I have long had a particular interest in the field of “zombie statistics”, statistics that are widely circulated as factual information but which have become entirely detached from their original source to the extent that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish their validity. Some zombie […]

Sometimes it’s not so much what newspapers print as what they don’t print that matters. Last week, for example, the Department of Health published what was supposedly “new” guidance on sex-selective abortion, if a simple restatement of the existing legal position, which remains entirely unchanged, can actually be […]

Harry G Frankfurt’s classic monograph “On Bullshit” begins with a very simple but striking observation: One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. There is indeed and much of it is, sadly, to be found on the pages of national […]

According to The Independent: Pressure is growing for the Government to curb the way that ultrasound scans can be used to inform pregnant women about the gender of their unborn babies following an investigation by The Independent suggesting that female foetuses are more likely to be aborted within […]

Okay, time to get back in the saddle after a short break to recharge my batteries and we’ll start, as so often seems to be the case, with abortion and an editorial which finds the Telegraph in somewhat conspiratorial mood: The decision of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) […]

Of the many variations on Martin Niemoller’s famous ‘First they came for…’ speech I’ve seen kicking around the Internet none, so far as I can recall, has ever started with the line ‘First they came for the sex offenders”. As population sub-groups go, it’s difficult to think of […]

The latest newspaper to jump on the burgeoning anti-porn bandwagon is the Sunday Times, which recently put its name to a “symposium” on the “dangers to children of online pornography” in conjunction with the Tory Think-tank Policy Exchange: The Sunday Times is organising a symposium on the dangers […]

So, there I was looking through the public bills section of the Parliament website for the new Lords’ amendments to the defamation bill when what should I notice but a new bill, introduced less than a week ago, calling itself the Abortion Statistics Bill. Hmm… A quick search […]

Desperation has clearly set in at the offices of the Amalgamated Union of Bigots, Godbotherers and Allied Dinosaurs, AKA the Coalition for Marriage, which has commissioned no less than seven separate opinion polls for publication this week in the hope of wrapping the issue of same-sex marriage in […]

I am unashamedly a fan of the work of fact checking organisations and websites, not least amongst which is the excellent Full Fact. However, as a stats hound myself, I am also very much aware of the limitations and occasional pitfalls of the standard fact check model used […]