Chesterfield Online Forum
General Category => Politics => Topic started by: Pete on July 10, 2013, 11:39:58 AM
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Not according to a survey by Ipsos Mori in today's Independent.
"The research, carried out by Ipsos Mori from a phone survey of 1,015 people aged 16 to 75, lists ten misconceptions held by the British public. Among the biggest misconceptions are:
- Benefit fraud: the public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent - so the public conception is out by a factor of 34.
- Immigration: some 31 per cent of the population is thought to consist of recent immigrants, when the figure is actually 13 per cent. Even including illegal immigrants, the figure is only about 15 per cent. On the issue of ethnicity, black and Asian people are thought to make up 30 per cent of the population, when the figure is closer to 11 per cent.
- Teen pregnancy is thought to be 25 times higher than the official estimates: 15 per cent of of girls under 16 are thought to become pregnant every year, when official figures say the amount is closer to 0.6 per cent.
Among the other surprising figures are that 26 per cent of people think foreign aid is in the top three items the Government spends money on (it actually makes up just 1.1 per cent of expenditure), and that 29 per cent of people think more is spent on Jobseekers' Allowance than pensions. In fact we spend 15 times more on pensions - £4.9 billion on JSA vs £74.2 billion on pensions.
Personally I blame the media - they spin everthing to sensationalise a mediochre story.
Full list here - http://ind.pn/1deslX8 (http://ind.pn/1deslX8)