Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Liar, liar, Gordon's pants on fire!

Plato REALLY dislikes liars - particularly those who pretend to be holier than thou such as Gordon 'Moral Compass' Brown.

The Head of the Office for National Statistics has bitch-slapped Gordon within hours of his BritishJobs4BritishWorkers speech for misleading the public.

Good stuff.

Read more here:

"Michael Scholar: hero. The new head of the UK statistics authority is finally coming to join we lonely crusaders who have long been shouting, as hard as we can, that Gordon Brown makes things up and uses dodgy statistics. Normally, the ONS shut up. But Sir Michael has - wonderfully, inspirationally - written an open letter to the Prime Minister telling him not to lie. Well, not quite in so few words, but this is the plain implication.


What is significant is that Sir Michael is using his job to protect the integrity of statistics in Britain. One of my favourite ever facts is that "65 percent of the UK population do not believe statistics". This is not because the people compiling them are crooked, but because people like Gordon Brown try to willfully deceive the electorate by careful editing and abuse of figures. Usually, the Tories are too witless to complain but Chris Grayling has been on Brown's case with this. And Sir Michael has adjudicated.

This is a healthy step forward for democracy. Next time Brown tries to use dodgy figures - on immigration, knife crime, whatever - he will have to ask himself "will Sir Michael expose me?".
So far, the press has not bothered to expose Brown. Journalists tend to be allergic to figures, a arguments about statistics lose viewers and readers. So statistical lies would never be exposed in newsprint or on airtime. It was a huge weakness in Fleet St which Brown has exploited to the full with his Brownies.

The digital media has filled this gap: there is no opportunity cost. We have endless energy and space to devote to lies.

And now with Scholar on his case, Brown has every reason to be very afraid next time he tries to lie through statistics.


P.S. I don't often do this, but Grayling has just issued a press release showing Brown's lies and how they were nailed. I paraphrase it below. I hope you're reading this, Douglas Alexander, because you repeated plenty of these Brownies on the Today programme last Saturday. Brownies may well be the first casualty of this digital election.

Read the most damning facts here

2 comments:

  1. Aren't you being disingenuous to poor Mr Brown? He's fed plausible-sounding statistics by his Nokia-scarred underlings, and just takes them at face value.

    The majority of the British public are now so wary of any politician's 'statistics' they're disbelieved until the bloggosphere can find no hole in them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aren't you being disingenuous to poor Mr Brown? He's fed plausible-sounding statistics by his Nokia-scarred underlings, and just takes them at face value.The majority of the British public are now so wary of any politician's 'statistics' they're disbelieved until the bloggosphere can find no hole in them.

    ReplyDelete