Why Everything Is Allegedly Great.

 If you're the sort of person who reads government reports, you might have noticed that recently, things are the best they've ever been. Crime is at an all time low, more and more people are being employed, and commuters are even happy about the state of the trains.
 If, like me, you're the sort of person who would rather stare out of the window than even attempt to read a government report, you might have noticed that none of this is true and the country has kind of gone to shit, in recent years.
 This assumes, of course, that you have a window. It's probably been nicked by that unemployed bloke who was laid off from the derelict train company.
 Plenty of reactionary thinkers will tell you that any good news is a lie, made up by some grand, over-arching conpiracy, but I'm not convinced that the people in power can run an egg and spoon race, let alone organise a complicated, Machiavellian plot to lie to us in the face of the evidence.
 This isn't to say that things aren't pretty crap - five thousand squaddies are about to hit the already saturated jobs market, and they'll rapidly find that their best chance of success was to have jumped on a landmine and become a paralympian, or failing that, a professional garden dibber for large plants.
 This ignores the strain of the combined staff of Jessops, Comet and Blockbuster will be putting on the job centres, to name the first three examples that came to mind.
 So yeah, I'm skeptical about the whole "more people are going back to work" statement. I'm equally skeptical of any other claim that things are going well for the nation, lately.
 This is not, however, due to some grand scheme to mislead us all.
 Instead, it all comes down to the samples. It's not the questions people are asked, it's the way in which they are asked them.
 Two days ago, I was in a train station to buy some lingerie.
 I'm kidding, I was there to catch a train, like everyone else at the train station.
 As I sat there, waiting for a train (as one often does in a train station for the catching of trains) I was approached by a pleasant old man who asked if I'd mind filling in a questionnaire about my journey.
 I've done his job myself - I once had a three day temp gig collecting data from train passengers with a clipboard. Because I'm not a total idiot (or particularly loyal to a three day temp job) I instead went to the pub and filled in the forms with a suitably random looking smattering of ticks and crosses.
 Apparently, they've gotten wise to that trick, because after I took pity on the old guy I was also asked to give my number in case his supervisor decided to call people at random to make sure we were real and had, in fact, taken the questionnaire.
 Still, worst case scenario, filling out the pages that the old guy gave me would give me something to do.
 Twenty questions later (approximately a quarter of the way through the form) I gave up and threw it away.
 The questions were incredible. One asked me to rate the "overall atmosphere" of the station.
 The overall atmosphere for any train station is "train station." Nobody has ever given a fuck about the ambience, mood lighting or general romance of a place which is only ever used - and the eagle eyed among you will have spotted me pointing this out already - for the catching of trains, and nothing else, ever.
 I gave up on the questionnaire (the old man was probably dropped into a fiery pit for his failure when they noticed mine wasn't mailed back in) but it made me think: What if I hadn't?
 What if I was stuck in a room and forced to work my way through something equally banal, of comparable length?*
 Like, say, a questionnaire about crime. Or unemployment.
 After eighteen questions on the "trains" form, I was so bored I decided I'd rather sit and stare into space.
 After thirty questions, by extrapolation, I would have completely glazed over and started ticking random boxes.
 By fifty, I'd have been screaming at them to do it to Julia, and by the end of it, I'd have signed anything you wanted just to make it stop.
 "Yes, crime IS down! Sure, there's no unemployment! The trains run on time! Everything is great! Just make the questions stop!!"
 We shouldn't look at the data the government is using. We should look at how dull the forms were that they used to collect it. 



*I wish I'd written this column a few years back, when a joke about Dan Brown's books would have fit really nicely, here.