In defence of Ryanair

Oh we do love to hate Ryanair. Low-cost airline? Pah! It’s a nasty little organisation, always looking for sneaky ways to charge customers more.

You could hear the sigh of whatever-next exasperation/outrage yesterday as the Mail brought out the “Now” word to report the company’s latest luggage policy – to revert to its old practice of allowing only one free item per passenger. “Now Ryanair charges you for hand luggage”. Note the neat use of “you”, so readers know exactly who the victim is here.

The report would certainly comply with the Editors’ Code standards of accuracy, but the tone is hostile. Passengers who turn up at the gate with two bags will have to put one in the hold, and face the “inconvenience” of having to collect it from the baggage carousel at their destination.
“Ryanair warned that anyone who refuses to put one of their carry-on bags in hold - for example because it contains valuables - will be blocked from travelling and will not be entitled to a refund.” 
Classic Mail, accentuating the negative.

But it was far from alone. For The Times “Millions of passengers will be stopped from taking wheeled luggage into the cabin of Ryanair flights amid claims that the current allowances are being abused by travellers.”

See! Millions of victims, while the airline’s explanation is presented as a “claim”, ie, something to be questioned.

So, too, is its marketing chief, who is seen “insisting” all over the place that this isn’t a money-making exercise. The inference being “in the face of all the evidence”. As the Mail reminds us: “Ryanair has frequently been criticised for the extra charges it levies on customers."

It also finds someone from an organisation called Fairer Finance to say: “This is a problem Ryanair created for themselves. By charging people a lot of money to check in bags, everybody has tried as hard as possible to avoid this. After years of treating customers with contempt, many will be suspicious of this.”

Here’s the Telegraph: “Ryanair is banning passengers from using weekend and wheelie bags as hand luggage, over claims that customers are abusing its "two items" rule and causing delays. From Nov. 1, millions of Ryanair passengers will be forced to put standard-sized hand luggage in the hold, unless they cough up £10 per return flight for priority boarding.”

There are those millions again. And now there’s a ban. And they’re being “forced” to put luggage in the hold or “cough up” ten quid. Again, all of that would probably pass muster with the Code’s accuracy clause, except there is no ban – or “bar”, as Metro puts it in its headline. You can still take those wheelie bags in the cabin if you’re prepared to pay.

Still, at least the Telegraph takes the trouble to compare baggage allowances with other airlines. The Mail, too, grudgingly admits that Easyjet allows only a single free bag and that passengers who want to take a second on board have to pay for extra legroom. Do you remember the headlines about this policy? No, nor do I. But paying for extra legroom isn’t the same is paying for priority boarding. Not least because Easyjet’s extra legroom seats cost £14.99 or £15.99. 

The Express also has “ban” in its intro, and the Mirror also makes passengers “cough up” a fiver per trip, but the i, Guardian and FT all manage to tell the story accurately and straight, and the Sun hits the nail on the head with its headlines (with the toughest count of all): “Airline 2nd bag charge” and “Ryanair axe freebie”.

I travel on Ryanair a lot. There are irritations.

It is virtually impossible to change a flight because the administrative charge makes it uneconomical: it’s almost always cheaper to write off the unwanted flight and rebook.

Customer service is a nightmare: it costs a fortune to talk to a person. But the fact that it’s an English-speaking business based on the British Isles leads us to forget that Ryanair is a foreign carrier, so contacting it involves international calls. Would we be as grumpy about expensive call charges if we were trying to contact Lufthansa or SwissAir?

And those bloody scratchcards – “your chance to help children’s charities” - and the fanfare when the flight touches down on time. Spare us, please!

Oh yes, there are irritations. But I’m still a pretty satisfied customer. And on abuse of the luggage allowance, Ryanair is absolutely right.

Those suitcases on wheels are a menace. I blame Alan Sugar and The Apprentice. It’s one thing for 16 wannabe tycoons to totter/swagger across London Bridge with their bags in tow, but when it comes to thousands sauntering through the departure lounge…

It is perfectly possible to wheel such a case alongside you, but no, most trail it behind them, oblivious to the hazard it poses to people behind. It’s like a dog walker who has no idea what her pooch is doing until the lead tautens and she turns to find it having a poo or sniffing a Labrador. These cases weigh at most 10kg, what’s wrong with picking them up? It’s supposed to be carry-on, not drag-on luggage.

The diehards won't lift their bags even when they board the plane, insisting on wheeling them down the aisle. And then there’s the general kerfuffle as they’re heaved up into the lockers.

Yes, Ryanair is right about the abuse and the delays. The rule used to be one bag per person. That was eased to allow a handbag/laptop case as well – possibly in response to complaints from airport shops who presumably lost potential sales because people wouldn’t be able to take their Ted Baker or Oasis bag in addition to their wheelie case/holdall. Signs popped up all over Stansted Airport saying “All airlines, including Ryanair, now allow a second bag” as an encouragement for waiting passengers to spend, spend, spend.

Whether they did or not, I don’t know. But I do know that people started turning up at the gate not with a cabin bag and a little handbag, but with two big bags. I also know that cabin crew struggle to get people on and off the planes as speedily as they used to. For a while they have been inviting passengers to put a bag in the hold for free, but it seems too few of us have done so, so now the airline is offering a financial deterrent – and a financial incentive, although yesterday’s coverage gave that less emphasis.

The new rules

So, with interests I hope disclosed, may I attempt a straight interpretation of the new Ryanair policy.

1: Passengers will be allowed to carry one bag with them without charge, as was the case until three years ago. This bag will, however, have to be smaller than it was under the previous one-bag policy.

2: Passengers will be allowed to put one bag weighing up to 10kg in the hold without charge. They will not have to check this in. They can simply drop it at the gate.

3: Passengers will be allowed to take two bags into the cabin if they pay £5 for priority boarding.

4: The check-in luggage allowance is being increased by 25% to 20kg and the charge being cut by 28% from £35 to £25. That represents a 46% price reduction in terms of kilos per £..

Case study

And here’s an attempt at a comparison of what the cost of flying to southwest France on Monday would be if the new charges were in place. The Easyjet service goes from Gatwick to Toulouse, Ryanair's from Stansted to Bergerac. Easyjet's cheapest fare for the trip is £36.49, Ryanair's £14.99.

Total cost with two carry-on bags, one checked 20kg bag, extra legroom/speedy boarding: Easyjet: £67.48; Ryanair: £54.99 (under the present regime, this combination would cost £64.99.)

With two carry-on bags, premium seat/priority boarding, no hold luggage: Easyjet: £51.48; Ryanair: £29.99 (unchanged).

With one big carry-on bag: Easyjet (without speedy boarding) : £36.99; Ryanair (including priority boarding): £19.99.

With one small carry-on bag: Easyjet: £36.99; Ryanair: £14.99

With one small carry-on bag, 10kg bag in hold: Easyjet: £52.99. Ryanair: £14.99.

