Day 5098: You Can Prove Anything With Statistics Un More Temps

Tuesday:

Ho ho ho Merry Christmas, and here’s Pollyanna Toytown in the Grauniad telling us that the Conservatories want to eat babies.

Polly’s clearly getting worried that Mr Ed won’t be delivering her cushy peerage a victory for social democracy anytime soon, as her language gets less believable by the day.

Today she’s claiming that “Only one in forty new jobs is full time”, citing the Workers Revolutionary Party(!) rather than the press release from TUC who came up with this statistic, presumably because the TUC use the word “Net” rather than “New”, a small difference but a significant one.


The TUC have arrived at their figure by taking the Office for National Statistics numbers for the amount of people in employment in summer 2014 and comparing them with the numbers from the start of 2008, before Mr Frown’s Government ran face first into the biggest crash in history.

The Coalition government like to do this too, because it shows that a million more people have jobs now than before the economy was wiped out under Labour.

And the figures do show that twenty-five thousand more people are in full time employment now than in 2008, which is indeed 25,000/1,000,000 or 1/40 of the total increase.

Think about it for a moment and see if you spot the flaw in the reasoning before I tell you.

Yes, that’s 1/40 is of the extra new jobs, not all new jobs.

This makes the TUC’s headline somewhat hyperbolic, but at least with a figleaf of honesty in that, pardon me, “safety Net”.

To switch the “net” for “new” makes the headline say a whole other thing.

So the question becomes, is Polly stupid or lying? I have to say that citing the Workers Revolutionary Party – when she is neither worker nor particularly revolutionary, and not much of a party animal either; despite her aspirations to influence, the defector to and then from the SDP usually ends up in a party of one – suggests that she was looking for the headline to match her prejudice.

For Pollyanna’s claim to apply to “one in forty new jobs” she would have to be saying that not one single full time job has been lost under the Coalition.

It seems unlikely that Ms Toytown’s message is that the Coalition are paragons of preservation when it comes to employment.

In fact, Polly – and the Labour Party – put it about rather a lot that the Coalition have caused the loss of a great many full time jobs (by implication “proper” jobs) and replaced them with part-time zero-hour (substandard) serfdom. And that is what this “one in forty” claim is trying to back up, to make you think.

But the figures actually show that just as many people (actually slightly more) have full time jobs now than before the Credit Crunch.

And there are a lot more people in part-time and self-employed jobs, who were previously without work at all.

Of course it’s not that simple. Some people who were in full-time jobs have lost them and not got new ones are now in part time work or unemployed. There’s genuine hardship and suffering about. And the real value – after inflation – of the wages from those full-time jobs may not be as much as they used to be in 2008 because we’ve been sharing the pain so that fewer people lose their jobs. We mustn’t forget that.

But Hard Labour cynically seek to capitalize on this politically by calling it their “Cost of Living Crisis”.

The recent cross-party report on hunger in the UK was remarkably fair and non-partisan. But again, almost immediately Hard Labour went for the self-interested spin and started crying crocodile tears over the “shame” of Britain’s Food Banks. (Germany, in fact, has more people using food banks.)

This point-scoring for their own ends undermines efforts to help end hunger. Labour don’t just put their own interests ahead of fixing things; they actually make things worse.

Polly Toynbee no doubt justifies her mendacity with the thought that Labour are “good” and so anything to get them into power, no matter how dishonest or harmful, must be “good”.

No doubt David Milipede justified British complicity in CIA torture with much the same reasoning.


Previously, Statistics Part Un

and Part Deux

Day 2781: Cities on the Edge of Forever aka Abandon hope all ye who enter Liverpool!

Tuesday:


Oh very fluffy dear. A lot of FUSS has been caused by the new pamphlet from the Policy Exchange.

Opinion has been divided between:

Northern Tuff: "Eee, ow very dare you! Appen our Northern cities r'as fine as any of yon poofy southen uns, by eck if they're not!"

and

Southern Jessie: "Ay say, what jolly poor show, we're too bally overcryded already! We don't want a hale load of oiks coming down ere ryning the hayce prices, dontcha know!"

But if Mr Balloon AND the Minister for Magical Accidents are rubbishing it, it must be doing SOMETHING right!


Mr Prescott, the former Magical Minister, was on the Newsnight Show defending his time spent pouring billions into centrally controlled redevelopment schemes and improvement gimmicks.

"Blah! Blah! Blah! Blah! Blah! Blah! Blah! THE TORIES! Blah! Blah! Blah! Blah!" he bellowed.

Just for once you wished Ms Waaaark had done her homework, 'cos she could have shot el Prezza down right there: "Mr Leunig ISN'T a Conservatory, you ignorant, prejudiced, half-witted buffoon," she could have said.

