A lot of tabloid watchers have obviously been looking elsewhere today, but the Mail still manages to peddle its usual level of bullshit.
I was particularly drawn to this piece [istyosty link]. In it they examine recent Department of Health figures on the number of girls of sixteen or under who have an abortion.
The Mail line is predictable.
Campaigners warned that the alarming figures, revealed by the Department of Health, were representative of a society where abortion was ‘on demand’ – even for very young girls who legally should not be having sex.
But there’s another way of looking at this data.
Here’s the table that the Mail published.
Now I’m not saying for a second that this is an acceptable level of teen abortions. Obviously anyone would hope for those figures to be far smaller – zero even. But take a close look at the figures for the last four years.
The number of abortions carried out on girls of sixteen and under has fallen every year since 2007. In fact the figure is now 15% lower than it was at its peak.
Surely that has to be seen as a good thing. That’s a substantial fall over four years. But no. The Mail looked at these figures and decided to spin it as a comment on our over-sexed society rather than the success story that it undoubtedly is.
Ecstasy death girl, 15, ‘idolised drug-taking musicians and was hooked on the internet’
Right from the first three crappy depersonalising words of the headline on Arthur Martin and Tamara Cohen’s shabby piece sets the tone for a careless, thoughtless long honk as the Mail drags the body of a dead teenager up and down the streets.
Let’s start with that claim she was “hooked on the internet”. You might think that if Isobel really was hooked on the internet, she’d be getting lambasted in a different part of the Mail for sitting in her bedroom looking at a screen. Her very real death was in the very real world, surely?
But how does the Mail know about this being addicted to the web, except for when she had switched the computer off and gone out with friends?
But one of her teachers blamed her downward spiral on an addiction to the internet.
Really?
Jaye Williamson, who was Isobel’s English teacher at Chiswick Community College, in West London, said: ‘She was into the kind of things that teenagers get into, but she got hooked on the worldwide web. She was part of the Myspace generation. She got caught and we are devastated.’
“Part of the MySpace generation” pretty much tells you to what extent Williamson is an expert witness on these matters. To be fair to Williamson, her quote sounds like something somebody who is still upset and confused by the death of a young person they knew might mumble out if being badgered for a quote from a shitty journalist.
Certainly, the Mail offers no other evidence for this “addiction” to the internet, and doesn’t seem to consider for a moment that ‘doing stuff on the internet’ is what people do now. It reports memorial events organised online and scrapes Facebook photos and YouTube videos from tribute sites without seeming to realise that this is the sort of “being sucked in” to the internet that is meant to be the bogeyman in the story.
So what of Martin and Cohen’s second bold claim, that Isobel “idolised drug-taking musicians”?
Did she edit a fanzine called something like ‘Works and Plectrums’? No.
Had she shot a YouTube video in which she cheered while waving round pictures of Pete Doherty? No.
Have Martin and Cohen got details of a tattoo she had reading “Bands who take drugs are cool”? No.
Their claim seems to be based on one single quote:
‘Like many teenagers she idolised musicians who took drugs and it was hard to tell them the pitfalls of copying such behaviour.
‘These bands seem to have it all and the kids just want to copy them. It’s just desperately sad that it’s ended in the death of such a beautiful and lovely girl.’
And who gave this line to the Mail?
Diane Bardon, 50, whose son David was at school with Isobel
So the parent of another child at her school farts out a suggestion that maybe she was “idolising” drug-taking musicians “like many teenagers” – a vague and empty claim that, you’ll note, can’t even stand itself up by suggesting a name or two of whose these musicians might actually be – and suddenly it’s up in the headlines.
There’s a dead child, a mourning family, and all the Mail is interested in doing is kicking the corpse to see if it can somehow blame the internet and rock music. What a triumph for journalism.
Today, the Daily Mail published the most hysterical pile of anti-internet crap [istyosty link] that I think I’ve ever seen. And that takes some doing as Daily Mail articles usually combine a complete lack of understanding of the internet together with the deep distrust and fear that Mail writers have for most of the modern world.
