Given the fun we have here in Coffee House picking Gordon Brown up on factual errors, it seems only fair to cast our eye over David Cameron’s speech. One can argue his errors are made from ignorance rather than calculation, but errors are errors and have no place in a leader’s speech.
It is untrue to say – as Cameron did – “In Afghanistan the number of our troops has almost doubled but the number of helicopters has stayed just the same.” Not only are all the choppers which were there two years ago still there, but they have been joined by an additional unit of Sea Kings with new blades for the hot-and-high that cause the Chinooks problems. In total, the MoD say the number of helicopters in theatre is up 60%. Less than the troops, certainly, but one must take into account other factors such as an increase in productivity (more crews and spares means each chopper can be flown for longer). There have been well-documented and scandalous equipment shortages, but when I was out in Afghanistan a few months ago I tried my hardest to find troops complaining about equipment and failed. Cameron has been out in Afghanistan long enough to have known this. His original text says the number of choppers has increased “just a little” so part of this was Cameron doing a speech from notes and fluffing a line. Also the MoD doesn’t issue absolute numbers, so fog surrounds equipment and supply. But it’s just wrong to say there have been no new choppers.
This isn’t a Brownie. Gordon Brown knowingly distorts statistics in order to misrepresent the public, such as when he said there would be 1,000 troops home by Christmas. He carefully cooked up this fake figure by including troop rotations and included Kuwait in his definition of ‘home’. Cameron is just being sloppy. His constituent did not die MRSA, as he implied in his speech. As we know in the Battle for Jennifer’s Ear and Margaret’s Shoulder, medical case studies need to be bombproof if they are going to be used politically. His claim that libertarians are extreme egoists who don’t care about other people was insulting and wrong. Although this, admittedly, could be deemed a matter of interpretation. Finally he kept saying last week that the Royal Bank of Scotland paid £4 billion in tax, now it will be nil. No company pays £4bn, not even Shell. The real figure was £2 billion, as you can find out in two minutes by Googling RBS’s accounts.
As Alice Miles says today, folk aren’t really in a mood to pick him up on anything, far less small errors. But that could change. I know criticising Cameron doesn’t go down very well here in CoffeeHouse (TGF UKIP excepted). Plus all of the above are sloppy errors, the type we all make. They are a qualitative difference to the outrageous mendacity Brown serves up so regularly. But if Cameron is complaining about Brown’s dodgy facts, he must get his own precisely right.
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