There are so many permutations. But the bottom line is that Ryanair almost always offers the lowest fare for people who just want to get on a plane, land on time and get to where they want to be with minimum fuss. Michael O’Leary once said he wanted travel on his airline to be like getting on and off a bus. It’s supposed to be no-frills. That’s the business model. If you want extra bits, you can pay for them, but don’t expect everyone else to pay for them too. 

Hence the joke about charging to use the loo. The inevitable furore followed, but it was never going to happen. The idea was to convince passengers “to go” before starting their journey, just as parents do before loading their children into the car, in the interests of efficiency and a smooth flight.

Mr O’Leary may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but – as the Times and Telegraph reports point out – millions of people use his services. In fact, it can fairly be called Europe's favourite airline, since it has the most passengers: 117m  last year, against BA's 100m and Easyjet's 70m. This is, of course why the papers are so interested in everything it does - and why the Express and Mirror were wrong to treat the announcement as a business, rather than consumer, story and put it at the back of the book.
Sometimes it seems that O'Leary prefers to treasure the reputation as our least-favourite airline. Blaming your customers for the introduction of a new charge is not good PR. Ryanair doesn’t do good PR.

What would be the point when the Press has already made up its mind before a word has been uttered? After all, who would read a story that said "Chuck your bag in the hold for nothing, without having to turn up early to check it in"? Or "Ryanair slashes baggage charges by 46%"?

As another Irishman from way back would say: it's the way they tell 'em.

The Press v Google - or pots v kettles

You could almost touch the schadenfreude as big-name advertisers walked away from YouTube after finding themselves appearing alongside extremists.
 "At last!" proclaimed a Daily Mail leader hailing the "fightback against web anarchy". Google (which owns YouTube) rightly stood accused of profiting from hatred, it said:

Day after day, the already deeply tarnished reputations of the filth-peddling, tax-dodging terror-abetting internet behemoths sink lower into the mire.

For many years, Google, Facebook and Twitter had wilfully turned a blind eye to poisonous content, it continued. But now the day of reckoning had arrived. The BBC and Whitehall had pulled their ads. And when banks, supermarkets and Marks & Spencer joined the exodus, there was more from Dominic Lawson on the "utter shamelessness of the filth-peddling web giants".

For The Times, which set the ball rolling with an investigation by Alexi Mostrous, this was the "shaming of Google", which should now face up to its responsibilities. The alternative was "an unacceptable role as an accessory to barbarism".

The Mail and the Murdoch stable hate the internet giants because they think they are stealing their revenue and readers. Having had the field to themselves for more than 200 years, newspapers resent the interlopers. Free marketeers all, they just can't stand competition. It's the same as their gripes against the BBC (publicly funded left-wing propaganda - just look at that anti-Brexit Countryfile with the farmer saying he'd go under without migrant fruit pickers) but writ larger.
Essentially, their cry is "It's not fair!"

Murdoch titles dominate the British print media and his Sky channels dominate the satellite television market. The Sun and Times reach 31 million people a month, according to the National Readership Survey, and figures from the British Audience Research Bureau suggest that the Sky channels between them achieved a total audience of about 8 million last week. The Mail is the most successful news website in the world and its print and online offerings now reach 29 million a month. But they want more.

Murdoch not only wants full control of Sky, but he wants the opposition nobbled. Having moved into BT's world of telephones, he started complaining - through his newspapers - that it was anti-competitive for BT to have control of the cabling. And when a deal was reached with Ofcom for Openreach to be hived off as a separate company under the same umbrella, that still wasn't enough. He wants an enforced sale.
The "respectable" argument is that BT is failing to invest enough in improving broadband speeds - a view that SubScribe wholeheartedly endorses - but it's hard not to notice that BT Sport has been outbidding Sky for key football rights.

The fight with Google goes back even further, with Murdoch threatening in 2009 to remove his newspapers' content from the search engine in a row over free access. That was followed in 2014 by News Corp's appeal to the much-derided European Commission for action to combat what it called "a platform for piracy". Then came the furore over tax in January last year. Mostrous, who had been honoured for his work on celebrity tax avoidance in 2015, was again on duty for The Times, showing how little tax Google paid and how the Government had failed to get as much as other European countries out of the company.
It was a legitimate investigation - if a bit rich from a paper whose parent company had previously managed to pay not a penny of UK corporation tax on billions of pounds of income over a period of 11 years.

The latest assault is also a valid inquiry - the speed with which MPs and big businesses responded proves as much - and it has thrown up three distinct strands:

• the content itself;
• the algorithms that place advertisements alongside extremist videos;
• the fact that money generated by the ads goes to the video makers and so funds extremism

One of the biggest beefs of the Mail and the Sun is that the internet is not regulated. British newspapers, they say, are subject to the toughest regulatory system in the world. They invest money in journalism and strive for accuracy, but their very existence is being imperilled by people like Gary Lineker who can reach millions with a tweet that turns out to be misinformed. And don't get them started on fake news. (Well, actually, they’ve already started with the News Media Association’s submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s inquiry saying there should be a government investigation into Facebook and Google – but “don’t bring in any new rules for us”).

The Mail warmed to that theme in its leader on Saturday, accusing the web giants of ruthlessly invading the privacy of their users by gathering and exploiting personal information, going on: "Meanwhile, endless fake news and blatant libels are spread with impunity around the world."

Impunity? They must have short memories in Kensington, for only days before the Mail Online's own columnist Katie Hopkins had to pay libel damages and costs over a tweet.

For a technophobe who does not use a computer, Mail editor Paul Dacre seems remarkably well-informed about the "vile" material all over the web and its malign effects on society. His newspaper has run hundreds of stories on the subject and appears to be of the opinion that all such material – porn, fanaticism, body-shaming - should be removed. Yes, some of it is execrable, but wouldn’t that be censorship, an attack on free speech?

The advertisers seem more concerned about their good name than about removing content from the web. They don't want to be associated with inappropriate material. If Google cleans up its algorithms, they'll go back.

Then there's the notion that advertisers and their customers (and, in the case of Whitehall and the BBC, the taxpayer) are inadvertently funding hate because a proportion of the fees they pay ends up in the hands of the people producing the page on which their ad appears.
The papers say this adds up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Google says it is "pennies".
[SubScribe can attest to the fact that Google is not exactly generous in sharing the proceeds of web ads with the page producers, but then again SubScribe does not get millions of views, so please click on an ad or two!]

So the Mail could be said to be in favour of the ad boycott to force the removal of material that spreads hate and fear.

Wait a minute. Funding hate? Ad boycotts? Material that spreads hate and fear? Doesn't all that sound familiar?

For the past eight months a group called Stop Funding Hate has been trying to persuade household names not to advertise with the Mail, Sun and Express while they continue to run so many anti-immigration stories. It chose those three papers because they were called out by the UN for the tone of their coverage. The organisation - which has just raised more than  £100,000 through a crowd-funding appeal to expand its work - argues that it is not good for companies to be associated with such a material, that the newspapers are profiting from spreading hate and fear, and that by advertising with the newspapers, advertisers are effectively using their customers' money to fund those hate messages.

