Wednesday, February 03, 2010

BBC says Tories 'shopped' on crime con...

Delighted to hear the Conservative con on violent crime figures exposed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning.

As I posted last week HERE, David Cameron's 'Broken Britain' campaign relies heavily on them being able to prove violent crime is rising...when he knows that in fact the reverse is the truth.

This morning, the BBC put Mark Easton - their journalist who first publicised the Tory con - head to head with Cameron's spokesman on crime, Chris Grayling.

Grayling had sent out spurious statistics to local Conservative parties across the country encouraging them to claim violent crime had risen since 1997.

Mark Easton explained that the Tories had ignored official clear warnings that the figures they were sending out could not be compared due to major improvements in recording violent crime.

The Conservative spokesman tried to move the debate onto his promise to make collection of crime figures independent of Government.

Mark Easton point out that the British Crime Survey, which has been around for 30 years, IS independent of Government and shows that in recnet years violent crime has been halved - down a full 50 per cent.

The Today presented challenged Mr Grayling: "Now that you have been shopped, will you send out a note to local Conservative parties instructing them not to use these figures...?"

No, of course not.

If they did that, the entire 'Britain is Broken' scare-mongering would be shown for what it is - a Tory con.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Labour are the one's who invented this sort of thing.

Remember Phil?

fairdealphil said...

So do you really believe that Britain Broken as Cameron would have us believe - and why they have to rely on fiddled figures - rather than the truth revealed in the most reliable stats - that violent crime has halved in recent years...