For anyone who enjoys a spot of Daily Mail bingo, today’s front-page splash had it all: prostitution, drug dealing, EU rules and an out-of-control foreign aid budget. However, the connection between these Mail favourites was misleading and the newspaper’s blame game didn’t stack up.
The Mail’s headline raged: “Foreign aid: now it soars by £1.2bn” The sub-heading read: “UK’s payouts surge to £13bn… because farcical EU rules add prostitution and drug-dealing to official economic figures”
Daily Mail, front page, Thursday 6 April
The Mail is right in saying that the latest official figures show foreign aid, which the government has fixed at 0.7% of national income, jumped from £12.1 billion to £13.3 billion last year. Where the Mail is misleading is in attributing the increase to prostitution and drug-dealing, and in describing the regulations that led to a new higher calculation of national income as “farcical EU rules”.
Illegal activity such as drug-dealing is responsible for a very small proportion of the £1.2 billion rise in foreign aid. As the Mail itself recognises, around £525 million of the increase was down to the UK’s economic growth – in other words, nothing to do with the new rules on how national income is measured. And although the remaining £685 million was caused by calculation changes, the bulk of that came from a few key areas – for example, counting research and development as investment.
The Mail mentioned that the new calculations “gave more weight to financial services and activities such as research and development – which the UK does well in”. But this only emerges 15 paragraphs into the article, with another mention in a box on page two. Many readers will not have got that far.
Meanwhile, although the new rules were implemented by the EU, it was responding to worldwide changes adopted by the UN in 2008. Many countries, including the USA, Canada and Australia, have already implemented them. Whether inside or outside the EU, it seems almost certain the UK – as a developed global economy – would implement them too. The Mail’s article ignores this global dimension entirely.
Daily Mail response
After InFacts pointed out these errors, the Mail made the following changes to the online version of its story:
- The headline was amended to read: “Foreign aid soars by £1.2 BILLION: UK’s payouts surge to £13bn… and now farcical EU rules even add prostitution and drug-dealing to official economic figures”. The key change was to replace “because” with “and” and thus remove the causal link between the foreign aid increase and prostitution and drug-dealing.
- The first paragraph was changed to: “The foreign aid budget soared by £1.2billion last year – in part because EU rules have added prostitution and drugs to national statistics.” The original version didn’t have the words “in part”.
- A footnote explaining the changed headline was put at the bottom of the article.
In correspondence with InFacts, the Daily Mail also said: “The new accounting rules were agreed at EU-level and are compulsory for all EU member states. While other countries around the globe have made similar changes, it is undeniable that Britain has changed the way it works out the size of the economy because of changes to EU rules.”
The Mail has also offered to print a “clarification” on page 2, the wording of which is yet to be agreed. InFacts doesn’t consider this response satisfactory. It will be seeking further changes to the online story and a full correction of the print version.
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This article was amended on April 7 to clarify that the Daily Mail mentioned the impact of the UK’s economic growth in its own article and offered to print a “clarification” on page 2 of its newspaper.
Edited by Hugo Dixon