Bending the facts

EVERY so often there's a story on BBC News about a subject I already know quite a bit about, and all too often its version of reality seems to be unsettlingly different from the one I know. It really makes you wonder how much you can trust all its other stories, writes David Davis.

This morning BBC Breakfast tried to cheer us all up with this one, that a section of the Regents Canal has been drained for repairs as part of CaRT's annual winter maintenance programme.

Voids

Along with the usual shopping trolleys and and, er, a bath, they found metre-deep voids under one of the country's most busily used towpaths.

Your regular readers will be well aware that not only does annual maintenance happen every year, but for about a decade now it's had a funding shortfall of tens of millions of pounds, leading inevitably to the canals being in a worse state.

However BBC Breakfast reported this work on the Regents Canal as 'the start of a historic multi-million pound restoration effort across 2000 miles of Britain's canals'. Hey ho!

A law against it?

Alan Richard's encounter with one of CaRT's chuggers was amusing, but hearing of all those remarkable 'Untrue Facts' that CaRT were pedalling, I have to ask: trying to get people to part with money under false pretences—isn't there a law against that sort of thing?