The British press and the labour debate

Addressing the royal commission on the press in 1948, newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook said: “I run the Daily Express purely for propaganda and for no other purpose”.

Somehow, the word propaganda comes to mind after perusing a few weeks’ worth of reports from UK newspapers on the question of whether citizens of Bulgaria and Romania will be allowed, after the two countries join the European Union, unlimited access to the British labour market.

With few exceptions, much of the UK press coverage has played the matter with strident notes of xenophobia and sensationalism. Naturally, with the habits of a national newspaper industry that appears to have learnt nothing from the various scandals in which it has embroiled itself - especially from the 1980s onwards, which saw a precipitate decline in media standards in Britain - reports about Bulgaria and Romania have been served up with lashings of loaded language.

Resorting to that favoured media standby, the opinion poll - quoted without revealing anything about the methodology used, the precise questions asked, or with vagueness of the size of samples, the Daily Express informed us on September 4: “Most people living in the UK favour imposing restrictions on migrant workers, a new survey has revealed”.

Three-quarters of those polled (in fairness, in this case a figure was given, of “more than 2000”) felt limits should be put on the number of people allowed into the UK (sorry to interrupt, but I have a professional editor’s question: What does “allowed into the UK” mean? May we still come to have a look at the swans at Avon, and the corgis at the Palace? Just visiting, mind) or the type of work they were allowed to do.

The same report moves on to quote a former chief inspector of schools, one Chris Woodhead (I am firmly resisting all temptation to speculate about how that surname may have dogged him during a career in education) who was interviewed an ITV programme about the possible impact of Bulgarian and Romanian children on Britain’s education system.

Woodhead “warned” (the Express’s phrase - in my Stylebook, I prefer the word “said” to its more pejorative alternatives) that the situation would become very, very serious if large numbers of people from the two new EU states were allowed into the country in 2007, unless the government invested significant extra resources into meeting the increasing demands on teachers.

“It’s inevitable if a teacher is faced with children in the class who can’t speak English they’re not going to be able to concentrate on the education of children who can speak the language,” Woodhead was quoted as saying.

The Express report concluded: “He predicted plummeting morale among teachers and a backlash from parents of English-speaking children if standards dropped as a result of an influx of immigrant pupils from Romania and Bulgaria once the two countries join the EU next year”. I hope that everyone who read that sentence, especially those in the paper’s UK domestic audience, did notice that it contained that little word, “if”.

The UK press has been doing well out of the story, foot flat on the xenophobic accelerator, and hand deep in the grab-bag of journalistic cliches.

The same address, by the head of the UK Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, was covered in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most sober coverage was that by the Independent, which limited itself to soberly and reasonably extensively quoting what Phillips actually said, which was to say that the growth in the number of immigrants coming to the UK from Eastern Europe presented “major new issues” for the established population.

Phillips said that new immigrants of this type brought with them their own institutions and were settling in greater numbers in smaller areas.

Perhaps once again demonstrating the cyclical nature of the media and modern modes of public debate, Phillips referred to the media coverage. In recent weeks, he said: “The newspapers and the airwaves have been full of chatter about the potential consequences of the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU. Set that noise against the background of public anxiety about terrorism inspired from abroad but executed at home and you have a recipe for policymaking by panic” the Independent quoted Phillips as saying.

Contrast this with the angle taken by the Sun, in a story under the headline “Migrant flood changing UK” and under the byline of its political correspondent, Michael Lea.

“New immigrants are dramatically changing the face of Britain, race chief Trevor Phillips warned yesterday.” Need I point out the presence of the w verb again? How we all wish that the internet and associated technology had been around a lot longer, to look up the Sun’s coverage of events of 1066.

Still in the discomfiting harsh light of the world as lit by the Sun, the same tabloid followed up its own story about the hordes of Bulgarians and Romanians queuing at the British embassies in the two countries by interviewing “three impoverished Bulgarians” who spelt out “why the UK is a promised land - and why they long to find work here”.

