Tories put the decimal point in the wrong place

Grenville

This is the funniest thing I've heard in a long time!

toco

So if they had placed the decimal point a further place to the right it would suggest 540% of girls of this age become pregnant.James you should try and get a non virtual life.

tim

Is this why Cameron is busing students in to his speeches in poor areas, he thinks the audience would otherwise be pregnant and wouldn't fit in the seats provided?

Richard

semms that if you vote Cameron you get the Marx brothers as well for a cabinet....oh dear.

John

Yawn. So what?

Paul Danon

The decimal place, eh? Shome mishtake, shurely.

Paul Danon

It is an immutable law of nature that all articles about mistakes will, themselves, contain a msitake.

Verity

"It is easy to see how a mistake like this is made".

No. It's not.

Derek

Yes, and in the text of Mr. Cameron's speech in Scotland,linked in Mr. Nelson's blog a couple of days ago,there is a reference to "the straightjacket of the euro". I imagine this as a zoot suit, or should that be "Zut!"?

Sally Chatterjee

Surely all press releases get vetted? A researcher should know their facts, the shadow minister should vet the release and then a PR handler should review the paper. If all three of these people can't spot the mistake then it suggests people aren't doing their job properly.

On the other hand, opposition parties do not have the luxury of the civil service to mine data for them.

Charles

Typos happen. They shouldn't in an ideal world, but life isn't and can't be perfect. Accepting that fact is one of the basic premises of being a conservative.

Horshamite

The key point here is not the mistake - they happen - but that nobody seems to have applied simple common sense before using it. In the real world everybody gives "facts" a reality check before using them. If the leading Tories demonstrate such incompetence there must be doubt about their fitness to run the country.

Yam Yam

What with all those zeroes on the end, it's easier still to get the national debt wrong. But, hey, what's ten million quid here or there.

Chris lancashire

If Labour are clinging on to misplaced decimal points they really are desperate.

Richard Blogger

Sure mistakes happen, but the fact that this figure was released shows how little Mr Cameron thinks about us. He actually thinks that we are that bad. He has no compassion for his common man/woman if he did not think: "this cannot be right".

Nick

The document also claimed that 19% of teenage women in the ten most affluent areas of the country also got pregnant.

This is also wrong by a factor of ten. SO evidently another typo.

The central premise though is that the teen pregnancy rate is still three times higher in poor compared to rich areas.

TGF UKIP

I'm sure Tiberius will be even more understanding of the Cameron Tories' cock-ups than usual - if that's possible of course.

Mac Walker

As this is such a glaring mistake, the fact that it was not picked up right away confirms Brown's comments on "the Tories not being in touch with the people". They had better get in touch PDQ.

Tom

This adds to the Grayling data-fudging technique which wilfully misuse data for political reasons. Missing a decimal point is stupid, what Grayling did was far worse.

Piers Fallowcherry

A small but essential general point: numerical literacy is just as important as the, um, wordy kind. Editor Nelson understands this well.
It does seem that too many people can spot an impertinent apostrophe from 50 yards yet are oblivious to a rogue number in a column.
This mistake would have been spotted by anyone with a head for figures (as distinct from being able to toss off a stat in blink of an eye).

John Smith

Running out of news stories. How about writing on the great success of the big push in Afghanistan. 12 dead - sorry only civilians - oh it was a mistake !!!

EyeSee

Of course Labour would spot the mistake straight away. If it had really been 54% they would have hit one of their targets.

Anne Wotana Kaye 1

So it's not just Oiks that make little mistakes!

Verity

Dave's a pr man. Surely he wouldn't let an annual report, or a press release on earnings, go out without several proofreaders and several fact checkers having gone through it with a fine tooth comb.

The reason it's rare to see spelling or actual factual errors in newspapers and magazines is because they have sub-editors and proof readers. There is no excuse for this mistake other than a total lack of respect for the target audience, who the Tories clearly think will believe anything.

wolfi

Even in the USA the correspondingfigure of unwanted pregnancie is only about 7 % - there is a satire on it in the Onion