Its not really a downright lie - just, as with all politicians and parties a mangling of stats to suit.

Doesn't it just make you so weary....even the C4 link puts its own interpretation on what 'health tourism' actually is (given away by the use the words' in the sense of')

In terms of the link, couple of things jumped out for me..

Health Tourism (i.e 'non-entitled' healthcare £20-100m - a huge range of £80m, how do they not know more precisely than that ?

Second, £2bn is the figure for entitled 'non-residential healthcare' - a huge leap from £20-£100m to £2bn....£2bn is an astounding number.

Actually the real cost of “health tourism” – in the sense of people who have travelled to the UK for the sole purpose of getting free healthcare to which they are not entitled – is actually only about £20m to £100m, according to this report from the Department of Health.

That figure of £2bn refers to the total cost to the NHS from treating all the people who are not ordinarily resident in Britain, including visitors and short-term migrants, students and indeed British expats.

Edited by The Sash (24 Feb 2015 9.27am)

Isn't it just

I saw one the from a website against coalition cuts the other day which had a wonderful pie chart comparing benefit fraud and tax avoidance which had the tiniest sliver of yellow for benefit fraud and a whopping great sea of blue for rich people shovelling away tax.

Its de riguer at the moment to excuse benefit fraud because rich people avoid / evade tax - neatly sidestepping the fact that regardless of number both are equally reprehensible acts that f*** the rest of us over who try to play with a (relatively) straight bat.

I cant remember the exact tax figure for avoidance but 20 odd billion rings a bell whilst the benefit fraud was a 'meagre' 1bn in comparison.

If you look at the HMRC figs the tax avoidance figure is nowhere near 20bn (again cant remember exactly but think its c.5 to 6bn).

On the accompanying forum someone had pointed this out but people simply ignored that and continued to spit and rant about fat cats and demonization of the poor, when actually we should be demonising both - don't let the truth get in the way of a good rant.

Edited by The Sash (24 Feb 2015 11.05am)

Spot on. It's the same in the US. Both parties are equally guilty of plain lying about stuff like this. They no longer look at the numbers and try to figure out what they might mean. More often than not, if the official numbers do not say what they want them to, they simply make up their own. It's pathetic and means we end up with a puerile shouting match that would not be out of place on a year 6 playground.

Anyway getting back to UKIP....

I'm interested in the furore/kerfuffle surrounding Rifkind and Straw.

I've noticed that the media are concentrating wholly on the pair of them rather than associating what they've done reflecting on the Conservatives/Cameron and Labour/Miliband.

If the story had been about Reckless the new UKIP MP, then the media would be all over UKIP/Farage as well as Reckless.

Surely Jack Straw won't be far behind.