Data

There were cheers in the Treasury last month as the nation’s statisticians discovered a spare £3 billion down the back of the sofa. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admitted that VAT receipts had been under-reported by £1 billion last year and £2 billion this year. The newly found cash will go some way to filling the Chancellor’s £30 billion fiscal black hole, but not everyone was celebrating. Just 150 miles west along the M4, at the home of the ONS in Newport, Wales, the mood was grim. The embattled agency was splashed across the papers for the wrong reasons. This error was just the latest in a long line of data disasters. That’s because the quality of Britain’s official data, like much of British life, has deteriorated to the point of being dangerously unreliable.

Power play The former energy minister Chris Skidmore resigned in protest at a bill to issue more licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. What are other countries doing? – US oil production hit a record 13.3m barrels a day last month, up from 10.8m five years ago. – Qatar is investing $150 billion toincrease oil production by 50% to 5m barrels per day by 2027. – Brazil plans to increase oil production from 3.1m barrels per day in 2022 to5.4m barrels per day by 2029. – Canada increased oil production by 375,000 barrels per day between 2021 and last year. Judgment call The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has called the Post Office scandal the ‘most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history’.

For the love of dog XL Bully dogs were banned in England from this week, although there is an exemption for animals which are neutered, registered, insured and kept on leads and muzzled in public. Some other things that have been banned this week: – Parking on the pavement in Edinburgh. – Importing disposable vapes in Australia. – Selling new homes with gas boilers in the Australian state of Victoria. – Displaying toys in Californian shops under male and female sections. A gender neutral section must now be included. – English councils trying to charge for disposing of waste from DIY projects. – Withdrawals in dollars from banks in Iraq. – Imports of Russian diamonds to G7 countries.

Within limits Do 20mph speed limits save lives?– A 2018 report by Atkins/AECOM/UCL found that 51% of motorists conformed to the new limit (47% in residential areas and 65% in city centres). – When a 20mph zone replaced a 30mph one the median speed fell by 0.7mph in residential areas and 0.9mph in city centres. It was found that there was insufficient evidence to judge whether the 20mph limit reduced casualties: while accident rates had tended to fall within the zones, the same was true of comparator zones which had remained at 30mph. – Only one area of 20mph zones (in Brighton) had seen a significant fall in casualties compared with comparable 30mph zones, with overall casualties falling by 19% and pedestrian casualties by 29%.

Puffed up Just 12.9% of Britons smoke cigarettes, figures out this week showed – the lowest on record. How does the UK compare? – The highest smoking rate is in Nauru (48.5%), the lowest is in Ghana (3.5%). – 24.5% of people in France are daily smokers compared with 11.5% in the US. – In Germany, the overall smoking rate is 34%, an increase from 26.5% in March 2020. For young Germans aged between 14 and 17, this has almost doubled between 2021 and last year, from 8.7% to 15.9%. – Maybe it’s the price of a pack. The average cost of 20 cigarettes in the UK hit £14.47 after the Budget in March. In France it’s £8.70, in Germany it’s even lower, at £5.68. Winning touch The Rugby World Cup is starting. Who do the bookies think will win?

It is out of sight and usually out of mind, but recent events are forcing Americans to focus on the security of a vast network of undersea cables that the nation depends upon. In early February 2022, cables connecting Taiwan to its Matsu Islands off the coast of China were cut in what appears to be an act of sabotage that Taipei later ascribed to Chinese vessels. It took nearly two months for the internet to be up and running again, highlighting the importance of a largely ignored element of a country’s critical infrastructure.  According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and consulting firm, there are around 552 undersea cables, connecting almost every inhabited landmass. Most are fiberoptic, utilizing light to transmit massive quantities of data.

America isn’t having enough sex. Phew. Cockburn thought it was just him — but now the New York Times is issuing a call-to-arms: Americans need to bump uglies more! In the national paper of record, Magdalene J. Taylor wrote a guest essay in favor of sex, arguing that it is a "critical part of our social wellbeing, not an indulgence or an afterthought" and explaining “across almost every demographic group, American adults old and young, single and coupled, rich and poor are having less sex than they have had at any point in at least the past three decades.” She goes on to say that, “In the 1990s, about half of Americans were having sex weekly or more — that figure is now under 40 percent. For many who are having sex, the frequency has dropped precipitously.

With a new year comes the New Year’s Honours and I’m struck to see an MBE given to Pouria Hadjibagheri. He’s the technical lead of a civil service team whose drive and creativity led to the Coronavirus data hub. It was a breakthrough in the democratisation of public data. He and his team saw to it that information and metrics were not the secret preserve of a Whitehall cabal, cherry-picked to make a certain point, but available to everyone. This transformed the debate about the virus and the need for lockdown, allowing for new perspectives and new projects. The Spectator’s data hub was one of them. If you were pleased we avoided lockdown in December last year, you have Hadjibagheri’s team to thank – they made the debate possible.

Feminist author "Dr." Naomi Wolf is making the rounds with a bombastic new claim that nearly half of pregnant women in a Pfizer vaccine trial miscarried. It's not true. Several media outlets have touted Wolf and her analysis, with her blog being shared all over social media. The doctor (of English literature) claims she has 2,500 volunteers and hundreds of lawyers combing recently released Pfizer documents. This makes it even more astounding that they so wildly misinterpreted the data available to them. Wolf's egregious claims center on the document linked here — a report of adverse effects in subjects who took the Pfizer vaccines prior to March 2021.

In Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis gave it a name: he called it ‘the inverted pyramid of piss’: ‘One of [Geoffrey Mabbott’s] specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real doubt that his settled antipathy to all things Indian, from books and films about the Raj, to Mrs Gandhi… was rooted in Alcestis’s second husband’s mild fondness for curries.’ It’s high time this phrase was revived, because piss pyramids are everywhere. We assumed more data would help humanity settle its differences: in reality it often exacerbates them.