The art of headlines

Over the past few weeks, the press has managed to get a ton of headlines out of mass animal die-offs. Birds, fish...there have been several incidents widely reported from across the world where a couple of hundred critters are found dead somewhere, and this has been great fun for conspiracy theorists, armchair occultists and people who just wish something more interesting was going on than by-elections and cuts.

Today's Mail reports another such incident with a typically dramatic headline, pleading desperately with the authorities to stop covering shit up and tell us The Truth, dammit! "Now 300 dead birds fall from the sky in Alabama (how much longer can scientists keep saying this is normal?)", it seems to yell. Yeah, Mr Science Guy, how long are you gonna keep bullshitting us and admit it's time to start stocking up on shotguns and fortifying our basements?

The strange part is, though, the article is...actually fairly sensible. Y'know, for the Mail, I mean. Early in the piece, an entirely rational, non-apocalyptic, and deeply mundane explanation is offered for this particular incident:

It appears that the birds died of blunt force trauma - possibly from being hit by a truck, wildlife biologist Bill Gates told local news station WAFF

The article goes on to give a similar explanation for a recent incident in California. Flock of birds hit by truck. Not, perhaps, the start of the Rapture. DAILY MAIL REPORTER briefly mentions the excitement about the apparent spate of incidents, but then punctures such giddiness with a note of skepticism:

The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated.

Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don't notice them and don't try to link them to each other.

Indeed, most of the article is a pretty decent, if lightweight, debunking of the fuss around these animal deaths; the bottom line being that these things have always and will always happen, and we're just reporting them all of a sudden which makes it look like more. It's a little reminiscent of the Bridgend suicides, which were not particularly unusual statistically speaking but ended up portrayed as a massive sinister suicide pact. Or indeed the recent Implanon contraceptive jab story, where out-of-context absolute figures gave the impression that a massive amount of failures were occurring when in fact the failure rate was very low.

So what of that title? As we know, it's usually a sub-editor or someone other than the author who adds the title. If you'd given this article a title along the lines of "Animal deaths 'not unusual', say scientists", it would have made a lot more sense in the context of the article. But would people have read it? We live in an age of short attention spans where a shouty headline is what's needed to get hits, even if it's wildly misleading. I suppose the thing that bothers me about this case is that it's not just sensationalism; the headline seems to actively try and scorn the relatively sensible article beneath it in the name of cheap publicity. The person who wrote the article seems to think it's perfectly reasonable that "scientists keep saying this is normal", yet that ridiculous headline wants you to click on the article in the expectation finding that something deeper, something weirder, something perhaps conspiratorial or apocalyptic is going on. Why, I can only speculate, but it would hardly be surprising if the headline was purely designed to get a fairly mundane story Tweeted and Facebooked around the world by people who haven't really got any desire to read past the headline.

How to report a murder in the absence of facts? Use a psychic!

The time between a murder and someone being charged has always posed problems for the tabloids. Eager to keep the story running, but with no real hook for it, they often end up scrabbling around for something, anything to keep people glued in anticipation of someone being caught. So it is with the Joanna (now just 'Jo') Yeates murder.

Today we find several papers tossing wildly different logs into the fire. The Sun goes with this good old-fashioned campaign nonsense:



The Mirror features the previous suspect, now released without charge, continuing to vow to clear his name. The Mail, meanwhile, goes back to one of its favourite social ills, Facebook, with a rather flimsy-sounding suggestion that Yeates may possibly have been killed by someone who knew her through the social networking site:



I won't go into much detail on that, as it's already been very well covered by Natalie Dzerins over at Forty Shades Of Grey, which you may go and read now as long as you promise to come back.

Today's prize for most grotesque coverage, though, must go to The Daily Star, who have gone for this:



It's a bad enough headline in itself, but it becomes even more grim when you realise that this story, this new 'evidence', worthy of a front page headline no less, is based entirely on the claims of a single psychic. Yes, you read that right, a national newspaper has given over its front page to the wild claims of a psychic investigator.

In the article we get some more detail about the claims;

The psychic investigator insists she “saw” Jo being attacked by two of a group of five men after she rejected their offer of a lift.

It's later revealed that this vision took place 10 days before Yeates went missing. She speculates further, saying "The girl wasn’t bosom friends with the men. It looked like they offered her a lift but she didn’t take it and they followed her". It looked like? Is a psychic giving rough details of something she saw in a vision of something which may or may not have been relevant, really good enough for a national newspaper front page? Apparently it is.

The psychic in question is Carol Everett, a shameless self-promoter who has attached her, er, unique gift, to various high-profile cases, including the Ian Huntley murders and the Washington sniper. She claimed to have drawn Huntley and Maxine Carr before they were arrested, a claim which seems impressive at first but falls apart when you scroll down to the untouched image, which has 'Carr' with beyond-shoulder-length hair, and an utterly generic white male drawing which claims Huntley has blue eyes (he doesn't), piercings (none visible) and isn't even sure whether the thing on his head is hair or a scarf. [EDIT: thanks to @tabloidwatch on Twitter for correcting me here, I think the 'piercing' may have been a description of Huntley's eyes. Which still aren't blue, mind].

