A quick thought on the famous Tory letters. If you want to spill the Tory leader, you need a set percentage of the Tory MPs to write to the 1922 Committee chairman. The current trigger level is 48, and the current chairman is Graham Brady MP. There is a lot of mystery about the process,…
Read More How many letters?The NHS is in the news, so it’s probably time to promote the hell out of this awesome blog I found! Point the first: There is no relationship between “rising demand” for A&E treatment and waiting times. Also, a large majority of people waiting in A&E need to be admitted, so there is no point…
Read More You should be reading Matt Black’s fantastic NHS blogI never knew until very recently that the standard National Readership Survey socio-demographic classifications – ABC1, C2DE etc – deal with pensioners by classifying them all as working-class unless they are rich enough to be considered independently wealthy and therefore bucketed in with the As. (The rival National Statistics classification doesn’t deal with the retired…
Read More NRS social grades are flawed but at least it’s not FacebookBizarre question in a Labour Party survey: we’d like to know how you feel about our values as a nation. Please complete this sentence: “Above all, I believe Britain should be…” The options were: Compassionate Diverse Fair Pioneering Respectful What are they up to? Presumably “Respectful” is meant to identify Hazel Blears fans, the sort…
Read More Respectful. Diverse. Compassionate. Fluffy. ThunkfulSo I said you could hide a million-strong dole queue with enough bogus hairdressing and then it totally like happened. Shift in jobs market in 6 months incredible: on experimental ONS monthly figs 8% Aug (stuck for 4 yrs) to 6.6% in Feb pic.twitter.com/SFdhaLq0bn — Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) April 16, 2014 Discussion follows. Fortunately it’s…
Read More sidewalk social scientist don’t get no satisfaction..David Goodhart responds to Jonathan Portes and it’s as bad as you might expect. To focus, remember he said 50% of schoolchildren in Bradford have special educational needs? Here’s the tape: Bradford has just opened two more schools for children with Special Educational Needs,’ he writes. ‘On some measures nearly half of all children in…
Read More The Bradford mutants strike back.Ever wanted a map of where people care about the monarchy? Jubilee street parties, per 10,000. The borders are coloured to reflect the number of parties. Darker is more in both cases. Purbeck is the Valley of Loyalty. Next door in the rest of Dorset is the Zero Zone. Ken Clarke’s constituency contains the only…
Read More Monarchism, mappedAnd the ones who think the other kind of people ought to be exterminated. Discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s six foundations theory of politics (which argues there are six, innately determined, moral intuitions that define political identity), in which it’s suggested that they actually reduce to two, driven by the emotions of shame and guilt. Now,…
Read More There are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people…This is fascinating, especially when you remember GTech’s role in our own dear sordid raffle. Great reporting, too.
Read More it could be you, but not while she’s aroundSo it was OpenTech weekend. I wasn’t presenting anything (although I’m kicking myself for not having done a talk on Tropo and Phono) but of course I was there. This year’s was, I think, a bit better than last year’s – the schedule filled up late on, and there were a couple of really good…
Read More OpenTech washup, and an amended result