The Statistics Don't Match the Truth

American author Mark Twain once said that there are “three types of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics”. This nifty little phrase certainly comes to mind today, when you see that the Institute of Fiscal Studies have accused the government of using dodgy stats to support their claims that living standards are going up.

I mean I accept that it can’t be easy for the Treasury or George Osborne. You come into office having to deal with the aftermath of a massive financial recession and you claim that your system of austerity and cuts will deal with it. Four years on, and a year before the next general election, you want to be able to show that you were right. And to an extent they have been. Their polices have bought about a certain level of economic growth – though having a former US Treasury Secretary tell you “Nice work, but you could have done better” can’t have been easy for Osborne – but you also want the statistics to back you up. If you can’t claim to have evidence that austerity works, you can’t campaign on it.

The problem is that the statistics don’t match up with the claims. Not only have the government been accused of fiddling the stats, but the real stats don’t support them. The other main report in the I last Saturday was that local councils are running out of money to support people hit hard by the Bedroom Tax, or as Cameron prefers to call it, the Spare Room Subsidy. On top of that the number of people and families using food banks and other forms of relief services has risen by 170% according to the Trussell Trust, with the Trust also predicting that up to a million people could end up using food banks in 2014. The reason for this? Benefits are being cut in order to make savings elsewhere. Such as for top tier tax cuts.

This government’s ideas haven’t worked, because at the end of the day they aren’t making cuts where they are necessary. While I am aware that driving big business away from the UK would potentially make the economic situation even worse, it seems that the Tories are more interested in making life easier for those in the Square Mile than anything else. And how do you find the money for top tier tax cuts? By slashing benefits and punishing those who don’t have the resources to fight back. By taking away money from those who need it most, without considering the consequences.

David Cameron ran for the Tory leadership in 2005 on a platform of dragging the party away from its Nasty Party roots. Has he done so? No. He has proved himself to be just as tied to the country squire, aristocratic, ethos as his predecessors. He has shown himself again and again to be out of touch with the needs of the people, with a limited understanding of what life is like for the non-Eton educated. The man who couldn’t even secure a Conservative majority has shown he doesn’t have what it takes to run this country.

And now he’s shown himself to be economical with the truth as well.

 

Smart Technology is the Way of the Future

In the latest episode of Sherlock, the master detective becomes convinced that the Napoleon of Blackmail, Charles Augustus Magnusson, has some sort of smart technology within his glasses that allows him to recall information on people, some sort of 4G remote wireless. While in the episode this belief turns out to be false, the technology for producing something like that is well within our grasp.

For example, Samsung has already produced, and Apple is about to produce, smart watches that can be connected to your phone. And smart glasses like in Sherlock are also on the way.  I am not entirely certain why this technology is necessary, but I am sure we are moving closer and closer towards the time when smart phones will have proven themselves obsolete.

The one thing all these new inventions share in common is that they are making use of the fact that technology is getting smaller. From having mobile phones the size of bricks we can now access our emails on our wrist, and the potential benefits of this new technology can be seen in areas such as health and defence.

A prime example of such benefits is Google’s latest innovation. They have recently announced the development of smart contact lenses for people with varying types of diabetes. Using tiny sensors, these lenses will detect the levels of glucose in a person’s tears and alert them to when they need to take their medicine. Currently, glucose levels have to be checked by doing a blood test, which is both painful and disruptive. Therefore, according to Google, people check their glucose levels less often than they should. With these lenses they do not have to worry, but simple pay attention when the sensors go ping.

Google’s smart contacts are currently only in the testing stage, and they still need to be approved by the FDA, but it is hoped that they will soon be rolled out into general use. However, the fact that it is Google that are investing in them tells you a lot about how useful (and potentially lucrative) this new type of technology may be.

The potential for this type of technology cannot be overestimated. If, for example, people could wear devices specifically tailored to keeping a track of their vital signs, then their doctors could pull their medical record off a watch, or glasses, or anything, and boom. They could just go ahead and treat them based on what they’ve read, thus saving both time and money.

Fans of Sci-Fi, especially Star Trek, have long marvelled at some of the technology available to the characters in those shows, including combadges that can track a person’s movements and vital signs. But just as smart phones have long since outstripped Star Trek’s portable communicators, so now it seems that in the field of combadges modern technology will once again outstrip its fictional counterpart.

It will probably be a long time before this type of technology is available on the mass market. But the fact that we are finally taking a step into the future is one that we should certainly be excited about.

Why not ask the Teachers?

Michael Gove is not a popular Education Secretary. The fact that he has been the subject of a vote of no confidence from both of the major teaching unions stands as a testament to this. But then again, this shouldn’t be surprising. Very few Education Secretaries are ever popular. And there’s a very simple reason for this.

Despite the fact that few - if any – Education Secretaries have actually been teachers, they seem to believe they know what’s better for teachers and schools than the teachers themselves.

This is something that has always confused me. I fail to understand why, as soon as a party takes power, or before then when they are writing their manifestoes, they start talking to think tanks and analysts and specialists and then come up with an education policy, rather than getting the teaching unions in a room, and going “Right. Other than better pay and less paperwork, what can we actually do to make education better? Tell us. You are the experts.”

Because they are. Someone who has been teaching for twenty years is far more likely to know what makes schools good and teaching easier than someone who worked for The Times before becoming an MP. It’s not rocket science, it’s just common sense.

This isn’t just true of the education system either. Want to know what’s best for the NHS? Why not ask the Doctors and the Nurses. As the people who spend their lives as part of it, they probably have a pretty good idea of what needs to happen in order to make it better. Get their opinions and not only will you have decent policy, but you will have their support when you come to announce it, something you can use as clout with the electorate.

Government, especially in the UK, is supposed to be representative. That’s why we are called a “representative democracy.” Our MPs represent the people and are apparently supposed to listen to what they have to say, and act accordingly. And yet, when it comes to forming policy, they never seem to be willing to listen. Rather, they go with what they think is the right thing to do, regardless of how many voices are screaming at them to stop and think and try again. Then they wonder at election time why nobody is happy with them, or with what they are doing.

If politicians are really keen to get people interested in politics again, then they need to make politics relevant, and, yes, representative. Rather than simply passing down commandments and policies from on high, they need to come down here with the rest of us, ask our opinions, get our views. And when they have them, they need to do something with them. Only then, will people truly believe that politicians have their best interests at heart, and only then will they feel comfortable getting involved with politics again. It’s not hard. They just need to start listening.