I don't want to get dragged too far into the subject of whether psychics are real or not, but ultimately this kind of unfounded speculation from a single source who has no knowledge of the case can't be helpful, particularly when she's allowed to toss out potentially serious misinformation like this:

Carol described the killer she saw as of mixed race, 5ft 11in to 6ft tall and in his early 20s

Perhaps it's the mysterious "some Puerto Rican guy" from South Park. Either way, this really feels like tremendous barrel-scraping from a paper content to give a platform to self-promoting bullshit merchants for the sake of keeping voyeurists entertained.

It's probably an outrage!

At this festive time of year, you might be feeling a little more contented than usual. This, no doubt, worries the Daily Mail. Have you even rolled your eyes at anything and had cause to say "This bloody country...couldn't make it up!" today? Luckily, the Mail has staff working year-round to ensure you get your RDA of self-important tutting at the way society's gone both to the dogs and to hell in a handcart.

So, you like Top Gear, right? Of course you do! No political correctness on Top Gear! Just endless hours of Jeremy Clarkson saying everything with exactly the same mildly Partridge-esque intonation. On Boxing Day, Top Gear did a Christmas special. I didn't watch it, obviously, as I would genuinely rather spend the same amount of time repeatedly slamming a car bonnet on my balls than listen to Clarkson affect bafflement at a foreign car's dashboard layout yet again.

Anyway, apparently, during this episode of Top Gear, everyone's favourite trio of denim-clad raised-eyebrow-possessors went to Syria and dressed up in niqabs, to no doubt hilarious satirical effect. Take that, politicalcorrectnessgonemad! Everyone had brilliant fun and we all probably learned something profound.

Except, of course, they won't bloody let you do stuff like that now, will they? The Muslims, I mean. And the PC Brigade! They'd never let you broadcast something like that on the painfully liberal BB...er... So anyway, predictably, poking gentle fun at the Muslims has stirred up an absolute hornet's nest of seething outrage from the miserable asylum-seeking foreign killjoys living here on benefits and telling us what to do. In Top Gear stars cause religious row after dressing up in burkas on Boxing Day special, we learn that this classic bit of harmless British dress-up japery "sparked religious outrage"! Our irreverent speed-camera-hatin' heroes were "slammed by Muslims for mocking their religion" after it "caused a storm online"!

Now, this was the first I'd heard about this storm, despite spending much of my Christmas cocooned in my little online bubble surrounded by like-minded woolly liberal types. None of my humourless Marxist PC friends had been spluttering their non-denominational Winterval egg nog on their screens after finding out about the show. What gives? It's almost as if no-one really gave that much of a toss!

But hey, maybe I just got lucky. I'll read on and find out the many examples of frothing outrage this stunt has generated.

Islamic extremist Anjem Choudary, said: 'The burka is a symbol of our religion and people should not make jokes about it in any way.

'It would have been equally bad even if they’d not been in a country mainly populated by Muslims.'

Ah, it's Anjem Choudary! Yeah, he'd be my go-to guy for a representative sample of Muslim opinion too!

Okay, okay, so Anjem Choudary was a bit outraged. But then he always is. He's the Islamic equivalent of Phillip Davies MP or that guy from Christian Voice in terms of playing the Indignant Self-Appointed Mouthpiece Who's Always A Phone Call Away When You Need An Angry Quote For Your Deadline. If Anjem Choudary getting pissed off constitutes a 'storm', we must be embroiled in one near-constantly. The only time Anjem Choudary isn't outraged is when he's asleep, and even then he's probably dreaming about it.

So what about people who aren't rent-a-quote Islamic extremist trolls?

On the Yahoo! forum, someone wrote, 'Death to America', which another, called Rebecca Liberty, said mocking burkas is 'ugly'.

Now, that sentence doesn't actually make any fucking sense, but picking out some of the important words, I can just about work out that someone on a Yahoo! board said it was 'ugly', and that someone else with an apparently tenuous grip on reality may have said 'Death to America'. Of course, the miserable killjoy OUTRAGE wasn't confined to that Yahoo! board which I'm startled to find out people still use, there was also something on Twitter too!

Some viewers also took to Twitter to blast the burka stunt with one saying: This is probably the worst top gear special. Y the f*** r they wearing burkas!!?

So, not so much outraged, as calling it shit. And...that's it. That's the sum total of the Mail's evidence that anyone anywhere got upset by this; one Islamic extremist and someone on a Yahoo! forum whose single-word quote isn't given any context at all! Maybe there were more examples but DAILY MAIL REPORTER didn't have time to do any more messageboard quote-mining because he or she was feeling bloated after eating too many pigs in blanket? THOUGH YOU PROBABLY CAN'T EVEN SAY 'PIGS IN BLANKETS' ANY MORE IN CASE IT OFFENDS THE ETHNICS, AMIRIGHT?

