TORIES 'DON'T QUITE TELL THE TRUTH' ON CRIME STATISTICS

I could never baldly accuse them of lying, you understand...Does it get better than this? Our wannabee ruling party can't quite understand government statistics so it appears to have decided to tell a story instead. The approach of the Tories appears to be to scare us all in our beds, when the actual situation, based on boring old evidence collected by boring old statisticians, appears to be that crime does appear to have gone down in many areas. The Tory spokesman, one Chris Grayling, even criticised the widely respected British Crime Survey as being unreliable, when pretty much everyone else accepts that, anecdotal though it is, the BCS provides an excellent 'snapshot' of the real situation around the country, rather than the obviously flawed Police statistics. I should note here that I do not seek to criticise the police statistics but they will always only record the tip of the iceberg since much crime simply isn't recorded, whereas the BCS asks what people's actual experience has been.

Rather nicely, the civil servant responsible for all things statistical, Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, has taken very public - and very strident - issue with the Tory press release since it has welded together two distinct sets of statistics which do not correlate. This is pretty much an 'O level' error from our putative ruling elite. This party is simply not fit to run the country.

Rather nicely, it appears that the good old electorate is waking up to the nightmare. I have always had confidence in the Great British Public to see the light. As we say at Oxford United: 'Come on you Yellows!'