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Thursday 16 June 2016

Mail Front Page - EU’re Busted

The legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre and his obedient hackery at the Daily Mail have decided to throw their paper’s clout behind the campaign for Britain to leave the EU. As a result, there have been a number of variously creative stories run over recent days intended to persuade all those readers that they should vote to leave, some of which have veered straight across the creativity median and into the dishonesty zone.
This excursion into post-reality journalism has been illustrated superbly by today’s Mail front page splash, which tellsAs politicians squabble over border controls, yet another lorry load of migrants arrives in UK declaring … WE’RE FROM EUROPE - LET US IN!” Thus another attempt to equate the EU’s principle of free movement of people with refugee movements as a result of conflict in the Middle East.

The article in support of this headline was all that Dacre could have wished for (probably because it was cobbled together on his direct order). Readers learnt “Squeezed in among storage boxes, another lorry load of migrants sneak into Britain … The 11 stowaways - three of them children - were intercepted by police in east London yesterday. Asked where they were from, they replied: ‘Europe.’" And there was more.

The dramatic pictures emerged as the Tories were accused of being in referendum chaos over border controls. George Osborne insisted there would be no change to European Union rules on freedom of movement … But only hours later Theresa May declared further reform was needed … Brexit campaigners said the Home Secretary had blown a huge hole in the case to Remain by effectively admitting the Government's renegotiation with Brussels was inadequate”. And the objective of this piece is what, exactly?

As if you needed to ask: “Under the free movement edict, 500million EU citizens enjoy free access to the UK. This will continue if Britain votes to Remain on June 23”. But there was one teensy problem with the Mail’s attempt to suggest that voting Remain means lots of people arriving in lorries - it wasn’t true. Minor point, eh?
Had the group in the lorry actually been “from Europe”, they would not have had to enter the UK in that way - they could have just rocked up at any airport, Eurostar station or ferry terminal, bought tickets and showed their EU member state passports. This group was not “from Europe”. It was from the Middle East. We know because they said so.

The BBC’s Daniel Sandford was quite clear when he Tweeted “Only one problem with the Daily Mail front page. I've listened to the video, and people in lorry clearly say ‘We're from Iraq’”. And that is why they stowed away in the back of a lorry. They are not “migrants”, they are not “from Europe”, they are refugees from Middle Eastern conflicts.

Had the BBC - or, indeed, any other broadcaster, dropped such an elementary clanger, the Mail would have been down on them like the proverbial tonne of bricks. But there will be no swift or willing retraction from Paul Dacre or any of his doggies.

The Mail has been caught deliberately lying in order to advance its agenda. And it will just carry on doing so. Being Paul Dacre means never having to say you’re sorry.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did they leave from a european country bound for the UK?

Anonymous said...

So the refugees ended up in east London.

I bet that pleased the local freedom-loving Alf Garnetts and Pearly Kings and Queens.

Or maybe not.

Anonymous said...

This is the type of dishonesty is real dog-whistle stuff for the thicker end of the DM's readership and 'comments beneath' is usually full of bile and spite. But I've just looked to find 'currently not accepting comments'. Does this mean the mods are busy elsewhere? Or could it be that smarter readers have inundated with comments full of contempt and ridicule for the lies and Dacre has taken fright, ordering the comments section to be pulled?

Nothing would surprise me about the cretin.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure that this debunk is correct. If you listen to the video for yourself (it's embedded in the DM story that is linked to), the guy in the lorry is asked where he comes from and he says something very unclear, with two syllables, the first sounds like a vowel intermediate between "E" and "O" and the second could (stress 'could') be "Raq" or "Rap". The man doing the questioning is obviously unsure of what he's just heard, because he says "Where's [that] then?"

I think (stress 'think') what the Mail is trying to do is paint the people in the lorry as frauds who are exploiting Europe's open borders to get into Britain by pretending to be from elsewhere in the EU. That would be fair enough, but it's not at all clear - for the same reason that this debunking isn't entirely successful. I wonder if the Mail's ambiguity was calculated, incompetence, or simply another case of 'too good to check'?

Andy McDonald said...

"We are currently not accepting comments" usually means one of three things:

1. The story is about an ongoing legal matter and commentary could be taken as contempt of court.

2. It's gone beyond even the Mail's standards of acceptability.

3. The story was bullshit and people are calling the Mail out on it.

J said...

Oh look... they just put a bit of extra text at the bottom, in small print.

"* In common with other newspapers, an earlier version of this agency story said that stowaways intercepted in east London had told police that they were ‘from Europe’. In fact, while they had travelled to the UK from mainland Europe, the migrants told police they were from Iraq and Kuwait."

Well gosh what a shocker! Not!

Anonymous said...

Oo look!......Another "agency story" - like the one Mackenzie got that prompted his over two decades of lies and propaganda about Hillsborough?

What a coincidence.

Not.

Daily Heil and Scum jobsworths are just about the lowest, cowardly slime even in the sewer they "work" in.

Gonzoland said...

@Jonathan Wilson
They continue to call the refugees 'migrants'.