ANGRY MOB

The Daily Mail's coverage of the election has been a disgraceful, dishonest, scaremongering mess. But then what else could you expect from a newspaper that constantly makes stuff up. Take this story for example: 'Hospital worker who saved 60 fish from drained ornamental pond 'faces prosecution and £1,000 fine'*:

A hospital worker who rescued 60 fish from their ornamental pond when it was being drained has claimed he is facing prosecution and a £1,000 fine.

Clive Roberts saved the fish in an act of mercy by scooping them into a bucket to move them to his own garden pond.

The 58-year-old said officials at the Environment Agency told him he needed to go through red tape to get a formal licence to move the goldfish...

"I've been told I could be prosecuted - it seems a bit unfair when all I was trying to do was help"...

The Environment Agency say it is illegal to remove fish from their habitat without permission. Officials say the law is designed to prevent the spread of lethal fish diseases.

A quick read of the comments confirms that this is indeed another crazy case of 'elf 'n' safety gone mad' and the evil intervention of the 'PC brigade'. The comments section also confirms that terrible habit of Daily Mail readers not being able to make it to the end of any article they have ever 'read', because if they did they'd read this:

An Environment Agency spokesman said: 'Mr Roberts has not been arrested or charged with any offence and will not be interviewed under caution.

'Moving fish short distances between garden ponds is not an offence, as it does not present a significant risk to the environment. The Environment Agency does not investigate such incidents.

'In situations where fish need to be moved at short notice we can offer help and advice, and would be happy to advise the hospital on the best way to maintain a healthy stock of fish.'

Still, it brings their attempt to be a serious political commentator into sharp focus, given that even basic news journalism is so far beyond their grubby grasp.

Once again it is interesting to look at the url for the story which is 'Wales hospital worker', surely it should be 'Welsh hospital worker'...

One of the best things about the recent election - in my humble opinion - is that lots of people have been talking about politics and actually getting really interested in what is going on. The worst thing about the recent election - again, in my humble opinion - is that so many of these discussions are reliant almost entirely on dishonest tabloid narratives. Almost exclusively, these narratives are based around one topic: immigration. I have heard people talk about immigration increasing the deficit problem, causing a depression in wages, shrinking the available jobs for 'British workers' and so on. Immigration must be reduced, they proclaim, as a matter of extreme importance: immigration is in their minds intricately linked to all the social and economic problems that they care to list.

So I respond. I point out that immigrants are a net contributor to the economy and that without them the deficit would be a little bit worse. I point out that the idea that there are a fixed amount of jobs is a fallacy, and that studies have shown that increased immigration does not lower wages. Evidence suggests if anything that it actually causes a small rise in the average wage. Whether they like it or not, immigration has played a big part in economic growth, growth that has enabled Britain to carry the burden of its debt better than many expected.

With each tabloid narrative countered you face another one, and the longer this rally continues the more likely it is that you arrive at the final argument against immigration: 'Ah', says the tabloid debater, 'But what about social cohesion?'. This is the trump card, this is the point where if the debater has accepted that immigrants are a financial benefit to the economy, they have to bring up a deeper problem, one that makes any economic benefit just not worth it.

Social cohesion. It sounds good, it sounds considered, it sounds intelligent and it sounds like a really important thing; for who could not want social cohesion? Yet when you sit back and consider what 'social cohesion' actually means it becomes a hollow phrase, one that serves only to highlight the inherent problems of modernity, not immigration. I tried to put this argument into words a while ago when discussing Richard Littlejohn's assertion that he wasn't against immigrants per se, he wast just against immigrants that did not 'integrate' into British society.

As I said at the time: 'Integration is such a woolly, indefinable idea that of course it is an easy stick to beat immigrants with', and I believe that the same can be said of 'social cohesion'. We live in a society that still has strong class barriers, so should an immigrant integrate with all social classes, or identify the social class that best suits their wealth? Is social cohesion damaged by immigration, but not by the massive difference between the wealthiest people in this country and the poorest, and the rigid political and social structure that ensures the gap between the two widens with each passing year?

To pretend that 'social cohesion' is anything other than a ethereal ideal says a lot about the core dishonesty that defines so much of the dialogue about immigration. Social cohesion has never existed in the UK, a society that more than most always defines itself in terms of class and wealth. Does the fact that we have the traditionally working class Labour Party winning the majority of seats and hearts in Northern England, Scotland and Wales, whilst the elitist Conservative Party win seats and votes almost exclusively in the wealthier Southern parts of England suggest that social cohesion has more pressing enemies than immigration?