So what's the motive for this flimsy confection of "cuh, can't say anything any more" bollocks? Well, I can't say for sure. But it fits with the Mail's usual narrative about how we the good old white male British law-abiding are being persecuted in our own country by uppity minorities with a sense of grasping entitlement, who complain about everything and have the sympathy of the out-of-touch metropolitan homosexual elites that run everything from their ivory towers in Islington. A quick glance at the best-rated of the (360 and counting!) comments shows that it's working:

To all the foreigners complaining about this programme and 'Come Fly with Me'. There is something you need to do before complaining if you don't like BRITISH humour, remember, it's our country, and we will laugh at whatever we want to. If you don't like it, PACK YOUR BAGS!
- Had Enough, England, 28/12/2010 15:40

What doesn't offend them? There is no Top Gear in Saudi. Move there.
- CF Tab, Johannesburg, SA, 28/12/2010 15:39

They looked great, it was hilarious and just a bit of fun. This country has the best humor in the world, don't like it, don't live here, simples.
- In awe, Surrey, 28/12/2010 15:32

Get the hell out of our country and go back to your own if you don't like what we do nor like our sense of humor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- bels, norfolk, 28/12/2010 16:30

Regardless of what you thought of the TV programme, that was funny. On the BBC (the first B stands for British).

If you were offended, go to the airport and fly somewhere else never to return!
- P.C. Gonemad, Loughborough, 28/12/2010 18:16

Well done top gear, the best way is just to keep winding these inbred idiots up
- steff miller, edinburgh, 28/12/2010 16:51

...and many, many more along those lines. Do you get it now? We're British! We all love Top Gear here, and if you 'inbred' Muslims don't like it you can fuck off back to Saudi Arabia or wherever! The BBC may not have confirmed whether or not anyone actually got riled enough to officially complain about the show, but the message is clear; if you complain about a simple joke*, you should leave the country, you bloody miserable multiculti oppressing bastards.

*doesn't apply to poncey floppy-haired liberal 'comedians' making indiscreet jokes about granddaughter-shagging, obviously. That was an outrage!

BREAKING: Melanie Phillips not impressed with the Left, feminism

The thing that always strikes me when I read the extended word-vomits that Melanie Phillips calls her newspaper columns, is that they do actually sort of make sense, as long as you buy into one or two comically absurd notions about her opponents.

First, a summary. Over the past couple of weeks, debate has raged on the left about Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It's been interesting to follow, and a lot of very sensible (and some stupid) things have been said. One major issue that has caused some arguing has been people's reactions to the rape charges levelled against Assange. The timing of the arrest so close to a major bout of embarrassment-causing by Wikileaks has caused some to be suspicious that the charges were not genuine, and this has not been helped by a torrent of misinformation about the nature of the charges, ranging from the bizarre "it was sex by surprise!" to the idea that a condom simply broke. As a result of this confusion, and in some cases no small element of political bias, some on the left were perhaps rather too quick to insist on Assange's innocence. In the worst cases, this has led to some tremendously ugly bashing of the women concerned, which has understandably caused some of us to feel rather uncomfortable. This Kate Harding post makes a pretty good fist of explaining why it's okay to support Wikileaks and still take the rape allegations seriously without resorting to slinging mud at the women making the claims. Above anything else, regardless of the facts of this case, it's important that women are not discouraged from reporting incidents of rape and sexual assault, and reactions like this (which have come from both the left and right - indeed the Mail itself was the source of much of the smearing of the women concerned), are not helpful in the bigger picture.

So, serious issues, big things at stake, topics worthy of grown-up debate and discussion, right? Enter Melanie Phillips [I apologise for any disturbing images that phrase may have given you]. Phillips is reacting to this with absolute glee. Arguments on the left of politics are not a sign of adult discourse, or a reflection of genuine disagreements about real issues. They're just funny. Funny, and a sign of wavering moral confusion. "...our most sanctimonious campaigners have managed to hoist themselves simultaneously on not just one, but multiple politically correct petards", she reports.

Phillips rampages through this tale with unconcealed joy. It involves Sweden! Liberals like Sweden! Isn't that terribly funny? What a hilarious mess! She gets to have a go at 'luvvies', and most joyously of all for her, the Guardian. At no stage in the piece does Phillips particularly concern herself with stating her own beliefs, either about Wikileaks, about Assange or the allegations. Pointing and mocking is fine enough.

What confuses Phillips the most though, and its a theme that courses through her writing, is nuance. Melanie Phillips isn't really about nuance. It's not something she does, or feels she needs to do. Like her fellow columnist Peter Hitchens, everything is simple. Things A and B are right and moral. Things X and Y are wrong and disgusting. Person 1 is dead wrong. Person 2 is dead right. Phillips never seems to be able to understand why other people cannot instantly uncover the rights and wrongs of a situation in the way she can. There are a couple of examples of the binary way she views the world in this piece, and she asserts the same central canard twice. The first is here:

For the whole world-view of the Left rests upon its iron-clad conviction that America is a global conspiracy of evil from which all bad things ultimately emanate.

...and repeated in more depth further on:

To understand why there is such an ear-splitting screeching of brakes from The Guardian, it is necessary to consider the mind-bending contradictions of what passes for thinking on the Left.

For it believes certain things as articles of faith which cannot be denied. One is that America is a force for bad in the world and so can never be anything other than guilty. Another is that all men are potential rapists, and so can never be anything other than guilty.

