Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Where has he been?


Faced with another tranche of meaningless government figures, Ian Cowie writes in the Failygraph that it is "No wonder people are beginning to lose faith in official statistics".

Simple-minded souls who believe the official handouts, he writes, might imagine that money is losing its real value or purchasing power at a modest rate of only 4.5pc – the current annual rate of change in the CPI. But that is less than a quarter of today’s gas and electricity shock, which follows double-digit increases in the cost of transport and many basic foods.

At this rate, viewers of BBC TV will begin to feel like Russian readers of the Soviet government newspapers Pravda – the Russian for "Truth" – or Izvestiya – Russian for "News" – who used to joke: "In the News there is no Truth and in the Truth there is no News".

Actually, we have been there for years. Mainly, it is only the simple-minded souls in the media, in politics and the claque that actually believe the BBC. Even fewer believe official government figures, or the analyses in the MSM. It is a testament to the British sense of humour that so many people keep watching the longest running political satire in history, known as the BBC News and the British press.

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