Friday, 14 November 2008

Number crunching

Christina Speight sent me this from the Private Eye:

- 42% Drop in Labour vote in Glasgow East by election, which was apparently Gordon Brown’s worst moment in June.

- 37% Drop in Labour vote at Glenrothes by election, which was apparently Gordon Brown’s finest moment last week.


Tee hee.

Problem is, although Labour did indeed poll about 40% fewer votes in the Glasgow East by-election than it did in 2005, in Glenrothes it obtained 19,946 votes (55.1%) in 2008 and 19,395 (51.9%) in 2005. So that second statistic is complete hogwash.

2 comments:

Lola said...

Entirely o/t but I thought you might be interested in a lunch meeting I had with an investment company on Monday. They fielded two blokes, one of whom was an alledged 'banking analyst'. He was discussing the recapitilisation of the banks and lauded the governments action as the necessary and only action. I responed and asked what he thought of debt for equity swaps, and he asked me to repeat the remark. I did and his reply was clearly waffle; not a clue. So he's not going to get any more client money then, is he?

Doesn't it just make you weep when even the so called professionals have no idea. Oh dear oh dear.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, that's exactly what we're up against.

What enrages me most is that no political party has picked up on the merits of debt-for-equity swaps. This would be a vote-winner, whether it came from hard-left of the Green Party or the hard-right of UKIP