauce and transfer production to Holland. For reasons which are completely unfathomable, the World's Greatest Newspaper (And Proud Of It) has decided that brown ketchup is an important component of British identity. The closure of the factory therefore becomes a pretext for a bout of self flagellation The fact that our sauce bottles will now say 'made in Holland' rather than 'made in Britain' is another example of the way in which ‘we’ are being stripped of ‘our’ national identity. We’ll still be able to pour H.P Sauce on our Fish and Chips, but

One more British icon has bitten the dust. Somehow, it just won't taste as good.

But even worse than the threat which Heinz foods pose to our nationhood is the threat from...Scotland.

Tony Blair is a little bit Scottish; Gordon Brown is very, very Scottish; and there are a number of people from Scotland in the cabinet. But that doesn't matter because the people of England, Scotland, Wales and the North of Ireland are all loyal subjects of the Queen and patriotic Britons. Or, as a columnist Leo McKinstry puts it:

ABSURDITY OF SCOTS RULING THE ENGLIGH

....Perhaps unique among Western democracies, England is a country largely governed by politicians from another nation. If anything, Blair's mishandled reshuffled has only strengthened the stranglehold that the Scots exert on our Government.
You may need to read that twice to see where the cards are being palmed. If one democratic nation were ruling another democratic nation that might very well be absurd. In fact, the nation of Britain is made up of four countries. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all send representatives to the national government in Westminster. (Some people think that Scotland and Wales ought to be nations in their own right; they call themselves Scottish Nationalists and Welsh Nationalists.) But Mr. McKinistry deliberately uses 'country' and 'nation' interchangeably in order to advance his absurd fantasy that England is the only country which is ruled by another nation.

We continue:

It is an outrage that control of English domestic policy should be in Scottish hands...What makes the tartan takeover even more unjust is that Scots have had their own parliament since 1998.
Having confused us by saying 'nation' when he means 'country', McKinstry is now trying to get us to associate what he calls 'the tartan takeover' (the fact that Prime Minister and some cabinet members come from Scotland) with the completely separate and extremely boring West Lothian Question.

Try to stay awake: I'll make this as painless as possible. People from Scotland and England elect MPs to Westminster. People from Scotland additionally elect MSPs to Scottish parliament, to which Westminster has 'devolved' certain powers. There is no equivalent English parliament since England is governed directly by Westminster. It follows that Scottish MPs vote on certain issues which affect England (but not Scotland) but English MPs cannot vote on equivalent issues which affect Scotland (but not England.) This is certainly an anomaly and you may think that Tony Blair made a pigs ear of devolution. There is a fair-to-middling case for saying that either England should also its own devolved parliament or else that Scottish MPs should be asked to leave the room when a specifically English issues come under discussion.

But this has nothing whatsoever to do with McKinstry's fictitious 'tartan takeover'. If it's unfair that English MPs don't have a say about who empties the rubbish bins in Balamory, then that would still unfair even if every though every single cabinet minister was an H.P sauce drinking Englishman. If you don't think it matters, then it still wouldn't matter even though the whole cabinet started to put salt on their porridge. (And on no possible view does 'Scottish MPs voting on English issues' amount to 'Scotland ruling England'. Before devolution, if English MPs had wanted to pass a law prohibiting Haggis and Deep Fried Mars Bars, they could have done so, and all the Scottish MPs voting together could not have stopped them. After devolution, it is still impossible for the Scottish MPs to get together and pass a law banning fish and chips and decent beer -- for the very simple reason that English MPs out number Scottish MPs by nearly ten to one.)

Having misdirected us with this sleight of hand, McKinstry is able to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

They voted in favour of devolution because they did not want England running their domestic affairs, yet they believe they still have the right to rule south of the border.
Are you keeping up, here? There are Scottish cabinet ministers; there is a possible constitutional anomaly about devolution. Therefore Scots, in general, believe that they have the right to rule England. It is a small step from here to conflating Labour with Scotland and saying we have a government that hates the English:

It is no wonder that Labour is sinking so dramatically in the popularity in England when it is encouraging such a naked bias and abuse of power. The tartan led Labour government has bent over backward to address every kind of Scottish grievance, no matter how synthetic, but has treated England's identity with indifference and even hostility. They have shown no real love of this country because they are not really part of it.
Again, the writer is very cleverly throwing dust in our eyes. A lot of people have a general sense that Labour is unpatriotic: it doesn't love this country (Britain) sufficiently. Since the left tends to be anti-nationalist and pro-European, there may be something in this. McKinstry turns this general feeling into a specific allegation that Labour doesn't love this country (England) at all, because they are foreigners from Scotland. He then makes general allegations that these foreigners 'bend over backwards' to accommodate Scottish interests, and that they are 'positively hostile' to English identity, without citing a single instance of either of these things happening.

