Martin Hadfield was 20 years old when he died. He got a job as a landscape gardener when he left school but lost his job in April last year. His step-father said that, "Martin never claimed any money or benefits in his life. He got nothing off the government and was proud not to." In the space of 3 months he applied for about 40 jobs, unsuccessfully. Before a meeting at the Bury Jobcentre he updated his CV. But, his step-father claimed, the bureaucracy was "ridiculous" and the meeting "unproductive". The following day Martin Hadfield hanged himself.
How do I know all this? It's in the Express. With no sense of irony, let alone shame, the Express reports the tragic suicide of an unemployed young man, one who was too proud to claim benefits. This is the paper which peddles relentless hatred against the poor and unemployed, which uses a special, vicious language when writing about them. It's the paper which would have classed this tragic young man as a feckless, idle, work-shy scrounger if he'd had the temerity to claim benefits (sorry, hand-outs). Presumably its editor Hugh Whittow makes no connection between this death and the abuse vomited by his "journalists". There won't be even a tinge of embarrassment at Express HQ.
Showing posts with label Daily Express. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daily Express. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 May 2014
Saturday, 10 May 2014
Telling porkies for a living
YouGov sends out a regular survey which includes questions on the companies which you would be proud or embarrassed to work for. I usually leave these blank, partly because the companies they list are no better or worse than any others, but mostly because a job is a job. However, there are two organisations which I would indeed be embarrassed, or even ashamed, to work for; the Daily Express and the DWP Press Office.
There are obviously people who are quite happy to work for the Express. One is Giles Sheldrick, who wrote yesterday's appalling article headlined "6,000 claimants forced into jobs as 'war on handouts' continues". You hardly need to read more. But the sub-heading is "Thousands of feckless families are off benefits and finally earning their keep a year after the Tories declared war on handout Britain." It's based on ONS figures which, of course, show nothing of the kind. How many people would have got jobs anyway? But IDS is quoted, the odious Tory Taxpayers Alliance is quoted (and Lord Freud and Anne Widdecombe), and it's all larded with the sort of language which would land Mr Sheldrick in court if he used it of, say, an ethnic minority. Some of the article cannot be put down to ignorance. Take: "About 300 of the worst offenders pocketed £47,000 a year – the equivalent of a £70,000-a-year taxable salary – official figures show. A further 900 got up to £42,000 a year." No mention of what Sheldrick surely knows - that most of that goes straight into the pockets of landlords. Or take: "Workshy families helped create an annual benefits bill of £167.7billion – up £27billion from 10 years ago." That bill, as Sheldrick surely knows, includes state pensions, which actually make up the bulk of it. So are we to conclude that Sheldrick was simply given the 6,000 figure and told to cobble together an article on it, so he reached for all the cliches with no sense that what he was doing was wrong?
The DWP Press Office is becoming an increasing cause for concern. There's an excellent summary of those concerns on the ilegal website. The Press Office consists of civil servants, who should be bound by the Civil Service Code. They should politically impartial. Yet their press releases often are not. In January they issued a press release which referred to "welfare handouts". This was taken up by the Daily Mail as a headline, as you'd expect. You can read what followed on the excellent Benefits and Work site. When challenged, there was no sense at the DWP that they had done anything wrong. The DWP Press Office also has a Twitter account, on which it posts utterly misleading graphics and statements which cannot be construed as politically neutral.
I'm beginning to think that I would also be ashamed to work for the BBC. But that's for another day.
There are obviously people who are quite happy to work for the Express. One is Giles Sheldrick, who wrote yesterday's appalling article headlined "6,000 claimants forced into jobs as 'war on handouts' continues". You hardly need to read more. But the sub-heading is "Thousands of feckless families are off benefits and finally earning their keep a year after the Tories declared war on handout Britain." It's based on ONS figures which, of course, show nothing of the kind. How many people would have got jobs anyway? But IDS is quoted, the odious Tory Taxpayers Alliance is quoted (and Lord Freud and Anne Widdecombe), and it's all larded with the sort of language which would land Mr Sheldrick in court if he used it of, say, an ethnic minority. Some of the article cannot be put down to ignorance. Take: "About 300 of the worst offenders pocketed £47,000 a year – the equivalent of a £70,000-a-year taxable salary – official figures show. A further 900 got up to £42,000 a year." No mention of what Sheldrick surely knows - that most of that goes straight into the pockets of landlords. Or take: "Workshy families helped create an annual benefits bill of £167.7billion – up £27billion from 10 years ago." That bill, as Sheldrick surely knows, includes state pensions, which actually make up the bulk of it. So are we to conclude that Sheldrick was simply given the 6,000 figure and told to cobble together an article on it, so he reached for all the cliches with no sense that what he was doing was wrong?