As a recent study suggested, the BNP are not buoyed by the votes of people living in areas of high immigration, rather they consistently win the votes of the poorest, least-educated citizens in the UK. People can feel disenfranchised by society and vote BNP without having any social or economic interaction with immigrants. They are told by the tabloid press that the reason they have no job, no money, poor social housing and worst of all no hope, is that immigration is 'unchecked' and 'uncontrolled'; whilst those 'flocking / flooding / swamping' here are 'showered / hosed / gifted' with masses of benefits at their expense. They are explicitly told that the immigrants are responsible for their woes, by a tabloid press that has a huge amount invested in maintaining the wealthy elite who really cause the majority of social problems.

The irony is that one of the key issues tearing apart social cohesion is not immigration, but rather the tabloid narrative that has been so carefully constructed to frame the immigration debate. The narrative has created a huge number of citizens that feel like they have lost out because of immigration, that somehow their suffering - real or imagined - is a direct result of immigration. The narrative hasn't just altered the perception of the working classes, it has infiltrated every aspect of society. During the election quiet middle-England villages found their greens stabbed by UKIP signs, villages that to all intents and purposes remained physically untouched by immigration were nevertheless keen to support a party that was 'tough' on immigration and almost exclusively xenophobic in its outlook.

People up and down the country - irrespective of local realities - all had the same discussions, based on the same tabloid narratives and the same tabloid lies. When participating in these discussions I'm always reminded that everyone is 'entitled to their own opinions'. I could not agree more. I just wish, sometimes, the people I argued with actually had their own opinions.

So, on the face of it things went pretty badly for the Liberal Democrats, who look set to end up with less sets than they had in 2005. However, you then start to look at how many people actually voted for the Liberal Democrats and you start to get pretty angry with the current system. The Conservatives gained 10,615,958 votes and currently have 302 seats. The Liberal Democrats received 6,781,005 votes (over 60% of the Conservative total) and currently have just 57 seats. That means the Conservatives have less than twice as many votes, but six times as many seats.

The results for Labour are equally unfair. Labour received 8,535,952 votes, less than two million more than the Liberal Democrats, but currently have exactly 200 more seats - nearly four times as many as the Liberal democrats, even though the Liberal Democrats had over 75% as many votes as Labour. The Liberal Democrats made electoral reform one of the central features of their campaign and, fittingly, the election results have more than proven their point that reform is needed.

I made these points on Twitter and someone responded with a 'problem': 'ah', they said, 'but if you brought in Proportional Representation then UKIP and the BNP would win seats, and that is a bad thing'. I'd disagree in principle: it isn't necessarily a 'bad thing', it is merely democracy in action. We need to realise the reasons why the BNP are gaining support (up 1.2% in this election) and it isn't - as newspapers would argue - that immigration is 'uncontrolled' or that British people are being treated as 'second-class citizens'.

If we want to stop the BNP gaining seats in an election we shouldn't block electoral reform, we should actually tackle the reasons why people vote BNP. The reasons are simple: a lack of education, a lack of personal experience of immigrants - meaning that they always remain an abstract concept (the 'other', 'them', 'they'), rather than a human being - and most importantly the constant dishonest stories run by the press that are regularly quoted on the BNP website and by BNP voters when they explain why they vote BNP. If we want to stop the BNP gaining voter share we need to tackle an unregulated, racist press that has an agenda of creating hatred towards immigrants.

As I pointed out recently, immigration is an issue that cannot be discussed whilst the current dishonest tabloid narratives remain unchallenged. Research has been conducted that has shown that BNP voter share is less in areas with a high immigrant population, precisely for the 'access to reality' reason I have mentioned above. When newspapers blame New Labour's immigration policy for the rise of the BNP they are lying to cover their own complicity in the rise of the far right in this country.

This does raise an interesting dilemma for the tabloid press. Currently they can offer implied support to the BNP by printing a consistent stream of lies for BNP voters and leaders to feed on without having to overly worry about such lies having an electoral consequence. As we saw last night, most BNP candidates polled quite poorly (although in several areas - such as the almost exclusively white, immigrant-free Blaenau Gwent - they got well over 1,000 votes) and not even party leader Nick Griffin could win a seat. However, if PR was brought in then the tabloid press would be well aware that the current BNP vote could win the party seats. Then when the inevitable recrimination starts after such a result the press wouldn't be able to avoid their own complicity in creating the very lies that drives people to vote BNP.

Essentially, PR would demonstrate just what a evil influence the tabloid press has other poorly educated or poorly integrated voters. Currently a lot of people understand that the tabloid press is the biggest recruiter for the BNP, but because of our electoral system we can all be content with just a quiet boo when the low polling results are announced for each BNP candidate. I cannot help but think that if BNP votes turned into BNP seats we'd all have to be a lot more vociferous about just who is to blame.