Why is this news exactly, Daily Mail?

On page 4 of today’s Mail is an interesting little think-piece about motherhood and ethnicity in modern Britain.

A shy headline bellows: ‘Baby divide: Where just 1 in 10 mothers is white and British’, above a helpful map demonstrating the areas of Britain with the largest numbers of non-white or non-British new mothers.

The article continues in a similar vein to its headline, regurgitating statistics based on NHS monitoring of the ethnicity and nationality of new mothers. It does little else for 536 words: just a litany of NHS trusts and the percentage of women giving birth in them who do not self-describe as ‘white British’. At the end, there are a few gentle expositionary paragraphs talking about a so-called ‘immigrant baby boom’, and a mention of David Cameron’s pledge to reduce the level of net immigration.

It’s all very banal, except for the profoundly unpleasant undertones of supressed racism. There is little news value to any of these statistics – about 62 per cent of last year’s new mothers were ‘white British’, across the whole country. There’s nothing to suggest that this figure has markedly changed in the last few years, and no real reason to run with this so prominently.

Except, of course, to stoke racial fears amongst Daily Mail readers. There are ghostly ‘brown tides’ and ‘rivers of blood’ between the lines of the article, and though the headline has been softened for the Mail’s web edition, the new effort still fails to scrub the bitter taste from my mouth.

This is a shameful piece, dogwhistle racism cloaked, barely, in shallow statistics and a smiling picture of a nice blonde mummy. You couldn’t make it up.

Picture via.

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