I think we are also over-working the phrase 'tartan army' and 'tartan takeover' a little. I wonder what the Scottish equivalent would be? 'Bowler hat takeover'? 'Morris dancing army'?

But this contempt cannot go on. It has awakened a new sense of exclusively English pride, manifested in the revival of the cross of St George....
Well, the use of the cross of St George as the logo of the English soccer team, at any rate. The Daily Express's own logo has always been a crusader knight with a St George cross on his shield. So much for Us Britons.

....and it will culminate in driving the Scottish elite from power.
If you think that all this is mad, then some of the letters of support from 'readers' published over the next few days were positively scary. One lunatic thinks that there is a 'constitutional issue regarding the handover of power' to Gordon Brown because:

Mr Brown represent a Scottish constituency and cannot therefore legitimately bring forward legislation that does not affect his constituents but does effect the English and Welsh electorate.
Got that? The West Lothian Question means that foreigners from Scotland should be debarred from being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Perhaps on Planet Daily Express, the Act of Union never happened. (I also like the use of the word 'handover', with its implication of 'surrender' and 'giving up without a fight'.)

Another letter-writer drifts into genuinely fascistic language:

Wake up England, and take back what belongs to us....all English people know of the history between England and Scotland and also the perceived hatred our friends north of the border feel towards us Sassenachs. So why do we sit back and take this abuse of power from our so-called leader Tony Blair....We have had enough. Why is it so wrong to want England ruled by the English?
Er…gosh.

5: No taxation without...er...well, just 'no taxation', basically.

Tax is bad. Tax is theft. Tax is a bad thing which bad people do to us out of spite. On Planet Daily Express a malign State comes and takes money from hard-working H.P sauce eating Britons from England and gives it to lazy skiving sponging foreigners and asylum seekers. Some days, I get the impression that it goes into Gordon Brown's personal bank account. None of this tax money seems to go to pay for police-men, soldiers, prisons, schools, hospitals and other things that Britons might think were quite a good idea. The state does things to us; it never does things for us.

On Tuesday, the Express declared victory in its crusade (that logo again) against inheritance duty. As the law now stands, you have to pay 40% tax on any legacy above £285,000. Since good time Britons are enjoying a property bonanza, even quite modest houses can sell for this amount. There is a perfectly reasonable argument that the threshold for inheritance tax should be modified up and down in line with the property market. But you will not hear that argument here. Tax money is money stolen from you by the government, and nothing more need be said.

The latest inheritance tax smash and grab....the devastating tax raid....Mr Brown's inheritance tax-grab
But because of all the taxi-drivers putting 'Property Tax is Theft' stickers on their cars, the tax has been abolished and you won't have to pay it any more. Well, perhaps on Planet Daily Express. In the real world, something rather more boring has occurred.

Treasury officials were last night said to be having second thoughts about the devastating tax raid that would leave millions of Britons facing huge tax bills.'
Again

'A spokesman for Association of British Insurers said a meeting with Treasury and Revenue officials had produced some results.'
So: an un-named person had a meeting with another un-named person, and thinks that as a result of it, the government might be thinking about changing their mind about something. On Planet Daily Express, this equates to 'Cilmbdown On Death Tax'.

And it isn't even the £285,000 tax threshold about which someone thinks that someone else may be thinking of changing their mind. What might be happening is that some rather technical changes to the laws on trust funds (or, on Planet Daily Express: 'new rules hidden in March's budget') may not being going forward. These changes might have meant that some people might have had to change their wills. If ten million people had done so, and if their lawyers had charged them each £250, 'that would cost Britons up to £2.5 billion.' Leaving them only £997,500,000,000 a year to spend on their gardens.

6: The state is at war with the citizen

But the foreigners from Scotland who run the country are doing much more sinister things than hiding laws about trust funds in the Budget (the last place that an accountant would think to look for them.) It has declared war on people who own houses; it has declared war on people who drive motor cars; it has a sadistic desire to punish gardeners; and it is going to use spies and surveillance satellites to prosecute this war.

On Thursday, the front page announced

SPY IN THE SKY ON MOTORISTS:
Big Brother satellite will charge you £1.34 a mile and will know if you are speeding.

while the internal sub-headline was simply

War on the motorist.

