A lot of people have been pretty quick to jump on the recent UNICEF report which puts the UK at the bottom in an international table for child well-being. On the Conservative Party website, George Osborne is quoted as saying that:
This report tells the truth about Brown's Britain. After ten years of his welfare and education policies, our children today have the lowest well-being in the developed world.
Except, as Tom Freeman points out, it doesn’t:
…if you delve into the small print, you find that the data used – the most recent available that allows for international comparisons – comes from this OECD report [PDF], which only goes up to the year 2000. So the last seven years of tax crediting, minimum wage and all the rest aren’t looked at.
Obviously, it’s expecting a little too much from the media and political parties for them to actually read things properly, isn’t it?
At least we have bloggers.
2 Comments:
I like fisking George Osborne. It's hardly challenging, but even so, it's good fun.
And Neal Lawson is on great form as well:
"Child poverty is at 16.2%. That's about one in every six kids. Labour has taken 700,000 children out of poverty - but that now only tells us just how much worse it could have been."
There's so much random time travel going on there that he must be making a pitch to be the next Dr Who...
The first comment on the Lawson article is great - what we needed to address poverty was obviously more Tory government.
After all, who better to get you out of a mess than those who got you in it!
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