Lying By Numbers

Mere experts are carping and criticising at the Bullingdon Club over its tax transparency statements, which are transparently designed to inform hard-working families how much of their hard-earned cash is being spent upon shirkers and scroungers, rather than on the worthier likes of G4S and Serco. In order to emphasise their point, the Bullingdons have employed much the same variety of creative accounting that allows the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith to say that Universal Credit is plop on schedule, no matter what state of affairs actually pertains on the planet most of us occupy. Notably, in order to support the claim that "welfare" eats up nearly a quarter of the tax money paid over by all the poor mugs who are too poor to dodge their bills, the Bullingdons have lumped in the pensions of retired nurses, soldiers, civil servants and even such major-league scroungers as ministers of state. This raises a number of questions, of which perhaps the most uncomfortable is this: were we correct in believing that the brilliant Duncan Smith could not have thought up his "telling blatant fibs" policy without some help from his masters, or must we face the infinitely more disturbing possibility that the brilliant Duncan Smith has imposed his own idiosyncratic counting methods on the Treasury by sheer force of intellect?