This is what the Mail had to say in a leader about that:

A more malicious threat comes from Left-wing campaigners who seek to blackmail firms into withdrawing advertising from newspapers with which they disagree.
Particular targets are those, like the Mail, which voice public concerns about mass unrestricted immigration and the wanton waste of taxpayers' money on overseas aid, while the elderly and vulnerable suffer at home.
But with fair-minded companies refusing to be bullied by groups such as Stop Funding Hate, this assault on free expression can also be overcome.

Thus far, only Lego and the Body Shop have shown tangible support for the SFH campaign. Most other advertisers, including some that have pulled away from Google, have responded along the lines that they have no say in what appears near their ads.
But their reaction to the Google "scandal" proves that they think they do - or at least that they do not want to be seen next to material that runs counter to their brand image. That is exactly the judgment SFH is asking them to make about the newspapers.

Let’s be clear:

• It is censorship for campaigners to ask advertisers to influence the mindset - as opposed to the specific content - of newspapers.
• It is not censorship for the Press to demand that Google removes material from its platforms.
• It is not censorship for advertisers to seek to influence what appears on Google’s websites.

Come on! That’s obtuse! You know that a radical cleric who has been banned from the country preaching jihad is far more dangerous than a newspaper telling you that migrants take all new jobs - even if the 120pt splash caps heading and story are wrong. One is a threat to Western democracies, the other is an honest mistake made in the rush of getting important information across to readers who need to know. And newspapers own up and correct their errors (months later, in 8pt on page 2 or 32).

Of course it's all a question of scale. There are some really bad people on the web advocating some really nasty stuff. We can see how lives could be put at risk, so it's an easy call for M&S to say it doesn't want to be shown alongside real people with real guns and bombs (as opposed to the ones in Homeland).
It's harder to take a stand against a stream of prejudicial headlines, especially when those headlines are delivering the very Middle England readership it wants to talk to. But there is evidence from a number of respected sources, not simply lobbyists, that lives are being blighted - and possibly endangered - by some of things printed in our newspapers. A lot of blind eyes are being turned.

Richard Wilson, who set up SFH, is encouraged by this week's developments, saying:

We think it's brilliant that there is now a serious discussion about hate speech and about the responsibility of advertisers to acknowledge their role in it. Obviously this is a major concession from the previous position of insisting that any suggestion advertisers should consider these things was an abuse of free speech. Even the Mail now accepts that advertisers do have to think about this and act accordingly.

The Mail would naturally argue that that it does not print "hate speech". But here's a thing.  In listing obviously offensive and extremist videos from "terror groups, neo-Nazis and homophobes", the Mail reported:

An investigation by The Times found that the Home Office, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force all had advertising promotions placed beside video rants from 'shock-jock' Michael Savage, who infamously told one gay caller he should 'get Aids and die'.

The often-offensive Savage Nation podcasts pull no punches, but they come with a health warning of "adult content, adult language and psychological nudity", and they are sufficiently mainstream for the presenter to have been inducted into the radio hall of fame last November.
If it is reasonable for advertisers not to want to be associated with his output, what about the output of a woman (Katie Hopkins) who calls refugees cockroaches or a man (Kelvin MacKenzie) who thinks it's outrageous for a newsreader wearing a hijab to report on a terrorist attack  - both "vindicated" by the toughest newspaper regulator in the world?

Postscript:

In taking the Google story on from the Times's findings, the Mail also reported that Google, Facebook and Twitter had been "branded morally bankrupt for hosting thousands of images showing youngsters how to starve themselves or self-harm". It helpfully reproduced a photograph of a thin young woman. There is a real problem of mental health issues among teenagers and pro-anorexia sites exacerbate it. The Mail has written a fair bit about the tyranny of fashion and size zero models, but it would never do anything to make women worry about their body image, would it? This collection was taken from half - yes half - of yesterday's "sidebar of shame".


And one last thing:


The Mail also reported  concerns about Google's "political clout" and its "cosy relationship" with Whitehall, as evidenced by  figures showing that the company had at least 27 meetings with ministers in the 17 months after the 2015 election. There was also a "revolving door" that had seen at least 26 Whitehall staff hired by Google in the past decade.
Murdoch made a similar point in January last year, when he tweeted that Google was infiltrating Downing Street and the Obama White House.

Those Google meetings included one with David Cameron and another with Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Over the same time period, executives of  News Corp held 20 meetings with senior government ministers, 18 of them with the Prime Minister, Chancellor or Culture Secretary. Murdoch attended seven. His chief executive, the former Times editor Robert Thomson, was at eight.

Pots and kettles.


SubScribe has analysed coverage of immigration and related issues over 2016. You can read about the front pages here and about the white-top inside pages here.

The Mail and the Dubs refugees: Day 2

More interesting coverage from the Daily Mail this morning of the Government's decision to end the Dubs scheme to give refugee orphans the chance of a new life in Britain.
This was the scheme trumpeted by the paper in a front-page splash as a "Victory for compassion" - and by extension the Mail - when it was approved last May.
Yesterday the paper reported the scrapping of the policy at the foot of page 6. Today it moves up the agenda to make the page 6 lead, focusing on the Archbishop of Canterbury's "highly political intervention". The piece is illustrated with photographs of three of the refugees who arrived last autumn, which notes in the caption that they were "said to be between 14 and 17". The inference is obvious.
The coverage is intriguing because the Mail usually makes it quite clear to readers what they should think. This story is almost perfectly balanced.
It again talks about refugees living in "squalid and dangerous" conditions and about  a "chorus of protest" and a "furious backlash" over the decision. It gives more slightly more space to the criticisms than to the defence and, while angry Tory MPs make an early appearance,  Theresa May insisting that the Government is "absolutely right" doesn't get a look in until four pars from the end.
In promoting and then celebrating the acceptance of the Dubs scheme last year, the Mail pointed out that it would be open only to children who had been in Europe since the previous March - and so should not act as an incentive for people traffickers. It also said that Whitehall would be financing the scheme - possibly using some of the foreign aid budget.
Yesterday Amber Rudd told the Commons that the scheme was dangerous because it acted as a "pull" for traffickers, and councils were reported not to be able to afford to look after the children. The Mail, which has a master's degree in reminding people what was said in the past, does not pick up on either point. And there is no leader.

If it still believed in the scheme, you'd expect the Mail to be shouting "betrayal". It isn't.
If it believed the Government was right, the Mail would put May at the top of the story and run a leader saying "We tried, we were taken advantage of, it's right to stop". It didn't.
The Mail sitting on the fence? Unheard of - especially on a topic it has claimed as its own.
So is it embarrassed about that uncharacteristic burst of compassion?

Or so in love with Mrs May that it doesn't want to embarrass her?

