2010 in numbers
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading this week's More or Less podcast. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. This week it's more of a guide to the numbers that defined the UK in 2010. We've asked our favourite number watchers to tell us the figures from minus 12,000 to 200 million that really caught their attention and why. And we've also asked Swedish statistical guru Hans Rosling to give us his favourite numbers from around the world.
The young couples in Iran, in Vietnam, in Brazil are grabbing the condom or the pill in the midst of the night when they make love.
Since 2010 saw a general election, our numbers of the year begin in the world of politics. The meat and drink of more or less are the errors and connivances embedded in the statistics which fill each news bulletin. That means the programme probably couldn't exist without politicians. And it's here we start our journey into the numbers of 2010, with Daniel Franklin of The Economist, editor of The World in 2010 and The World in 2011.
My number for 2010 was the revelation that the murder rate was the lowest that it had been in 19 years, and that came out just at the time when David Cameron was launching his remarks about broken Britain. We have had cases like Jamie Bulger, like Baby Peter, like Damolola Taylor, like Gary Newlove, like Ben Kinsella.
On each occasion, are we going to say that this is just an individual case, that there aren't any connections to what's going wrong in our wider society? Do we have a problem in Britain with violent crime? Do we have a problem with some aspects of what's going wrong in childhood? Do we have a problem with our care system? Yes, we do.
We looked at the whole slew of statistics which suggested that when you looked closely at the numbers, Britain was not really as broken as the Conservatives were suggesting. If you look at overall crime numbers from the British Crimes Survey suggested that overall crime was down by 45% since the peak in 1995. And if you look beyond crime, I mean, teen pregnancies, for example, smoking rates, things like that, they were all actually pointing in the right direction rather than the wrong direction. So there was this big gap between the popular perception, something that politically the Conservatives latched onto, and the numbers which were suggesting that actually things were, on the whole, getting rather better.
I'm Cathy Newman. I'm political correspondent for Channel 4 News and I run the Fact Check blog. I haven't just focused on one figure, but a whole range of figures from the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that I think sounded a little bit dodgy. On the 10th of March at Prime Minister's Questions this year, he made quite a startling claim.
The defence budget has been rising every year. He might have a complaint if we were cutting the defence budget every year, but it is rising every year.
So his figures didn't sound quite right to me. So I phoned the MOD and prized some figures out of them. And they showed that in real terms, so that's including inflation, the defence budget actually fell year on year on four occasions since 1997. Now, the MOD then said, well, Gordon Brown wasn't talking about real terms. He was talking about near cash, which means not taking into account inflation. But that wasn't what Gordon Brown said in PMQs. He was quite clear that spending on defence had risen year on year in real terms. A week later, Prime Minister's questions again.
He fessed up. Expenditure has risen in cash terms every year. In real terms, it is 12% higher. But I do accept that in one or two years, defence expenditure did not rise in real terms.
What's interesting, under Labour, so from 1997 until 2010, the defence budget had risen overall during that period by nearly 10%. Now, some would say, well, there's been five wars to fight. But I think what's interesting is that under the coalition government, even though we're still at war in Afghanistan, over the next four years, the defence budget will fall by nearly 8%.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:06
2
How did 2010's UK politics shape the numbers that mattered?
4:06–5:56
3
Which crime and social statistics challenged the 'broken Britain' narrative?
5:56–14:26
4
Did government defence spending actually rise under Labour?
14:26–23:54
5
How accurate was politicians' immigration data during the 2010 debates?
23:54–27:54