The DWP Press Office is becoming an increasing cause for concern. There's an excellent summary of those concerns on the ilegal website. The Press Office consists of civil servants, who should be bound by the Civil Service Code. They should politically impartial. Yet their press releases often are not. In January they issued a press release which referred to "welfare handouts". This was taken up by the Daily Mail as a headline, as you'd expect. You can read what followed on the excellent Benefits and Work site. When challenged, there was no sense at the DWP that they had done anything wrong. The DWP Press Office also has a Twitter account, on which it posts utterly misleading graphics and statements which cannot be construed as politically neutral.
I'm beginning to think that I would also be ashamed to work for the BBC. But that's for another day.
Friday, 30 August 2013
Hatred and the Express
I'm increasingly baffled by the Daily Express and its editor Hugh Whittow. He appears to have three main preoccupations: 1) the death of Princess Diana 2) exaggerated weather forecasts and 3) hatred of all benefits claimants. If he could get all three into one story he would no doubt be delighted.
That hatred of people who claim benefits - and "hatred" really is not too strong a word - is now descending into lies calculated to make targets out of the sick, the disabled and the unemployed. There are writers (I won't call them journalists) on the paper who are happy to cobble stories which are becoming increasingly bizarre.
Take Alison Little and Jan Disley. They produced a piece yesterday which conflates two bits of "news", with no justification whatever. One was about a fraudster who faces jail for claiming around £94k that she wasn't entitled to. Quite right too. Nobody, least of all genuine claimants, would ever defend her behaviour. But how's this for a headline: "Benefits Britain shame: Welfare cheat swindles £94k while 3.5m homes have NO ONE working". Not only does the one have nothing to do with the other. The Express has cited what was actually claimed as good news for the government by everyone else. And in its first three sentences the writers manage to imply that the workless household figures are getting worse, "out of control", when in fact they're improving. The Indus Delta site has a neat summary, taken from the ONS figures. There's a sort of acknowledgement of this by the Express: "Although the number of families dependent on welfare was very slightly down from last year's 3.7m, opponents of Britain's benefits culture said the official figures were still extremely worrying." And those opponents include, unsurprisingly, the the boss of the odious and misnamed Taxpayers' Alliance. So, whatever it takes to stoke the hatred is permissible.
But that's not enough. Today a writer called Giles Sheldrick produced another bizarre piece: "scarcely-believable excuses of benefit cheats revealed". (Note that "scarcely-believable". Not brave enough to say outright that they were lying.) The piece is scattered with the familiar hate phrases; "generous handouts" and "lifelong layabouts" are just two. They talk about "some of Britain's most deceitful individuals hellbent on conning the welfare state out of £1.2bn", without any explanation of where that figure comes from. They issue "a fresh call to hard-working and honest families to 'shop' those who view welfare as a limitless cash machine", linking dishonesty and unemployment. And, despicably, they say that IDS's reforms come from "frustration that a generation of lifelong layabouts trapped on benefits creates an annual £208bn welfare bill - £1 of every £3 raise in tax revenue". Note the carelessness of the verb "trapped" when that's not what he means. But, more importantly, note the way in which the benefits bill, which includes pensions and working tax credits, is said to be spent entirely on layabouts.
We heard this week that attacks, verbal and physical, on disabled people are increasing as morons, stirred up by this sort of vicious and dishonest writing, accuse them of being scroungers and worse. That's the tip of the iceberg. Hatred begets hate crimes. Why Whittow is doing this I can't imagine. Maybe it's down to his paper's owner, Richard Desmond. But the freedom of the press doesn't cover the freedom to spread this sort of vicious dishonesty.
That hatred of people who claim benefits - and "hatred" really is not too strong a word - is now descending into lies calculated to make targets out of the sick, the disabled and the unemployed. There are writers (I won't call them journalists) on the paper who are happy to cobble stories which are becoming increasingly bizarre.
Take Alison Little and Jan Disley. They produced a piece yesterday which conflates two bits of "news", with no justification whatever. One was about a fraudster who faces jail for claiming around £94k that she wasn't entitled to. Quite right too. Nobody, least of all genuine claimants, would ever defend her behaviour. But how's this for a headline: "Benefits Britain shame: Welfare cheat swindles £94k while 3.5m homes have NO ONE working". Not only does the one have nothing to do with the other. The Express has cited what was actually claimed as good news for the government by everyone else. And in its first three sentences the writers manage to imply that the workless household figures are getting worse, "out of control", when in fact they're improving. The Indus Delta site has a neat summary, taken from the ONS figures. There's a sort of acknowledgement of this by the Express: "Although the number of families dependent on welfare was very slightly down from last year's 3.7m, opponents of Britain's benefits culture said the official figures were still extremely worrying." And those opponents include, unsurprisingly, the the boss of the odious and misnamed Taxpayers' Alliance. So, whatever it takes to stoke the hatred is permissible.