In this article, writer Alex Brummer turns his attention to Google and the damage that they are doing to the UK’s digital industry. It’s the usual concoction of nonsense and half-truths and it contains a typical Mail conspiracy theory claiming that David Cameron is promoting Google as a good example of a digital success story because his strategy advisor Steve Hilton is married to Rachel Whetstone, Google’s head of communications. It doesn’t seem to occur to Brummer at all that Cameron is promoting Google as a good example of a digital success story because… well because it’s a bloody good example of a digital success story.
The article then goes seriously off the rails as Brummer explains how Google’s business plan is plunder the copyright of hard-working British artists like Adele and to share their work with everyone for free. It reaches a peak of insanity as he says this:
One only has to switch on the computer, call up the Google search engine and type in the name of a star like Adele to understand why the digital channel is such a threat to the UK’s performers, and for that matter our whole creative industry.
Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Google’s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adele’s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers.
Claims like this aren’t new, of course and presumably Brummer assumes that everyone who reads those paragraphs will nod in agreement whilst thinking to themselves, “Of course that’s what happens – wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns up a few pages of porn too”. Brummer relies on his readership being people who have be told so many horror stories about Google search results that they are now scared to even visit the site.
So what happens if you actually bother to try Brummer’s suggestion. Here’s what I got:
Three links to videos on YouTube. Two of them are from her record label and the other one seems to be from Adele’s own channel.
Two links to Adele’s official web site.
Three links to news stories about Adele (including Brummer’s own story).
A link to Adele’s MySpace page.
Five images.
A link to a page about Adele on last.fm.
A link to a page of Adele lyrics (this doesn’t look official).
A link to Adele’s Facebook page.
A link to an Amazon page promoting Adele.
A link to Adele’s record company’s page about her.
All of which rather seems to disprove Brummer’s theory. From this sample it seems that Google seems very adept at putting Adele’s fans in touch with official sources of information about her. Only the lyrics page seems unofficial or unapproved – and do lyrics really count as piracy?
There’s another option to consider here though. For a couple of years now Google have been providing customised search results. Whenever you search on Google, they take into account the links that you have clicked on from previous search results. I’m not surprised that I get a page of official links as those are the kinds of sites that I usually show most interest in. If Mr Brummer gets a page of pirate links then perhaps he should investigate who has been using his computer.
Full Fact came to the conclusion that about 457,000 children had been mis-diagnosed, not to belittle that number but it is significantly different to the 700,000 – 750,000 that these three papers claimed.
Mistakes happen. These reports are not usually the easiest things to read and interpret (for me at least). Given that an error in reporting of this size could influence any future debate about the subject (there has been some recent debates where SEN was raised), and being good public spirited citizens, Full Fact contacted the gang of three and explained where they had gone wrong with their figures.
I should mention that Full Fact, once they had done their adding and subtracting, went to Ofsted for clarification and to make sure they had infact got it right. Full Fact were correct in their workings and the figure of up to 750,000 children being mis-diagnosed with SEN is wrong, although Ofsted would only agree privately and not publicly. Ofsted only said anything publicly after a Parliamentary Question (.pdf) was asked.
By the time November had come round Full Fact had given…
…almost two months of concerted, polite effort on the part of Full Fact to remove inaccurate figures from the debate the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent still refuse to correct their stories. Indeed, the Independent and the Mail both repeated the claim. They say they will not correct except at the request of Ofsted themselves.
This is a clear breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice, which demands that “a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence…”
So, with the Mail, Independent and the Telegraph sticking to their mis-informed guns dispite clear accurate proof that their figures were seriously inflating an already serious number of SEN mis-diagnoses, off Full Fact went to the PCC.
Fast forward a month to December and Full Fact have another update. After initially refusing to get off it’s arse, due to those being directly involved, Ofsted, not making the complaint, the PCC accepted the complaint from Full Fact and the online articles have now been corrected and a note explaining why. Two out of the three articles have been corrected, at least.
