Maybe we are a bunch of Little Britons

Have the tabloids made us less tolerant of immigration, or are they simply reflecting their readers’

The “‘Transatlantic Trends” report appears to reveal that Brits are more worried about immigration than any other country surveyed – worse than five other nations with more immigrants in their population, says the BBC’s Mark Easton.

What could be responsible? Is it because we’re an island nation, fearful of “contamination” or “invasion” from overseas, without the free flow of people provided by a land border? There is no comparison in the figures with a similar island, so it’s hard to be sure. According to the Financial Times (link requires registration), as reported by Primly Stable, “Immigration experts blame this on the hostility to foreign newcomers espoused by many British newspapers and the fact that the arrivals from eastern Europe rose so rapidly during the middle of the last decade.”

It’s tempting, as one of those bloggers who has written so much about the anti-immigration language and stories of the tabloid press down the years, to conclude that Brits are more worried about immigration than we should be because we’re told to be more worried than we should be.

Certainly, headlines such as “Keep out, Britain is full up” (Daily Express, in an uncanny parallel of the BNP slogan “Britain is full up”), “Migrants take all new jobs in Britain” (Daily Express), “White men to face jobs ban” (Daily Express), “Asylum – you’re right to worry” (Daily Mail), “They’ve stolen all our jobs” (Daily Star), “One in five Britons will be ethnics” (Daily Express), “Muslim schools ban our culture” (Daily Express), “Bombers are all spongeing asylum-seekers” (Daily Express) and “Strangers in our own country” (Daily Express) would appear to lead to that conclusion.

There are also somewhat misleading stories about race, ethnicity and immigration that pop up almost daily in the tabloid press. Just this week we have seen the Express‘s story about the ethnicity of doctors, shown by Full Fact to be not the whole picture by any means; and anti-war politicians labelled as “Muslims” rather than anti-war by the Daily Mail when they refused to give a standing ovation to a British soldier (but called him a “hero” nevertheless), as reported by Angry Mob.

It’s tempting to see all of this going on and conclude that it’s the angry, scaremongering language of the tabloids ramping up the fear factor when it comes to immigration – but that doesn’t mean that the screamsheets are the only ones tainting the issue, or that they are the main agents responsible for what appears at first glance to be a rather intolerant, angry Britain depicted in the Transatlantic Trends survey.

For one thing, it’s not just newspapers doing this: our politicians of all hues are more than capable of using dog-whistles such as “British jobs for British workers”, linking “crime and immigration” in election manifestos and demanding impractical immigration caps as a red line during coalition negotiations, for example. It’s not just the odious BNP, and their vile little cousin the EDL, who are doing the yapping about immigration.

For another, it may simply be the case that we are more anti-immigration in this country than liberals like me might like to think; and that politicians and tabloids alike, rather than driving the people, are being driven by them. I’d like to hope not, and I prefer to think of this country as a warm, welcoming, rich and diverse place to live – but it would be wrong to rule out the idea that we’re Little Britons who want to pull up the drawbridge. Maybe a lot of us are.

Mark Easton’s conclusion is a little more hopeful: he says that Brits are more confused than anything else and we think immigration is a lot more of a problem than it really is. If that’s the case, then the language and tone of some newspapers when it comes to immigration can hardly help, particularly when they don’t give the full picture. Even if they are reflecting the views of their readerships rather than defining them, and simply confirming the prejudices that already exist, newspapers aren’t helping people see the full picture – which is surely what they should be there for.