Now, that's an absurd caricature of liberal thinking. It's a fairly common view on the right that the left HATES America, but it's a bafflingly simplistic depiction of it. A lot of time is spent criticising the US, but that's a reflection of two things; 1) the power which the US has, and 2) its democratic nature. We spend a lot time shouting about the US because in many ways it's the biggest hope for worldwide positive change. The direction of US politics can be changed by political action, if we can demonstrate the will. We criticise the US harshly at times because we recognise that if we want any kind of global political change, the US is always going to be a key player, and can be influenced in a way that other nations can't. It's kind of the friend we like to criticise constructively because we know what its capable of achieving.

The other 'article of faith', that the left believes that all men can never not be guilty of rape, is a cartoonish simplification of a viewpoint which isn't held by a majority of feminists, let alone leftist liberals. But you get the feeling Melanie Phillips actually unwaveringly believes that this is the stark, Manichean way liberals think. She's projecting her own binary way of thinking onto her opponents, seeing them as a mere mirror image of herself and unable to ever accept that maybe things are just a little less neat than they appear.

Of course, what Phillips is utterly unable to provide are any quotes to support her assertions that we all passionately hate the US and all assume men are guilty. I've read a lot of blogs and articles from various sides of this debate, and I've yet to come across a single feminist who has stated that they assume Assange's guilt; the vast majority have been at pains to point out that, at this stage, we simply cannot know. It's simply about taking serious allegations seriously, and affording the alleged victims the chance to put their case before the courts without simply dismissing the charges out of hand because the timing looks dodgy or because Wikileaks is something we may support. For all the fighting and debate that's gone on, ultimately there's no contradiction to be found when it comes to reconciling the two issues; Wikileaks can be a good thing whether or not Assange personally is a good man. We can defend Wikileaks' right to disclose documents that can inform debate without needing to assume anything about the truth of the personal allegations made against him.

The NHS is sending dirty texts to your child!

It's often said that there are few certainties in life; death, taxes, George Lucas pissing everybody off, Jamie Redknapp misusing the word 'literally'. You can add to that 'the Daily Mail getting outraged at any attempt by authorities to provide any kind of sexual advice to anyone under the age of 18'.

Today's 'controversy' is outlined in the ridiculously titled Sex texts for teens: Controversy as NHS promotes mobile advice line for children as young as 13. Or, as it was previously titled, "Sexting for teens: NHS promotes mobile advice line for children as young as 13". You can still see the previous title in the title bar at the top. The Mail likes to rethink its headlines, but this is a slightly strange one as it drops the more lurid 'sexting' but at the same time adds 'controversy' into the mix. Perhaps the original didn't have a rent-a-quote to back up the controvery claim.

Anyway, it's clear from the off that author Sophie Borland and whoever wrote the title want you to think this is all rather seedy. First of all, as you've probably worked out, this is sex advice via text, rather than 'sex texts' or 'sexting'. The NHS is not sending your teenager texts asking them what they're wearing right now and luring them into describing their sex fantasies in great detail, cock in hand. That is the job of dirty liberals like me! It begins;

Children as young as 13 are being sent sex advice by text message under a controversial NHS scheme.

There's nothing particularly untrue about that sentence, but it does make it sound rather like this is unsolicited advice. It isn't. It is an advice service for young people who have questions about sex, pregnancy and sexual health which they feel uncomfortable talking to their peers or parents about. You send a text, you get advice back from an anonymous but trained professional who won't judge you or tell you you're going to burn in hell.

The article goes on to outline the basic, fairly sensible sounding principles behind it. But, as predictably as night follows day with sex education stories, it's not long before the poorly evidenced claims that sex education encourages our kids to fuck rear their head:

But campaigners warn that the text service – funded by taxpayers – is simply encouraging promiscuity among underage youngsters.

Funded by taxpayers, no less! Who would have thought! Still, who are these 'campaigners'? The Mail cites one:

Norman Wells, director of Family and Youth Concern, said: ‘Not only does it undermine parents by presenting itself as an authoritative source of advice on sex, relationships and sexual health, but it also fails to respect the age of consent by offering a service to children under 16.

‘The information provided is not even accurate. The website fails to tell visitors that condoms provide much less protection against sexually transmitted infections than they do against pregnancy, and says nothing about the health benefits of keeping sex within a lifelong, mutually faithful relationship with an uninfected partner.’

You know the drill by now. An unelected, unaccountable, campaigner gets space to mouth off because his opinions chime with the editorial stance of the Mail. Family And Youth Concern are not sexual and reproductive health experts. They are a bunch of concerned conservatives with traditional values. Of course the advice does not tell young people to wait til they're married. This is advice to people who will in many cases already be having sex. They are looking for advice, not a moral lecture. If you want advice about sexual health, you go to a health professional. That is what they are qualified to do. If you want traditional moral guidance, text your local preacher. I'm not sure what Wells wants here. Does he want there to be no sex advice line at all? Or does he simply want every response to say "Are you 16 yet? If not, don't do it. Ever"?

In the spirit of swashbuckling investigative journalism for which it is renowned, the Mail poses as an anonymous young person to ask for advice. What they discovered was shocking boring.




There you have it then. Crushingly boring, sensible sex advice to concerned young people seeking it. It's a bloody outrage!

Britain sucks and everyone is laughing at us!

