Is there such a thing as a politician we can trust?

"If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth."

- Joseph Goebbels

It's times like yesterday that I seriously think I'll never vote again.

In the last few days, there has been a lot of comment about remarks made by the Prime Minister David Cameron during Prime Ministers Questions on February 22nd. You can read the analysis by Channel 4 news here. I won't go into the full analysis of the stats as C4 have done an excellent job.

Basically, what Cameron said was that there would be more visible Police this March than a year ago.

Theresa May said much the same thing about a month or so ago, and was widely criticised and ridiculed for saying this. A larger proportion, yes, but of a smaller number. Result: net decrease in "visible" police.

And here's what really gets my goat about this;

1. Was this a simple statistical mistake? No, it can't have been. One might have been able to be generous the first time, but the Government would have known that it was an unsustainable and indefensible statistic following Theresa May's use of it. Mistakes are made of course, but they should be rectified, not trotted out repeatedly.

2. Did the PM not really understand the issue? I sincerely hope that's not the case. If he did not understand the significance of what he was saying then he is not fit to be PM.

3. Did Mr Cameron simply regurgitate what he was told to say, without checking the veracity of the claim? See my answer to 2). You'd think he'd have learnt his lessons from the "45 minutes" saga.

4. Does the Government really think that we are stupid enough to unquestioningly fall for these bland statements? Probably. This is the only explanation that I can think of. They surely can't be saying these things with an "honestly held belief" that it's even partially true.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that HM Government think that the soundbite of "more visible police" is what will get the attention and that people won't read the small print. What's even more depressing, politically, is that I think all of the parties would have done the same thing. We've had 13 years of Spin from New Labour where such statistical deception was commonplace. Previous Governments have of course done the same but somehow now it seems more blatant and endemic.

It's very simple sub-GCSE maths to analyse this topic, and Mr Cameron and his aides seem incapable of this.

Is there such a thing as a politician we can trust?

Update 16th April 2012:

Turns out Mrs May has "form" for distorting the truth and misrepresentation for her own ends. Remember the "cat" story? Mrs May, during a speech to the Conservative Party Conference, claimed that an illegal immigrant was not deported because he had a cat. The Daily Mail reported the story here.

The slightly more rational view of events can be found on Channel 4's FactCheck blog.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Now, just to show I'm not entirely biased against the Conservative Party, let's subject Ed Miliband to the same scrutiny. On April 2nd, he said

“According to the British Crime Survey, violence, theft and robbery are going up – the fastest rise in a decade”



Really? The funny thing is, I seem to recall the Opposition making similar claims when Labour were in power, but the Labour Government dismissing these claims as scaremongering.

Once again, let's leave FactCheck to do the analysis. Read it here.