News management

Apparently, around 371,000 people who weren’t actually born in this country claimed work-related benefits last year. It’s estimated that 98% of these people had worked and paid taxes for long enough to be entitled to make a claim for jobseeker's allowance, income support, carer's allowance, disability living allowance, or whatever.

The Department for Work and Pensions is said to be investigating the "small number" of cases where claimants had “no lawful immigration status”. Employment Minister Chris Grayling admitted that the vast majority of the claimants were perfectly entitled to the benefits they’d claimed.

I understand all that. What I don’t understand is why this unremarkable non-story morphed into the top story on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, with Sir Andrew Green from MigrationWatch UK trying to scare Middle England witless with apocryphal stories of Bulgarian Big Issue sellers claiming to be self-employed (citation?) and Chris Grayling trying to reassure the same demographic that our ever-vigilant Government was ready crack down at the first hint of Bulgarian charity magazine-related misconduct, or similar.

It’s almost as if somebody in government is trying to divert attention from the government's own ill-thought out, failing, misleading, or just plain bonkers policies and big, bad news stories by encouraging journalists to focus on some trivial side issue that really is so tiny that the politicians can credibly claim to have it under control.

With no sign of Her Majesty's Opposition coming up with any alternative ideas the Coalition need to respond to, the Coalition will probably get away with this sort of news management.