Category: Current Affairs

In need of an asylum

I’ve often wondered whether the Express and the Mail are cynical or stupid in their coverage of asylum seekers and immigration. A strong voice for the ‘stupid’ lobby comes from a Committee hearing in Parliament, at which the editors of those two soiled organs gave evidence. The Express’s editor, one Peter Hill, as reported in the Guardian brought forth the following description of asylum seekers

hundreds of thousands of people many of whom hate this country; people who want to destroy this country, people who want to become suicide bombers.

Disturbingly, Express readers also believe that the number of immigrants in the country is three times higher than the actual level (7%). Frightening stuff.

The benefits of immigration in the US

From Salon.com.

Twenty-five percent of the technology and engineering companies started in the United States between 1995 and 2005 had at least one key co-founder who was an immigrant, reports a new study from researchers at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. The researchers estimate that these companies generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers. Immigrant non-citizens were also responsible for 24 percent of all international patent applications filed from the U.S. in 2006. Indians alone started more engineering and technology companies in the U.S. in the last 10 years than Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese combined.

Daily Mail: Zero tolerance for criminals, mostly

The lead story on today’s Mail, which I read in the barbers’, expresses the usual spluttering outrage at a campaign by the Revenue to reduce the number of people who underpay their tax. So paying tax is added to obeying speed limits as a law that should be optional for Mail readers.
They support their case with dodgy stats, as you might expect. To illustrate their love of dodgy stats, they also treat the latest ludicrous report from ‘think tank’ Migrationwatch seriously. This report claims that immigrants only contribute 4p each per year to the economy. Given that respectable organisations think the overall contribution of immigrants is about £15bn, that means there are 375bn immigrants in the UK’s population of 65m. Perhaps the paranoid xenophobes do have valid concerns.

Repeal a law you don’t understand

The Today Prorgramme is once again running its public vote on ‘a law we’d want to repeal’, and like so much of the programme these days, it’s completely uninformed pub politics. They’ve had people on the programme making more or less (usually less) cogent arguments about various candidates, and have now whittled the long list down to six.

You can vote on them here, though to be honest I wouldn’t encourage it. Indeed, I wouldn’t particularly encourage visiting the page, as there’s very little information either pro or con on any of the options: just audio clips of people condemning the laws.

And what are the laws in question? Two of them are perhaps reasonable candidates – the provision to ban protestors outside Parliament, and the Act of Settlement that prevents Catholics becoming monarchs. Two are pressure-group related – the Hunting Act and the Dangerous Dogs Act. And the final two are ill-informed bits of nonsense that neither the voters or the programme presenters appear to understand – the Bloody EU telling us what to do, I hate the bloody French Act of 1972, and the And they let out the black blokes what do murders but they won’t let me do fifty in a thirty zone, bloody human rights act, innit Act of 1998.

The worst of it that this circle-knee-jerk is presented as some form of grassroots democracy – a way for ‘the people’ (or at least that microset of them that listen to the Today programme) to kick back at the excesses of the ruling class. No matter that understanding the EU and our relations with it is a lecture series not a soundbite, or that arguing against Human Rights is perhaps a little 1930s Germany. Why would discussion or information matter when you have prejudice? What’s the point of treating the people with respect when you can have Oxbridge-educated radio producers pat you on the back for how democratic you are and then ignore you the other 364 days of the year?

I’m a conscientious abstainer.