RSSeNEWS to be determined...

The use of statistics by politicians has been under close scrutiny during the general election, including the  BBC's Reality Check and Channel 4's Fact Check. We've spotted the following stories picking up on the way politicians have used data to support their campaigning. Fellows are invited to submit other examples of independent scrutiny to the RSSeNews team.

16 April

• FactCheck examined Gordon Brown's assertion that "Police have got to spend 80 per cent of their time now on the streets”. The issue had previously been the subject of a ban by the Advertising Standards Agency of a Home Office campaign stating that police can now be expected to spend 80 per cent of their time on the beat as not “legal, decent, honest and truthful”. Factcheck criticised Brown for repeating this claim, and declared that "the 80 per cent target is at present nowhere near being met".

21 April

• BBC Reality Check reviewed shadow immigration spokesman Damian Green's assertion that Gordon Brown's talk about creating  "British jobs for British workers" is belied by statistics. Green says the data shows that Labour "has left British workers in a worse position than when he took office 13 years ago". BBC News Economics editor, Stephanie Flanders,  found that "the vast bulk of net job creation since 1997 appears to have benefited workers not born in the UK ... On balance, job prospects for British-born people have risen slightly since 1997, but those workers have been hit much harder by the recession than workers born outside the UK ... And the increase in jobs for native-born workers has been dwarfed by the number of British-born people, of all ages, who have left the country."

20 April

• Factcheck examined Nick Clegg's claim that “The liabilities of the UK banking system in totality are now four-and-a-half times the size of the British economy.” Factcheck found the claim to be "an understatement as more recent data puts the UK banking liabilities now five times the size of the British economy".

• Factcheck examined David Cameron's claim that “In a typical year now, you get 17,000 teachers being attacked by students”. It declared that Cameron was "rather loose with this claim. He’s right that the statistics show over 17,000 attacks but we can’t say if they were on teachers or how serious they were … his statement masks the fact that the incident which resulted in a suspension could have been a shove or a push."

23 April

• Factcheck picked up David Cameron's assertion that “We now have a budget deficit the same size as Greece” and responded "Not yet, it’s not".