It seems that the government has decided to charge a toll on road use, and to use a satellite tracking system to enforce the toll. The satellite will be able to tell exactly how far you have driven, and will then bill you at a rate of £1.34 a mile. Some of the implications are even more sinister. As a pull-quote explains

This control-freak government will now be able to track us wherever we go.
Of course, as we cast our eyes down page one, the assertion that there will be a satellite tracking system for cars, and that you will be charged £1.34 per mile becomes more and more hypothetical

...critics warned that the technology could be used to snoop on the private lives of citizens
...it was revealed that the system could be used to check if drivers were speeding
...how the spy in the sky could work
...this system could be used to track people's movements everywhere they go
The most frightening thing of all is that

...it could in time also be used to enforce speed limits
Because everybody on Planet Daily Express agrees that the idea that people might be expected to stick to the speed limit is

Just like Big Brother and typical of this control freak government.
It turns out that behind all these could-bes, might-bes, and can't-be-ruled-outs is a letter from the Prime Minister to the Minister for Transport, asking him to look at the feasibility of having a tax on road usage instead of (not in addition to) the present tax on vehicle ownership. The idea being floated is that 'you' would be charged £1.32 if 'you' made use of the busiest roads at peak times. If 'you' used quieter roads at off-peak times you’d be charged 2p per mile.

But 'Someone has floated the idea that you might perhaps be charged a road toll of tuppence at some indeterminate time in the future' would not be as interesting as 'Control Freak Government Declares War on Motorist', would it?

The government's other war is the one against home-owners. On Monday we were warned about:

'The pets and garden tax: Astonishing plot for a stealth raid on homes'.

Apparently 'council tax snoopers' are soon going to be 'peering over the fence for a furtive glimpse into your back garden.' Why they would peer over your fence furtively is never tackled: one would have thought that it would be easier for them to knock on your front door and say 'Hello, I am a government tax inspector.' They could even use the government's spy-in-the-sky satellite, if not for the fact that it doesn't actually exist.

The reason for this snooping is that if you add 'a fish pond, rabbit hutch or just that humble old vegetable patch' to your garden, you are going to have to pay tax on it. This is described as 'the latest punishment for people trying to build a better life'

Local taxation has always been a very contentious issue in the U.K -- presumably because you actually have to write out a cheque to the council each month, whereas the Inland Revenue takes money straight out of your pay cheque without you ever seeing it. Mrs. Thatcher's attempt to replace the old system of Rates with the barking mad Community Charge actually precipitated riots and brought down her government. Under the present system of Council Tax you are taxed a fixed amount annually based on the value of your home. The theory behind the Daily Express's 'pets and garden tax' is that if you build a rabbit hutch or plant a rose bush in your garden the Sheriff of Nottingham may decide that your house is worth more today than it was yesterday and plonk you into a higher tax band.

The major problem behind this theory is that it's bollocks. The Express admits that it's bollocks almost immediately. At the top of the report, there are pictures of a pond, some flowers, and a bunny rabbit, with captions that read:

This water feature could lead to you being soaked for higher council tax
A colourful display might cost you a pretty packet
Even the children’s rabbit might catch you on the hop
At the bottom of the page, we asked to cast our vote on today's phone-in poll 'Are you fed up of being fleeced by Labour' (99% of us are, surprisingly.) There is also risible op-ed column which runs:

Now is a great time of year to add a few attractive touches to your garden -- but you may come to regret it. Push the boat out even more and invest in a whole new vegetable patch or some floral borders or perhaps a rabbit hutch or fish pond and there could be an even bigger price to pay. Scary? You bet, but that is what happens when Labour is in charge...How else do you explain that everyday improvements to your garden could put your property in a higher tax band...There's talk about anything that adds value being taken into consideration. In other words a garden tax should not be ruled out as Labour continues its war against Middle Britain picking pockets at every opportunity....To punish homeowners for making the best of what they've got is not just unfair - but plain nasty.
Actually, what I find plain nasty is the paranoia which the Express slips into at the drop of a gnome. The state is out to get you -- you personally, out of sheer maliciousness. The imaginary garden tax is part of a war on the home owner. The imaginary scheme for road-tolls is part of a war on the motorist. The op. ed column sees the fictitious tax as a 'punishment' for people who want to improve their homes; the news story sees it as 'the latest punishment' for people 'trying to build a better way of life.' Yes, only the latest such punishment -- although the details of all the previous punishments aren't actually mentioned. This is indeed nasty, because it sets out to make people who own houses with gardens and people who drive motorcars -- that is, us, hard-working Britons from England -- feel that we are victims. Someone is snooping over our fence; someone is watching us from a satellite; someone is stealing our inheritance; someone is taking away our H.P Sauce. And this is the same State that is run by England hating foreigners from Scotland; the same State whose officials are colluding to protect whoever-it-was who murdered The People's Princess.

The significance of the phrase Middle-Britain (as opposed to Middle-England) is left as an exercise for the reader.

