Campaign against immigration and asylum seekers

Roy Greenslade -  professor of journalism at City University and was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1990-91. wrote for yesterday's Guardian  Comment is Free  as follows:

Daily Express's new editor plays the same one-note tune

It's easy to scoff at the Express and its declining circulation, but its anti-immigration campaign is too dangerous to ignore.

Beaverbrook's crusader logo, which still appears on the Express's masthead, illustrates well the paper's 'little Englander' stance.

The Daily Express has a new editor but not, sadly, a new agenda. Tuesday's splash, "One migrant a minute lands in Britain", was the continuation of a campaign against immigration in general and against asylum seekers specifically.

The headline, being in the present tense, was inaccurate because the figures – if accepted at face value – refer to immigration between 1997 and 2009. Then again, the statistics were anything but definitive (and certainly did not justify the claim that 1,440 migrants arrive in the course of 24 hours every day).

Mind you, it is fewer than the Express claimed in August 2008 when it ran a splash headlined "1,650 new migrants invade UK every day".

Both sets of figures were provided by Migration Watch UK, a rightwing thinktank for which the Express (and the Daily Mail) act as public relations outlets. The Mail carried the same set of figures but, in that paper, immigration is part of a wider, if dubious, reactionary agenda. By contrast, migration is a one-note samba at the Express.

Its one-lands-every-minute story is merely the latest in a long line of similar Express articles on the subject, many of which have relied on contested data, all the while playing to a far-right political gallery. When I interviewed the outgoing editor, Peter Hill, he registered surprise at the very notion that he was pursuing an anti-immigrant line. It couldn't be further from the truth, he said, because he is married to the offspring of two Jamaican immigrants. So did she agree with his paper's campaign? Of course, he said, like me she is not against past immigration, but there are now "too many … We can't cope". Obviously the new editor, Hugh Whittow, agrees. There is a political angle, of course, as Tuesday's leading article, "Labour's great betrayal", made clear. The coalition got no mention.

I have a feeling that the Express's late owner, Lord Beaverbrook, might well have agreed with the paper's modern anti-immigrant stance. After all, it was under his ownership that the little crusader logo first appeared on the Express masthead, as it still does. Beaverbrook, though a Canadian, was something of a little Englander who founded a daft political party advocating "Empire free trade".

But the old maverick would surely wonder at the paper's demise since his death in 1964 when it was selling more than 4.3m copies a day, a time when it informed – and was part of – the national conversation.

Despite Beaverbrook's political mischief, he had an instinctual grasp of how to run a newspaper. He knew that it must be upbeat, continually pushing his editors to run positive content amid the hard news. He also realised the value of journalistic technical expertise and the need to invest in journalism.

At its circulation height it vied with the Daily Mirror to be top of the sales league. Now it is selling just 640,000 copies a day. Even so, that print version is estimated, by the latest National Readership Survey, to have about 1.5 million readers a day.

Its content cannot be overlooked, especially now that its owner, Richard Desmond, has removed it from the system of press self-regulation overseen by the Press Complaints Commission.

Too many of the metropolitan and political elite lift their noses at the Express and its raucous red-top sister, the Daily Star. But they cannot be ignored. The Express brand may be tarnished, but it would be foolish to walk on by. It feeds the prejudices of a significant minority and must be exposed when it runs distorted stories of questionable factual accuracy.