The combination of coalition and financial crisis has, curiously, given David Cameron’s government more, not less, room to be radical. The administration knows it will be deeply unpopular anyway as the cuts bite and so there is not so much to lose in being audacious in other areas.
Mark Easton - Whatever Happened to Coalition Caution? on the BBC.
I always find Easton to be an insightful writer, particularly when it comes to analysing statistics and the way that the rest of the media cherry-picks them to suit their agenda. In this article, however, he is talking about the plans that the coalition government is setting out, and how they are actually amongst the most radical for decades.
These sentences struck me as being very true. It’s an absolute given that both parties are going to come out of this looking like bad guys, so they might as well aim for the skies in putting some of their more outlandish manifesto policies into practice.
The parties are most likely going to be rejected by the voters next time round, but an X in a box doesn’t give reasons.
[I]t will help to get us fitter, it will help to tackle the scourge of obesity, or Big Society, as it is sometimes confusingly known.
Our great and glorious Mayor (ahem!), Boris Johnson, simultaneously singing the praises of the new London bike-hire scheme, and having a little dig at the Prime Minister’s “big society” programme of policies.
As much as he is a bumbling toff beyond belief, he can be quite funny sometimes.
(Via the Guardian’s liveblog of the launch of the bike-hire scheme, in the 8:22am entry)
I don’t live in Birmingham, and this bit of news won’t affect me personally in the slightest, but for some reason I’ve been trying to keep up with various news stories surrounding the cuts made by the Birmingham City Council.
A few months ago, I wrote about the handsome pay rises that the council’s bosses had awarded themselves, shortly before making some big job cuts for council employees. The hypocrisy of it all amused me.
Amongst those cuts, it was reported that “workers in the children and young people’s department are expected to bear the brunt of the losses”, a total of 2,000 job cuts across the council.
This week saw the release of a report criticising Birmingham City Council’s children’s department, stating that it was failing to protect children, and showed little capacity to improve. The councillor in charge of the department, Len Clark, said he was leading an immediate “re-alignment” of the service.
Yeah, a re-alignment that is going to leave the department much weaker because you’re going to be firing so many people, and yet you’re still going to be collecting a cushy salary that saw an inflation-busting increase recently.
But please excuse most of the media for not covering this story; I hear Kerry Katona has a new boyfriend…
Mind. Blown.
Well, at least we know who will play Karzai in the inevitable film version of the last decade in Afghanistan…
(Pic via TotallyLooksLike.com)
Why context matters in statistics
A good little column from the BBC on why you need to take certain statistics (particularly when it comes to government spending and cuts) with a huge pinch of salt. Inflation and economic growth can wreak havoc on these stats, and too often they’re ignored by those making the claims and those reporting them.
The girlfriend is a journalist, and I’ve lost count of how often she’s asked me to calculate percentage changes from one number to another. She’s a smart cookie, so I can’t help but wonder how many people just don’t get this kind of maths at all.
What it means is that we’re blinded with X% cuts here, Y% rises there, and it’s never really explained for what it actually means. This all adds to the fog in which politicians operate, and explains somewhat the general disillusion with politics as a whole.
Just used the BBC’s budget calculator, and apparently between us the girlfriend and I will be £8.50 better off each year after yesterday’s budget changes. Woo!
Of course, this will be swallowed up after a mere £400 of shopping next year, thanks to the rise in VAT…
EDIT: Having done the calculation for each of us individually, I’m worse off whereas she’s better off.
Compare and contrast the Daily Mail’s changing opinion of a coalition government.
Last Wednesday, the day before the election, a frontpage leader column entitled ‘Vote DECISIVELY to stop Britain walking into disaster’ contained the following:
[The election campaign has seen] the emergence of a widespread belief that a hung parliament, giving nobody a clear victory, would be a desirable outcome. The Mail cannot stress too strongly how wrong-headed and dangerous it believes this view is. […]
A hung parliament, with the probability of a coalition or pact, will result in a weak administration, dependent on back-room deals and shabby compromises. […]
But we stress: any voters still attracted by the idea of a hung parliament should read the account on these pages by historian Dominic Sambrook of the misery and national humiliation we suffered the last time Britain had a hung parliament, with an enfeebled Labour propped up by the Liberals.
Now, with the Tories only able to take the keys to Downing St with the support of the Lib Dems in a coalition, today’s Daily Mail has seen a change of tune. Now the coalition is described as:
ground-breaking coalition deal […]
the most momentous day in modern British political history […]
Mr Cameron agreed a stunning deal that will mean Britain being governed by its first coalition administration since the 1930s.
It seems that it’s not just the political parties that are having to make compromises!
There was a good stat a few minutes ago on the Guardian’s Liveblog of this evening’s events (at the 10.13pm mark): of the 53 Prime Ministers since Walpole in 1721, 19 went to Eton.
A huge proportion of the representatives from the Tories and Lib Dems involved in coalition negotiations this week went to either Oxford or Cambridge university (9 out of 10, apparently), in another sign of how small a pool our political elite is drawn from.
This got me wondering: how many of the 53 Prime Ministers went to either Oxford or Cambridge universities? I went through the list on Wikipedia, and found out that 39 of those 53 PMs went to Oxbridge.
That’s 73.6%!
To be fair, things have improved since the start of the 20th century, with only 12 of 21 graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. So things are looking up!
There it is then: a new Prime Minister.
If you want to invade Britain, do it now! We currently have nobody in charge, other than the Queen, and she’s useless with a gun.
