"Fuelling xenophobia"

Former Tory spin doctor Amanda Platell (who achieved the impressive feat of getting fired as editor of the Daily Express for not having high enough standards) used her column in Saturday's Mail to look at last week's Transatlantic Trends survey. You may recall that it found that Britain topped the league table for intolerance of immigrants, and noted that the average Brit thinks there are three times as many foreigners living here than there actually are.

Platell chose to ignore this finding, instead concentrating on the claim that "two thirds of Britons see immigration as a problem".

Is it any wonder that a poll this week found that two-thirds of Britons see immigration as a problem, not an opportunity for this country, when we have cases like that of the woman known only as ‘ZH’? She is the failed Tanzanian asylum seeker who continually lied to officials, but who has now been allowed to stay in Britain because she has had two children in the 15 years she has been here.

Of course, political correctness gone mad etc. But Platell - herself an Australian citizen who has come over here and taken a job that could have otherwise been done by a British spin doctor-turned columnist - actually has a little bit of sympathy for ZH's kids, and concedes that it wouldn't be fair to throw them out of the country where they were conceived (by a British father), born, and raised. That's because the problem in this country isn't all down to immigrants like ZH and Plattell:

Surely the real villains here are the hand-wringers on the Left who established a legal system which allows transparently fraudulent asylum seekers to stall and appeal for so long that it becomes impossible to deport them. In so doing, they have only fuelled xenophobia against the many legitimate immigrants who have helped enrich British life.

Now, there may be a kernel of truth in this - too many politicians (of all sides) have made life easy for the likes of the BNP by refusing to address the fears and prejudices of voters who have misconceptions about the impact of immigration on this country. But where do those fears and misconceptions come from in the first place? From where do the BNP and EDL forums copy and paste a steady stream of stories that support their views? Where can you reliably go to get stories about immigrants that are at best gross distortions and at worst totally untrue?

Could it possibly be from a certain right-of-centre daily newspaper whose name rhymes with "fail" and that at the time of writing has more than 5,600 stories on its website that contain the word "immigration"?