Thursday 9 August 2012 Thursday 9 August 2012
Media: trivial coverage on foreign prisoners
Yesterday, it was about the huge cost of foreign prisoners in British jails and then, today we learn how hard-pressed British taxpayers are "paying to make jails in Jamaica and Nigeria more comfortable in a desperate bid to persuade foreign criminals to serve their sentences at home".
This is all done in lurid style as the Wail "reveals" that by March this year, there were 11,127 foreign prisoners from "a staggering 156 countries" behind bars - up from 10,778 in 2011. And the estimated cost to the UK public purse, we are told, is more than £420 million.
For the unwitting reader, the stories pop out of the blue, with the focus very much on David Cameron, as the Wail breathlessly informs us that it has "emerged" that "the dire need to create space in our packed jails has prompted ministers to take the extraordinary step of establishing a £3million annual pot to make it easier for convicts to serve their sentences back home".
Splashing money on prisons abroad, says the paper, "is certain to prove controversial. But officials insist it will be cheaper in the long run than the annual £38,000 bill for keeping a single prisoner locked up here".
But what is quite remarkable about this style of reporting is that it almost completely lacks any background or context. Buried in the second piece, we do have a hint of it, as the paper parades the claim that: "In November 2010, the Mail revealed how the Prime Minister had decided to spearhead a campaign for foreign criminals to serve their sentences back home".
Little would the readers guess from the coverage, however, that this goes back to October 2007 and before – with there being considerable controversy over foreign prisoners and deportation in 2006.
But it was on 27 October 2007 that The Guardian was announcing that Gordon Brown was holding out the prospect that "up to 3,000 foreign prisoners could be sent back home to finish their sentences as a result of prisoner transfer agreements that Britain is poised to sign".
We were then told that the prime minister had disclosed to MPs that "agreements were to be signed with Jamaica, Nigeria, Vietnam and China to enable foreigners in overcrowded jails in England and Wales to serve out their time at home".
Intriguingly, this had followed a piece in – you guessed it – the Daily Wail on 25 July 2005, headlined: "I'll kick out 4,000 foreign prisoners, vows Brown".
That story, five years ago, told us that there were "currently more than 12,000 foreign convicts in Britain's overcrowded prison system - 15 per cent of the 80,000-strong jail population" - suggesting that current levels have been reduced.
The report then had Brown saying: "We are going to take a far tougher line. I want a message to go out - if you come here you work and learn our language. If you commit a crime you will be deported. You play by the rules or you face the consequences".
Despite the lurid immediacy of today's and yesterday's stories, then, the facts of the matter are that this issue has been going on for a long, long time. And, on the face of it, the real story would appear to be the extraordinary length of time taken to fulfil Brown's promises: five years ago, he makes the pledge, and it is only now that we see the results.
A clue as to why there was such a delay can been seen here in a Nigerian newspaper. Although undated, it shows that one of the receiving countries had to change its own law to allow prisoners to be returned and then to be jailed in the home country.
Clearly, this was an unpopular law in certain quarters, and not until September 2011 did we see news that the Nigerian legislature had nearly completed the legal process necessary to permit the transfer of prisoners.
First of all, though, British law had to be changed but it was then that we saw "the presumption shall be that the public interest requires deportation", with the proviso that "the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or Refugee Convention" should not be breached.
Given the appalling condition of some foreign jails, it was not going to be possible under British law to deport many of the prisoners held in our jails, so spending an amount of money on improving some foreign establishments is probably making the best of a bad job for the British taxpayer.
So, what do we learn from all this? Well, we certainly find that government is a little more complex than the Wail makes out, and solutions take a lot longer than we would prefer. Doubtless, things could have been done better, and we are still hampered by human rights agreements.
Overall though, the story is very different from that presented by the Wail - and other newspapers. Trailing in the wake of its tabloid competition is the Failygraph, repeating the line about this government's "desperate attempt" to repatriate foreign criminals.
Small wonder this is a failing industry. Why should people bother to pay for being so ill-informed, especially when they already pay to be ill-informed by the BBC?
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 09/08/2012 Eurocrash: how much longer before the Greeks exit?
And now, on just as much evidence as there has always been – i.e., very little indeed - the marketsare dropping again as "doubts grew on the prospects for early central bank action to bolster the global economy and tackle the euro zone debt crisis".
Most likely though, what is actually happening is the normal cycle of speculation and profit-taking, all on very thin trading, and much of it initiated by computer algorithm, the "trades" untouched by human hand. The teenage scribblers and hacks then over-interpret the data and come up with conclusions that are as slender as the data on which they base them. 
What can't be gainsaid, though, is that the euro crisis is having a significant and adverse effect on the German economy. And, equally significantly, the Germans are open about blaming the "mess in the eurozone". The salad days for German exports are over – jobs, production and turnover are all falling.
Then, after Helmut Schmidt has admitted that letting Greece into the Euro, and Juncker has said that Greece leaving the euro would be "manageable", we have Otmar Issing, styled as the "euro architect", conceding that "some members" could leave the single currency.
Meanwhile, Die Welt is reporting that Greeks are "devious", with one in ten pensions possibly being wrongly claimed, in what might be wholesale fraud.
Tedious the ups and downs of the market might be, but the mood music is getting interesting. Softly, insistently, the German public are being prepared for a Greek exit. It is no longer whether, or even when, but how much longer.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 09/08/2012
Thursday, 9 August 2012
A few days ago the markets were tanking and then they were surging, and then Ambrose was telling us everything in the garden was rosy - all because Draghi had a plan.
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