Daily Mail Migration Egg On Face

Even before the New Year celebrations had begun, the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre were frightening Daily Mail readers with tales of the waiting migrant hordes massing on the borders of Romania and Bulgaria, ready to surge across Europe as soon as midnight had chimed, all of them en route to the UK to take our, well, everything.

What's f***ing wrong with migration scare stories, c***?!? Er, with the greatest of respect, Mr Jay

And, perhaps less well remembered, on New Year’s Day, the Dacre doggies treated the readers to yet another migration frightener, telling that Romania was “handing” passports to potentially millions of Moldovans, as well as Bulgaria doing likewise to some living in Macedonia. And, just for good measure, Hungary was issuing passports to ethnic Hungarians living in other countries.

Yes, there were not just 29 million of them, all bound for the UK, but millions more too! Sadly, both articles were nothing more than dishonest scare stories. Most Hungarians looking for work outside their own country are most likely to travel to Austria and perhaps Germany first. Many of those departing Romania and Bulgaria were also heading for Germany, where they don’t have a problem with migration.

But, as the deeply subversive Guardian has pointed out, “Flood of Bulgarian and Romanian migrant workers fails to materialise ... 122,000 Bulgarians and Romanians are now working in the UK, 3,000 fewer than when visa restrictions were in force”. So not only have there not been millions of new migrants fetching up on our shores, the movement in the first three months of the year has been the other way!

So was the Mail apologising? Was there to be conspicuous consumption of humble pie over at Northcliffe House? You jest. Of the earlier scare stories there has been no mention. Instead, readers are told “Ukip warnings over Romanian and Bulgarian influx 'nonsense' says minister as number with jobs in UK falls after work curbs lifted”. Yes, a big UKIP boy did it and ran away!

It gets more desperate: “Before employment restrictions were lifted ministers repeatedly refused to estimate how many Romanians and Bulgarians would arrive in the UK, leading Ukip to raise concerns that a ‘massive influx’ would place extra demands on public services and depress wages. Amid growing worries the Government introduced measures to prevent EU migrants from claiming unemployment benefits for their first three months here”.

They couldn’t claim anyway, but hey ho. This is a magnificent attempt at deflection: at no point are the earlier scare stories mentioned, nor the condemnation of the Mail for running them. And, as the late John Smith might have put it, it’s a bit rich trying to dump on UKIP, whose spinners were doing nothing different to the Mail.

The Daily Mail: still the paper demonising foreigners to sell papers since 1933.