If there's one thing guaranteed to be more boring than people complaining about the weather, it's people complaining about people complaining about the weather, and bemoaning our collective reaction to it. Every time Britain gets some bad weather, you know you'll see the following things:
- headlines screaming about CHAOS
- front pages consisting entirely of the predicted temperature in the coldest part of Scotland done in a MASSIVE font (in Celsius, even if the paper is bafflingly committed to Fahrenheit for the most part, because Celsius gives lower and hence more dramatic numbers)
- business leaders and the CBI on the radio complaining endlessly about how people getting stuck in the snow is affecting their profits
- tedious hack pieces about how Britain can't handle a bit of extreme weather because we've lost our Blitz spirit, and how embarrassing it is that foreigners can handle everything and we can't.

The latter rears its head in David Jones' Why we're a laughing stock with the rest of the world in the Daily Mail, which has moaning in spades.

Whiling away the long hours in my steamed-up Toyota on Tuesday night, I thought of the many countries I have visited on foreign reporting assignments with far harsher climates than ours, and wondered why they never have these problems.

Well, the reason is that countries with "far harsher climates" are forced to spend the money on solutions, otherwise the disruption would simply be too much. Britain has a mild climate for the vast majority of the time, and so unless we want to spent a whole metric shitload of money on vast stockpiles of rock salt and fleets of snowploughs on the off chance that we'll get a day or two's snow disruption. In January, up in Manchester, I missed one whole day of work due to the disruption which prevented me from completing a 40-mile journey to work. The problem in that case was that we'd already had ice and frost for several weeks before Christmas which had depleted the grit supplies, and so once we had several days of the heaviest snowfall I'd seen in many years, it became harder to get about.

It's not a particularly exciting topic; councils have limited funds, they have to make decisions about how to allocate those funds in the face of many competing demands, and so many of them won't put massive excesses of it aside for snow which may or may not come.

What's slightly more interesting, though, is the weird, insular assumption that we must be the only country shit enough to be facing any disruption. Did you know Germany has had no problems? You would if you'd taken David Jones' deeply scientific approach to the topic and canvassed the opinion of one friend:

According to a friend in Berlin, the trains are running, the schools are open and – in contrast with the horrendous scenes on the M25, where hundreds of lorry drivers slept in their cabs on Tuesday night – the autobahns are clear.

Well, that's that then, isn't it? The Bloody Germans, ruthlessly efficient as always, chuckling at our bumbling Hugh Grant ineptitude! Of course, if you have any Google chops at all, you'd be able to find evidence that Germany isn't made of magic and can't make everything work:

Wintry weather caused on Wednesday the cancellation of around 60 flights at Frankfurt airport, Europe's third busiest, a spokesman said.

The number of takeoffs on one of the western German airport's runways had to be reduced because of high winds, a spokesman for airport operator Fraport told AFP. On Tuesday almost 300 flights were scratched.

360 flights cancelled in two days in Frankfurt? But...Teutonic efficiency...? 250 were cancelled in Munich. But what of the roads? Let's go to a German news site:

Ongoing snowfall in the southern state of Bavaria caused major traffic snarls, with police reporting problems near Regensburg for several hours in the early morning. Many abandoned transport trucks blocked lanes near on-ramps, they said. And while winter road cleanup crews were out in full force, they were unable to keep up with the heavy snowfall in the region.

Deaths from traffic accidents were reported in Nuremberg and Aschaffenburg.

Meanwhile trains in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and northern Bavaria were also impeded by the snow storm. National rail provider Deutsche Bahn reported that drifting snow and felled trees caused numerous delays. Travel between Leipzig and Nuremberg, as well as between Gerstungen and Leipzig had to be cut off entirely during parts of the night, they said.

Oh. Still, I assume the "Hundreds of train passengers" who were "forced to spend the night at the Frankfurt train station" kept themselves warm with a good old chuckle at the Brits, eh? And we can just ignore the fact that schools were in fact closed in parts of Northern Germany.

It's not just Germany; stories like this reveal that Geneva airport had to close, as did Lyon in France. 8 people died of exposure in Poland.

In France, 12 regions in the frozen east and centre banned the use of lorries, forcing more than 7,000 of them to park overnight, while the weather has caused hundreds of accidents on German roads.

But...I think you'll find that a Mail reporter spoke to a friend in Berlin and they said it was fine? What more evidence do you need?

The Olivers/Mohammeds are coming!

Is it that time of year again already? Every year, a list of the most popular names given to newborn babies in England and Wales is published by the ONS. And, every year, certain people get upset about how many of them are called Mohammed. Let's compare and contrast some coverage of the latest report:

The Guardian: Oliver and Olivia top list of most popular babies' names
The BBC: Which baby names are the most popular?
The Press Association: Oliver 'most popular name for boy'
The Daily Mail: Mohammed is now the most popular name for baby boys ahead of Jack and Harry

So it's really up to your personal preferences which way you want to look at it. So why the different opinions? Why are some saying 'Oliver' and some 'Mohammed'? Well, 'Mohammed' is spelled in various different ways, with 14 recognised variations. The Mail likes to add all these together, and conclude that;

The name, when 12 different spellings were included, was given to 7,549 youngsters in 2009, official statistics revealed.