The actual basis of the garden tax story would seem to be a parliamentary question asked some months ago by one Caroline Spelman (John Prescott's conservative shadow). According to Hansard, it went like this:

Mrs. Spelman: To ask the Deputy Prime Minister whether the presence of an (a) orchard, (b) vegetable patch, (c) fish pond and (d) attractive flower arrangement influence the Valuation Office Agency's assessment of value significant codes GG, GN, NA, PS and PL when conducting a council tax valuation. [30837]

Mr. Woolas: The valuation of a domestic property is based on the valuer's estimate of what the capital value of the property is.
According to the Express, Spelman interprets this answer to mean that

They are actually refusing rule out whether they'll be taxing you on your vegetable patch or animal hutch. Is this Labour's latest stealth tax -- a tax on pets?'
'Stealth-tax is' yet another code-word. Tony Blair boasts that, unlike previous Labour PMs, he has not increased income tax. However, according to some people, he has made up the shortfall in less obvious ways -- for example, by increasing the range of goods on which V.A.T is payable -- meaning that we actually pay more tax over all. But the phrase has been cast pretty widely, so that the charge for replacing a lost passport, or the cost of a digital box for your TV might well be described as 'stealth taxes.' It is hard to think of anything less stealthy than receiving a letter headed '2007 Council Tax Bill.'

The way in which the Daily Express spins Mr Woolas parliamentary answer deserves some kind of award:

In its reply, the government admitted only that the valuation of a domestic home is 'based on the valuer's estimate of what the capital value of a property is
'Admitted only.' Mrs. Spelman asks a rather silly question. The relevant minister gives a straightforward answer: nothing has changed -- a valuer decides the value of your property and you are taxed you on that basis. And the Express, instead of saying 'The government said clearly that they weren't taxing vegetable patches' says 'They admitted only' that the tax was based on a valuer's estimate of what the property was worth. Which isn't much of an admission: it's the way that Council Tax has always been assessed; it's the only way in which it could possibly be assessed. The op. ed column glossed this as '(you can't) get a clear answer about this from the office of the deputy prime-minister.' It seems like a pretty clear answer to me; but they got an even clearer answer from 'a spokesman for the Valuation Office Agency' and printed it in the body of the article:

A fish pond or rabbit hutch isn't going to cause an increase in council tax band. It's all about scale. If it as an ornamental lake in a large property with rolling acres, it might increase the value of the property.
So: the 'garden tax' is a pure, paranoid fantasy. But this point is evidently lost on the inhabitants of Planet Daily Express. On Wednesday a letter appeared on the letters page under the headline: 'Ditch this daft garden tax'. (Do you see what has happened? Yesterday, the Daily Express made up the phrase 'garden tax' out of their own heads: today, readers are demanding the abolition of this non-existent tax.) The writer explains:

So, Prescott et al are going to penalise us for beautifying our homes.
No, they aren't. The news story made this quite clear.

If, after tax, you choose to spend what little is left...
'What little?' I thought we all had a trillion pounds in our pockets, and houses that were becoming more valuable every day?

...on going out, a holiday, or some electronic bauble, that's OK.
I thought it was more than okay, I thought it was part of a year long party that hard working Britons from England were enjoying?

...But woe betide you...
I had a junior school teacher who used to use that phrase as a euphemism for 'I'm going to hit you'. I didn't know that it was still in use on Planet Earth.

..if you spend it on some plants to make your home pretty. You will be rewarded with increased rates...
No, you won't. You'd have to put up some stables or an ornamental lake. The news story said so.

...How utterly wrong that is.
Wrong in the sense of 'incorrect' or 'not true'..

Does the great Labour levelling machine want everyone to live in slummy ghettos?
Another example in the genre of 'Very Interesting Questions To Which The Answer Is No'. (There is also the point about 'ghetto', which generally means 'the part of town where foreign people live' being used in conjunction with 'slummy', but we'll leave that to one side for the moment.)

Rather than taxing those who try to make Britain a green and pleasant land it should do what the Dutch do and penalise those who allow their properties to become derelict junk heaps.
So. In three days, we've gone from 'Your council tax is based on the value of your property' via 'Labour is going to tax rabbits' to 'Labour wants everyone to live in a slum.'

The Express have rather a thing about gardens. On Sunday, there is an impenetrable story which manages to go from 'new homes may be built on urban brown field sites' to 'Labour are going to take your garden away and build houses on it'; and concludes with a phone in poll to find out whether readers think that 'garden grabbing' should be allowed. But on Saturday, we dealt with the subject closest to Daily Express readers' hearts. Yes, even closer than H.P Sauce..... Privet hedges.

7: There is insufficient police brutality

This is the story of the week. This is a story so important that normal typography can’t cope with it. Upper case is not enough. Upper case underlined is not enough. Today, we must resort to upper case underlined and printed in red.

