There is a beautifully camp scene in an old 1960s episode of Doctor Who, where Patrick Troughton, locked in a cave full of cybermen, is confronted with the treachery of two human logicians, who have deliberately sabotaged their comrades' spaceship in order to give them time to build an alliance with the ice-cold creatures of steel. Why on earth do you believe the cybermen will form an alliance with you? asks the Doctor, in bemused horror. Because we're logicians, and because such an alliance makes sense, they reply: everything yields to logic, doc-torrrr.
I was quite powerfully moved by that scene as a child, and it probably had more to do with my ultimate choice of career as a statistician as anything else. Secretly, shamefully, I rather empathised with the logical humans. It's taken many years of therapy (aka "life") for me to discover that love is somewhat more important than critical thinking. However, I do retain a sincere belief that evidence, measured numerically, can tell us something real about the hidden motivations of politicians. Please don't quote Disraeli at me: even he wasn't right about everything.
So I'd like to use my first Centre-Right contribution to point you towards a really interesting piece of statistical analysis, which reveals something we may have suspected about the motivations of leftwing politicians. Ben Locker, writer and blogger of this parish, has analysed the relationship between per capita spending on Borough Council "free"sheets and the political colour of the councils involved. In light of Mayor Johnson's decision to scrap the Londoner, that Pravda-esque disquisition on the joys of socialism as applied to council services, what are we to make of Ben's finding that, surprise surprise, Labour councils spend more per head on their propaganda sheets than do Tory ones? (About £1.77 per head in Labour councils v 70p in Tory areas). Rejoice, of course; celebrate Mayor Johnson's decision as a confirmation of our correctly-held prejudice, that Tory councils and mayors will waste less taxpayer money on vainglorious projects than do their Labour counterparts.
But what of Ben's other finding: that the propaganda is effective? Labour
councils which spend more of our money on these newspapers are more
effective at keeping their vote up and retaining control of their
boroughs. The "incumbency effect" isn't just psychological: the
increased spending of taxpayer money on political propaganda has a
measurable effect on the outcome of elections. Take a look at the
expression of concern on the face of Hackney Labour mayor Jules Pipe,
on the front page of Hackney Toady Today, using
ratepayers' money to tell us how hard he's fighting to keep the local
post office open. That's a post office his government elected to close,
a decision our Labour MP supported - though you wouldn't know that from
the "news"paper.
What should we do? Should it be illegal to propagandise on the rates? This hardly sits well with a localist agenda. Local associations in constituencies suffering the blight of a Labour council, though, should check out the figures for their area, make the obvious pledge to scrap the newspaper concerned, and relentlessly highlight this fact on every piece of literature disseminated to their voters.
