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Tories’ duff up-the-duff stats
The Conservative Party was accused of bloating figures this week in a report carrying pregnant claims about teenage motherhood in broken Britain. The report, entitled Labour’s 0.2 Twenty Two Nations, gestated that ‘In the most deprived areas, 54% [of girls] are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18, compared to just 19% in the least deprived areas.’
The actual numbers were 54 and 19 per thousand, some 5.4 and 1.9%. A Conservative spokesman actually had the gall to tell the press that ‘A decimal point was left out in a calculation. It makes no difference at all to the conclusions of a wide-ranging report!’
The Tory misconception resulted in allegations from the government that the report had been sexed up. Claire Timkins, who has been in Labour for three terms, hit out at the Conservative statistics: ‘What this illustrates is that the Conservative Party is woefully out of touch with modern Britain. We in the Labour Party know what mothers really need: less money for higher education; the legacy of protracted, expensive conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; and a national identity database.’
Scientists from the embattled IPCC, the UN body responsible for aggregating research about climate change, were astounded by how lightly the Tories got off for their statistical blunder. Glaciologist Professor Francis T. Bargle explained: ‘If I’d said “A decimal point was left out in a calculation. It makes no difference at all to the conclusions of a wide-ranging report!” in an e-mail to a colleague which was hacked and stuck on some Russian server, it would have been branded “order-of-magnitude-gate” and I’d be on the front page of every bloody national newspaper.’
Another statistic in the Tory report suggested that all babies born in Tower Hamlets will have melted by 2035.
Brushing off suggestions that Conservative proof-readers are so disconnected from the common woman that they didn’t flag up these egregious numbers, Conservative statistician Marvin Wilcox told KTAB ‘Give us a break. We knocked it up in half an hour.
‘Or possibly five hours. Or three minutes. Hang on while I ask David Cameron what I meant by what I just said.’
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