AT LAST
Judge says police are RIGHT to give yobs a clip round the ear

A bobby convicted of clipping two yobs round the ear was cleared yesterday after a judge ruled that he acted in the best traditions of the police force.
I wonder if this is remotely intelligible to readers from outside the UK -- or, come to that, under the age of 30? 'Bobby' is a slang term for police officer which no-one on Planet Earth has used for decades. (Neither do we say 'Peeler'. Even 'Copper' is pretty old-fashioned.) A 'Clip' is a light cuff or slap. 'A clip round the ear' means literally 'to slap the side of a child’s head'. In practice, clip-round-the-ear is a portmanteau phrase meaning 'mild, informal corporal punishment'. ('My school had banned caning, but we did get a clip-round-the-ear occasionally.') A 'yob' is a badly behaved youth, possibly backslang for 'boy'.

But the three terms are three more ideological code-words. 'Bobby' is nostalgic and affectionate: it doesn’t mean 'policeman', but 'good, old-fashioned police-man on a bike who knows the names of local people'. If I say 'British Bobby' you will hear 'Both you and I agree that the British police force is honest and incorruptible' or perhaps 'the Police were much better in the 1950s.' Similarly, if I say 'clip-round-the-ear', you will hear 'Both you and I agree that corporal punishment is an acceptable way of disciplining children.' We are all against cruelty to children, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't give kids a clip-round-the-ear now and again… And of course, Prime Ministers since John Major have said that What Is Wrong With Britain Today is something called 'yob-culture.' So 'The days when bobbies could give yobs a clip round the ear' is code for 'you and I agree that nowadays, young people have insufficient respect for authority.' Or perhaps just 'things were better in the olden days'.

It is very doubtful whether there was ever a time when police officers on Planet Earth were permitted to administer on-the-spot corporal punishment to badly behaved children. What is certain is that, for the past 25 years, any teacher who administered a clip-round-the-ear, either literally or metaphorically, would be guilty of criminal assault; and that the law has become progressively less supportive of parents who slap their own children -- on the ear or anywhere else. Maybe in 1906, a policeman could have been considered in loco parentis and done to a naughty child whatever a reasonable parent or teacher might have done in the same circumstances; that certainly isn’t the case today.

So: the first thing to say about Saturday’s headline is that it is irrelevant. You, me or Judge Adrian Lion may very well think that police should give yobs a clip round the ear. We may for that matter think that Teach should give them a good slippering or the Witchfinder General should burn them at the stake. But neither you nor I nor Judge Lion can arbitrarily re-write the law of assault on a personal whim. The Judge's opinions are neither here nor there.

The second thing to say about Saturday's headline is that it is obviously and transparently untrue. The main headline: 'Judge says police are right to give yobs a clip round the ear'; the internal sub-header: 'At last, a judge who says yobs deserve a clip round the ear from police' the phone-in poll: 'Should police give yobs a clip round the ear', and the leading article: 'he was right to overturn P.C Mullaney’s ludicrous assault conviction for giving two trouble-making yobs a clip round the ear' -- all come from Planet Daily Express. If you bother to 'turn to page 17' you will discover that what happened on Planet Earth was almost the exact opposite.

PC Sean Mullaney, 38, was arrested and suspended 18 months ago for confronting the teenagers who terrorised his neighbours and taunted him after damaging his hedge…The court heard how the boys, aged 16 and 17 had been terrorising PC Mullaney’s neighbours in Hindley, near Wigan, Greater Manchester, leaving them 'frightened to death.' The officer told how he had been forced to move the pair on more than 50 times from outside his house and had lost count of the number of times they had damaged his £200,000 semi. The problems came to head in December 2004 when he took firmer action after he realised they had wrecked his privet hedge.'
The value of P.C Mullaney's house is crucial to the story. He owns a £200,000 semi. He has a share in the one trillion pounds generated by sheer hard work. He has a garden. He is a Briton. He is English. He is hard working. He has a family. He lives in Middle-England. He is very probably a Motorist. He may even put H.P Sauce on his rabbit hutch. He is precisely the sort of person against whom the Government has declared war. He is, in short, one of Us.

So. On this side, two yobs. On the other, an expensive suburban house. Separating them -- a privet hedge. What better symbol of Middle-England (against whom the State is at war) could there be? (Consider where J.K Rowling locates the Durselys.) Everything which the Daily Express believes is encapsulated in this scene. And what do the Out of Control Yobs do to the Ordinary Hard Working British Bobby? They damage his hedge. They damage his privet hedge. Tear down the wall! Tear down the wall!