The Mail and the Dubs refugee children

The question of foreigners - immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, hospital patients, murderers, rapists, mobile phone-using lorry drivers - coming to Britain is of abiding concern to the Daily Mail. It was deemed the most important issue of the day 56 times last year, accounting for 18% of the paper's lead stories.
It is probably fair to say that the Mail did not regard these arrivals (or potential arrivals) as a good thing.
But in the sea of hostile headings, one stood out.
On May 5, the Mail hailed a "victory for compassion". Three thousand lone children were to be allowed into the country and to stay here for up to five years, after which their cases would be reassessed.
The previous week David Cameron had reiterated his refusal to admit refugee children who had no family here, and a Commons attempt by Yvette Cooper to force his hand had failed by 18 votes.

The Mail splash and leader, January 28, 2016

The Prime Minister had first set out his objections exactly three months before. The Mail splashed on the story and ran an editorial praising his “brave and difficult and humane decision”. The leader predicted that Cameron’s enemies would have a field day, but that he was wise to stick to his existing policy.

Daily Mail, April 28, 2016

The Mail, however, turned out not have the Prime Minister’s willpower. After the narrow Commons vote, it took a deep breath and published a full-page leader. It denounced Cooper's "intemperate attack"; it attacked the paper's "sneering critics, parading their right-on consciences while enjoying the benefits of cheap nannies and plumbers"; it attacked the "bien pensant liberal elite, cocooned in their prosperous postal districts"; it attacked Angela Merkel, whose refugee policy had "left her with blood on her hands".
Cameron, it said, had "nothing whatever to be ashamed of".

BUT...he was wrong on this. Emphasising at every turn how the UK had "no duty to these children, however wretched or desperate they may be", the Mail decreed that he should let the children into "these overcrowded islands".

While we understand the the arguments for hardening our hearts, we believe that in the exceptional circumstances of the crisis it would be wrong to do so. True, we have no legal or treaty obligation to lift a finger to help. But our moral and humanitarian duty cannot so easily be shrugged off.

Influenced by the Mail leader - or by the prospect of a Tory rebellion (this was just six weeks before the EU referendum, on which he was already battling against half his party) - Cameron retreated and gave his backing to Lord Dubs's proposals that would allow up to 3,000 children who had already reached Europe to come to Britain.

Daily Mail, May 5, 2016

And so, on May 5, the Mail splashed on the change of heart - making quite clear in the overline and the second sentence its own importance in driving the new policy.

Up to 3,000 children stuck in squalid and dangerous EU refugee camps will be given a new life in Britain. Just days after the Mail called for David Cameron to show compassion, he dropped his opposition to the offer of sanctuary yesterday.

Further down the story, Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron says: "Today's result would not have happened without the Daily Mail and its readers."

A leader also played up the paper's part in the about-turn, starting: "When the Mail called on the Government...." and continuing: "Common decency demands that we help them and it was for this reason alone that we urged the Government to act."
To complete the package, Robert Hardman had been despatched to Calais to tell the story of 12-year-old orphan Zyrat and why a civilised Britain should take in children like him.

Well done, that paper.

Details of how the scheme would work were understandably sketchy at this stage, but the suggestion was that local councils would be in charge of the practicalities and that Whitehall would pick up the bill. Some of the foreign aid budget (another of the Mail's abiding concerns) could be used for the purpose.
It shouldn't be too difficult, the Mail leader said: "Given that we currently have annual net migration into Britain of 330,000, it should not be a huge burden." As it had reported the previous week, Sarah Brown had written on Mumsnet that 3,000 children amounted to just five per constituency - nowhere near the 10,000 (including Lord Dubs) that Britain had saved through Kindertransport before the Second World War.

Daily Mail, October 19 and 20, 2016

The children finally started arriving in the autumn and they turned out not to be the smudge-faced little moppets in raggedy dresses the Press had been hoping for. Some looked over 18. Rather than open our arms to them, some suggested that we open their mouths to subject them to dental tests to find out how old they really were. In the Mail, Sue Reid asked: "Yes, we must show pity, but is it being abused?" The next day the paper went for an approach even more scientific than dentistry: it scanned photographs of the incomers using a "fun" computer app called "How old do I look?" and concluded that one of the refugees was 38.
In the scramble to get refugees out as the Calais Jungle was being dismantled, a handful of older people may well have struck lucky, but there has been no definitive reporting of the ages of the overwhelming majority of the few hundred children who finally made it here.

Now the door has been shut, with the final tally of children accepted in Britain likely to be about 350 of the 3,000 who were originally promised a new start.
Immigration minister Robert Goodwill announced yesterday that councils had told the Government that they could cope with only 400 children to the end of the financial year - and 50 of those were coming under a different scheme.
Tim Farron, who had commended the Mail's role in securing the promise last year, described the decision as "a betrayal of vulnerable children and a betrayal of British values".

"Betrayal" is one of the favourite words in the Mail's lexicon and you couldn't blame the paper if it felt that it, as well as the children, had been betrayed by yesterday's decision.
It would surely be asking questions today. Questions like what happened to the government giving the councils the money and support they needed to help these children? Or asking why, if there are resources only to the end of this financial year - which ends in a few weeks - the programme couldn't resume in April?
Remember we're talking about five children per constituency - or about 32 per council with social services responsibilities.
Remember, too, that only last month the Mail published another full-page leader. This time about the importance to a democracy of a free press that was able to call those in power to account.
So it did that today?

No. It gave the story  318 words at the foot of page 6.

Daily Mail, February 9, 2017

Rather more space (albeit further back) was found for a double-page hatchet job on Gary Lineker, who not only dared to speak up for the refugees on Twitter when their ages were being called into question, but also had the temerity to upstage Theresa May by being accorded a Saturday Profile in the New York Times on the day it virtually ignored the Prime Minister's "historic" meeting with Donald Trump.

Ironically, the Lineker tweets that so enraged the Mail – and The Sun before it – called for compassion for the very refugees whose arrival was the result of the Mail’s “victory for compassion”.
But this was the wrong sort of compassion. It wasn’t Paul Dacre-endorsed compassion; it was Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband-endorsed compassion.
Lineker’s punishment was a quick trawl through Companies House that showed he had invested in a perfectly legal tax avoidance vehicle (which had been previously reported elsewhere) followed by 2,600 words of bile and speculation that included one rather galling fact: that he has 5.5 million Twitter followers, rather more than the Daily Mail has readers.

Daily Mail February 9, 2017

The politicos and their news bunny friends have moved on. In the summer there are boats full of refugees capsizing in the Mediterranean, most people are moved by their plight.
But this is winter. The boats aren't putting to sea at the moment. Hospitals are, however, full to bursting and the spotlight is falling on "bed blocking" because the social care system is unable cope with people who are fit to leave hospital but not well enough to look after themselves.

And so the refugee children must stay in their "squalid and dangerous camps".
Five per constituency were just too many.

Blood brothers: the Mail and the NHS chief

It does seem odd that hospitals are allowing lawyers to set up shop in their foyers to advise patients on how they might sue the people treating them.
The Mail sees personal injury claims as a bane of modern life and it will be pleased to have secured the support of the NHS chief executive Simon Stevens in its mini-campaign on medical negligence suits.
Stevens obligingly says that lawyers' fees (should we call them ambulance-chasing if they are already in situ?) are "sucking" £440m a year from the health service that could finance 14,000 nurses. This affords the paper the opportunity to describe them as "blood suckers" in its splash headline.
He is rewarded with a leader praising him for his unequivocal comments.

