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A historical account of the Daily Mail, the Conservative Party and Migration

The journalist Roy Greenslade once commented that "the daily newspaper diet of large anti-migrant headlines, accompanied by xenophobic columnists retailing thinly veiled racist rhetoric, was so common it became a cliché for us critics to complain about it. Yet as much as we railed against it, editors redoubled their efforts, ignoring rational arguments that exposed their distorted agenda." It has been argued that The Daily Mail is one of the worst offenders for encouraging hostility towards migrants. It has a long history of this kind of behaviour.

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John Simkin

In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.

According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Office’s Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.

As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.

We have published six e-books, Charles Dickens: A Biography (October, 2012), First World War Encyclopedia (October, 2012), Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia (November, 2012), Gandhi: A Biography (December, 2012), The Spanish Civil War (December, 2012) and The American Civil War (December, 2012). He also contributed an article to the recently published book, Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History (December, 2012).

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