And now it comes:

Although the louts, who cannot be named for legal reasons, claimed PC Mullaney went outside and slapped both of them across the head….
'Claimed'. Pause. Savor the moment.

….the officer insisted he had only pushed one after he was called a 'prick'.
And in a flash, the whole story vanished. The judge who says yobs deserve a clip round the ear; the Judge who says police are right to give yobs a clip round the ear. Total fantasy. What actually happened -- what the Daily Express admit happened -- was that two young men were vandalizing the property of an off-duty Bow Street Runner. The Bow Street Runner came out and remonstrated with them. The young men subsequently accused the Bow Street Runner of having assaulted them. The other Rozzers decided that he should be charged with assault -- they take this sort of thing seriously, do the Rozzers: if he had really hit a suspect, then Mullaney would no longer be a British Bobby -- he would be a Bent Copper. The Magistrate believed the youths; but he gave the Bow Street Runner a very mild punishment: a two year conditional discharge. However, this was still a very serious matter for the Bow Street Runner, because it meant that he was almost certain to lose his job. So the Bow Street Runner appealed to a higher court. And this time, the Judge believed his version of events. Listen to what the judge said:

There is no doubt the officer acted properly and appropriately in standing up to these young people who were seeking to wind him up. He did so in the best traditions of the police force....It is the essence of a police officer that he can control his anger in circumstances that to other people would be highly provocative
That is: he acted in the best traditions of the police force by not hitting the teenager when someone else might have done. He acted properly and appropriately in the sense that hitting a teenager would have been improper and inappropriate. Another Bow Street Runner, P.C Schofield is quoted 'Sean is a gentle giant. Any situations I have been in with him he has always been composed and calm' -- that is, not the sort of person who would give a clip-round-the-ear to anyone at all. (Schofield is Mullaney’s beat partner. Under the circumstances, I think we can assume this means: 'The officer who accompanies him on patrol' not 'the officer who helps him beat people up.') In case you doubt this, then I recommend you pick up the Daily Telegraph and read what Mullaney himself said.

They knew what I do for a living and disliked it. That was the cause of it all. One of the boys called me a prick. He clearly wasn't frightened of me and came into my personal space. I felt threatened and pushed him away. I certainly didn't thump him around the ears. That's not the way I conduct myself.
And once again, the original statement was literally true. 'A bobby convicted of clipping two yobs round the ear was cleared yesterday after a judge ruled that he acted in the best traditions of the police force.' He was indeed cleared, and the clearing did indeed happen chronologically after the judge said he acted in the best traditions of the police force. But 'Policeman denies hitting teenager; Judge believes him' has somehow become 'Judge says policemen should be encouraged to hit teenagers.' This would make about as much sense as translating 'Man found Not Guilty of Murder' as 'Judge says murder perfectly all right' -- which come to think of it, is not that far away from the Daily Express’s reporting of criminal trials.

8: England has legalised murder

On Planet Daily Express, people are literally getting away with murder.

'Widows fury as husband's callous killer gets just four years in jail',

explain a headline.

Naturally, the Worlds Greatest Paper has a solution to this problem. A more-than-usually prominently displayed phone in poll asks the magnificently unbiased question 'Do you agree that hanging should be brought back'. In the first paragraph of the news item, the grieving widow expresses the opinion: 'If the prisons are so full, they should bring back hanging.'

Perhaps they should. Perhaps they should bring back hanging, drawing and quartering and transportation to Australia, while they are at it. Or perhaps we should use those nice lethal injections that Tony's friend George Bush is so enthusiastic about. But even if 'they' did, it would have made bugger-all difference in this case because no-one was actually convicted of murdering anyone. Rather boringly, what actually happened was that one man, Alan Fessey, became involved in altercation with two other men David and Christopher Ratcliff. Mr. Fessey was hit with a crash helmet and a broken bottle; he subsequently died. Both men said they didn't intend to kill him. The younger admitted 'grievous bodily harm with affray'; and was sentenced to three years in jail; the older man admitted manslaughter and got four years. No-one, absolutely no-one at any point suggested that they got a comparatively light sentence because there was insufficient space in prison. (Is the Daily Express seriously proposing that we should execute people convicted of manslaughter, or, come to that, of juveniles convicted of serious assault?)

Anyone reading the headline and not studying the text would get the impression that four years in prison is the going rate for offences that fifty years ago would have earned you a very brief meeting with Albert Pierrepont. This is, of course, nonsense. But these kinds of headlines give the inhabitants of Planet Daily Express the impression that we live in a country where hardly anyone is ever punished for anything (apart from building rabbit hutches, of course.)


