NHS: the Labour claim that ‘didn’t stack up’
The NHS has always been fertile ground for statistics. Percentages of patients waiting, being operated on, staff vacancies.
But the danger is they can be open to interpretation or just plain wrong. And so at the Labour launch of its new NHS poster we had been sent a press release which said a survey of Tory councillors showed that more than a quarter were “willing to admit they support further charging and privatisation”.
By this morning, this claim had been reduced to a passing mention in the press conference. Because it didn’t stack up. The Conservatives’ rebuttal team was in full flow, pointing out there are over 8,000 councillors in the UK and that only 115 responded to the survey.
For maths nerds out there, that means just 1.4 per cent of elected councillors responded. And, so the Tories claim, the six they say support cuts to the NHS “constitute less than 0.07 per cent”.
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