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There used to be a theory that numbers were precise, but words were not. This has all changed. Now neither is precise, but, of the two, numbers are less reliable.

The fact is that we can only comprehend a small range of numbers. It’s like only knowing the first six letters of the alphabet. All those financial figures that engulf us are impenetrable. They disappear into meaninglessness after four digits.

We all know what a tenner looks like. It furnishes a few scoops, a visit to the cinema or even a newspaper offer for dinner at a posh restaurant where you can be patronised for showing a voucher rather than an interest in the wine list. I’d say most of us still have a fair grip of a pony and can contemplate a wedge. I’ve had hold of three-and-a-half grand in used fivers, money I slipped to an Australian in exchange for a camper van with dodgy plates. But much more than that, and it all gets vague. It just becomes a shedful.

So we turn off when someone tells us they’re going to put billions more into the National Health Service. You know Labour would quite like to if it were convenient and that the Tories think it sounds good, but won’t. The actual figures are too big to think about. Like the national debt. Do we care if it’s £870 billion? Not me. If we owed a couple of grand, I’d support an effort to repay it.

But more than a billion is too much to contemplate.

The media shows splendid contempt for figures. John Humphrys began a Today programme piece on Haiti the other

morning asking: “How many are dead in this latest earthquake? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? We don’t know. “

And then, having conceded his total ignorance, he proceeded to pontificate about how bad it would be if the worst of these “unsubstantiated reports” happened to be true before conducting a series of interviews based on his lack of knowledge. It confirms that figures don’t matter.

My tax form’s another good example. The Inland Revenue don’t write to me and say: “This is how much tax you’ll have to pay.” They send me some figures. “You have been assessed as a 636L”, they tell me. The number means nothing to me. To be fair, they always tell me I can challenge the decision, and I always do. So they reassess it and, a few months later, they write back to tell me I’m now a 637D. I have no idea if I’ve got a better or worse deal. I still wallow in primeval mathematical sludge.

This is the power of the imprecision of numbers. They affect precision while telling me nothing.

Crime statistics are another favourite. A shock announcement says that crime has gone down by 3 per cent. It’s an interesting figure, but it’s meaningless. It has no significance. I don’t think: “That’s good, crime’s gone down. I’ll nip down to the supermarket today while I’m safe, rather than risking next week’s figures.”

Numbers are vague in all kinds of contexts. For example, the number of people in your union’s membership is susceptible to enormous variation. Like most figures, it depends who’s asking. Counting is not an exact science. A union can have almost half a million members when its general secretary appears on Question Time, a quarter of a million at the TUC and half this number when it’s a matter of paying affiliation fees based on membership to outside organisations.

I’m pleased to see that Harriet Harman has begun to share my suspicion of numbers and statistics. She was busy last week discounting the figures thrown up by her brainchild, the National Equality Panel. The NEP had the nerve to drone on about the richest 10 per cent of the population being 100 times as wealthy as the poorest.

This was not to Hattie’s taste. She was bullish and talked that way if you add a “t” to the mix. She dismissed the figures to the extent that she concluded the Government needed to “sustain” its action. What? Keep going? So the gap can get even wider and Peter Mandelson can become even more intensely relaxed?

We even go to war on the basis of vague numbers. Like: “We are going to war because the Iraqis have a lot of weapons of mass destruction’. “How many exactly?” “A number between nil and a million.’ Well, that seems precise enough to commence mass slaughter.

The point is that, if numbers are so hugely unreliable, why do we have a national obsession with measuring everything? There are more people in education measuring performance than there are teaching. The police force has more statisticians than coppers. We’re blinded with so much bogus information that we’ve no idea what’s happening.

The only conclusion is that figures say nothing and measuring is bunkum. And that isn’t just a personal view. It is shared by 65 per cent of the population, almost 50 million people, of whom 32 per cent have committed a crime, 68 per cent failed their SATs and 22 per cent, like obsessive measuring, have passed the number on their sell-by date.