9: Human Rights are a bad thing and should be abolished as soon as possible

An English football fan is currently serving a sentence for murder in a Bulgarian jail. Some people think that he may be innocent. One British official went so far as to express grave doubts about Bulgaria's justice system. On Monday, the Express published a reader's letter that appeared to argue that it doesn't matter if a British person is being punished in a foreign country for a crime he didn't commit; because foreigners in this country are sometimes not punished for crimes they did commit. At any rate:

If my guess is correct, the whole British nation has grave doubts about our justice system. Anything connected with the Home Office is in freefall, police detection rates are lamentable, sentencing is derisory and a sad joke, prisons are thin on the ground as serious crime rises; and the immigration system is in chaos and puts the indigenous population in danger.'
Mr. Atkinson doesn't say in what way the immigration system is putting people in danger. He doesn't need to. Weeks and months of Daily Express headlines has made 'immigration' and 'asylum seeker' synonymous with 'foreign criminal' and 'terrorist'. The writer says 'the immigration system is in chaos' and we hear 'there are lots of foreign terrorists, murderers, and rapists roaming the streets.'

I would have thought that if you let an actual foreign criminal into the country, then he would be a danger, not only to the indigenous population but to everyone else as well. If he was a terrorist, then he might not only kill members of the indigenous population, but also any tourists who happened to be travelling by tube at the time. And course, the terrorists who actually did kill a lot of people (indigenous or otherwise) on July 7th were born and brought up in Britain, and, indeed, England. Are British Muslims part of the indigenous population, we ask ourselves, or are they, like Scotsman, not Britons at all?

In another letter, printed under the headline 'find the courage to boot out these foreign thugs' one Mr Flynn explains that

Asylum seekers and immigrants should be told that they are expected to conform to our laws and that if they commit a crime they should expect to be deported.
He explains with enthusiasm that last year, Norway deported 1,500 'foreigners who had committed crimes', and are going to extend the law so they can depart even those who commit minor offences 'because they believe that their public has a right to be protected'.

Alongside this letter is a picture of a not very indigenous looking person, with the caption: 'SUSPECT: Somalian Mustaf Jama was not deported.'

This is rather clever. The letter gives the impression that, as a matter of policy, the UK does not deport foreign criminals, and contrasts it with Norway, which does. But as a matter of fact, the UK does have a policy of deporting foreign nationals who have been convicted of serious crimes. The whole furore over deportation of foreign criminals blew up because the Home Secretary -- who was subsequently sacked -- admitted that due to an administrative error a number of foreign criminals who, according to the law as it now stands should have been deported were allowed to stay in the UK. There are a small number of hard cases, of the kind that make bad law, where we have decided that we can't deport someone because they might be tortured in their own country. Mustaf Jama -- who is suspected of murdering a police officer -- is one such: at the end of long prison sentence, a decision was taken to let him stay in the UK because it would not have been safe to send him back to Somalia. This may or may not have been a good decision. But it has somehow been transformed into a general policy of allowing, even encouraging, foreign criminals to come to this country; which in turn means that the whole idea of 'immigration' is putting white, sorry, indigenous people at risk.

But there is a solution to all of this:

Mr Flyn asks

Why is it that in this country our rights are deemed less important those who would come here for the sake of committing crime
Mr Atkinson concludes

Before we accuse Bulgaria, let us see some root and branch changes at home, starting perhaps with the abandonment of the ridiculous Human Rights act.
Ah, 'Human Rights' -- currently hated by Daily Express readers even more than the 'Political Correctness Brigade.' On Planet Daily Express, 'human rights' is only ever used to mean 'the rights of criminals and immigrants'. So far as I can tell, such people do not really have any rights at all -- at any rate, the word rights is generally printed in quotation marks, or spelt 'so-called human rights.'

A news story on Thursday makes the point pretty clearly:

Maniac freed to kill because his 'human rights' were more important than ours.

A sex attacker who killed a mother had been freed from prison because officials placed his human rights above protecting the public, an official watchdog ruled yesterday.
Well, up to a point. Anthony Rice had indeed served 16 years of a life sentence, and did indeed commit murder while on a Life Licence. Everyone agrees that something went badly wrong with the system. What the Daily Express calls an official watchdog, and everyone else calls Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation summarised their findings in the following boring and careful terms:

We find evidence to conclude that on balance Anthony Rice should not have been released on Life Licence in the first place, and once he had been released he could and should have been better managed....This principal finding arises from our analysis of a complex picture where a sequence of deficiencies in the form of mistakes, misjudgement and miscommunication at all three phases of the whole process of this case had a compounding effect so that they came to amount to what we call a cumulative failure.
They go on to say that it was 'often not clear who was in charge of the case' which led to 'diffusion and discontinuities in lead responsibility for the case, and we consider that these were key contributing factors to the cumulative failure.' They say that the Parole Board did not know enough about the inmates previous behaviour; they were given over-optimistic reports of his progress; they were allowed to think that the fact that the inmate had transferred to an open prison made it more or less inevitable that we would be let out. And they also say

