BBC 's 'Immigration debate': How racism works within beeb

A picture tells a thousand words and is indelibly etched in the viewers mind. The British Broadcasting Company know and understand this better than most. So, what picture did they want to paint when their flagship news programme, - 10pm news - highlighted its top story on immigration last night?

BBC’s anchor man Huw Edwards announces:

Measures to control immigration are at the heart of the Government’s plans for the year ahead"

BBC man on the ground Mark Easton explained further:

Concerns about immigration can be heard right across the country, not just about the scale of it but the perception that foreigners are taking advantage of Britain’s generosity."

At this point the image on TV is a bird’s eye view of just houses. Then the camera cuts to Mark Easton, he is the only white face in a market stall  imagery somewhere in East London.

This proposed Bill,’ he again explains, 'is part of series of measures designed to deal with illegal immigration and foreigners, in the words of Minsters who abuse our public services."

So within the space of two minutes, we’re informed about the fact that immigration needs to be ‘controlled’ that it is the nations biggest concern, particularly illegal immigration and ‘foreigners abusing our,’ note the stress on ‘our’ public services. All these bold statements with a back drop which sees everyone either from African or Asian decent with the exception of the white reporter.

Easton does interview another white person, Landlord Toby Structon who he speaks to in regards to the Government’s proposals to demand that Landlords, such as Structon check whether their tenants have the right papers to rent accommodation. Also to prove the BBC are not 'racist', Easton gets a Black person on camera to complain about 'those immigrants'.

But this view that the ‘foreigner’ and ‘public service abusers’ equates to Easton’s images of African and Asian people just doesn’t stack up. Whilst its true that according to the Office of National Statistics the number of Commonwealth Country nationals entering the UK -117k in 2012 is higher than EU countries 62k, a number of factors need to be considered, including the fact that those from Commonwealth countries also include Australia and Canada,-nationals who are very likely to be white-, and of course the UK has many USA migrant workers here too.  Secondly, and equally important is the fact that many from the Asian sub-continent, particularly India came to the UK on Student Visa’s, which as we’ve now seen the Government are very keen to attract these migrants due to the revenue they bring to their chosen universities.

The other element in the real complex immigration picture is the fact that there are nearly half a million East Europeans who the Government estimate came into the UK without being counted. They of course would be almost exclusively white.

The immigration debate is complex with a kaleidoscope of factors to be taken into consideration, but it appears that for the BBC, fear and loathing and concern for these issues  is crudely painted literally in black and white.

As Lee Jasper argued yesterday on our blog that the political race in following Ukip to gutter is by its very nature flawed given that overall immigration figures have fallen by half. Worst still the debate about immigration is scare mongering political tactics, sadly aided by the BBC who in this instance have wilfully undertaken a level of communication we would better associate with the BNP, not the BBC.

One would hope that the BBC would apologise and in future take more care how they talk about and view migrant communities. But don’t hold your breath.

See the clip for yourself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01s9cn1/BBC_News_at_Ten_08_05_2013/

It starts 7 mins in.

Simon Woolley