The Independent and The Telegraph have both updated their articles but sadly the Daily Mail, being a true rebel, hasn’t.
The Daily Mail, in the face of the correct figures, Ofsted claiming publicly, albeit forced to, that the figures the mail has used in it’s story are incorrect and the PCC telling it it is wrong and should issue a correction, is still sticking with the wrong numbers. Full Fact explain why…
However the Mail’s response to the PCC argued that based on the information in the report and the press briefing, the figure was valid – and made only more so by the use of qualifiers such as “up to”.
We feel that even if the use of the higher figure was reasonable based on the briefing, this is no grounds not to correct the story in light of the later clarification.
Exactly. Fine, the Mail came to the wrong conclusion like others did, but why, when new information comes to light, shouldn’t it update/correct itself? Answers on a postcard please, to Northcliffe House, London.
Whoever’s compiling the statistics for the Department for Work and Pensions could do worse than get the Mail and Express involved as they seem to have the inside knowledge.
1.6m benefits claimants have never had a job ‘because it does not pay to work’
The article underneath doesn’t back up this claim, presumably because the headline can be a total lie and still be ok with the PCC. As FullFact.org state…
Unfortunately there are no statistics available for the reasons why people have never worked. Although the Labour Force Survey does record a person’s reason for currently being out of work, this would not necessarily be the reason they have always been out of work.
Therefore there is no way of knowing precisely how many of the 1.6 million have never had a job due to caring responsibilities or disability.
The headline is only the bit of the article that gets read by *everyone* that looks at it. Not everyone reads to the bottom of articles. Nearly everyone reads past the first couple of paragraphs, but *everyone* that looks at that article reads the headline.
It doesn’t matter that there are no figures for why people have never had job. The Mail doesn’t even say how many of those 1.6 million are claiming any sort of benefit. It’s just pulled the headline out it’s arse.
There will be some people that have never had to work because they have a spouse that earns enough for them not to work. There will be others that cannot work because of disability or are carers. There will be a bucket load of teenagers that are included in this that aren’t in full-time education that have never worked because they haven’t had chance to get job, despite wanting one.
But no. Every one of those 1.6 million people are lazy, workshy scroungers sponging off the state because ‘work doesn’t pay’. Or as I like to put it, capitalism sucks.
Now about that headline, this is the paragraph where I make it ok by stating that an expert says that, no, Daily Mail headlines aren’t truthful. They’re a load of bollox, isn’t it?
*the Express is not quite as forthright as the Mail, but still goes on in the same vain.
You might have heard of a campaign to move the UK onto the same timezone as Central Europe. There are a number of groups campaigning for this (see, for example, Lighter Later) and the proposals are going to be discussed in parliament on December 3rd.
Now, I don’t have any particularly strong feelings either way on this, but the arguments about saving a lot of energy by changing the time seem pretty persuasive to me. Of course not everyone is an ambivalent as I am and today the Mail on Sunday publishes an article by Peter Hitchens called “Don’t let them force you to live your life on Berlin Time”. The title makes it quite clear the direction that the article is going to take, but it’s astonishing just how ridiculous the article is. The blatant xenophobia is amazing.
But it is easy to see that since 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arrogant and expansionist new ¬German Empire adopted Mitteleuropaische Zeit (Central European Time to you), German power has been forcing its ideas of time on the rest of the Continent. First in 1914, and with redoubled force after 1940, the conquered nations of the Continent were instructed rather sharply to shift their clocks forward to suit the needs of German soldiers and German railways and German business.
A map of the present Central European Time Zone looks disturbingly like a map of a certain best-forgotten empire of 70 years ago. Would it really be silly to suspect that the neatness and standardisation fanatics of Brussels and Frankfurt, who have abolished almost every border in Europe, devised the European arrest warrant and the Euro passport and the European number plate and the European flag – and imposed a single currency on almost every state – would not also like a single time zone?
In a particularly nice touch, there’s a black and white picture of someone adjusting a public clock with the caption “Forced change: The Nazis made occupied nations adopt German time”.