All of which seems perfectly fair.

Daily Mail, page 12, May 23, 2016

Wind back the clock to last May and we find that the Mail is less enamoured of Mr Stevens.
In the heady days of the referendum campaign, he told Andrew Marr that he was concerned about the impact on the NHS of a vote to leave the EU.
While there might be a financial bonus - Vote Leave said an "independence dividend" would produce enough money to build a new hospital every week  - Stevens feared that could be wiped out if an economic downturn followed Brexit. He outlined plans to improve cancer,  mental health and primary care services, but said these were dependent on the overall health of the economy. He was also worried about the fate of 130,000 staff who had come from the EU.
His words were interpreted by the Mail as a warning that Brexit could put the lives of 30,000 cancer patients at risk and presented under a headline saying "Stick to the day job!" The paper's report also pointedly described Stevens as "a former adviser to Tony Blair" and said that he had "presided over a £2.4bn spending deficit - the worst in the history of the NHS".
Those two points were repeated in a leader which accused him of making the "blood-curdling" 30,000 cancer deaths prediction.

So when it comes to the NHS's finances, it's ok for the chief executive to speak up about the £440m lawyers make from the £1.5bn paid out in compensation (where he agrees with the Mail).
But he should have kept his mouth shut about the possible impact on his budget of Brexit (where he disagreed with the Mail).

Or to put it another way: blood-sucking good, blood-curdling bad.

How Lego changes the game by doing nothing

The Mail's Lego promotions in May and October this year. 

@StopFundingHate We have finished the agreement with The Daily Mail and are not planning any future promotional activity with the newspaper

— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) November 12, 2016

And so Twitter erupted in joy. The BBC, the Independent, the Huffington Post reported that Lego was pulling its advertising from the Mail.
It isn't.
Lego was stopping its free giveaways with the paper.
It wasn't.
A promotion had run its natural course. When a customer wrote to say he didn't think the tie-in with the Mail was appropriate, Lego responded with the tweet at the top.
The customer's letter may genuinely have caused the company to pause and think: "Hey, no. We don't want to be associated with anti-migrant, anti-judge headlines." Or it may have thought: "Here's an opportunity for some good publicity at no cost. We don't actually have to do anything.
"After all, the last freebie promotion ended last month and the next one isn't due until the spring and then we can just pick up as usual."

Well the Twitter reaction means they won't now - unless the Daily Mail demonstrably changes tack in the next six months.
And therein lies Stop Funding Hate's victory. Not in what it has achieved, but in what it is possible for it to achieve thanks to Lego's response. For not only is Lego unlikely to resume any deal with the Mail - or any other newspaper that might be perceived as peddling hate - but other companies will also think twice before entering into promotional contracts with them.

The timing of the Lego story, coinciding with the anniversary of the terrorist attacks across Paris, couldn't have been bettered. For that atrocity demonstrated the importance to the Mail of the Lego promotions - and makes Stop Funding Hate's "victory" the greater.
The paper has combined with the company and WH Smith to give away the toys twice a year for the past two or three years. They clearly boost circulation as the launch puff is always bigger the norm, dominating the page.
And so it did for the issue of November 14 last year - in spite of the fact that even before the bombers and gunmen struck in Paris, there was a pretty big news story in the killing of Mohamed Emwazi, the ISIS killer glorified by the media as "Jihadi John".
As the scale of the horror in Paris became apparent, most night editors cleared their front pages. But at the Mail, the Lego puff remained inviolate, surrendering not an inch of space to the unfolding drama.
(The Mirror really came a cropper: it's "real" front page was concealed beneath a wraparound advertising Morrison's Christmas puds.)

Lego may have inadvertently painted itself into a corner, but the good publicity will be invaluable. It may well give it a Christmas sales fillip.
Unfortunately, John Lewis found itself on the other end of this see-saw. After two days of appreciative oohs and aahs over its latest Christmas video, it looks leaden and po-faced in its response to Stop Funding Hate's suggestion that it cease advertising with the Mail, Express, Sun etc.

@StopFundingHate We fully appreciate the strength of feeling on this issue but never make an editorial judgement on a particular newspaper

— John Lewis (@JLcustserv) November 10, 2016

This is, in fairness, what most businesses have told SFH. But, coming hot on the heels of the Lego story, it looks churlish.

And of course businesses do make editorial judgments. They decide where to advertise on the basis of which newspaper, radio station, roadside poster position best matches the customers they want to reach. John Lewis would not advertise in a porn magazine or a rundown inner city sidestreet because they wouldn't fit with its brand.

There are questions to be asked - and SubScribe has asked them - about the advisability of trying to get advertisers to put pressure on newspapers to change their attitudes.
Look at the furore over the Telegraph's lack of coverage - some would call it suppression - of the HSBC tax scandal last year, which was attributed to the fear of losing a valuable client.
Advertisers should not be in a position to decide what papers do or do not carry.
Stop Funding Hate accepts that, and argues that it is not asking advertisers to influence editorial judgments, simply to make a judgment of their own: Does their brand benefit from being associated with a particular type of journalism? And if it doesn't, to walk away.

This has all been theoretical until now. But Stop Funding Hate's bombardment of companies advertising in the Mail's "Enemies of the people" issue and its new video, combining some frankly offensive front pages with the cloying Christmas adverts, have brought its campaign to the attention of hundreds of thousands of people.

Not for the first time in its history, Lego may well be a game-changer.

Woman with brain speaks, Mail has apoplexy

If there's one thing the Daily Mail can't abide (ok, there are many), it's an intelligent woman who dares to speak out. Especially if she can be branded a "luvvie" - even if her only connection to the arts is by marriage.

Take Amal Clooney. A well-established human rights lawyer, Clooney addressed the UN about refugees on Friday and has this week announced that she intends to try to take legal action on behalf of a Yazidi woman used as a sex slave by ISIS jihadists.

She also suggested that the UK – and other countries - might do more to help refugees from warzones and pointed out that only one Yazidi family had been granted asylum here, against 70,000 in Germany.

The Daily Mail website likes Clooney: she is beautiful, glamorous and married to the biggest name in Hollywood. It loves to put her in the “sidebar of shame”.

The printed paper is less sure.
President Obama may think her views are worth listening to and be willing to share a platform with her, but the Mail has difficulty looking beyond her bunions, her thinness and her wedding ring.
There was also that little spot of bother with her husband when it claimed that there was a family rift over their marriage. 

So this is how the paper reported her contribution to last weekend's refugee summit: 

“Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney angered MPs last night by attacking Theresa May and Britain for not taking more refugees from Syria.

“The wife of George Clooney, who lives in a mansion near Mrs May’s home in Berkshire...”

