The Press: The uninvited

The British press recently set a record-five consecutive days in which the phrase "bogus asylum-seekers" did not appear. These were the days immediately after the discovery that 58 clandestine migrants from China had asphyxiated in a sealed container bound for Dover from Belgium.

The Daily Mail (24 June) showed how good a paper it can be when it applies its considerable resources to honest reporting. Its reporter, Rebecca Fowler, dispatched a two page story from Fujian Province, southern China, in which the reasons why so many young people leave for the West were sympathetically explored. The Sun (22 June) picked up another stowaway story. This time it was 24 people trying to leave Britain in a freight train bound for Milan. The language was unusually restrained: "Migrants make tracks," said the headline.

The tragedy of the 58 drew the fire away from asylum seekers and towards the traffickers, whom all the press fingered as the real criminals. Nick Cohen in the New Statesman (24 June) traced culpability further, pointing out that "European Union governments have made it all but impossible for refugees and economic migrants from the third world legally to breach the walls of their fortress. Desperate people grasp desperate solutions." He also emphasised that our demographic shortfall makes immigration essential if standards of living are to be maintained. The Spectator, in its own way, made the same point, as have most serious papers on both the right and left wings.

The good behaviour of the two rogue tabloids quickly gave out. The Sun defaulted to its normal diet of sport, sex, and royals. The Daily Mail reverted to its old tricks with its headline, "Make way for asylum-seekers, nurses told" (26 June). The asylum seekers had been housed in a nurses' hall of residence, and the article suggested that resources had therefore been taken away from "deserving" Brits. The true culprit was the accommodation office of John Moores University in Liverpool, which had failed to inform or consult the nurses about moving them out to a different hall of residence. But, as always, it was the asylum seekers who were to blame.

Earlier in the year, the Sun and the Daily Mail had been the subject of a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission by the Asylum Rights Campaign, a consortium of refugee and human rights organisations. A major focus of the complaint was their inflammatory coverage of Romany gypsies, which reached a peak in March.

"Kent and West London have become transit camps for the world's flotsam and jetsam ... Our land is being swamped by a flood of fiddlers," screamed the Sun's editorial (9 March). And in the same week, the paper gave us, "Gypsy spongers are building themselves PALACES with the vast fortune they are milking from soft-touch Britain."

The Daily Mail targeted individuals. In the case of Maria Nistor and her 4 month old son named "Lucifer," the pursuit filled innumerable column inches. "This Romanian was smuggled here with her children in the back of a lorry," said the paper (1 March) alongside a photo of a smiling woman in a swirling skirt carrying a baby. It went on to say, "A court heard how she now gets £20 an hour begging, £230 benefits a fortnight, and a three-bed house."

Three more days of sanctimonious headlines followed, such as "Look how they repay our generosity" and "Scroungers endangering a noble ideal." But on the fifth day, an abrupt twist put the Home Office in the dock. The Daily Mail had discovered that "the Romanian gipsy [sic] twice convicted of begging with a baby while claiming benefits is an immigration service spy" (5 March). She was not even an asylum seeker but had been granted false asylum papers by the Home Office in exchange for informing on other members of her community, the Daily Mail admitted. But by now the damage had been done.

The tabloids' picture of Britain as a "soft touch" both reflects and compounds government policy. The Immigration and Asylum Bill, passed last year, is full of references to "abuse," "racketeering," "fraud," and the need for "stemming the tide." Some broadsheets, notably the Guardian, have pointed out the contradiction between a nakedly deterrent policy and government statistics that reveal at least a third of asylum applicants are granted refuge-in other words are found to be genuine.

The implementation of dispersal, a central part of the bill, invited strong press criticism, after a devastating Audit Commission report in early June revealed its deficiencies. A key finding-quoted in most papers-was that "inadequate support services outside London present a major barrier to dispersal ... Mental health services, English language support and refugee community organisations-which offer practical and social help-are concentrated in the capital." Case histories illustrated a grave lack of access to appropriate medical care.

General practitioners in some areas are starting to close their lists. Without extra resources, they feel they cannot take on any more refugees. It is easy to imagine the headlines to come: "Refugees hog GP surgeries" in the tabloids, or "GPs block vulnerable refugees" in the liberal press. Doctors are likely to find themselves in an all too familiar situation-damned if they do, damned if they don't. Before they become the buffer between a state that will not provide and a press keen to attribute blame, they need to speak out on what they know is happening. Otherwise, the press will set the agenda.

Jennifer Monahan, freelance journalist, London


studentBMJ 2000;08:259-302 August ISSN 0966-6494