But that's not enough. Today a writer called Giles Sheldrick produced another bizarre piece: "scarcely-believable excuses of benefit cheats revealed". (Note that "scarcely-believable". Not brave enough to say outright that they were lying.) The piece is scattered with the familiar hate phrases; "generous handouts" and "lifelong layabouts" are just two. They talk about "some of Britain's most deceitful individuals hellbent on conning the welfare state out of £1.2bn", without any explanation of where that figure comes from. They issue "a fresh call to hard-working and honest families to 'shop' those who view welfare as a limitless cash machine", linking dishonesty and unemployment. And, despicably, they say that IDS's reforms come from "frustration that a generation of lifelong layabouts trapped on benefits creates an annual £208bn welfare bill - £1 of every £3 raise in tax revenue". Note the carelessness of the verb "trapped" when that's not what he means. But, more importantly, note the way in which the benefits bill, which includes pensions and working tax credits, is said to be spent entirely on layabouts.
We heard this week that attacks, verbal and physical, on disabled people are increasing as morons, stirred up by this sort of vicious and dishonest writing, accuse them of being scroungers and worse. That's the tip of the iceberg. Hatred begets hate crimes. Why Whittow is doing this I can't imagine. Maybe it's down to his paper's owner, Richard Desmond. But the freedom of the press doesn't cover the freedom to spread this sort of vicious dishonesty.
Saturday, 4 May 2013
The freedom of the press - to lie
The owner of the Daily Express is Richard Desmond. The editor is Hugh Whittow. The writer of a particularly shameless article today is Giles Sheldrick. I mention these names because newspaper articles don't come about by accident. They are the result of deliberate decisions by men who consider themselves free to debase the whole concept of truth. This is propaganda of the most egregious kind, peddling an interpretation of figures which have been shown to be false. These men don't have to explain why they do this. They are not answerable to the people they insult and denigrate. They just make money.
If you have read the article, you might also read this piece in the New Statesman; or, if that's a bit left-wing for your taste, this one in the Economist. You might also read FullFact's analysis of the figures, written back on 24 April. But the circulation of the Express is nearly 600,000, and presumably those people read it because it confirms their prejudices, not for truth.
Related to all this is an interesting piece on the Left Foot Forward website, which graphs the number of times the word "scrounger" has been used in British newspapers since 1994. It takes off steeply from 2010. Some of the comments under the article rubbish the accuracy of the exercise, but it remains fascinating.
PS: I later discovered this, even worse, article in the Daily Mail. They've added a bogus "workshy map of Britain" to fuel the lie of those "found fit to work". It's breathtaking in its sheer dishonesty. The writer is someone called Amanda Williams. I wonder how much she was paid for this scurrilous trash. These two papers between them continue to make Britain a nastier place than even the politicians know how to do.
If you have read the article, you might also read this piece in the New Statesman; or, if that's a bit left-wing for your taste, this one in the Economist. You might also read FullFact's analysis of the figures, written back on 24 April. But the circulation of the Express is nearly 600,000, and presumably those people read it because it confirms their prejudices, not for truth.
Related to all this is an interesting piece on the Left Foot Forward website, which graphs the number of times the word "scrounger" has been used in British newspapers since 1994. It takes off steeply from 2010. Some of the comments under the article rubbish the accuracy of the exercise, but it remains fascinating.
PS: I later discovered this, even worse, article in the Daily Mail. They've added a bogus "workshy map of Britain" to fuel the lie of those "found fit to work". It's breathtaking in its sheer dishonesty. The writer is someone called Amanda Williams. I wonder how much she was paid for this scurrilous trash. These two papers between them continue to make Britain a nastier place than even the politicians know how to do.
Friday, 2 September 2011
Libel and an appeal
If I was still a jobseeker (and thank God I'm not) I would be trying to instigate legal action against the Daily Express for libel. Yesterday they had to tone down a vicious piece about "workshy Britain". Today they've come back with two vile little pieces instead of one. One headed "4m Scrounging Families in Britain" reports the latest figures, with nothing whatever to justify the "scroungers" label. They quote their pals the Taxpayers' Alliance (which is simply a Tory-funded lobby group) on the subject of "over-generous benefits". Not content with that, there's an equally nasty piece headed "400 jobs up for grabs .... but nobody wants them". Apparently it's in Penzance. "A spokesman at the town’s Jobcentre blamed our soft-touch welfare state which has taken away the incentive to find work." This chap is not named, unsurprisingly. There's no analysis of what these vacancies are actually for - how many are not real jobs, for instance, or whether they require skills or experience which no one in the area has. No, it's just another way to traduce the unemployed. Just what is the editor's motive in this maniacal campaign?
