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.

Sun vilified over true refugee story

Don't disbelieve everything you read in the papers.
Just because it's in a newspaper doesn't mean it isn't true.

Last Sunday the Sun carried a page lead about a woman called Rosie who claimed that a 12-year-old Afghan boy she had fostered turned out to be a young adult Jihadi sympathiser.
Her own children had become suspicious about his age when they noticed while swimming that his body was hairy. He had appeared adept at handling a gun at a shooting range. He was able to overpower an "older" boy living in the house. A driver turfed him off a school bus, refusing to believe he was under 16. A dentist told the family - and social workers - that he was probably between 18 and 21.

Coming after Tory MP David Davies's calls for dental checks to determine the ages of child migrants and the row over Gary Lineker's tweets, it was obvious that the story was just another pack of lies to further the Sun's xenophobic agenda.

Except it wasn't - a pack of lies, that is.
There were white lies and errors. But essentially the story was true.

The young man didn't "strip down" a rifle. Identities were changed to protect the source - the number one rule in journalism.
The photograph of "Jamal" was doctored not because it was fake or to protect him (one doubter asked: "why was his face blocked out when the Sun didn't mind showing photographs of arriving refugees?") but to protect the woman who gave the interview.
She was frightened both of "Jamal" - as stated in the story - and  that she might lose the other children she fostered and the opportunity to care for more in the future.

Why did she take a 12-year-old who had just fled a warzone to a shooting range? Good question. It turns out it was more akin to a children's activity centre.

Why did she march him off to the dentist as soon as he got there? She didn't - and certainly not to find out how old he was. She took him for a check-up at the request of social services.

All of this and more is on a recording of a face-to-face interview with the woman, including:

• details of material found on his phone, 
• evidence that he had used another name and another age (17) to try to seek asylum in another country,  
• and the fact that the father of a 12-year-old girl at Koran classes complained about "this man" being with the children. 

It's probably also worth mentioning that this was not a woman on the make. She did not take her story to the Sun. The journalists approached her.

The Sun is not averse to giving a home to stories that put immigrants - and the immigration system - in a bad light. One reporter tells SubScribe that there was a ready market for such material before the EU referendum. There are legitimate questions to be asked, but the overall impression of hostility that comes from the Sun means it may not be the right newspaper to ask them.

So which is? The Mail? The Express? Just as bad. The Mirror? The Guardian? The story might be more believable coming from them - but would they run it?

Political correctness allowed the abuse of girls of Rotherham and Rochdale to go unchecked for years until  Andrew Norfolk's dogged reporting for The Times forced authorities to confront what was going on under their noses. In today's xenophobic atmosphere, what right-thinking (as opposed to Right-thinking) paper would carry this story?
Yet it deserves - needs - to be told.

In the hands of the Sun, the story of Rosie and Jamal feeds into the prejudices of those who think we should be turning our backs on immigrants/refugees/asylum-seekers, call them what you will.
If you read the copy carefully, it is actually dead straight with no editorialising or ranting.
But because of where it is, the Sun's core market will think that such situations are typical and Sun-haters will write it off as lies. What is the paper to do? Wave its hands in the air and say "Honest, guvs, this one's true"?

The Sun is being vilified on social media and in the blogosphere over this. One needs only to look to its recent past to see why. But on this occasion, it has conformed with the best standards of journalism. It has told a true story that is undoubtedly in the public interest and protected its source in doing so.
The real villains of this piece are "Jamal" and the social workers who left him with a caring family even after they had evidence that he was not the boy he purported to be.

There will be some nasty people among the refugees and asylum-seekers, people who want to exploit others' humanity to advance  nefarious projects. That doesn't mean we should close our borders and shut our hearts to the vast majority.
Remember that news is about highlighting the unusual.

Sometimes you can believe what you read in the papers.

A cautionary tale for The Sun

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