Half a trillion

 Half a trillion

 The Labour party claimed that more than half a trillion working days had been lost to sickness since the last General Election. 

Don't our politicians have any common sense? Any sense of scale? Half a trillion is 500,000,000,000. This is another Diane Abbott style of mistake. It seems that to our politicians, all numbers are equal.

There are 33 million workers in the UK. So that works out at 15,150 days lost per worker. But in the 3.5 years since December 1019, there were only 875 or so working days. So, somehow, each British worker managed to claim seventeen days off sick into every working day. Absurd!

I own a calculator, it's 36 years old. But even without a calculator, I could see that the figure they were citing was impossible.

So then they issued a correction.  Not half a trillion; they meant to say half a billion. 

It's Diane Abbott again.  All numbers are equally valid, and it doesn't matter if you confuse billions with trillions. And none of the people checking that initial press release, could see that the claim was absurd.

And these are the people who think they can run the UK economy?