Finding themselves in an especially intolerant mood at the moment, the Daily Mail and The Sun have been rounding on child migrants to Britain, accusing the majority of them of lying about their age. Almost 200 arrived amid the clearing of the Calais Jungle, vulnerable or with family connections already in the United Kingdom, but the Mail and the Sun took gross exception to their appearance and the preponderance of males.
Calling them ‘child’ migrants with dubious inverted commas, characterising them as ‘burly lads’, the yellow or yellowing tabloid newspapers were at pains to publish pictures which they felt proved their point, alleging mass deception with the odd inference of terrorism. Using facial recognition software which Microsoft averred was only ever intended as a bit of fun – which varies often while proving routinely inaccurate – the Mail claimed that one child migrant with a few chin hairs possessed all the features of a 38-year-old.
David Davies, the MP for Monmouth, spurred the furore when he called for dental tests, whimpering ‘I hope British hospitality is not being abused’. But dental tests are invasive and unreliable, in the case of young people capable of erring by up to three years. Davies’ message was echoed by the warmongering former cabinet minister Jack Straw, who engaged in the usual hand-wringing after setting up a dichotomy between greedy economic migrants and real refugees. When the BBC presenter Gary Lineker proved a voice of sanity, calling the outcry ‘hideously racist and utterly heartless’, The Sun demanded that he be fired on the spot.
As the Mail pretended that established facts and longstanding aspects of immigration policy were only now emerging – with the false implication that details were being hidden from the British public – both papers headlined with the claim that two-thirds of child migrants quizzed about their age were last year found to be adults. The whole thrust of the rhetoric was to suggest widespread deceit as a means of stirring up virulent nationalism and racial tension. So it is worth noting in opposition what actually happens when a child migrant arrives in the United Kingdom seeking asylum.
When somebody makes an application for asylum in the United Kingdom, an initial age assessment is conducted to determine whether they should be processed as an adult or a child. If an asylum seeker presents him or herself as a child but two immigration officers agree that they look significantly over the age of 18, they will be processed as an adult pending further documentation.
Asylum seekers will be given a case file and a case owner, and in cases where they have been processed as a child but with some degree of doubt as to their real age, local authorities can choose to administer the Merton test, an interview which seeks to draw out the person’s background and determine their credibility. In such disputed cases, the local authority’s determination will often prove decisive, but case owners should also draw on any documentation provided by the asylum seeker before making a final decision on their age.
The Mail and the Sun cited figures from last year which suggest that in 65% of disputed cases, a determination was made that the asylum seeker in question was an adult. Since 2006, there have been 11,121 age disputes in total, with 4,828 asylum seekers – or 43% – found to have been adults.
But the same period has seen a total number of 254,470 asylum applications. This means that of all the asylum seekers over the past ten years, just 1.9% have been queried regarding their age and judged to have lied or provided inaccurate information. So the indication is that when it comes to their age, the overwhelming majority of child migrants are being truthful.
But what of those who write and report for the Mail and the Sun, or who edit and own the two newspapers? Thankfully using specialist computerised dental X-ray technology, the noble institution that is The Shimmering Ostrich has managed to run such scrubby figures through the veritable age scanner, producing the following intriguing results.
Take baby-faced Sam Tonkin, who wrote about the ‘wave’ of child migrants from Calais for the Mail. Alas a bit of facial fluff cannot distract our X-ray age detectors, which have thoroughly examined Tonkin’s teeth and determined his years to be 14.
Or Sam Greenhill, trapped in the Mail playpen with Arthur Martin and Ian Drury, who threw a collective temper tantrum when their facial recognition software suggested one migrant to be 38 years old. Greenhill looks red around the cheeks like a ripened cherry tomato, but through all the gnashing his teeth have remained young, for this rosy-faced cherub is in fact aged just 3.
On the other hand Tom Wells – who covered the topic for The Sun along with Hannah Crouch and Alain Tolhurst – is starting to look his age, showing the stresses and strains he suffered at the hands of Operation Elveden, which cleared him of making illegal payments to public officials last year. The jury in this case says he is 41.
Mail editor Paul Dacre is sometimes described as truculent, but here he attempted to appear insouciant, surreptitiously seeking to prevent the detection of his age by clenching a lollipop firmly between his teeth. Sadly the conceit worked, as the 67-year-old, who would speak for middle-England, came up on our scanner as a decidedly middle-aged 53.
What of Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch’s Cleopatra, her poop beaten gold as she sails every scandal, her wavy red locks covering her delicately ruddy cheeks? Restored as the chief executive of News UK last year, at the same time as Tony Gallagher switched from the Mail to become the Sun‘s new editor, Brooks would be resplendent indeed if it weren’t for her teeth, missing where they are not broken or jagged. Our X-ray suggests that in time-honoured fashion, she is several years older than her claimed age of 48.
Which brings us at last to Murdoch himself, the almighty head of News Corp, ostensibly already very old at the age of 85. But surprising to nobody, our sophisticated software having peeled back the layers of time, Murdoch emerges instead as Nosferatu, the centuries-old vampire and long-decayed member of the undead.