First up was “Dad-of-one” Petar Slavev who, so said the Sun, was in a rush to move his family to England before “Brits get fed up with the immigrants influx”.

Some quotations attributed to Slavev, described as a law student with a history degree: “We are in a hurry because I expect things to get worse there very soon. Britons can’t bear the heavy burden of so many immigrants any longer”.

I had an unpleasantly familiar sense of deja vu as I read this. It reminded me of some of the coverage of the influx into the former colonial power of Asians: “Pakis” in the racist language of the 1960s.

According to the Sun, Slavev was using a student visa to go to London.

“In Bulgaria if one wants to achieve something professionally he must work 10 years, eat nothing but air, to earn small change...the capable are not respected, only criminals and those with connections. I know my education won’t be worth anything in the UK but I can get a job and feed my family well,” the Sun quoted Slavev as saying.

The next two: Maria Christova (sic) reported to be living in a wooden shack in a rundown area of Sofia (“Maria, 29, hopes to earn a normal year’s pay in a MONTH in Britain.” Colleagues who resort to putting words in capital letters for EMPHASIS never fail to AMUSE me.)

Then there is Marieta Ivanova, 31, who “plans to get a job fruit-picking and will live in a caravan”. She has heard, according to the Sun, that people in Britain do not like picking fruit.

Overall, the British press coverage has been slanted against opening of labour markets. Less prominent coverage has been given to calls by the Business for New Europe group, reported by the Independent to include among its members the heads of supermarket chain Sainsburys and the European division of investment bank Merrill Lynch, for the UK to have an open door policy towards citizens of Bulgaria and Romania.

Two aspects receive scant mention overall in British press coverage. One is that the free movement of persons conferred by the EU concept will enable people to enter the UK, and have a shot at the job market, legally or illegally. But this, after all, a story about the coverage, not about the substance of the debate.

Another interesting but much-neglected aspect of the debate was mentioned in passing in a story in the Guardian on September 2, that said a key UK government defence of the historic “big bang” enlargement of the EU in 2004 - that immigration to Britain would amount to a trickle - was based partly on unrelated German research.

Within this story was a quotation from Nuremberg-based academic Dr Herbert Bruecker, the author of the research in question, who said that his research was extrapolated from the German model because (and here I am resisting temptation to resort to Sun-style capital letters) “the UK does not report migration precisely”.

Am I alone in wondering why my colleagues far away across the English channel do not delve deeper into this? The British press has been reporting unofficial and semi-official estimates, without bringing out the fact that a fairly significant factor in making any calculations, especially if they are percentage-based, is based on an unknown.

If Bruecker is correct, and the UK does not report immigration precisely, how reliable are the figures that we have been reading about the number of immigrants to the UK from new EU states in Eastern Europe, post-1994? May we ask about the methods used to come up with the guesses, pardon me, estimates, regarding potential new entrants from Bulgaria and Romania?

I shall leave it up to my colleague Petar Kostadinov, on the page facing this article, to cover the performance by the Bulgarian media and Government on this issue. We were all amused, and perhaps mildly horrified, by the statement by the EU in Bulgaria-Press Centre, alleging that the UK’s News of the World wanted to hire a Bulgarian sex worker and facilitate her passage to Britain. Along the way, the press centre - basing its statement on a story in Bulgaria’s daily Standart - alleged that the News of World team wanted to procure a fake passport for her. The same statement alleged that David Jones, identified as a journalist for The People, grievously mis-rendered statistics on unemployment in Bulgaria. The statement implied that it was his editors who were at fault.

The question of admission of Bulgarian and Romanian workers to UK labour markets has become fodder for the tabloids, and in time-honoured fashion, an avenue for anonymous leaking of statistics and mooted policy positions to journalists across the spectrum, from relatively respectable publications to hysterical tabloids.

A final note. The story thus far has been about UK media coverage, but it must be remembered that Britain is only one among several EU member states that has not yet announced its decision. How, one may wonder, will the debate be conducted and covered in other EU countries?