As we anticipate the next round of quarterly immigration figures from the Office of National Statistics this Thursday, a new Migration Watch UK report has been released amid a wave of media hyperbole.
The Daily Mail’s undue emphasis on focusing on benefits claimants as immigrants disproportionately is not backed up by Office for National Statistics data.
Shadow education secretary Andy Burnham today told the Commons he had written to the UK Statistics Authority to look at the government’s use of statistics in school sport. Mr Burnham was speaking during the Opposition Day School Sports Funding Debate, in which he implored education secretary Michael Gove to rethink his decision to abolish School Sport Partnerships.
In an open letter to Iain Duncan Smith, Douglas Alexander queries the Department for Work and Pensions’s use of statistics.
Writing in the Spectator, Fraser Nelson claims that the 50p tax rate, along with other high profile taxes on the wealthy, actually reduces tax revenue from the top percentile. The major piece of evidence he draws on is the table below. Showing the tax liability through income tax shouldered by various deciles of the tax base, he argues that as you reduce the top rate of tax, you actually collect more revenue.
DWP is under investigation from the Statistics Authority. In today’s Daily Mail, IDS makes erroneous claims about the proportion of “net jobs” goings to “people from overseas”.
‘Worklessness’ is one of those terms which means one thing in specialist usage and something quite different in political discourse and media commentary.
Cancer – and particularly Breast Cancer – has become a political football with questions being asked over whether very large increases in investment by the last government have led to better results. This morning the BBC and other news sourcestest
Gaffe-prone work and pensions minister Chris Grayling has made another stunning statistical screw-up – over-estimating the proportion of London households in which no one has ever worked by a factor of more than 3:1.
Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has been caught out being cute with the stats in a piece immigration and employment for a right-wing mouthpiece. Again.
