Getting the numbers wrong seems to be becoming a habit among Conservatives.
First we had those dodgy crime statistics, with the Conservatives claiming wrongly that violent crime had massively increased over the last decade.
Today we discover the Conservatives have inflated tenfold the number of girls getting pregnant in deprived communities. What’s a tenfold increase between friends?
The Conservatives launched the attack document, called Labour’s Two Nations, to try to show the rise in inequalities under the current government. It claimed – three times – that women under 18 are “three times more likely to fall pregnant in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas. In the most deprived areas 54% are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18, compared to just 19% in the least deprived areas.”
The figures said that 54.32 per 1000 women aged 15-17 years old fell pregnant, which becomes 5.4%, not the 54% the Tories had arrived at.
This would appear to be a mistake, rather than a malicious twisting of the figures.
Schools Secretary Ed Balls has a fair point, though, when he says that you have to be pretty clueless about life in Britain, especially its poorer areas, to think the 54% figure was even possible. Making the mathematical error seems excusable; failing to spot it before publication in an important campaigning paper less so.
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Perhaps it is not that surprising that the Tories would believe and not check the 54% figure, since their report focused on the 10% most deprived areas and, as with Chris Grayling’s claim that “in many parts of many British citiies, the Wire has become part of real life in this country”, they appear to have an entirely impressionistic approach, quite probably aiming to propagate nonsense and stereotypes. Broken britain is clearly nonsense in terms of evidence; the Tories’ efforts have helped to make it widely believed.
Yet the other claim that stayed in through any rudimentary fact-checking was the claim that 19% of girls under 18 get pregnant in the most affluent areas of Britain too. So between one in five and one in two in every fifth form class in the country! It takes the dystopian Dacreland nightmare that the Tories think of as modern Britain to quite another dimension that nobody thought that might not look right either.
D’you think they just don’t know what a percentage is? I mean I try not to fall into using the ‘dumb Tories’ stereotype, but sometimes you gotta wonder…
The Voice has utterly stolen my thunder.
Of course the Tories made a genuine mistake. What is deeply troubling is that none of them did a double-take and said “Hang on. Over half?”
Perhaps they are disconnected. Or perhaps the figure they thought they’d found was so damning that they wanted to believe.