In which Oxfam deceive and Huff Post (and the Guardian) publish without question.

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Here's the headline:

Income Inequality Soars With Five UK Families Wealthier Than Bottom 20%

We begin with a confusion between 'wealth' and 'income' (wealth is a stock and income is a flow). The author then digs her hole of ignorance (or maybe deception) a little deeper:

The UK's five richest families have more cash between them than the poorest 20% of the entire population, 12.6 million Britons, with new research showing the chasm between rich and poor is growing wider.

The truth is that Jessica Elgot, who wrote the article has simply lifted the lies straight from the Oxfam press release without thinking - churnalism at its worst. At the top of the 'rich list' here is the Duke of Westminster with £13 billion in assets. I'm prepared to bet that, while the Duke's not short of cash, that £13 billion is nearly all land and property - and Ms Elgot put in the word cash not Oxfam.

What it isn't is income, which makes the next line of the press release (and the articles) deceptive:

Oxfam's figures also show that over the past two decades the wealthiest 0.1 percent have seen their income grow nearly four times faster than the least well off 90 percent of the population. 

This may be true but it hasn't got anything to do with wealth, with those assets that the Duke owns. Oxfam (not for the first time) are suggesting that the imbalance in wealth equates directly to an imbalance in income when it doesn't.

Whatever the political differences over inequality, we really shouldn't be making the arguments in this sloppy (or deceptive) and ignorant (or misleading) way.

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Of course Public Health don't want us to understand it...

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This quote sums up everything wrong with Public Health:

But Greg Fell, consultant in public health, who was leading the discussion, said the idea of an Easy Read version had been considered but rejected.

He said there was a concern that it could be too “reductionist”.

Even the explanation of why it's incomprehensible is difficult to understand! And just for flavour:

“It is recommended that we make greater, but still intelligent and parsimonious, use of the wealth of epidemiological data that can be found within existing but as yet untapped sources of data.”

Suck on that ordinary member of the public!

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How academic public health deceives us...

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But the most significant aspect of this story is that the paper is reporting a conclusion based on data which demonstrate the opposite. The paper reports that heart attacks declined after the smoking ban, but the data show that heart attacks did not decline after the smoking ban.

Yes folks, that our public health folk - the facts don't fit what you want? Just ignore them!

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Public health - in which truth takes second place

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Sometimes people say the most worrying things:

So if these exercises are not capable of producing truth as we know it, do they serve other functions that are useful if not scientifically credible?

Read that carefully, at least three times. Ponder on its meaning.

Now read the next bit:

In a democracy, politicians and policymakers often need to be shamed into doing the right thing, and costs to society have the ability to shame, blame and even defame.

So the figures used by public health people are not true but it doesn't matter because we need to be "shamed into doing the right thing".

And that right thing is prohibition of course. Denormalising choices made by ordinary people. Banning and restricting our choices.

Despite the "science" being a lie. A lie justified on the basis of a specious "public good" by a man who claims to be a scientist:

Dr. Babor spent several years in postdoctoral research training in social psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and subsequently served as head of social science research at McLean Hospital's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center in Belmont, MA. In 1982 he moved to the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He has served as the Scientific Director at the Alcohol Research Center and the interim Chair of the Psychiatry Department before moving to Community Medicine in 1998.

Welcome my friends to the world of "public health".

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A climate scientist comments....

A real climate scientist remarks on Climategate:

The response to climategate (of which hide the decline is the slogan) of the climate scientists and the broader climate establishment has been to say to the public "not to worry, the science is still sound, nothing has changed." No one is standing up to acknowledge the problems and talk about addressing them so that this kind of thing does not happen in the future. Restoring trust would have been easier a year ago than it is now.

This is a reminder - even to those of us who are inclined to accept the argument for AGW - of the huge damage done to science and to the climate change case by the arrogance of those responsible for "Climategate" and those who covered up after the deception, lies and fiddles were revealed.

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So where has the money gone then?

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In his latest Telegraph blog, Dan Hannan points out the big deception at the heart of the government’s fiscal strategy – the fact that, in the aggregate, there are no cuts:

The Treasury statistics are unambiguous. Total public spending has risen in every month since the coalition was formed. During the seven months that followed the general election, spending was £23.3 billion higher than during the equivalent period twelve months previously, an increase of seven per cent.

Except that – as we are all very painfully aware – there are cuts. Libraries, leisure centres and day care centres are shutting down. Your local hospital probably is being asked to make £20m in “savings”. And thousands of people really are losing their jobs.

So, as the man says, where is all that money going?

• Debt repayments – the more we borrow, the more we have to pay back and the less we have available to spend on the services people actually want us to provide. Currently, the government’s interest payments amount to around £31bn but the budget forecasts anticipate this rising to £60bn in 2015.
• Regulatory infrastructure – the ‘bonfire of quangos’ did not touch the core of our government’s regulatory infrastructure and it seems likely the government (local and national) will remove direct service before reducing regulatory bureaucracy. In some sectors, such as health and child protection we are likely to see increases in regulatory costs.
• Additional spending directed to schools and the NHS – although it doesn’t sound like it, the money heading to schools and frontline health care is planned to increase. This is partly at the expense of central supports and grants but includes real increases

Still this doesn’t seem to explain the pain – to show why the end of substantial year-on-year spending growth results in actual service cuts rather than an end to expansion? Which brings me to the final problem – inflation.

Public bodies have to budget for inflation. Across many services this can be managed – even removed from the budget – but some costs such as energy cannot be treated in such a way. And, as energy costs shoot upwards, there will be a significant impact on spending. Furthermore, public bodies have a range of contracts – PFI contracts, for example – that build in inflation making it harder for those bodies to constrain increases (and, incidentally, contributing to the continuance of higher than trend rates of inflation).

Which rather explains how we can have real increases in total spending while at the same time seeing serious reductions in front line services. Link this to the Labour Party’s penchant for using cuts as a political tool – the budget of spite in Manchester being an example – and we have something of a ‘cuts nightmare’.

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