Faith-Based Statistics

Well, here's a thing: the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith, of all the spouse-employing CV-cheats in the world, has been accused of misrepresenting government statistics. The Department of Workfare and Poverty released figures yesterday which showed that eight thousand likely victims of Duncan Smith's benefits cap had found work, and Duncan Smith immediately claimed that they had done so as a direct result of his financial mugging. Jonathan Portes, formerly a chief economist at the DWP and therefore hardly Duncan Smith's intellectual equal, has now said that there is no evidence either way, and that there is a "consistent pattern" whereby ministers try "to draw out of the statistics things which they simply don't show". Imagine that.