Tuesday 19 May 2009

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 4)

Are they all the same? Are they as bad as each other? Is bad even the right word or is there something in their nature?

Politicians that is.

I'm still playing around with the expenses versus majority spreadsheet, my mind boggles. In lieu of having a job and any other productive thing to do with my time, I'm in the Brioche cafe in West Hampstead, I've had one cappucino, one hot chocolate, a glass of water and some apple and toffee pie and I've got some cool new graphs.

We've previously shown that in the great scheme of things MPs with very safe seats, with huge majorities tend to claim a little more in expenses than average and MPs with unsafe seats and very slim majorities tend to claim less than average.

But there are different types of MPs, some of them are Red and some are Blue, Labour and Tory. Now historically Tory folk have been rich land owning upper class and Labour folk are from the working class, so you'd kind of expect Tory folk to not claim much cos they don't need to and Labour folk to claim everything they can because they don't need to.

I'm not sure what to expect of the LibDems but hey, lets look at the graphs.

The old scatter graph still doesn't show anything clearly, its just a big noisy Jackson Pollock style thing. We've ranked all the MPs expense claims and ranked all the majorities, and plotted it with colours representing the parties.

If you squint, you can see that the orange blobs, representing LibDems, they seem a bit sparse the further you look to the top right. But other than that, I see nothing significant.

So let's do those quartile bar chart things for each of the parties.



Crikey!

I know what you're thinking, and you're right.

The graph for Labour shows some kind correlation. But right now, my head is mush, and I can't work out what it means.

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