"And besides, didn't you 'improve' Hull so magnificently that the people of that fair city… ditched you for the Liberal Democrats?"

Now Mr Balloon has commented.

"Insane," says Mr Balloon.

Though of course, since the City of Liverpool is not a member of the Conservatory Party he cannot comment further.


The way it's being reported is that the report by a "Conservatory" think tank is suggesting that the cities of the North should be abandoned and their citizens moved to the South East where the jobs are.

You would think it said the entire North of England should be raised to the ground and the people led in chains to be paraded in loin-cloths before the Emperor Balloon before being fed to the cat-monsters in the new Olympic Stadium.

Instead, if you READ it, there appear to be two quite reasonable suggestions.

First suggestion: look at the evidence.

For all the money spent by the Magical Minister and his new layers of unaccountable quangocracy, has it actually helped the redevelopment cities to catch up? NOT has it had any effect at all – you cannot deny that there are many beautiful buildings, and many gainfully employed people, and many wonderful artistic projects in the development cities. But on average, wages are STILL lower and there is STILL more poverty there than in the South East where no redevelopment money has been spent. And in fact the gap is getting WORSE.

Second suggestion: stop spending all that money centrally. Simplify the system for allocating it and give it to the local councils to spend how THEY want, or more importantly, how the local people want it spent! If they still WANT the same redevelopment scheme then there's nothing to stop them. Or they could do something else. That seems like a very LIBERAL idea. Cut the state, devolve the power, put people back in charge.

Quite the OPPOSITE of abandoning the Northern Cities, the suggestion is to stop treating them like babies who need nurse-maiding by the Magical Minister in Whitehall and PUT THEM IN CHARGE of sorting themselves out!


Now, the OTHER part of the pamphlet also suggests allowing cities in the South East to expand – London, obviously, along with Oxford and Cambridge all get fingered.

Now it seems to me that this is about OPPORTUNITY and not about some crass "on yer bike" COMPULSION. Looking at the evidence (again): people are ALREADY coming to London from the cities and regions of the United Kingdom.

In free market economic terms, housing is THE barrier to entry in the South-Eastern labour market.

The shortage of decent housing in the South East is the key reason that people remain TRAPPED in poverty. If people who WANT to move are blocked from doing so, then there will be too many people and too few jobs in the North, and the reverse problem in the South.

That drives inflation too – because if there is a shortage of labour in the South then people can demand more pay (if only to cover the higher cost of living) and that means costs go up all over.

This drives up house prices too (AND leads to rip-off builders building smaller and smaller rabbit hutches in the knowledge that some poor sap is still going to be forced into buying).

And the North is left even further behind.

Now, you might quite legitimately argue whether people moving en masse to the South is a good thing or a bad thing. More people and more cities means pushing back the green belt and putting ever greater strain on resources like water and electrical supply, which means more infrastructure to move power and water around the country which means more greenhouse emissions which means melting icecaps and the whole of the South East drowning in the long term anyway, and THEN all the people still in the North can feel smug.

But at least look at the evidence and SEE that it is HAPPENING and then plan accordingly.

Mind you, I'm not going to include that as one of the "reasonable" suggestions… 'cos I’m not sure how you do that without contradicting the whole "return power to local people" bit earlier.

Day 2497: Boring Statistical Point

Friday:


I am getting a bit BORED of the commentary (copyright all newspapers) that "half of all the new jobs created since 1997 have been taken by foreign workers".

It is JUST AS LIKELY that two million new jobs have been created and ENTIRELY taken by British workers… leaving one million LOWER-PAID jobs vacant, which have drawn in workers from Europe to do the jobs that British workers are no longer willing to do.

I am not saying that that HAS happened – it's just no more unlikely than the other EXTREME, the one that everyone is quoting as gospel.

Of course, the Labour didn't create ALL these jobs, either. They just created the public-sector ones by spending money like it was going out of fashion. And this week's latest banking crisis suggests they may have been RIGHT! The Conservatories are just miffed that the Labour is better than they were at creating the CONDITIONS in which other people can create jobs too.


It is the MIX of jobs that is important. If MOST people have moved UP into a better job – British people into better British jobs; European workers move into better-paid jobs in Britain – then surely that is an all round WIN. WE are better off; THEY are better off; the GOVERNMENT gets more tax; the vital jobs still get done… where is the DOWNSIDE?

(Oh yes, it's the new DOG-WHISTLE that the Right have discovered: pressure on housing. Of course, it would also help if they were calling on all those big building corporations that fund the Conservatories so well to build more affordable houses even though that would mean lower profits.)