Thus a rentaquote MP's response, her husband and her living arrangements are all given precedence over what she had to say. Under a snide headline that suggests that no one has heard of her and that her opinion is risible. She is, however, comely enough to warrant a full-length photograph.

If Clooney and her opinions are so insignificant, you'd imagine that the paper would leave it there. But no, Christopher Hart is on parade today to denounce the "dubious poseuse celebrity lawyer and wife of the famous George".

Actually there's nothing dubious about Mrs Clooney; Hart had only to read his own paper's cuttings to discover that she has credentials beyond being a wife. When the couple became engaged in April 2014, the Mail wrote:

"Her life could not be more removed from the celebrity world which Clooney inhibits.

"She comes from a prominent intellectual Lebanese family who fled war-torn Beirut when she was a child and settled in a large modern house in Buckinghamshire.

"Her father, Ramzi, is a retired professor of business studies at the American University of Beirut...

"After leaving Oxford, where she gained a 2:1 in law, Miss Alamuddin studied at the New York University School of Law.Now working out of London's Doughty Street Chambers, she specialises in international law, human rights, extradition and criminal law."

 When they were married that September, the paper described her as "Oxford-educated, with a high-profile client list":

"She has represented Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and is an adviser to former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan"

Even when the critical scrutiny intensified with a spread on Clooney's "scary skinniness", Amanda Platell noted of this "clever, thoughtful woman":

"A year ago, no one outside illustrious legal circles knew the name Amal Alamuddin. Fewer still had an opinion about her clothes, figure, hair, handbag or shoes.

"An internationally renowned human rights lawyer at the top of her career, her performance in court and her fine brain were all she was judged on."

Clooney's client list goes beyond Assange and Annan. She also represented Mohamed Fahmy, a journalist jailed in Egypt for "distorting the news"  in a case that prompted an international campaign to protect that cause so dear to the Mail's heart - Press freedom.

But none of that gives her the right to speak on a subject that is her specialty. That was apparently relinquished when she married an actor.

Just in case you can't get hold of a copy of the Mail, here's a list of other "bleeding heart luvvies" whose opinions are, according to today's Oped, to be discounted:

Leonardo diCaprio
Benedict Cumberbatch

Helena Bonham Carter

Stephen Fry

Emma Thompson

J.K. Rowling

Bob Geldof

Emma Thompson

Vanessa Redgrave

Cate Blanchett

Keira Knightley

In fact, the list is so long that Hart admits:

"Actually, it's probably just easier to say 'all of them'. The whole ghastly, smug, cosseted, self-adoring crew."

 Hart also has a dig at Juliet Stevenson and David Miliband's International Rescue charity for "hijacking Parliament Square" for a display of 2,500 lifejackets worn by refugees who died trying to cross from Turkey to Greece.

That exhibition - sorry, stunt -  really annoyed the Mail.
Most papers used a photograph and a brief caption to say that the demonstration was linked to the migrant summit in New York.
The Mail used the lifejackets (with the statue of Churchill circled in red) plus an inset picture of Stevenson alongside a story focused on those who thought the “protest” should not have been allowed.

Such was the paper’s distress about the whole affair that it wheeled out Max Hastings yesterday on a spread combining the event and Angela Merkel’s woes.
Migration posed the gravest threat to Europe since 1945, the headline said. “We need answers – not stunts”. 

Fair point. 

Now let's wind the clock back to last Saturday, when the Mail ran a spread by Sue Reid, who hired a rubber dinghy to show how easy it was to sail to France and back without being stopped by any authorities. 

A smiley woman in sunglasses and a couple of male companions are perhaps not quite as suspicious as a boatload of young men, but Reid appears dismayed by the lack of interest they attracted.

She spots a Royal Navy warship on the horizon, assumes that its radar must have seen her dinghy and notes “yet they did nothing to stop us” – before conceding: 

“although, it must be said, the warship's responsibilities do not include checking boats such as ours”.

The lifejackets were laid out in Parliament Square to draw attention to the plight of  refugees. People took notice. 

But to the Mail, the display constituted a stunt.

Sue Reid hired her little boat to draw attention to a lack of border controls. No one took any notice. 

That was, of course, serious journalism.

Don't anyone dare suggest that it might have been a stunt.

These are the sorts of serious issues that Ms Clooney should be concentrating on

The Press and immigration: reporting the news or fanning the flames of hatred?

For a couple of days last year, the cacophony subsided. For five years the noise had been growing in intensity to the point where it was almost unbearable. Then a photograph of a small boy's body and a Turkish soldier almost silenced it.
Suddenly the snarling was replaced with compassion. Suddenly the "cockroach" was a child.
Aylan (or Alan as he is styled now) Kurdi drowned with his brother and mother on September 2 last year after his Syrian father paid people traffickers to ferry them from Turkey to Kos. Their boat capsized within five minutes of setting sail and Aylan's body was washed up on the beach.
The next day the Independent ran a photograph of the child's body on the shore. Others used the picture of the soldier carrying him up the beach. Newspapers not known for their sympathy for African refugees or their dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean demanded action.

The Sun September 3, 4,5

The Sun launched an appeal and within two days was hailing its readers as heroes for raising £350,000 to help children like Aylan; families put up their hands to say they would offer foster homes to the young refugees. David Cameron, who two days earlier had said that Europe's migration crisis would not be solved "by taking more and more refugees", apparently promised to admit thousands, prompting headlines such as "Britain opens its arms to refugees". Fifteen, twenty thousand people would be admitted to Britain, foreign aid money would be diverted to help asylum seekers, "Refugees welcome" banners appeared across the country.

But then there was a new season of Strictly and X Factor and another twist in the VIP child abuse inquiry saga - and the tabloids lost interest. 

By the end of the following week, Cameron had ordered a drone to kill a pair of Britons fighting as jihadis in Syria, the Queen had become the country's longest reigning monarch and Paula Radcliffe had been accused (falsely) of being a drugs cheat. Who had time for the boat people now?

Autumn was here, the political machine was cranking up after the summer break and for the newspapers it was time to return to the usual news mix. And, as far as migrants/refugees/asylum seekers were concerned, to return to the usual mix of hand-wringing and hostility.

Daily Mirror September 3, 4 and 14

The Daily Mirror, the one paper that has shunned front-page stories about migration, broke step for three days to cover the Kurdi story and the deaths of four more refugee babies two weeks later.  It had not led on any aspect of migration in the previous eight months and has not returned to it since.

The Daily Express, the paper that has been most vociferous in its rejection of immigrants in any circumstances, did not break step. It did not publish the Aylan photograph either on its front or inside, but instead spent a couple of days berating the EU for the human catastrophe unfolding on its borders before resuming normal service with a diabetes breakthrough.

Daily Express, September 3,4 and 5 last year

As the rest of Fleet Street finally recognised that the "swarm" of refugees was actually a collection of individuals with individual stories, Leo McKinstry kept his eyes focused on the issues that mattered: the trains running on time.