Oliver was the second most popular and it was given to 7,364 boys in England and Wales in 12 months.

The Mail is very insistent that this must be done. Last year, when Mohammed was third by their reckoning, the never knowingly understated Max Hastings railed against what he called a "shabby effort to conceal" the fact;

The ONS's hit parade of children's names, as released for publication, seemed designed to mask a simple truth which dismays millions of people, and which politicians and bureaucracies go to great lengths to bury: the Muslim population of Britain is growing extraordinarily fast.

He was so angry that the ONS felt moved to respond, saying they simply count by exact spellings.

As someone who occasionally gets a mild semi-on over statistics, this isn't actually totally unreasonable, allowing for variations like that. However, if you're going to apply statistical massaging like this, you have to be, y'know, fair about it. By 'fair', I mean simply applying the same rules to everyone. So, if you're going to add up all the various spellings of 'Mohammed', then you should do the same for other names in the list.

So, I went to the source at the ONS There I found the full list: 2009 Baby Names Statistics Boys (.xls file - 535kb). Here, we discover that there are 127 Oliviers, 104 Oliwiers, 9 Olis, 9 Oliwers, 4 Olivers' (plural!), 4 Ollivers, and most significantly, 511 Ollies (with an additional 16 Ollis). Even just adding Oliver and Ollie together, we get to 7,875, putting it back above Mohammed into first place again (and it becomes 8,148 if you add all the above variants). And that's before we get onto the more controversial stuff about how 'Jack' is historically a diminutive of the name 'John' (although of course many would argue that the former has now become a name in its own right).

Regardless, though, of whether the Mail's headline claim actually stands up (and for me it doesn't), it remains a somewhat deceptive statistic. The Mail wants you to infer that there's a scary amount of Muslims beings born, and Max Hastings' column from last year laboured this point quite a bit. Mohammed is simply, for cultural reasons, a very popular first name for Muslim boys, whereas 'British' names are a lot more varied (as, thankfully, are Polish ones, or else we'd probably be having an article about the explosion of Polish names in Britain). It has been that way for a long time, while British names have fluctuated far more with changing times and trends, and we don't tend to call our kids 'Jesus', though I am tempted to now. It's why there's no fuss made about the girls' names list; Muslim girls are not named in honour of the Prophet, therefore they're not dominated by a single name and derivations thereof. Thus the girls' list is full of good old British-sounding names like Emily and Sophie, instead of scary-sounding foreign ones.

It's just a meaningless excuse for more scaremongering. If you want to moan about the Islamification of Britain (and Christ knows the Mail wants to do that), then at least use accurate statistics about ethnicity and religious background, instead of using a cultural quirk in naming traditions as another excuse to get your Union Jack boxers in a twist.

Peter Hitchens: Not A Feminist

It's probably fair to say that Peter Hitchens and I don't see eye to eye on everything. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if my life would have been noticeably different if I'd made every decision based on a "what wouldn't Peter Hitchens do?" credo. I know what Peter Hitchens' worldview is, and it leaves me a bit cold. Well, a lot cold. Still, every now and then he expresses it in such a brutal, fundamentalist way that it catches me off guard.

In Hitchens' most recent piece, One benefit reform that would make us happier... and richer, he makes his position clear in the first paragraph.

There's only one lasting, simple welfare reform package this country needs. It goes like this. First, an announcement that nine months from today, all benefits of any kind for new unmarried mothers should cease.

It's so simple, so straightforward! Simply by making unmarried mothers poorer and increasing the hardship in their lives, we could change everything in Broken Britain! The conclusion of the next paragraph is where my jaw first collided with my knees:

Note the word 'new'. Existing victims of one of the stupidest policies in human history should continue to get their handouts and subsidised homes until their children are grown. It is not their fault, or their children's, that they were misled by weak and wicked politicians into this way of life.

Because, of course, it's always a choice, right? And what's more, these feckless, stupid single mums creaming state benefits are not just irresponsible, but so incredibly weak-minded that they were manipulated into choosing this way of life by...politicians. Presumably in these families (if indeed you can call them "families", these abnormal living arrangements), the mothers kneel before a framed picture of Jack Straw or Charles Clarke or Tony Blair and thank them for their blessing, their inspiration, their encouragement to choose a life raising a child on meagre state benefits.

He's not all bad, though, Hitchens, he's got a heart! I mean, look...

They should not be condemned or harassed. But this state-sponsored assault on marriage should stop.

Yeah, don't harass them, these silly women! After all they're too stupid to think for themselves, being victims of the Sixties liberals who have caused all these problems. No, the real problem, if you're Peter Hitchens, is that providing state support to lone parent families is nothing short of a "state-sponsored assault on marriage". Hitchens then goes on to generously throw these women another bone; if your husband got exploded in a war, or utterly abandoned you, you might still get benefits under a Hitchensian system! Hooray!

