One in four people are... {add your own vested interest here}

On LBC Labour MP Stella Creasy said 1 in 4 Londoners now take out a payday loan every month. 

Really?

 1 in 4. That's some 2,500,000 payday loans in London every month? 

From Wiki - The number of people taking out payday loans in the UK in recent years has increased fourfold, to 1.2 million in 2009. The latest 2011 info on Stella's own webpage has a figure of 1.3 million individuals in the UK taking out a loan. That's a hell of a growth if she is right..which, of course, she isn't. In London payday loans would have risen by some 1000%. A rate of increase even the payday loans companies themselves would envy. As the report she quotes goes on to say the insolvency practitioner in November 2012 showed 5 million adults in the UK are considering taking out a payday loan in the 6 months to May 2013.
 What a useless statistic. The car salesman would be rich on commission if he could bank all the people thinking about buying a car as actual sales. And that 1000% increase in payday loans in London. I just guessed a %. You're not going to check. Which is what the problem is.

I've no idea what Stella really meant to say but what was disturbing was that the interviewer, Julia Hartley-Brewer, didn't pick up on it. So its 1 in 4 Londoner's taking out a payday loan to help pay for food and nappies. What an evil society we live in when a quarter of all families in one of the richest countries in the world has a system that means a full 2.5 million citizens in its capital city must take out a loan to eat.

There was a figure on Question Time the other day that said 1 in 5 women has been raped. I queried it on Twitter and met with some strong tweets saying how rape is unreported. Women suffer terribly and the real figure is nearer 1 in 3.
Ok.
But 1:5 women being raped means what? 20 million rapists in the UK? 10 Million? Its an insane figure that cannot be true. Wiki again: According to a news report on BBC One presented in 12 November 2007, there were 85,000 women raped in the UK in the previous year.
2013 census has 28.5 million women registered. Take out the under 16s and call it 20 million. 1 in 5 is 4,000,000 rapes. That's a 4700% increase. We'd have noticed, surely?

The disabilities agencies claim between 10 and 12 million disabled people in the UK. Around 1:5 of working age adults and 1 in 2 of pensioners.
There are 44 million drivers. There are 1.3 million tax exemptions from road tax granted. 
That exemption is available not just to the disabled person, who might be blind or otherwise incapable of driving, but to the partner, parent or carer of the disabled person. So 1 in 5 begins to look suspicious. 

1:5 families in the UK live in poverty.
6.5% of UK people are homosexual -2005

Unless, as in all these examples, every possible permutation of the statistic is included, the figures cannot be correct. Colour blindness and stammering and baldness as a disability? 
Felt up once in a pub counts as rape? Agreed to have a session with their partner when not in the mood? 

 Why do so many bodies use such nonsense figures that are so obviously at odds with the real world experience. If these figures were correct ALL of us would know a disabled lesbian, living in poverty who has been raped and recently taken out a payday loan. All of us..not just one of us.
There would be one such person in all our families. And one rapist too..who is also taking out a payday loan.

 Its a headline. And the media often allow the statistics to go unchallenged. Owen Jones was very, very surprised when Andrew Neil told him that no member of the cabinet earned a million pounds a year. Poor Owen. No one had ever questioned one of his assertions before. 

Tax cuts for millionaires! Assuming £150k is the new million.
Unemployment fell by 50,000 in august 2012 - or maybe it rose by 50,000 as 100,000 is the approximate +/- error in the figures.
Crime fell by 8% last year. Or maybe not. Depends on what crime is recorded doesn't it?
In 2008 97.2% of A level students passed. Its risen a lot since then.

Statistics! 
Don't believe a word of any of them.

{Homosexuality figures fell dramatically to about 1 to 1.5% in 2010 after new research. Worse news for Dave then.. He's pushed 20% of former Tory voters to UKIP trying to catch 1% of the national Gay vote. Or maybe its 1% to UKIP out of 20% of the national vote..who the hell knows? Or cares..Just make your own up..No one checks.}

Finally - something that can definately be cut!

Our language was designed a long time ago, in a different era. It is no longer fit for the 21st century.
Over the years a number of immigrant language words have joined our native English. Latin. Greek. French. German. Hindi.Arabic. They've all come over here and taken over the jobs of hardworking English words.

That has left a number of letters virtually redundant. These letters have the same status as other, more hardworking letters. They consume space on a keyboard. yet some of them do little or no work at all.

Q is an example. Q does virtually nothing. In the picture above Q is for Queen. And Q is always for Queen because we struggle to think of even a single other word that starts with Q.
A hardworking letter, like S or T, goes to work and sees Q, still in bed, and likely to stay there all day. And Q can't even function on its own. In needs U to help. That's two letters in use.

Let us abolish Q.

If we need a word like queue, quick or Quaker, we can use C.
Cueue, Cwick and Cwaeker.
And X. X is worse than Q - X-ray and X-men, which aren't a real words anyway, and Xylophone, that just seems to be a word made up to give X something to do. Z is on the abolition list too, but a Z-X merger could save Z.
Zylophone. Z-ray. Z-men. Job done - goodbye X .

K is another letter on thin ice. Hardworking C is a ready made replacement.
Kitchen - Citchen
Greek - Greec
Smack - Smac.
Knowledge - duh! Nolledge.

 Special K is the real loser here. And Potassium. They can rebrand. Scrabble users will have to adjust but within 1 generation those missing letters will be forgotten.

Think of the space saved on keyboards that could be put to much better use such as incorporating a ½ or a  € or the common @ on its own key.
Thinner dictionary. Less school time learning wasteful letters. Easier for foreigners. 
This is a cut worth making.

And apostrophes. Goes without saying they are out. Waste of time possessives.
The Kings arms
The King's arms.
Oh, how will we know what this means without apostrophes?
Well, Lynne Truss, just look at the context. 

"We shall meet at the Kings arms." 

Does that mean a reunion at an  inn or a public house or by the upper limbs of two or more male monarchs? Not hard to figure out.


So, that's enough cuts for starters. But Capital letters, semi colon and inverted commas, plus the letter J are on notice.
J has a worse record in English use than X or Z. But kind of hard to write just jerk the juice jug without it.