13 July, 2010

 

But it's only for illustrative purposes, guv

Remember all those brochures for, say, idyllic holidays in the Yorkshire Dales, in the sort of place where the sighting of a non-White face on the village street would be so unusual as to make the front page of the local paper, with the parish council ordering bunting to be put up to celebrate Great Swiving's new-found diversity and dicussing whether to hold a mela, before realizing that they didn't actually know what a mela is. You know, those brochures which for some reason are always full of pictures of groups of smiling folk so relentlessly ethnically diverse that even the producers of Balamory would, if you'll pardon the expression, blanche.

Curiously, the reverse effect seems to have been in operation in this Mail piece about a forecast that
One in five Britons 'will be from an ethnic minority by 2051'
That fraction seems a bit on the low side to me. But that's an argument for another time. Look instead at the photo used to illustrate the piece. Typical "commuters walking over London Bridge" stock shot. Of about 50 people in clear enough view to guess at their ethnicity, two are clearly North East Asian (Chinese?). The guy in the centre might be South Asian but then again he might be South European. The rest are as White as White can be.

What is the Mail trying to tell us here, if indirectly? That we're going to be overrun by immigrants but don't worry, because we're only going to be overrun by invisible immigrants who are really the same as us anyway and nothing's going to change really, honest.

I told you I wasn't afraid to read naughty websites, so a tip of the titfer to this Stormfronter chappie for pointing up this piece of egregious manipulative hypocrisy.

Oh, and for readers unwilling or unable to follow the Stormfront link above, I repeat this link to a piece in the Independent which partially explains my scepticism about the Mail's numbers.

Comments:
I saw an Express headline on this 1 in 5 business by mid-century.

Its bullshit, it will hit 20% long before that.

I believe that 25% of primary school children are foreign born. OK that includes plenty of salt-of-the-earth Polish types but even so, add that to our already enriched population. That 20% looks optomistic to say the least.

 
The way that the progressive websites like 'Pickled Politics', 'CiF' and 'Liberal Conspiracy' reacted to this headline was rather amusing, I have to say...

 
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