Those pesky decimal points

This is hilarious. There's some good commentry over at Next Left, too.

The most immediate points are I guess that either (a) the Tories are so out of touch that they thought the erroneous figures were simply true or (b) that they so badly wanted them to be true they just ignored any doubts they might have had. So far, so politician.

But I think the more interesting points are raised in the Next Left comments. The 'this just chimes with people's direct experiences' meme raises its head (and I paraphrase - the point is well made and not just parroted out). That is, people don't believe national level statistics, or they swallow major errors such as the above, because what they see around them is decline, decay and disorder. But as Sunder Katwala points out there isn't actually much evidence for this.

Most people, when asked, generally say that things are getting better, or at least not worse, in their local areas (see chapter five here, for example, in relation to crime and disorder). It's exactly at the national level that they see things getting worse. So we're right back to a point I've made (hardly originally) before - people use crime and disorder issues to vocalise their sense of unease about the nature and extent of change in society even when what they think is going on 'across the country' directly contradicts their own local experience.

Politicians (of all parties) prey on this, whether consciously or unconsciously, because it prepares the ground for good sound bites and populist rhetoric ('something must be done!'). Which I guess is another reason why it's so easy to misplace decimal points.