Now, there may be good reasons to object to this change but if there are, Hitchens seems to have missed them completely. Bringing the argument down to this disgusting “who won the war, anyway?” level is surely a tacit admission that Hitchens has no reasonable arguments against the proposals.
Hitchens does, at least, mention the benefits that supporters of the change expect to see, but he decides that “many of these claims are pretty much guesswork”. To back this up he points out that:
Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day.
This is, of course, indisputable. But what Hitchens forgets to mention is that supporters of the changes know this. It’s the redistribution of the daylight hours which brings the benefits, not some (scientifically improbable) lengthening of the day. It’s a straw man of the most obvious kind.
The most offensive part of the article is the way that Hitchens seamlessly merges the EU with the Third Reich. He ends with this chilling warning:
If we are foolish enough to hurry down this path, it is by no means certain that we shall ever be allowed back if we decide we do not like it. Once we have fallen in, who would be surprised by a quiet Brussels Directive making the change permanent, whatever Parliament does? Now is the time to save our own time.
I’m all in favour of a debate about these changes. No-one would suggest making a change of this size without a full discussion taking place first. But surely those opposing the changes can find better arguments than this poisonous nonsense.
This post was originally posted by Uponnothing at his Angry Mob blog. It is reproduced here with kind permission.
I know it is not news to anyone that the Daily Mail is staggeringly hypocritical, but sometimes it is just worth repeating because they do something like this:
Phil Woolas is a deeply unpleasant man who not content with authorising the forceful deportation of children during his time as Immigration Minister also decided to run for re-election by – and these are the word of the Daily Mail no less: ‘[embarking] on a toxic campaign of lies, smears and dirty tricks to “make the white folk angry” enough to vote for him.’ The Daily Mail is appalled at the fact ‘that while he was stirring up racial ill-feeling against his rival, Phil Woolas was the minister in charge of immigration’.
It is worth mentioning at this point that Minority Thought and Primly Stable have already covered this story and they both move in the same direction here, the only direction possible, and that is to point out the Daily Mail’s own record of running ‘a toxic campaign of lies, smears and dirty tricks to ‘make the white folk angry’. Minority Thought puts forward the smears of Nick Clegg during the election campaign in which the Daily Mail asked: ‘Is there ANYTHING British about LibDem leader?’ Minority Thought then moves on to the recent announcement of a proposed strike on Bonfire Night by the Fire Brigades Union, to which the Daily Mail responded by rooting through the bins of union general secretary Matt Wrack; as well as knocking the doors of various family members to dig for dirt.
Both Minority Thought and Primly Stable give a few examples of the Mail’s efforts to stir up racial tension, but in reality one would need an encyclopedic memory to recall all of them, and it would make this blog post as long as the entire archive to list them. I’ll attempt to pick out a few of their more disgraceful efforts anyway, just to ram the point home that the Mail can hardly criticise a few leaflets, when it has thousands of newspaper editions doing far worse – under the current editor, Paul Dacre, so no excuses.
First of all, the Daily Mail repeatedly repeats the myth that immigrants and asylum seekers rush to the top of social housing lists at the expense of local, white folk. In July 2009 the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released a report on social housing that the BBC summed-up thus:
There is no evidence that new arrivals in the UK are able to jump council housing queues, an Equality and Human Rights Commission report says.Once they settle and are entitled to help, it adds, the same proportion live in social housing as UK-born residents…
“It is largely a problem of perception,” he [Housing minister John Healey] told Today.
“The report shows there is a belief, a wrong belief, that there is a bias in the system.”
Accept, of course, the Daily Mail, who instead took a different angle:
This article ignored the main finding of the report in order to protect the Daily Mail narrative that immigrants were being treated better than ‘indigenous’ Brits, a narrative that fuels much of the BNP support as well as the rising militarism of the EDL. Just before the Daily Mail completely whitewashed the findings of this report they were still pushing the myth hard:
‘The “British homes for British workers” plan, if it succeeds, will force councils to end the unfairness which sees immigrants with large families vault to the top of the council house list’.