I've been contacted by a Radio 4 journalist who is working on a programme about the government’s Work Programme, and wants to hear from people who are currently doing courses run by private providers such as A4E, Ingeus, Reed in Partnership, Seetec etc., or have recently been on FND. She would be interested to hear about the experiences of both clients and current or former staff of all the providers. Her email address is anna.meisel@bbc.co.uk and her telephone number is 07706154283. She assures me that all contacts will be treated in strict confidence.
Not entirely unrelated is a request from me to a few people who have posted comments on this blog in April, May and July this year which I have not published. Doncaster and Nottingham were mentioned. Please get in touch with me via a comment I will NOT publish.
Sunday, 28 August 2011
The bandwagon
Lots of people are leaping aboard the bandwagon of solutions to unemployed trouble-makers, and displaying the usual ignorance, arrogance or naivete. All three are evident in a piece on supplymanagement.com by Rebecca Ellinor, who reports that the DWP believes it has "struck what it calls a ground-breaking commercial deal, with minimum cost to the tax-payer, and says this work is now an exemplar of procurement" with the Work Programme. It describes the speed and efficiency of the process; but neglects to mention that it's a procument process which ignores past failures by providers. Does any commercial enterprise operate like this?
The Financial Times takes a more intelligent stance in a piece by Chris Tighe. It highlights the way in which smaller, especially voluntary, organisations have been squeezed out of the Work Programme.
Then there are Social Impact Bonds. We reported on these some time ago, because A4e's Mark Lovell is very keen on them; and someone who is promoting these was on the Today programme a few days ago. The Cabinet Office describes them thus: "A major trial of an innovative new way to fund intensive help for families blighted by anti-social behaviour, crime, addiction and poor education was announced by Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society today. Social Impact Bonds lets people invest in social projects to address these issues and be paid a return if the projects are successful. Up to £40million could be raised by four Social Impact Bond pilots launched in Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster, Birmingham and Leicestershire."
The Express, of course, shows its customary thoughtfulness with the headline "War on the Scroungers". It's actually commenting on a report by a think-tank, the IPPR, which has been out for some. And it's not quite what the Express portrays it as. The report says that those who have been unemployed for a year should have to take minimum-wage jobs; but these would be created by the government. And that's an admission that the jobs are not there unless the government creates them. The same IPPR report gets a very different treatment in the Telegraph, which focusses on the prediction that "around 100,000 people over 50 who lost their jobs at the start of Britain's economic crisis are now at risk of being forced to retire earlier than they planned. That will leave them living in retirement with a lower pension than they had hoped for."
It's left to the Guardian to strike a cynical note, with Alex Clark's piece inspired by Emma Harrison's publicity drive on family champions: "Be careful how you preach the benefits of the work ethic". It's a thoughtful critique of Harrison and her admirers, and, as always, the comments posted under the article are well worth reading.
The same can't be said for a piece in the Sheffield Telegraph, which is always sycophantic towards Harrison and A4e. Its article, "It’s not because they don’t want a job - it’s that they haven’t got a clue what to do next", is pure PR, and repeats the stuff she has said in her radio interviews.
I expect this bandwagon to roll on for a while yet.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Vox and meetings
If you don't read the Daily Express (and why would you?) you'll have missed Emma Harrison's Jobs Tips. Not to worry, you can read them on A4e's website. Your confidence in A4e's competence may be shaken, however, by the howler in the introduction - "ensuring your poised and ready for an interview". Anyone applying for a job would be well advised to do better than that on their CV.
A growing part of A4e's business are the Vox centres, which give skills training to children and young people who have been excluded from schools. Emma is opening the 10th such centre today, at Sheffield Wednesday football club. She seems to think that it's "a fascinating new model"; the private company stands the cost of setting up the institution and the local authority buys places in it. It is not new at all. Private companies running special schools, for instance, operate on exactly the same model. It doesn't look as if any of these centres have been inspected by Ofsted yet. Emma says she's not concerned about public sector cuts, and she may well be justified.
One company which has decided that the Work Programme is too big a risk is Sarina Russo, an Australian outfit. Despite being put on the framework they've announced that they are not going to bid for any of the contracts as prime contractor. They say that they support the payment model, but they only want to be sub-contractors. That's going to leave only a handful of companies, like A4e and Serco, which are willing to take the financial risk.
Ex-A4e employee Hayley Taylor who, in a few short months, rose to "international careers expert" has had a meeting with Chris Grayling. She says, "it was good to hear that the issues the unemployed face are being addressed, although it remains to be seen what the outcome will be." One wonders whether Grayling is meeting any of the unemployed.
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