It is with some concern that I read in the papers that Iran could face tough new UN sanctions within weeks after it announced plans to step up its uranium enrichment programme. Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, earlier said Tehran had told the UN’s nuclear watchdog it would start enriching uranium to 20% from today.  The move heightens fears that Iran is moving closer to weapons-grade uranium.

What reaction has there been from the international community?

• Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, angrily denounced the Iranian regime for refusing to send its uranium stocks abroad for enrichment in a deal that would have met the country’s needs but removed the danger the material would be used to make nuclear bombs. “This is real blackmail,” he said. “The only thing that we can do, alas, is apply sanctions given that negotiations are not possible.” French Defence Minister Herve Morin added: “It will unfortunately be necessary to launch a dialogue with the international community that will lead to new sanctions if Iran does not stop its programmes.”  French President Nicolas Sarkozy later added his voice, saying Iran should face “strong sanctions” over its nuclear programme.
• Robert Gates, the US defence secretary said Iran had scorned “multiple opportunities” to dispel fears over its ambitions to acquire a nuclear bomb and said more sanctions were the only route left. “We are very much agreed that action by the international community is the next step,” Mr Gates said after talks with his French counterpart in Paris.  Although Mr Gates said he still wanted to “try and find a peaceful way to resolve this issue”, he said: “The only path that is left to us at this point, it seems to me, is that pressure track, but it will require all of the international community to work together.”
• The British Foreign Office swiftly issued a statement warning that were Iran to take such action it would instantly be in additional violation of five United Nations Security Council resolutions.
• “It may be that the sanctions screw needs to be, or can be, turned here and there,” said the German Defence Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.
• Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, predicted the Security Council would be asked to vote on sanctions by the end of March. He said Israel was willing to back broad international pressure on Iran but believed the need for action was urgent. “The cost of stopping Iran now is nothing compared to what it would take to stop them if they become nuclear powered,” he said.
• Even the Russian foreign ministry again called on Iran to abide by its earlier agreements to send uranium abroad for enrichment.

Clearly, we have a broad international consensus for stopping Iran.  But, wait a minute, isn’t there someone missing from this list of reactions?  Hasn’t someone recently been appointed to deal with this sort of crisis? 

What’s their name…..  errrmm….. you know…..  hold on, it’ll come to me……

2. Daniel1979 takes aim at the BBC’s love of climate change.

3. Dick Puddlecote wonders what the Conservatives are going to do about the BBC.

4. The Adam Smith Institute finds another person getting the wrong end of the economic stick.

5. Anna Raccoon discovers that Labour are quietly barring their opponents from voting.

- Tony Blair’s former communications chief Alastair Campbell on an emotionally charged interview with Andrew Marr.  Just to clarify, that’s Alistair Campbell accusing the media of treating other people badly.

I read your joint blogpost last week on Mark Reckons and Left Foot Forward about whether the MPs with the safest seats are the worst expenses claimants with some interest.  The original suggestion of a link came several months ago on Mark’s blog and it certainly provoked discussion in various political channels.  However, on looking through your analysis and doing my own version, I find it very hard to agree with your conclusions.

I’ll start with a quick recap on your main analysis:

“…in order to try and find a better way to see if the safety of an MP’s seat could be correlated with the amount of expenses money claimed we listed the 328 MPs who (after appeals and adjustments) have been asked to pay money back and ordered them by size of payment. This way we are now taking into account this wide range of difference in amounts paid back and including all the implicated MPs.

We then split this data into quartiles and looked at the average size of the majority for the MPs in each quartile. What we found is that for MPs in the top quartile (including Barbara Follett, Andrew Mackay, and many of the most controversial claims) the average majority is 8,678. In the second quartile the average majority is 7,534. In the third it is 7,705. And in the lowest quartile (including people like Mike Gapes and his 40p) the average majority is 7,276. So there is a fair bit of difference here but there is another point to note. The average size of majority for all 328 MPs implicated is 7,798 (7,613 for all MPs). This means that the top quartile is quite a way above this average (by nearly 1,000 depending on from which point you measure it) and the bottom quartile is a fair way below it (by close to 500). The two middle quartiles are clustered near the average(s).

As with Mark’s original posts, there will likely be debate over what these figures tell us the degree of statistical significance, but we feel that, at the margin, they show that there is a link between the expenses scandal and the size of an MP’s majority. Of those MPs implicated, on average the safer their seat, the more they wrongly claimed.”

Sorry, don’t buy it, and here’s why.

First, I find it extremely hard to understand why you are only discussing MPs who paid back expenses in this analysis.  Your conclusion is that there is a link between the expenses scandal and the size of an MP’s majority, yet you explicitly excluded every MP who didn’t cheat on their expenses from your statistical analysis.  What’s up with that?!  If it is indeed true that the MPs with the safest seats were the biggest cheats, surely, you cannot just cut out all the MPs who didn’t cheat at all!

Second, the use of quartiles and lumping MPs who paid money back into big groups doesn’t seem that helpful.  What you need to show is a clear, unambiguous pattern between your two variables and I don’t think this type of data really tells you much.