Just last month the Daily Mail were again repeating the myth by claiming that Birmingham City Council was putting ‘Asylum seekers last in the housing queue: Britain’s biggest council decides to put its locals first’. The implication was clear: all other councils were still putting asylum seekers at the top of the housing queue.
Or what about the annual claim that the majority of new born boys in the UK are called ‘Mohammed’? This year the Daily Mail’s coverage earned the first Five Chinese Crackers‘ ‘Tabloid bullshit of the month award’, against some stiff competition given that every tabloid and some broadsheets were running with this myth. I’ll let 5CC take over:
Here’s why your version won:
It’s a crap trick. Adding together 12 variations of a name and saying the official list has Mohammed at number 16 without pointing out that the official list doesn’t add any variations of names together is just a bit dishonest.
As is not bothering to mention exactly how popular a name Mohammed is among Muslims.
Or that altogether, boys named every variation of Mohammed made up around just 2% of all boys. Actually, the number of boys named all variations of Mohammed actually took a slight drop since last year, but you didn’t mention that either.
It’s an old crap trick. I was mentioning it on my blog back in 2007, when the trick made it look as though Mohammed was the second most popular boy’s name.
It scaremongers unnecessarily about Muslims.
Or how about the Daily Mail coverage of Winterval (again, they are not the only newspaper guilty of pushing this myth)? At first the banning of Christmas was aimed at the ‘PC brigade’ but the Mail has now realised it has a much better target: Muslims. The PC brigade were banning Christmas in case it offended Muslims. Councils, not content with giving them all the benefits and free houses denied to good old British white-folk, they were now ‘pandering’ to their ‘demands’.
This may seem a ludicrous idea, but it is believed by many, including the EDL whose leader, Stephen Lennon, recently threatened any council thinking of ‘pandering to Muslims’ in an interview with the Times:
He said that “reluctantly” he uses the threat of a demonstration as “blackmail” to ensure that councils do not pander to Islamic pressure groups to change British traditions. “We are now sending letters to every council saying that if you change the name of Christmas we are coming in our thousands and shutting your town down.”
Who are these ‘Islamic pressure groups’? When has any Muslim ever wanted to ‘ban Christmas’? Phil Woolas used racial tensions to get re-elected, the Daily Mail use racial tensions to sell newspapers, whilst providing a stable diet of disinformation to bolster support and shape the ideology of right-wing extremists in the UK. Christmas has never been banned and councils have never renamed it. The myth has been debunked so many times it is worrying that a collection of adults believes it to such an extent they are writing to every council.
So, what is worse than leaflets stirring up racial tension? The tabloid press.
This was originally posted at www.fivechinesecrackers.com, where I’ll be selecting a dodgy tabloid story for the award on the last Saturday of every month.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s here. It’s…
Fanfare please…
…the 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award.
This has been a short month for me since I’ve been away for half of it, but I’ve been paying attention to blogs and keeping my eye out for particularly good bullshit. I considered breaking the rules for the first award and presenting it to MigrationWatch for being particularly rubbish this month, but rules is rules so MigrationWatch just get a raspberry blown in their direction.
Actual tabloid contenders included:
Most of the tabloids and the Telegraph pretending an extractor fan had to be removed because of Muslims
Most of the tabloids pretending Aldi had banned poppies
Most of the tabloids blarting on about BBC presenters wearing their poppies too early
The Mail for it’s head poppingly stupid attempt to link Ed Miliband and Joe Stalin
The Daily Star for every front page headline they’ve ever printed, ever
The winner was a version of another story that was picked up and churned everywhere, but some coverage was better than others. The Sun even managed to report this story properly, something that the Telegraph, The Mail, The Express, The Star and to an extent the Mirror all failed to do.
It’s the ‘the Muslims are invading and Mohammed is the most popular name and they’re trying to keep it a secret‘ nonsense.