The whole process is additionally complicated by the human rights consideration in each case which have grown in importance follow a series of court judgements...It is a challenging task for people who are charged with managing offenders effectively to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations.
There is a problem in the way in which the human rights act is being applied; it is complicating the process of paroles; and some lawyers may be applying it more widely than it should be. A footnote on page 36 of the report points out that according to the human rights act as it now stands a persons right to privacy and family life are not absolute; and that according to the present law, interference with both of these rights can be sometimes be justified.

What has happened is that a long, detailed report which says, among many other things, that human rights laws may have caused problems in this case has been spun into an unequivocal statement that this man was let out 'because his human rights were more important than ours ', This would give anyone reading the story the impression that a parole board said 'Oh, he'll probably murder someone if we release him, but what the hell, his human rights are the most important thing' -- which is, of course, total fantasy. And the suggestion that we may want to look again at the way in which the human rights law is being applied to parole board hearings turns into an even more general feeling that the human rights act must be scrapped, abolished, dumped, banned, got rid of.

On Saturday, we have a headline about Conservative Leader David Cameron:


'Human rights laws must go' says Cameron .

Cameron is actually quoted as saying 'We will reform, replace or scrap the human rights act' but the qualification have vanished from the headline. In the same report Anne Widdecombe says 'If we have a review, we can show that (the act) does not work, and scrap it.' And abandoning actual quotes from real human beings, the story continues

Privately many Tories are now convinced that that Human Rights Act is beyond reform and should be scrapped immediately. It is being blamed for the 'rights' of hoards of offenders being upheld while the suffering of their victims is forgotten.
As ever, there is a perfectly sensible debate to be had about how you take a nebulous idea like 'human rights' and turn it into a workable law. You could even have a philosophical discussion about the whether there is any such thing as a 'human right' in the first place. (Maybe we should forget about my right not to be tortured, and instead talk about my obligation not to torture you?)

But once you have framed the question in terms of a conflict between the human rights of the criminal and the human rights of the victim, you've guaranteed that that sensible debate is not going to take place. It is certainly true that we would like the state to do as much as it possibly can to stop us from being murdered. For example, we would like some of the money that it steals from us in taxes to be spent on bobbies who could arrest murderers, or failing that, clip them round the ear. But to cast this aspiration as a 'right not to be murdered' and to set it in conflict with a criminal suspect's right not to be detained without trial, or to be kept in human conditions if convicted is not much more than a pun. We're using the same word ('right') to refer to two quite different ideas.

Those of us who spend a few minutes each day on Planet Daily Express may get into the habit of conceptualising the question in these terms. And if we can only ask the question in the form 'What is more important -- the human rights of the terrorist, or the right of indigenous people not to be blown up?' then there's only one way for us to answer the question.


10: Doctor Who is rather good at the moment.


If you want to give a group a sense of identity, then tell it that that identity is being taken away. If you want to make a group pull together, make it believe that it is being threatened from the outside. And if you want to make a group of people do something very, very stupid, then allow them to believe that they are helpless.

The Daily Express has convinced itself that the mainstream of British (or at any rate, English) society -- the car driving, home owning middle-middle classes -- are a marginal, persecuted sect; ruled by a despotic foreign government which hates them and which uses high tech surveillance and low tech spying to prosecute a war against their traditional values. But have they convinced the people who buy their paper? Do millions of my fellow Britons believe that the real world resembles Planet Daily Express? And if so, what are they going to do about it? I find the idea of a radicalised middle-class declaring a jihad in defence of their vegetable patches and privet hedges far more frightening than any number of yobs, louts, immigrants, asylum seekers, thugs or Scotsmen.

But I don't want to create the impression that everything in the Daily Express is paranoid rubbish. On Monday, the TV reviewer said that he thought "The Girl in the Fireplace" was quite a good 'Doctor Who' story.

It was.


Vox Pop

Should we ever pay criminals? Yes 1% No 99%
Should HP Sauce only be made in Britain? Yes 98% No 2%
Should Tony Blair quit immediately? Yes 92% No 2%
Are we fed up of being fleeced by Labour? Yes 99% No 1%
Should Prescott lose all his perks? Yes 96% No 4%
Should hanging be brought back? YES 97% No 3% (The actual question was 'Do you agree that hanging should be brought back?')
Should all foreign criminals be deported? Yes 99% No 1%


Andrew read the Daily Express from Monday May 8th to Sunday May 14th, but he has since made a full recovery.