Sun Child Refugee Claim BUSTED

[Update at end of post]

It’s clear that the Murdoch poodles at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun are not going to let such trivial things as facts get in the way of their continuing campaign of incitement against the unaccompanied children who have been allowed to leave the Calais refugee camp and join families already in the UK. Despite their having blatantly lied in this morning’s lead story, there they are again like a dog returning to its vomit.

Sun "research" fails again

The Home Office has said, in response to the Sun’s “teeth” claims, “dental checks to verify age of young refugees hoping to settle in UK would be ‘inaccurate and inappropriate’”. Moreover, as the Guardian has reported, “The official rejection of the demand from Conservative backbenchers was welcomed by the British Dental Association, which had earlier condemned the proposal as inappropriate and inaccurate”.

As to the photos showing some of the unaccompanied children, the Sun has been misleading its readers: “It has transpired that seven of the remaining children were younger and officials had asked photographers not to take pictures of them”. That’s as in younger than 16. So the only ones the paper’s readers see are 16 and 17. There have been several younger than that. The Sun doesn’t show them.

Worse, as the Guardian has also told, “George Gabriel of Citizens UK, which has been working in the Calais camp for more than a year on the transfer of child refugees to Britain under its Safe Passage programme, said that one of the photographs of ‘overage’ refugees that appeared on the front pages of British newspapers on Wednesday might in fact be a translator”. Did the Sun research this possibility? Did it heck.

That’s a pity, because the man on the front of yesterday’s Sun front page - and today’s Daily Star front page - is indeed an adult interpreter. THE SUN GOT IT WRONG. Very wrong. They lied to their millions of readers. And they aren’t sorry. Because the name of the game is not news reporting, but racist incitement. It’s like the past half-century of enlightenment on such issues never happened.

Instead, the paper has run yet another slice of incitement prominently featuring Tory bigot David T C Davies, who has now said “We must not be naive about this. It’s no good Lily Allen turning up with tears in her eyes and all the rest of it – we need to be quite hard-nosed here”. So it’s all right to be a raving bigot and use my taxes to fund it, then.

And it gets worse: Davies has also said “Someone who is willing to throw themselves on to an electrified rail line or jump into a moving lorry isn’t going to be terribly worried about having an X-ray”. Well of course - throwing yourself on to live conductor rail, that’s just trivial stuff, innit? Christ on a bike, this buffoon has literally no sense of self-awareness.

SPOT THE BRAINCELL

As for the Sun’s claim “AS THE third batch of so-called ‘child refugees’ arrive in Britain this morning it has been revealed more than two-thirds of them who had their ages assessed by the Home Office were found to actually be adults, official figures show”, that is the whole point. THE ONES WHO WERE FOUND TO BE ADULTS WEREN’T LET IN.

Meanwhile, those like Match Of The Day presenter Gary Lineker, who has been prepared to call out the racist bigotry, get a kicking on social media from the pond life. Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it? Yeah, well, maybe it doesn’t. As you were, Sun hacks.

[UPDATE 21 October 0905 hours: the Home Office has stated that the person in the photo was not an interpreter.

But that does not mean he was one of the unaccompanied teenagers, either.

That has not stopped the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog from all but making that claim (sorry Fawkes folks, but if you aren't going to link to this blog, I'm certainly not doing you the favour) and declaring that their bosses in the mainstream press are right.

That, O Great Guido, is the difference between this blog and yours: I say if there is doubt, while you just lie for the hell of it and hope no-one will notice]