The tough part is choosing which of the many, many versions should win. Runner up is the Telegraph, which nearly sneaked a win for laughably trying to pretend that Mohammed is secretly the most popular boy’s name. But the winner of the 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award, for the reasons outlined in the email below, is:
Your story, chosen for being such an excellent example of tabloid reporting prowess, is the winner of the first ever 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award, presented by me at Five Chinese Crackers. In such a crowded field with all the crap tabloids and the Telegraph covering the same thing it was a tough choice, but your version beat even the Telegraph’s, which pretended not only that Mohammed was the most popular boy’s name, but that it was a secret.
Here’s why your version won:
It’s a crap trick. Adding together 12 variations of a name and saying the official list has Mohammed at number 16 without pointing out that the official list doesn’t add any variations of names together is just a bit dishonest.
As is not bothering to mention exactly how popular a name Mohammed is among Muslims.
Or that altogether, boys named every variation of Mohammed made up around just 2% of all boys. Actually, the number of boys named all variations of Mohammed actually took a slight drop since last year, but you didn’t mention that either.
It’s an old crap trick. I was mentioning it on my blog back in 2007, when the trick made it look as though Mohammed was the second most popular boy’s name.
It scaremongers unnecessarily about Muslims.
The Mail was probably the first paper to pull the trick this year. Blogs were already calling bullshit on the story a day before any other paper has dated its version. Yours is dated the 28th too, but that could just be when you rewrote the copy originally provided by someone else. That would be more tragic when you think about it, your name on an embarassingly crap scaremongering trick that you didn’t even pull yourself.
Even the Sun managed to report this story properly.
The prize is essentially a crap drawing of an award, but you will now be in contention for the 5cc tabloid bullshitter of the year award 2011. You’ve got 14 months to get as many monthly prizes as possible to be a winner, so keep up the good work!
If you’d like to make an acceptance comment, reply to this email and I’ll publish it at Five Chinese Crackers. In the meantime, you might want to look at this post I published on my blog a while back. You might also want to add ’scaremonger about the number of ethnic minority babies being born like I did earlier this year’ to the list of stuff I mention there.
Anyway, well done. Give yourself a lolly.
Cheers then!
5cc
So, there we go. That’s it for this month. If you spot any really choice bullshit in the coming month, email a link to fivechinesecrackers [AT] gmail [DOT] com, or DM me @5ChinCrack on twitter, and I’ll consider it.
> The Mail’s story is mince. It does not show that 75% of disability claimants are fit to work. It shows that 75% of those who apply for the benefit under a new system of testing introduced by the Department of Work and Pensions under New Labour, wherein outsourced medical professionals are incentivised to reject patients, are either rejected or withdraw their applications, which means that the new system is designed to exclude the vast majority of those who apply. Whether or not this means those rejected by the assessors are actually fit for work is not clear. Even if those rejected were indeed fit for work, this would tell us nothing about those currrently on disability allowance.
>The Mail does not discuss the failings of Atos Origin – the private sector assessment contractors whom they mention in their article. It is their assessments that are resulting in the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of people from incapacity and disability benefits. Yet, as they have been hired to help the government meet its target of driving 1 million people of disability rolls, they have a vested interest in finding people to be fit for work. The Child Poverty Action Group has written to Chancellor Osbourne complaining about “the woeful inadequacies in the design of the Work Capability Assessment and shortcomings in quality of assessments undertaken by Atos”. The assessment quality is often a problem because the medical professional used by Atos to undertake medical examinations or review the evidence may not have the qualified experience necessary to make a judgment on complex medical problems that people can have. Just as often, it is a problem because the investigation is perfunctory, and unilluminating. (See this discussion). Because one has been deemed ‘fit to work’ by Atos does not mean that one has been properly examined, or that one is indeed fit to work.
