The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

We've seen this process in campaigns to tackle binge drinking or obesity (aka "the obesity epidemic"), in demographic predictions and assessments of terrorist threats, in education policy, in foreign policy – in fact, there can be few areas of government policy untainted by the selective use of statistics and tendentious research. The government has loudly proclaimed its commitment to "evidence-based policy-making" while instead pursuing policy-based evidence making. In the short run, this has produced some extremely bad legislation. In the longer term, it risks destroying public faith in any evidence put forward by the government. Even when their figures are accurate no-one will believe them.