I've argued with Hitchens before on his blog. His view is very stark and simple, black and white. Briefly, he believes that all moves to make divorce easier (and also all moves to make gay marriage a possibility) are purely ideologically driven; not by the ideology of trying to be fair to people whose relationships fail, or to give people choice, but by a straightforward liberal Marxist hatred of the "traditional" family unit. The norm for Hitchens is, and should always be, husband and wife, married, living together with children. The Left, however, because they believe in state control, supposedly see the family as a threat, a unit that needs to be broken up if the state is to have the pliant subjects that socialism, he believes, requires. Hitchens is married, and his marriage is still intact. He seems to be unable to understand why it might be different for anyone else, and not that interested in finding out. And what's more, he's so convinced about the unquestionable correctness of his view, he believes that his norms should be enforced or at least encouraged financially by the state.

You can make your own judgements about his position. I look at things a little differently to him. I think marriage is a fine thing, it's not something I believe should be abolished or banned, despite being a card-carrying member of the PC Brigade. However, it's not the only way to exist. There are a huge range of reasons why a woman with a child might be single. Hitchens views any state benefit given to such a woman as a political endorsement of her foolish choice, and believes that we should reward marriage and penalise lone parenthood. I, on the other hand, view the benefits system as a safety net for those who need it. Lone parents are already at a disadvantage on a purely economic level. To punish them in order to make an ideological statement condemning their lifestyle seems irresponsible and judgemental to me, patronising even. Even if I accepted that all single mothers were foolish, feckless idiots, which I don't, I could never endorse a benefit-slashing policy that would see their blameless children suffer as a result.

And who's to blame for all this foolishness? Well, the BBC of course!

[The Tory party] has sold its soul – and the conservative people in this country – in return for the approval of the BBC and for the empty, pompous joys of office without power

Anyway, you might be thinking, "oh, leave old Hitch alone! He's just an old romantic who believes in the sanctity and purity of marriage and its high-minded ideals!". But, further down the column, he presents a view of marriage, and men in particular, that ranks among one of the darkest assessments of anything I've ever seen in a mainstream newspaper. Criticising the film "Made In Dagenham" for telling the story of a woman who let her husband look after their child for a bit while she fought for equal pay, Hitchens writes;

As she hurries off to yet another meeting, he points out to her that he's been a good spouse – not drinking or gambling away his wages, not raising his hand to her or the children.

She turns to him, rather snottily, and makes a Germaine Greer-type speech saying that she expects all these things by right, not as a privilege.

Feminists, eh? Where do they get off, treating the right not to be battered by their husbands as anything other than a privilege we men bestow upon them! He continues;

Men don't naturally behave in the responsible, considerate way that most working-class husbands still did in 1968. There was a deal, called marriage, which persuaded them do so.

But when that deal collapsed, not least when sex outside marriage became freely available, men began behaving like cavemen again, and women suffered from their own 'liberation'.

Did you get the message? Women have themselves to blame for this! By seeking, with the help of the Sixties liberals, rights like the ability to divorce, they have screwed men over in the deal we had. The deal was this; marry us, and we promise we probably won't beat the shit out of you after a night spending all the money on booze and greyhound racing. But hey, if women as a whole do anything to undermine the sanctity of marriage in the eyes of right-wing newspaper hacks, then indiviual women can't realistically expect us men not to revert to our woman-thumpin' caveman instincts, right?

It's an astonishing bit of woman-blaming, and a depressing conclusion to reach about marriage. I like marriage, or at least I did before I read this article. I thought it was a romantic statement; not one for everyone perhaps, but something people should be free to choose, a declaration of love and commitment. If Hitchens is right, and marriage is little more than a brief declaration of ceasefire, where men agree to temporarily stop behaving like animals in exchange for compliance from their woman, then maybe I'm not so hot on the idea after all.

I'll leave you with Hitchens' baffling conclusion;

The normal household needs two pay packets to survive, instead of one.

...and yet lone parents on benefits, Hitchens believes, should be forced to live on LESS than one pay packet, and penalised financially until they effectively have no choice to hook up with a man and depend on him. Cheerful fellow, Peter Hitchens.

ALL YOUR WAGE ARE BELONG TO US

In a way, I find the Express quite endearing. It's kind of like a children's version of the Daily Mail. I like to imagine that its writers sit on the floor in front of little fun plastic desks, copying Press Association articles out using massive crayons, tongues sticking out of the side of their mouths as they concentrate really hard on every letter.



Today's front page seems to bear this out. It comes across like an angry, stamping toddler, complaining loudly that he doesn't get enough pocket money to buy sweets. It's not fair, Kevin's parents give him twice as much and he's got a Wii!

It's really quite a staggering front page, isn't it? Even after you get over the initial confusion of thinking that Michael Douglas has been appointed The Taxman and isn't too happy about it, you're confronted with something quite bizarre. The taxman wants ALL our wages? This 100% income tax idea seems a bold step, particularly from a Conservative government. Labour, yeah, that's the sort of mad communist thing they'd do, but Cameron's Tories? Has Comrade Vince Cable warped them with his Marxist hectoring?

Of course, the story, as it turns out, is almost breathtakingly mundane. The coalition Government made a lot of noise about how overcomplicated the tax system was, so it's outlining a bunch of proposals to make it simpler. One of them is the possibility that maybe, at some time in the future, if the idea gets through Parliment, they might change the system so that HMRC makes its deductions itself, rather than having employers make the deductions on its behalf and then sending the money to the Government.