> The Mail relies on the suggestion that people are ‘trying it on’, and that if the new testing system was applied, perhaps as many as 75% of those who receive the benefit would be rejected as workshy chancers. The evidence of past research shows that the vast majority of those claiming disability-related benefits are in fact disabled. Most such claimants are concentrated in former industrial areas where manufacturing and mining industries regularly produced crippling or disabling accidents. The research finds that at most the government could expect to remove half a million from disability allowance by introducing stricter definitions and procedures. That’s not a negligible sum, but a) it’s less than 20% of claimants, not 75%, and b) there’s no evidence that those who would be removed are deliberately evading work or have trivial complaints. Rather, they would find themselves compelled to undertake various forms of education and training that would make them apt for some forms of work, so that they could be reclassified as jobseekers and put on lower benefits. Surveys of disability benefit claimants find that there are about a million of them who would like to return to work if properly supported. But there isn’t such support in place, and there aren’t actually millions of jobs waiting to be filled by such people, nor has the government made any indication that it will seek to create those jobs – quite the contrary these days – so the changes introduced by the last government, with Tory support, are actually about reducing the income and consumption of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.
> The Mail relies on apparently shocking, but false, and irrelevant, claims to bolster its case. For example, the Mail thinks this is a right laugh: “Incredibly, 7,100 tried to claim because they had sexually transmitted diseases and nearly 10,000 because they were too fat.” The DWP breaks up initial self-assessment claims according to the categories of the International Classification of Diseases. The Mail has, shall we say, taken liberties in decoding the technical jargon used. Let’s start with the figure for being “too fat”, which corresponds with the category in the DWP report labelled “Endocrine, Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases”. This category includes all sorts of problems such pituitary, thyroid, and pancreatic disorders. These are not reducible to being “too fat”. As it happens, however, obesity-related disability is a genuine problem and is about more than fatty tissue. There is a strong relationship between obesity and health problems limiting one’s ability to work (see). Being obese is often a symptom of underlying problem – a sudden change in metabolism or rapidly diminished mobility. It can create severe functional impairments that prevent people from working. There’s nothing in this to laugh at – unless you’re a Daily Mail reader, or Top Gear fan. Now let’s consider the claim concerning STDs and disability. This figure corresponds to the DWP category “diseases of the genitourinary system”. This includes such problems as acute renal failure, renal tubular acidosis, bone and kidney diseases, breast hypertrophy, etc etc. These are not sexually transmitted diseases, but they can be serious disorders and highly painful and debilitating conditions. Again, the only humour available here is the comedy of the psychopath. The Mail’s claim is absurdly, flatly false – a downright lie.
> The Mail seeks to give the impression that even those who have been turned down for incapacity or disability benefits have grabbed millions from the system: “Even so, those who have failed or avoided the test since it was introduced have managed to claim as much as £500million in total before being screened out.” In fact, during the first three months in which the assessment takes place, claimants received £65 a week, exactly what they would receive on jobseekers’ allowance. They have not duped the system out of money to which they are not entitled. In fact, jobseekers’ allowance is a very small benefit that has been steadily declining in value since the 1980s, from about 16% of the average wage in 1987-8 to 10% in 2007-8.
> Last thing. I’ve picked on today’s Daily Mail front page. It’s actually the same as the Express front page from two weeks ago. And it’s almost identical in the nature of its claims and basic agenda to recent Daily Mail articles, and to numerous other front page shock exclusive reports made for the last few years by the right-wing tabloids, inspired by DWP press releases. It’s also identical to ignorant claims made by the former investment banker David Freud while he was working with the last government to ‘reform’ welfare. It is a propaganda line, constantly promoted by the state, business and the right-wing media. It fits in which the agenda of capital, but is rejected by trade unions, charities, and disability groups. The regularity of its appearance in widely read newspapers is more decisive as a factor in its acceptance than the reliability of its conclusions. Undoubtedly, this will have contributed to a situation in which most people, who lack access to the kinds of information that would expose the propaganda as a sham, will either endorse or acquiesce in cuts to such benefits. It is repeated far more often than any criticism of business, or of bankers, and certainly of the capitalist system which produces mass unemployment and incapacity. This is, in other words, a concrete example of the ideological power of capital.
