Saturday 2 May 2009

Fun Online Poll Results & Trial By Internet

Thanks to everybody who responded to the question "What's a fair total 'package' for Westminster MPs, including salary, second home and staffing allowances?"

The final results are:

£nil - 28%
£20,000 - 2%
£40,000 - 18%
£80,000 - 31%
£160,000 - 21%


As there is no real consensus on this, I'll have to go with the arithmetic mean of the above, which is £66,000. Just out of interest, the harmonic mean is £3,440; the geometric mean is £19,699 and the median and mode are both £80,000. Yes, I know you can't calculate harmonic or geometric means if the results include zero values, so I stuck in a token £1,000 instead.
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Something else that has been bugging me for two years is this whole Madeleine McCann thing, I can't make up my mind about it. In fact, I can't even make up my mind about whether I can be bothered to make up my mind.

So this week I'm running a Trial By Internet, I'll go along with whatever everybody else says.

2 comments:

sobers said...

I didn't vote on the MPs poll, but my thoughts are that the whole package couldn't be less than £100K. It would cost £25-30K at least to employ a full time assistant (including all NI contributions etc), to rent offices up to £5k, travel to and from the constituency at least another £5K, staying in London overnight for 3-4 nights a week (for an outside London MP) £10-15K at least. Thats £50-60K straight away, and I've probably missed a fair few costs. I doubt the MP would be left with more than £40K to live on.

Thats not a great deal of money to pay the people running the country. Especially when there are Local Council CEOs who get hundreds of thousands.

Word veri: lesses!

Henry North London 2.0 said...

Oh can you fix the embed code for the Youtube then?