As the immigration crisis deepens, a mood of anarchy is descending across Europe. Our once well-ordered civilisation is sliding towards chaos in the face of the unprecedented, colossal influx of foreign arrivals. The signs of dislocation are all around us.Only yesterday the Eurostar service from Paris to London suffered massive delays because of a major security alert sparked by migrants climbing on to tracks and trains.

Against the Mirror's three migration splashes last year and this, the Express has managed 90.

Promises were easy to make the day after that photograph appeared

The fifteen or twenty thousand have not, of course, reached our shores. And by April this year Cameron was denying entry to three thousand unaccompanied children on the grounds that they were already "safe" in Europe. 

For this he was taken to task by the Daily Mail, which has the sophistication to differentiate between the vulnerable and those it deems to be unworthy, even if its readers haven't. It also has the chutzpah to take credit where it may not be due and so when Cameron did an about-turn, the paper that vilifies economic migrants and foreign nurses hailed its "victory for compassion". 

Ever watchful for hypocrisy in others, the Mail acknowledged that it was "robust" in its opposition to mass migration and took a quick dig at the "liberal elite" who enjoy the services of cheap plumbers, nannies and cleaners, as it tried to square the circle of its demand that children who may be uncomfortable but who were not in danger should be allowed into the country while those who might contribute to the economy should not.

The three thousand haven't got here either. And what hope is there for them doing so when 178 children with an absolute legal right to come to Britain - because they are alone in Europe and have family here - can't cross the red tape?

If it's business as usual for the Press, politicians are just as recalcitrant.

The Sun pages 1, 2 and 5 on August 31

It is not only the Mail that can differentiate between "good" and "undesirable" migrants. Last Saturday, Arkadiusz Jozwik was kicked to death by a gang of teenagers in a small shopping arcade in Harlow, Essex, apparently because he was speaking Polish. The crime was shocking and the Sun was one of only two national papers to recognise its newsworthiness. It splashed on the story - and then, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, published a set of statistics on page 2 about hundreds of thousands of "hidden" EU migrants.
So on page 1, the paper mourns a solid family man who came to Britain thanks to his homeland's membership of the EU, and on the very next page decries the fact that anyone should be able to enter the country on those terms.

Oh yes, and a little further back there was a spread that likened the Calais Jungle to a festival site, describing a "booming micro-economy" with shops, restaurants, churches, mosques, two musical halls, a nightclub and a boxing gym. An accompanying single says that one "illegal" is stopped every hour in the UK.

The Sun pages 8-9 on the day it reported the murder of Arkadiusz Jozwik

The paper might rightly argue that once here, anyone should be safe from murderous gangs, but might it not also pause to consider whether the rhetoric coming from Fleet Street is inflaming the situation?

Only a few days earlier, the paper's first instinct on learning that five young men had been drowned on Camber Sands was to ask if they were illegal immigrants - on the basis that they were not white and had been wearing shorts. They turned out to be a group of friends on a day trip from London.

The Leave campaign in the EU referendum and its newspaper supporters made great play of immigration and of how leaving the community would give Britain back control of its borders - and there has been strong evidence of a rise in racist or "hate" crimes since the vote in June.
A certain section of our society appears to have believed that the moment the votes had been counted, all foreigners would be put on the next boat and that any who remained were fair game. It is frightening.
Going through the Sun's coverage of the issue so far this year, SubScribe had collated 120 almost entirely negative news reports and opinion pieces when this one from June 28 turned up:

This spread, from June 28, was The Sun's 121st "migrant" story of the year

The Mail and the Sun may be able to tell the difference between refugees from war zones and Romanian car-washers, but how often do they bother - and can their readers? And why be so nasty about anyone wherever they come from?

People are, sadly, mugged at cashpoints all over the country every day, but if the perpetrator is a Romanian,  it's national news. And if the crime is more serious - rape or murder - it's worth a page lead at least.

For the Daily Express, all foreigners are a problem and everything is Europe's fault. Since the Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, the paper has splashed on migration issues on 179 occasions - including today - with a marked acceleration since the run-up to January 2014, when Romanians and Bulgarians were given full access to the UK. And that's not taking into account all the puffs at the top of the page when advice on living longer or rising house prices take centre stage.

Why? The paper has yet to respond to SubScribe's inquiries, but it may be supposed that if one were forthcoming, the answer would be "because it is what most concerns readers". 

In that it would have corroboration from Ipsos-Mori's monthly "issues" polls. Since that 2010 election, immigration has regularly emerged as the subject most frequently mentioned by voters. Fair enough, but another such topic is the health service and yet - miracle cures apart - the state of the NHS has bothered the Express's splash headline writers on only a handful of occasions over the past six years.
[The Mail, which - with 122 - comes second to the Express on the number of migration splashes since May 2010, is constantly on the case of the NHS, GPs and junior doctors.]

But do these papers reflect or feed public fears about immigration?

SubScribe has been monitoring front pages for some years and it's actually quite hard to determine what should be included in these "migration" charts and the composites @gameoldgirl routinely posts on Twitter.
There's a lot of complaining about the proportion of the national budget spent on foreign aid (0.3%), how it should be diverted and the dodgy places that it is sent to (with some justification). These sorts of stories have been excluded.
So, too, have been stories about benefits going abroad to expats, those about Muslims who may not have integrated into UK society quite as the Mail or Express might wish, and all terror-related splashes.
It should also be pointed out that the "heavies" - the Telegraph in particular - are perhaps under-represented, since they often have immigration stories on their fronts, but these are only included on the #chartofshame if they are the lead to the paper.

That still leaves rather a lot.

As mentioned before, the Mirror does not lead on migration. The Sun and Star see footballers and reality TV stars as better sellers, but are generally hostile. The Telegraph is not quite as fevered as the white-top tabloids, but shares their outlook. The Guardian, i and Independent are all generally sympathetic, while the Times tries to steer a middle course.

The chart above relates to print editions, since the papers are collated on the basis that they are what people see in the supermarkets and on television, and so have a greater impact than their circulations alone might imply.
The Independent figure therefore runs only to the end of March, when it ceased publishing in print. Since then, it has continued to produce and share "front pages" of its digital edition and nine of these were devoted to immigration - most of them neutral or sympathetic.

The same cannot be said of the Express, Mail or Sun. And there is a groundswell of opinion that something needs to happen to stop this dangerous drip-feed of negative headlines.

How can that be achieved?

My tweets are widely shared and common responses are "don't buy that rag" or "it should be shut down". Well, it's not a good idea to shut down a newspaper just because you disagree with it - and 60 million people don't buy any of those three papers, so "not buying" doesn't seem to be having any effect at the moment. 

Now at least two groups are mobilising to try to affect change.

CitizensUK is an organisation that seeks to help to settle immigrants into the community and it is particularly concerned about Britain's slowness in helping refugees and about the recent rise in "hate" crime.

