Fraser Nelson On Brown’s Porkies
DOES Gordon Brown tell the whole truth and nothing but? Fraser Nelson looks at the details…
1. “We now have the second biggest defence budget in the world”. This dodgy figure is cooked up by looking at military spending in nominal terms – rather than adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP). If you spend £1 million it will obviously go further in China than Britain - which is why analysts routinely use PPP adjustments for international comparisons. Brown takes the raw data from the Stockholm Peace Institute (find it here, pdf). Unadjusted for PPP (ie, the dodgy raw data Brown uses) than America is first ($547bn) then Britain ($59.7bn), China ($58.3bn), France ($53.6bn) and Japan ($43.6bn). But adjust for PPP and the real figure has Britain fifth. And by the way, Brown inserted “as a share of GDP” afterwards. He’d forgotten his own scam. If you take it as a share of GDP then Britain at 2.6% is fifth behind the India (2.7%), Russia (3.6%), the US (4.0%) and the Saudis (8.5%).
We’re number 24…
Posted: 17th, July 2008 | In: Gordon Brown, Labour Party, Politicians, Twitterings Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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July 18th, 2008 at 1:07 am
That white chess piece on MM thread, is it also a mistake?
Somewbody does not want us to talk about the McCanns.
By the way, the Attorney did not talk about shelving (SIC.pt).
The comments will come from the Public Prosecuter and the Attorney will read them to the media.
Where do the media get all the news from?
July 17th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Mods and Adm,
what happened to Anorak and Madeleine forum?
Very difficult to achieve the first comment.
M and A
Maravilha, the Sepguy had to do an upgrade, a bug in the tabs, but whatever has gone wrong affects only the MM thread. The others are all ok. I have notified him, but he’s probably logged out now
July 17th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Massaging figures again