You can't trust the Tories - in blogs or with the economy

Over at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the very serious men in grey suits are ripping the government's claims about the spending review to shreds. Faisal Islam, the Guardian's economics correspondent, describes it thus:

already the most devastating critique of flaky claims, policy inconsistencies, dodgy maths, i've ever seen by IFS

Laughter at the IFS briefing as it shows the most regressive looking graph in history vs the puny looking treasury version 

in response to Cameron and Clegg saying things like this.

People do not only think of themselves as recipients of benefits. There is also: "How much does it cost to get childcare? What kind of education is my child getting at school? What am I getting back if I am doing some low-paid, part-time work?" That is how people live in the real world, and in the real world it is the richest that are paying the most – about that there is not doubt at all.

Meanwhile, it's time to look to Nadine Dorries, one of the most appallingly unpleasant of the Tory Scum back benches. She fiddled her expenses but fell ever so slightly short of being charged, but the Parliamentary Commissioner's report takes her to task over her non-co-operative approach and generally relaxed attitude towards the truth. She responds with this astonishing confession about her blog, which the authorities used as evidence:

My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

Right. I see. Or rather, I don't see. But here are a couple of extracts which might help us understand this menace to society:

Did you know that if every GP referred one less patient per year and requested one less diagnostic test, the NHS would save half a billion pounds in that one year?

Would you like to be that one patient? How does the doctor decide who shouldn't be treated because it's too expensive? Why doesn't Dorries know the difference between 'less' and 'fewer'? (And where's the source for this statistic?).

Try this:

The BBC will only receive the equivalent of a 16% cut over five years. That just isn’t good enough.

The BBC has done a very good job over the last thirteen years to support the Labour Government. They have facilitated the very process which has resulted in the cuts every family in the nation has to bear. The blood which will flow from the cuts is all over BBC hands too.

That's right. You heard it here first. The BBC caused the banking crash and made Labour rescue the banks and needs to be punished. 

It's like reading Ewar's Shropshire Star letters over and over again, before remembering that this woman is a Member of Parliament on the government side. 

The stupid, how it burns.