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.

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.

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.