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During 23 years with the BBC, and 40 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), figures have always played a central role for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, and now this is highlighted by China proclaiming crime is so low there that it is one of the safest societies in the world, but critics say its statistics are completely unreliable.
Previously he has described how he was helped to break into the South Wales Echo office car when he was a cub reporter, recalled his early career as a journalist, the importance of experience in the job, and made clear that the ‘calls’ to emergency services as well as court cases are central to any media operation.
He has also explored how poorly paid most journalism is when trainee reporters had to live in squalid flats, the vital role of expenses, and about one of his most important stories on the now-scrapped 53 year-old BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) TV Current Affairs series, Week In Week Out (WIWO), which won an award even after it was axed, long after his career really took off.
Phil has explained too how crucial it is actually to speak to people, the virtue of speed as well as accuracy, why knowledge of ‘history’ is vital, how certain material was removed from TV Current Affairs programmes when secret cameras had to be used, and some of those he has interviewed.
Earlier he disclosed why investigative journalism is needed now more than ever although others have different opinions, and how information from trusted sources is crucial.
I wish things were different, but regrettably they aren’t.
As anyone who knows me will testify, I am totally hopeless with numbers, and unfortunately, they lie at the heart of many of the stories I do so I always have to triple-check them, and use a calculator!
However, I can earn sympathy, because there seems to be an impenetrable fog around some figures.
They are often correct (or incorrect) depending on how you look at them, and who says them, while other statistics are just downright dodgy.
Let’s look, for example, at China because ‘official’ statistics have just come out there showing, we are told, that it is one of the safest societies in the world.
The recorded homicide rate per 100,000 people in China is about a tenth of the global average.
Only 6,522 people were murdered in 2021, according to the state, down about 80 per cent from two decades ago.
During that same period, robberies fell by 97 per cent and assaults by 40 per cent.
Yet many in the West are highly sceptical of these numbers, because China has a notorious reputation for offering extremely questionable ‘official’ statistics.
Senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members want to show the country in a good light, especially to observers from the West, so its figures cannot be relied upon.
There are, though, other instances from abroad where ‘official’ statistics are just plain wrong, and one involves, of course, Donald Trump.
In 2015 Mr Trump placed a recycled image on social media that included the claim that “Whites killed by blacks – 81%”, citing “Crime Statistics Bureau – San Francisco”.
But the US fact-checking site Politifact identified this as completely fabricated – the ‘Bureau’ did not exist, and the true figure is around 15 per cent.
When confronted with this, Mr Trump just shrugged and said: “Am I going to check every statistic?”.
In other cases the figures used aren’t actually wrong, but they ARE misleading because they have been shown in a certain way.
For instance, in the same year, the then shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham declared that “crime is going up”, and when pressed pointed to the police recording more violent and sexual offences than in 2014.
But police-recorded crime data were de-designated as official statistics by the UK Statistics Authority in that year as they were so unreliable: they depended strongly on what the public chose to report, and how the police recorded it.
Instead the Crime Survey for England and Wales became the official source of data, as it also records crimes that are NOT reported to the police.
This actually shows a steady reduction in crime over the last 20 years.
There’s almost always some basis for numbers that get quoted, but it’s often rather different from what is claimed.
Take, for example, the famous (or notorious!) £350 million, as in the “We send the EU £350 million a week…” claim plastered over the big red Brexit campaign bus.
This is TRUE, however, in the words of Sir Andrew Dilnot, at the time chair of the UK Statistics Authority, it “is not an amount of money that the UK pays to the EU”.
Actually the UK’s net contribution was more like £250 million a week when the UK’s rebate was taken into account – and much of THAT was, in fact, returned in the form of agricultural subsidies or grants to poorer UK regions.
This reduced the figure to £136 million.
Sir Andrew expressed disappointment that this “misleading” claim was being made by Brexit campaigners, but the ticking-off did not get the bus repainted.
In 2014, Tom Blenkinsop MP said, “Today, there are 2,500 fewer nurses in our NHS than in May 2010”, while on the same day David Cameron claimed “Today, actually, there are new figures out on the NHS… there are 3,000 more nurses under this Government”.
BOTH these claims are strictly correct!
But Mr Blenkinsop compared the number of people working as nurses between September 2010 and September 2014, while Mr Cameron used the full-time-equivalent number of nurses, health visitors and midwives between the start of the UK Government in May 2010 and September 2014.
So they were both, in their own particular way, RIGHT!
With this kind of behaviour I don’t feel so bad.
Perhaps others should double check their figures as well!
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (during which numbers always had to be checked!) as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – how working in a free environment has always been critical for Phil, but now there is more evidence of the reverse happening in Russia after an artist was jailed for replacing price tags in a supermarket with anti-war messages.
