Brown gets his sums Wrong (Again)

Gordon Brown reckons he isn’t the “smiles and PR man” in this election campaign, and it turns out that he isn’t the numbers man either. On Friday (23rd April 2010), he managed to somehow make savings of £1bn from an expenditure of £74 million.

The Prime Minister got his numbers wrong on immigration a few weeks back too. So much so, that the Office of National Statistics had a moan at him for quoting from 2 sets of statistics. That is, 2 disconnected sets of statistics which, when pieced together made it look…. well, how he wanted it to look.

When he gave his evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry, he got his sums wrong on defence spending. There was a statement like “defence spending has increased year on year…” which wasn’t true either.

The latest one is even better(worse if you are a Labour Party supporter) though. He claimed that you can save £1bn from a budget of £74 million. Bloody hell, this bloke was chancellor for how long? If he can’t do numbers, has little or no charisma as a politician, is deluded over how to fix the economy and wants to tax jobs, this general election is surely the time for him to removed by the electorate - since he wasn’t democratically elected as Prime Minster anyway.

The background to this latest gaffe is as follows:

Mr Brown had been asked how the public spending cuts would affect ordinary people. He used the example that child benefits will be processed via the Internet which would result in a saving of £1bn in child benefit administration. how much does the administration of the child benefit system cost? Well according to this official data from Revenue and Customs it only costs £74 million – do you feel a “oops moment” coming here for Gordon Brown?

All this goes to show that the Labour government can’t be trusted. They massage numerical data to suit their purpose, and their leader then gets that data wrong - it is more of the breathtaking incompetence we have had to endure for the last 13 years. It is time we had real change, it is time for straight talking.