Yesterday it organised a "memorial" service for Aylan Kurdi outside the Home Office, urging politicians and officials to act speedily to admit those 178 children who have an absolute right to be here and a further 209 who could come under Alf Dubs's amendment to the immigration bill. That seeks to help the most vulnerable, who may not have relatives in the UK, but have "valid claims for protection".  Next week the group will host a "Refugees welcome" summit in Birmingham to assess progress since last year and consider further action. 

The Aylan memorial outside the Home Office. Photo: Ana Ferreira

In the meantime, some of its members are looking at ideas to try to persuade newspapers to tone down their language, including an approach to the Press regulator Ipso.

SubScribe asked Ipso if it was comfortable with coverage as it stood and whether there was any way it could tackle the cumulative effect of stories that might not individually contravene the editors' code. Its director of external affairs Niall Duffy confirmed that the regulator considered stories on a case-by-case basis, but pointed out that it did have the power to instigate an investigation of its own without any complaint if it considered the issue serious enough. It did, indeed, do exactly that with the Brooks Newmark sting a couple of years back. SubScribe is still awaiting a reply to the question of whether the immigration coverage might qualify.

The signs are not auspicious, however, given the ruling - in the face of an intervention from the UN high commissioner for human rights -  that Katie Hopkins's notorious "cockroach" column did not breach its guidelines on discrimination.

There are those who believe that Ipso cannot be an effective regulator because it is still in the pay of the big newspaper publishers. The putative rival regulator, Impress, recently started consultation on its own draft code of conduct. 

Policy and complaints officer Brigit Morris was hopeful that the end product would be strong enough to tackle such drip effects, describing them as a very important and challenging area for regulation. Morris said that the code committee had considered the issue and that Impress's discrimination provision set a high bar for publishers, including an obligation not to incite hatred against a group.

While the draft code does not specifically address cumulative discrimination as this is very difficult to enforce in a regulatory sense, Impress believes that the draft provision would generate a better culture at news publications when it comes to running stories that discriminate against individuals or groups on the basis of their protected characteristics

She added, however, that - like Ipso - complaints could not be advanced based on a collection of articles, but that the Impress board - again like Ipso - would have the power to start its own investigations in serious circumstances "where there is evidence of systematic wrongdoing".
In other words, it's pretty much the same - and no national publisher has yet signed up to be regulated by this organisation.
Not encouraging.

Another approach is to try to convince advertisers not to spend with newspapers that paint a relentlessly negative portrait of foreign nationals coming to our country or in need of our support. Step forward Richard Wilson.

Sixteen years ago, Wilson's elder sister was among the victims of a massacre in Burundi. What happened next coloured his view of life and the Press. A Daily Mail reporter approached his mother - who had taught English to refugees from a slew of conflicts - to tell her story. She gently showed him the door, explaining that she had lost count of the number of newspaper articles - many from the Mail - that she had seen portraying refugees as liars, cheats, frauds, “bogus” people.
 

My mother had seen the effect of these stories on government policy, and she’d seen the effect of those increasingly harsh policies on her students. She would feel she was betraying them now if she had anything to do with the Daily Mail... Just three days after suffering one of the worst blows of her life, faced with a representative of an organisation that she and most of her colleagues regarded as something close to “hate media”, she’d shown a calmness and dignity that I found quite extraordinary.

When Wilson saw Katie Hopkins's column in the Sun describing Mediterranean boat people as cockroaches, it struck a chord. It was the very simile used by "hate radio" stations to explain the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A year later, the tide of anti-immigration coverage before the referendum spurred him to set up a Facebook page called Stop Funding Hate and a petition aimed at persuading Virgin to stop advertising in the Express, Mail and Sun. A big target, but a well-chosen one, since Branson himself had advocated the power of petitions in his own blog a few years back.
Virgin is still advertising with the target tabloids, but the Facebook page has had more than five million views, attracted 78,000 "likes" and the petition has more than 41,000 signatures.
Wilson says:

Our aim is to shift the balance of incentives so that running hate campaigns costs newspapers more money through lost advertising than it makes them in sales.
We hope that this will contribute to a long-term improvement in the quality and tone of Sun, Mail and Express coverage about the groups that they have previously demonised.
I hope that we can also contribute to a wider debate about the extent of demonisation and hate speech across the board. It clearly isn't just about the right-wing press. It also seems endemic in left wing discourse and everywhere in between. Somehow describing human beings as "vermin", "traitors", "cockroaches" and "monsters" seems to have become normalised. And these words have consequences.

So what's the strategy?

  

We are building a team of volunteers to carry out more in-depth research - to identify and track advertisers in the Sun, Express and Daily Mail more systematically - especially where there seems to be a strong clash with the company's brand values and/or with the values of the advertiser's target customer base. This research will then inform the development of the campaign as we start to widen it out.
We've already found some quite surprising cases - for example this week Waitrose, Iceland and M&S were all running adverts in the Daily Express. What's striking is that companies that might shy away from supporting other types of socially harmful activity don't yet seem to make the connection when it comes to media hate campaigns. We're hoping that strong consumer pressure might start to change this. Obviously the first company that does pull their advertising will be showing that they're ahead of the curve in responding to the deep public concern around this issue, so there are some positive incentives too.

It'll be a difficult trick to pull off. The whole essence of an independent Press is that it shouldn't be influenced by people with power or money in their pockets, so do we really want advertisers dictating or censoring editorial content? [SubScribe admits it supports Stop Funding Hate's ambition, but is hesitating about signing its petition for this very reason.] Wilson recognises the delicate balance he must achieve with his campaign, saying the objective is to modify behaviour, not to censor.
And is it not unreasonable for companies to decide that it's not good for their image to be associated with a particular brand or organisation? Look at what happened to Maria Sharapova's sponsorship deals after her failed drug test.
The extreme example of this is the closure of the News of the World when advertisers deserted after the Milly Dowler phone-hacking story. But if Rupert Murdoch hadn't actually wanted to close the NotW, he would have brazened it out.
The campaigners are taking on hugely powerful players who can be guaranteed to deploy their big guns if they feel their challengers are gaining traction. It's not surprising that both groups are turning their attention first to the Express rather than Dacre or Murdoch.

So, finally, what are these groups fighting?
Here are some of the composites, the stats, that SubScribe has collated over the past couple of years, the accumulation of venom and bile coming from an honourable trade that is supposed to hold authorities to account, to defend the oppressed and inform the people.  The language and mood are ugly.
The freedom of the Press is an essential element of democracy, but surely we need to find a mechanism that can both protect that and stop this:

Sometimes a story is so beguiling that it can be regurgitated several times over a few years. See this old blog post and look at the pictures below illustrating Express stories from 2010 and March this year (a follow-up to a Sun spread the day before). Doesn't the house and its interior look familiar?

The drip-feed effect

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

...and it's not just the splashes (of which more will follow next week). There are the puffs:

...and the columnists:

All of which send just one message:

Photograph: Getty Images

Further reading

The whitetops and immigration: the inside story of 2016

By the end of the year, our paid-for national newspapers had led on migration a total of 277 times, with more than half coming from the Mail and Express. This follow-up post looks at what they put on the inside pages.