Did you see the Sun today? On its front page was a story about Arkadiusz Jozwik, a man who was killed by a group of feral youth apparently for being Polish. The Sun was outraged. So was the local Tory MP Robert Halfron who fumed that the killers had “literally come from the sewers.” I suppose it’s a little early to speculate on where they actually did come from and for all I know they may well have literally come from the sewers. I don’t doubt that Mr Jozwik’s killers belong there.
The sheer irony of the story should be lost on none of us. The Sun, more than any other paper with the possible exception of the Mail, has run scores, maybe hundreds, of stories about immigrants, almost always portraying them in a negative way. How about these examples of Sun headlines:
“Draw a red line under immigration or else!”
“As another 330,000 migrants prove we cannot control our own borders, Cameron responds”.
“Green and pleasant crammed”.
“One in ten on dole is an immigrant – huge rise in benefit tourists”.
“All migrants claim benefits and will give you cancer”.
All right, I made the last one up but I’ll bet you didn’t notice. There are plenty more examples on the internet and if you search for the Mail and Express you will find even more. The point is this: for as long as I can remember the right wing press, as well as certain politicians, have presented migrants as being bad people. It is a constant drip feed of a combination of misinformation and outright lies and if someone’s only source of news is the Sun, it follows that some people will believe falsehoods to be true. We do not know if Mr Jozwik died because he was Polish or not and since the Sun says he did, we must attach a health warning to the story but the truth is that the pernicious red top media frenzy affects some minds.
Was there an element of guilt in the Sun’s story, an acknowledgement that they might have been a tiny bit responsible for this gruesome murder? I doubt it. Rupert Murdoch has shown throughout his entire life that he has no scruples as long as his newspapers make money. I do have a theory, though.
Every time the Sun goes over the top about one subject or another, it can always point to a story that shows how liberal and caring they are. “Yes, we have run stories about thieving foreign benefit cheats, but you never mention this story about this poor Polish bloke who was killed for being Polish. Even though if we had our way, he’d have been locked up and sent back to Poland the second he got here.” Actually, they didn’t say the last bit, but they didn’t need to.
I repeat what I always say about immigration: we need a national debate about it. Not the Tory/Ukip line that all immigration is bad and we should pull up the drawbridge or the Corbyn Labour line that all immigration is good so just shut up. It is precisely because ordinary people are never consulted about immigration and that they are never included in debates about the benefits and downsides of immigration that people get angry and frustrated.
We will find out soon enough who killed Arkadiusz Jozwik and what their motive was. I’m afraid the Sun’s motives for selling papers are far more cynical. And if the owner of that newspaper presided over another newspaper that hacked into the voicemails of a dead schoolgirl, how on earth can you believe a single word he says?