So here is my contribution to the debate.  Instead of excluding MPs who weren’t caught cheating, I’m going to look at all MPs because this is the only way to definitively identify a link between safe seats and crooked politicians.  In addition, I’ve chosen a scattergraph and subsequent correlational analysis to look for clues.  And here’s what I got:

The first thing you’ll notice is that the majority of MPs who paid nothing back is sizeable, hence the blue blob at the bottom of the graph.  I’m sure it would look very different if only MPs who had actually paid money back were included but, like I said, to establish a link between the safety of an MP’s seat and their propensity to cheat the expenses system you must include everyone. 

Not only does the pattern that you claimed seem to disappear from visually inspecting the scattergraph, a correlational analysis shows that link is a mere 0.05, which is about as close to ‘no relationship whatsoever’ as you can get.  I noticed that Mark carried out a Spearman’s Rank correlation test and found a “weak positive correlation” between the two variables, but this was only for MPs who had paid money back, which I don’t think is a valid test.

So there you have it: a totally amateurish Excel-powered debunking of the myth that MPs with the safest seats were more likely to cheat on their expenses.  Over to you, gents.

Regards

A.Tory

- Dominic Lawson in today’s Times (full article HERE)

Ed Balls reveals his struggle with secret stammer (23rd January 2010) – Schools Secretary Ed Balls spoke last night for the first time about his lifelong struggle to overcome a stammer. He revealed that he faced a daily battle to deliver his words and had to memorise all his speeches because he could not read a script. The speech impediment has caused him to freeze when speaking and give a halting delivery to hide the stammer. …He was constantly mocked at his boys’ private school, and says that he was not given any therapy. “Being in the school play was never for me. I was in the debating society because that was I wanted to do, but it was so hard to get going. You find ways to deal with it. You coupe, but it never goes away. It’s always there, like an iceberg. No one sees what’s under the surface.”

And now we have this:

Gordon Brown weeps on TV as he talks about death of Jennifer (7th February 2010) - Gordon Brown wept in public this weekend when he talked of the death of his daughter Jennifer and spoke of facing up to the possible premature death of his son Fraser, who has cystic fibrosis – and his hope a cure will be found. Mr Brown’s wife Sarah, who was present, also sobbed in an extraordinary display of emotion when the Prime Minister was interviewed by Piers Morgan for a TV programme. The candid exchanges, which took place over two-and-a-half hours in front of a live studio audience, are to be broadcast on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV next Sunday.  Mr Brown told how it was he, and not his wife, who was first to realise that Jennifer was not going to survive. She died in 2002, at just ten days old, after suffering a brain haemorrhage. He also spoke of his agony at the knowledge that his three-year-old son Fraser may have a ‘poor life expectancy’. A member of the audience said: ‘It was remarkable to hear Mr Brown talk like that. ‘He said he was the one who could tell Jennifer wasn’t going to make it and he described how he held her tiny little hand until the very end. ‘He was asked if he was angry about his son’s illness and said, “We sometimes ask, why us? But we try not to be bitter.”‘  Another member of the audience said: ‘It was so moving, some us were close to tears as well. It was hard not to be.’

Now, I would never suggest that either of these two men’s difficulties are worthy of ridicule or jokes because they are clearly not.  To go through political life with such burdens is never easy.  However, I just can’t help but feel that the timing of these extremely personal revelations is too convenient for my liking.  It’s not like these two individuals have just appeared in politics and want the voters to get to know them better.  They have both been around for years and years, and also happen to be on the verge of losing an election.  Why did they choose now to go all Oprah Winfrey on us?  Hmmm?  I mean, the same interview could have been conducted by Brown at any point since 2002 but he waits until this moment to strike, while Ed Balls could have been honest and up front about his stammer years ago to save himself considerable political embarassment but he choose to wait until now as well.

How sad that, even in their most private and sensitive moments, Labour are still a bunch of cynical bastards who will manipulate anyone or anything to suit their own purposes.

2. Tim Worstall corrects a little fallacy spread by Guido.

3. Blue Idea says that MPs who screw the taxpayer don’t deserve protection from the law.

4. Patently explains the concept of ‘consequences’ to Gordon Brown.

5. Obsidian discovers even more ammunition for the BNP.

- a message on Vodafone’s official Twitter account, which prompted hundreds of followers to contact the mobile phone company.  The message appeared on their Twitter feed, which is used by the company to deal with customer complaints. Instead of the usual helpful hints on how to make the most of its range of handsets or direct responses to individual customer service queries, VodafoneUK’s 8,824 followers were treated to the above message.  Vodafone was forced to release a stream of apologies, replying to each user individually to say: “we weren’t hacked. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We’re very sorry”.  ”An individual posted an obscene remark on the Vodafone UK Twitter account,” said a spokesman for the company. “The individual has been suspended pending further notice.”  The ‘tweet’ is understood to have emanated from Vodafone’s customer service centre in Stoke.

There has been an increase in the number of British people who are sceptical about climate change, a poll commissioned by BBC News has suggested. It showed that 25% of those questioned did not think global warming was happening, an increase of 10% since a similar poll was conducted in November. The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75%. The poll, based on a sample group of 1,001 adults, was conducted by Populus.

2. Obselete discovers a new breed of disturbed prankster.

3. Laban Tall explains the dangers of non-existent racism.

4. Liberal England wonders if libertarian bloggers will ever grow up.

5. John Ward supports Chris Grayling in the ‘dodgy crime statistics’ row.