I don't know whether Iain Duncan Smith and Richard Desmond have ever met, but they certainly work to help each other. Desmond is the owner of Channel 5 and the Daily Express, and he uses both to demonise the poor. After Channel 4 had screened the infamous Benefits Street, it was Channel 5 which hosted the "debate" on the subject. Now, Desmond's channel is making a series of its own. No title has been decided, they say (but the makers of Benefits Street said the same, and they lied) but it's about the benefits "culture", and they are in the process of filming.
We can see how they go about it through the protests of one of the cities unwillingly involved. Hull has a lot to be encouraged about at the moment, in the midst of one of the worst unemployment rates in the country. But now the film-makers have been leafletting the poorer estates seeking gullible people to take part, and have already done some filming. Local councillors are furious, but seem helpless to prevent it.
Of course people should have the freedom to take part, if they are given accurate information and understand what they're doing. But what about the people who live in the area and have not consented to this? Benefits Street led to children who live in James Turner St being bullied. Other residents felt that they had been stigmatised simply for their address. Many of those who did take part believed that they were misled by the film-makers. If there's a redress in law, none of them can afford to sue.
I have a suggestion. Send Katie Hopkins to live on one of these estates for a while. I'd watch that.
Showing posts with label Richard Desmond. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Desmond. Show all posts
Sunday, 30 March 2014
Monday, 3 February 2014
The hate campaign
It makes you wonder why Richard Desmond hates the poor so much. But perhaps the owner of the Express and Channel 5 doesn't hate, or indeed feel anything except the lure of money for himself.
Yesterday the Express added a new word to the lexicon of far-right poor-bashing - "ghettos". A ludicrously skewed story reckoned to have "uncovered the nation's Benefit Ghettos". It draws on data for which it gives no source to show that an area of Blackburn has 71.9% of the working age population claiming benefits. The rest of the story is what you'd expect, except for the fact that they do quote Jack Straw MP to the effect that there are a lot of hostels in the area, distorting the figures. But who cares about the facts? Who cares about the working poor who are so badly paid that they have to claim benefits? No, these are "ghettos". And I'm sure Desmond understands the significance of that word.
It's all in preparation for another Desmond venture, a programme on Channel 5 tonight advertised in today's Express. It claims to be based on a YouGov poll showing that "two-thirds of Britons believe the system of state handouts needs an overhaul". Now, I seem to remember taking part in that poll, and I realised that there was an agenda behind it. I must have been among the 45% who thought that benefits claimants were portrayed unfairly. However, it's an excuse for Channel 5 to put on a "debate" featuring - wait for it - "White Dee" from Benefits Street, Katie Hopkins and Edwina Currie. Ken Livingstone is also in the line-up. No, of course I won't be watching.
Yesterday the Express added a new word to the lexicon of far-right poor-bashing - "ghettos". A ludicrously skewed story reckoned to have "uncovered the nation's Benefit Ghettos". It draws on data for which it gives no source to show that an area of Blackburn has 71.9% of the working age population claiming benefits. The rest of the story is what you'd expect, except for the fact that they do quote Jack Straw MP to the effect that there are a lot of hostels in the area, distorting the figures. But who cares about the facts? Who cares about the working poor who are so badly paid that they have to claim benefits? No, these are "ghettos". And I'm sure Desmond understands the significance of that word.
It's all in preparation for another Desmond venture, a programme on Channel 5 tonight advertised in today's Express. It claims to be based on a YouGov poll showing that "two-thirds of Britons believe the system of state handouts needs an overhaul". Now, I seem to remember taking part in that poll, and I realised that there was an agenda behind it. I must have been among the 45% who thought that benefits claimants were portrayed unfairly. However, it's an excuse for Channel 5 to put on a "debate" featuring - wait for it - "White Dee" from Benefits Street, Katie Hopkins and Edwina Currie. Ken Livingstone is also in the line-up. No, of course I won't be watching.
Monday, 21 October 2013
The hate campaign goes on
The Express's disgusting hate campaign against the unemployed continued today with a story which has so many holes in it that not even the editor should have believed it. Read it carefully before continuing.
Do you see what I mean? This bloke has a job agency in Worcester. Now, the idea of these agencies is that they sign up people onto their books so that, when a company contacts them for personnel, they've got clients who they can contact and use, even at short notice. The agencies then get paid for supplying the labour. This chap, Danny James, hadn't done that. When he got an urgent order for 50 people to man a food packing line that same night, he went to the Jobcentre. (Would James have given the agency commission to JCP?) The Jobcentre, obviously, couldn't help. A spokesperson said, "The very short timescale given by the agency and the need for jobseekers to be available to work the night shift, that same day, meant that we were unable to help on this occasion." So Mr James had to fall back on doing what an agency is paid to do in the first place - phone his own contacts. He could only find ten. Now he's ranting on Facebook about people "scrounging from us taxpayers". And the Express has deliberately misrepresented people who were unwilling to do a single shift at a few hours' notice; people who would lose money by doing so, because the system penalises them for signing off, doing one shift and signing back on again.
But facts don't matter to the Express, or to its owner, Richard Desmond.
Do you see what I mean? This bloke has a job agency in Worcester. Now, the idea of these agencies is that they sign up people onto their books so that, when a company contacts them for personnel, they've got clients who they can contact and use, even at short notice. The agencies then get paid for supplying the labour. This chap, Danny James, hadn't done that. When he got an urgent order for 50 people to man a food packing line that same night, he went to the Jobcentre. (Would James have given the agency commission to JCP?) The Jobcentre, obviously, couldn't help. A spokesperson said, "The very short timescale given by the agency and the need for jobseekers to be available to work the night shift, that same day, meant that we were unable to help on this occasion." So Mr James had to fall back on doing what an agency is paid to do in the first place - phone his own contacts. He could only find ten. Now he's ranting on Facebook about people "scrounging from us taxpayers". And the Express has deliberately misrepresented people who were unwilling to do a single shift at a few hours' notice; people who would lose money by doing so, because the system penalises them for signing off, doing one shift and signing back on again.
But facts don't matter to the Express, or to its owner, Richard Desmond.
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.
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