Gordon Brown gives interviews like he is programming a computer. In his pre-election appearance on Today at 8.10am he fired off statistics, as if they spoke for themselves – sounding passionate, one might argue, and knowledgeable. But on several areas his information was misleading or simply false. Here’s what jumped out at me.
1). “We’re about to take a million children out of poverty”. A million children? The figure is 600,000 from the benchmark year of 1998/99, and that’s going by his narrow definition of children whose parents have incomes below 60% of the median. Choose a different threshold, say 40%, and it’s 400,000. Millions is spent trying to massage this figure upwards. Rounding up to a single digit is a far cheaper way of doing it.
2). “If young people are able to stay on at school to 18 which is the new legislation we’re bringing in and not 16 then that is a fundamental change to the education system”.
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