Falsus in Uno...

Some disobliging people at the UK Statistics Authority have re-ignited the burning question of whether Iain Duncan Smith is a liar or an imbecile or, if both, in what precise proportions. Last month Duncan Smith claimed that he had transformed eight thousand scroungers into strivers by capping their benefits, and backed up his statement with some ad hoc (mendacious, in standard Latin) statistics. The chair of the UK Statistics Authority has responded to an official complaint by the TUC with the assertion that Duncan Smith's claim was unsupported by official statistics and that the figures used by Duncan Smith had been explicitly marked as "not intended to show the additional numbers entering work as a direct result of the contact". Of course, Duncan Smith is far too brilliant for that sort of thing to matter, and duly extruded a spokesbeing to proclaim that people are telling him all the time what a salutary effect the cap is having. Meanwhile, no doubt this latest display of bureaucratic inefficiency has resulted in the UK Statistics Authority being marked for corrective privatisation at the earliest opportunity.