Britain in Numbers (2005)

Book Review from the July 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain in Numbers: The Essential Statistics by Simon Briscoe (Politico’s, 2005) £14.99

Did you know that workers in Britain clock up nearly 900 million hours of work each week? That a recent survey of 688 school lunchboxes recorded just one salad? Or that half of the households in the UK have less than £1,500 in savings? Simon Briscoe is Statistics Editor of the Financial Times and this book provides copious statistics on a range of key indicators for British society and the economy at large, including comparative statistics with other countries. There are 78 chapters in total covering everything from asylum seekers to unemployment through to internet usage and vegetarianism.

As is always the case with books such as this socialists will claim that a lot of the statistical categories deployed are highly superficial or artificial (those for class being the most obvious example), but much else of what is presented is valuable and can be used to test some of the claims of politicians of all parties on major economic, social and political issues. The early section of the book is particularly interesting as it accounts for the growth of statistics-keeping and publication in the UK, set in the context of more recent developments such as the increasing use of targets as an aid to meeting policy objectives. Briscoe also usefully discusses how statistics can be used to deceive as well as illuminate and identifies a number of the common tricks employed by governments and others using case studies to illustrate his point.

Briscoe is a strong critic of New Labour in office and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in particular. The way in which the Chancellor has made extravagant claims for economic growth, low unemployment, inflation and interest rates attracts some merciless criticism, and rightly so, with Briscoe detailing the statistical distortions and trickery used to justify bogus (or highly partial) claims.

Unfortunately, other aspects of Briscoe’s book are less satisfactory. While his critiques of Labour since 1997 are authoritative and have much to commend them, Briscoe has a regrettable tendency to argue that anything he considers to be positive about the British economy or society at present has its origins in the Conservative governments that dominated politics before Blair came to office. Quite remarkably, for instance, he can claim that the Conservatives appear to have “put in place many of the foundations for the current [economic] stability”. Exactly what these foundations are or how the Conservatives laid them he doesn’t say, and it is also noticeable that he doesn’t say – with the type of sleight of hand he chides others for – that the UK saw its two most severe downturns since the Great Depression, firstly under Thatcher in the early eighties and then under Major in the early nineties, with the ERM debacle to boot. Some ‘foundations’ and some ‘stability’.

Generally, he places far too much emphasis on differences between Labour and Conservative governments in office – on occasion not being able to see the wood for the trees (and sometimes the branches and even the twigs). Desperate to paint Labour as a party of big government, high spending and high taxation (and – by association – comparative economic incompetence) he manages to portray a picture of Labour and Conservative governments in modern history that few people who are thinking seriously about the issues are likely to find convincing.

You would never think it from reading Briscoe, but tax as a percentage of GDP was higher when Thatcher left office than it was when she was elected in 1979 and it is an almost identical figure now under Blair (at about 36 per cent). Similarly on government spending, where little that is remarkable has occurred for many years. Largely because of the raft of one-off privatisations in the 1980s, the proportion of GDP accounted for by state spending declined from its peacetime peak in the early-mid 1970s (under Tory Ted Heath and then Labour’s Harold Wilson) but since then it has tended to hover around the 40 per cent mark under governments of both complexions.

So while useful, this book has to be treated with caution as it seems to exaggerate the differences between the parties when in office, and it certainly understates the uncontrollability and anarchy of the capitalist economy, subsequently over-estimating the power of governments (especially Conservative ones it would seem) to influence it through his favoured low tax and spend policies.

The book was published just before the General Election and was reviewed in many of the broadsheet newspapers with the underlying suspicion that Briscoe hoped it would open up a debate that might be ultimately favourable to the Tories on Labour’s economic record. If so, it failed and is a bit of a curate’s egg because of it.

DAP