It’s sad to see comments all over the place, on the BBC website for instance, talking about how “statistics can’t be trusted anyway”.

The lesson is not that statistics mean nothing, it’s that they are useful if they’re clearly presented. Grayling taking two incomparable statistics and attempting to compare them being wrong doesn’t mean those statistics are useless when used appropriately.

@MikeSC

Hear hear… when the collection methods are representative and when used in context statistics are invaluable. The kind of shenanigans Grayling tried to pull, as pointed out by Michael Scholar, are the very reason we get comments like that.

Let’s not forget that Grayling’s immediate predecessor, Dominic Grieve, criticised the British Crime Survey in the Telegraph for failing to record homicides.

It would be a hell of a feat if it did record homicides, given that its a self-reporting victimisation survey and could record data on homicides only the if victim succeeded in completing the questionnaire.

Grayling is just using the same tactic as the US right-wing lie machine. He does not care if he is called out for the distortion. The intention is to get the lie out there and hope few pay any attention to the rebuttal.

It’s truly outrageous and deeply cynical that he continues to peddle the broken record on ‘rising violent crime’ when he knows the opposite is actually the case.

He knows that many British people strongly believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – that violent crime is still rising and thinks that the Tories (as usual) can capitalise on this. Sadly, he’s probably right.

Why is this myth such a pervasive one?

It’s the same as the thing about rising high street prices. I sat through an hours programme with some family a year or two ago all about how prices on most goods have actually fallen over the past few decades. At the end of the programme consesus in the room was basically, ‘I don’t care what it says I want to believe prices have gone up’. And a whole slagging session kicked of about this and that product that had gone up when the programme had categorically shown those same things had dropped in price. Some things people just seem to need to think have got worse.

Freedom of speech is one thing but flagrantly lying to the public is exactly the sort of thing that should have Grayling up on charges of electoral fraud of some description. It’s abundantly clear that he is lying through his back teeth, and the public should be protected from such words coming from an elected politician.