We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 5)

The problem with yesterday's graphs and calculations is the assumption that if an MP's expenses are expensive, then there is something clearly wrong, which is a little flawed.

With the current expenses scandal, whilst public opinion is generally against MPs, its mostly been The Telegraph who are judging which expenses are fiddles and which aren't. Their editorial policy judges what to report. Here's their latest list of all the MPs they've reported on, the ones without links are generally cases where MPs have not claimed, and the ones with links are generally fiddles.

By my flawed counting, there are 136 current MPs who The Telegraph have reproted on.

Carrying on from Mark Reckon's groundbreaking work correlating MPs election majority with how much they fiddle, here is a table of number of fiddles by majority decile.

	Number of reported fiddles	Percentage of reported fiddles
1st decile (smallest majority)	7	5%
2nd decile	12	9%
3rd decile	7	5%
4th decile	13	10%
5th decile	17	13%
6th decile	14	10%
7th decile	13	10%
8th decile	16	12%
9th decile	21	15%
10th decile (largest majority)	16	12%

Lets look at that graphically:-



And once more but with quartiles just to show off that correlation a little more clearly.


So what Mark Reckons already demonstrated the other day still stands with a few more day's worth of data.

I wonder if all three parties exhibit the same behaviour to the same degree...

Party	Conservative	Labour	LibDems
1st quartile (smallest majority)	6	13	2
2nd quartile	10	20	1
3rd quartile	9	22	3
4th quartile (largest majority)	16	17	7
Total Fiddles per party	41	72	13
1st quartile (smallest majority)	15%	18%	15%
2nd quartile	24%	28%	8%
3rd quartile	22%	31%	23%
4th quartile (largest majority)	39%	24%	54%

And graphically...

Crikey!

It looks like Labour buck the trend amongst the three largest parties, their safest MPs haven't been outed by the Telegraph as much as safe Tories and LibDems.

It could just be that The Telegraph are being selective as to whilst MPs the cover, or maybe safe LibDem MPs really are twice as likely to fiddle their expenses as safe Labour MPs.