The Express is furious about this though. The idea that the money would technically go to the Government first seems to anger them to a frankly baffling degree. The article begins:

THE taxman could soon be getting his hands on all our hard-earned gross pay before we see it, it was revealed yesterday.

BEFORE WE EVEN SEE IT! Even though we don't get to see the money anyway because it's all deducted by our employers first! OUR HARD-EARNED GROSS PAY!

The taxman could then deduct income tax, national insurance and any student loan payments – before money is paid into our bank accounts like a parent doling out pocket money.

The thing about this, though, is that this already happens, but it's employers who do it instead of The Taxman. Does this mean our employers are effectively our parents? Is the head of monthly payroll my mum? I haven't been getting her anything for Christmas. And hey, look who it is:

Emma Boon, Campaign Manager of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “After recently telling six million people they’ve been paying the wrong income tax for the past two years, there’s no way we should reward HMRC for failure by giving them more power and responsibility.

Aside from a fact this is only a proposal and will most likely never come anywhere near being implemented, that argument doesn't even make sense, given that one of the reasons people paid the wrong tax was because it was left to employers to determine what tax people should be paying. But then I suppose it's the TaxPayers' Alliance's job to be angry about everything involving tax, all the time.

Now, I'm sure there are loads of potential issues with this proposal. It may be unworkable or unwise. Lord knows I don't particularly want to defend this Government. But if you're going to make a big deal about creating an Office of Tax Simplification, as they did, then it kind of behooves you to at least consider all the possible ways of reforming the system. Yes, even if one method makes you feel like you're being given "pocket money"! It wouldn't be so grating if the Express had come up with some reasonable, adult reasons for complaining, but this? This is just throwing toys out of the pram.

SHOCK AS BRITAIN HAS AVERAGE NUMBER OF FOREIGNERS

Another day, another angry Express headline about how we've got too many foreigners. In BRITAIN NOW HOME TO 4 MILLION IMMIGRANTS, the Express tells us:

MORE than four million foreign nationals now live in Britain – nearly seven per cent of the population, according to the latest official statistics.

Four million? That's, like, millions! These figures do at least appear to be accurate for once, as they're taken from this official Eurostat PDF. However, when I look at it with my non-Express hat on, I'm struck by how tediously average our number of foreign nationals is.

First, though, a neat little bit of that customary disingenuity we've come to expect;

The UK is one of the most sought after destinations in Europe for immigrants. Only Germany and Spain have a larger number of foreign citizens.

That implies that we're third on the list, but as anyone who's ever gently brushed past a bit of statistical analysis on a crowded train will tell you, absolute figures like that don't mean shit. The UK has a relatively large population compared to a lot of other European countries, so the only really relevant statistic is one which expresses this as a percentage of total population.

Of course, looking at the Eurostat figures, you soon realise why the Express hasn't made much of a big song and dance about the percentage of people in the UK who are foreign nationals; the average across the 27 EU member states is 6.4%. The UK figure is 6.6%. A shocking difference, I'm sure you'll agree. Germany and Spain, it transpires, not only have more foreign nationals in terms of absolute numbers, but a significantly higher percentage than us (8.8% for Germany, 12.3% for Spain).

Here, for perspective, is a list of all the countries in the EU that have more foreign nationals per capita than we do: Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Luxembourg and Austria. Italy has 6.5%, so is only very slightly behind. The figures show that the UK has a very slightly above average number of foreign nationals. Given the UK's relative prosperity and how widely spoken our language is, you may actually be surprised by how close to that EU average we are.

The Express though, would rather draw our attention to the fact that poorer countries in the far-flung reaches of Eastern Europe have unsurprisingly low figures;

In contrast, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia have less than one per cent of their populations made up of foreign nationals.

So, those are the facts. But what does the Express want us to think?

Yesterday Labour’s shambolic immigration policy was blamed for opening the floodgates.

And critics said the official figures for UK immigrants had been “wildly underestimated”.

Hmm, who blamed Labour? Who called it "shambolic" (a strangely emotive choice of word for a supposedly factual piece, as is "floodgates")? You're probably thinking "Well, either Sir Andrew Green, the entirely unbiased Migrationwatch guy, or unstoppable quote machine Philip Davies MP!". But on this occasion, you'd be strangely wrong! I can only assume that those two are on holiday, or that they've run their phone batteries into oblivion, because they are conspicuous by their absence.

Instead, the Express turns to another non-partisan, fully-qualified, expert voice of reason to speculate on mysterious Immigrants We Know Nothing About:

Last night UKIP party chairman Paul Nuttall said: “Of course Britain is a place where people want to come and live and I would say this is a massive underestimate. The figures are questionable because we do not control our borders.”

So there you have it; Britain has FOUR MILLION foreigners here! But it's almost definitely probably A LOT HIGHER AND MORE SHOCKING than that. In fact, it could be as high as INFINITY because under this Labour SHAMBLES there's a distinct lack of surface-to-immigrant missile silos defending our borders. Literally ANYONE could be here! There could be HUNDREDS of immigrants IN YOUR LOFT or something. Have you checked? One of them might be BIN LADEN! While you're at it, check your passport/speak to your mum. It could be that YOU are a foreigner! It wouldn't surprise me, bloody Labour.