David Cameron's speech revisited

I started this post as a response to Anonymous in the comments of 'Look who's wearing the Emperor's pants', who asked for an analogy because my statistical analysis is hard to follow. That's fair enough, because it is. In fact, it's so hard to follow that creating the analogy made me realise I'd made a mistake in one of my assumptions about how Cameron's speech is trying to hoodwink with its eastern European figures.

Yes, I did give myself an ironic lolly and call myself 'Lumpy'.

Here's a clearer idea of what's wrong with the figures I looked at in Cameron's speech yesterday. I'll be starting by using barrels and marbles for the easier stuff, and then dropping the analogies for the things that are more dishonest than I'd at first realised.

Look who's wearing the Emperor's pants

Twice in two posts? What are the chances?

In the comments to this post, Anonymous asked for an analogy to explain my stats.  In thinking of one, I realised I'd made a couple of mistakes in what I thought Cameron was doing with the figures. Turned out things were even worse than I'd imagined.  Please go to 'David Cameron's speech revisited' for a clearer idea of what the foreign worker stuff is about and a better idea of how dishonest he's being with everything else.  Stay here for more jokes about pants and gussets.

One of the most depressing things about realising how bad the tabloids are and how little attention they deserve is watching people who ought to know better spouting tired, tired tabloid myths that have been debunked a million times over as if they were true.  Whether the motive is deliberate skulduggery or boneheaded stupidity, it's always depressing to watch someone like Baroness Warsi talk about Winterval replacing Christmas or Eric Pickles bang on about health and safety gawn mad as if these things were real.