Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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UK Weather Trends #39 – Annual Temperatures in 2025

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The year 2025 was both the hottest and 2nd hottest year on record in the UK.  Last year, I used a CUSUM Chart to conclude “if the calendar year average is greater than 9.48 degrees Celsius and the meteorological year average is greater than 9.33 degrees Celsius … (this will) signal an upwards trend change“.  By co-incidence, the average 24-hour temperature across the UK in 2025 was 10.09 degrees Celsius for both the calendar (Jan to Dec) and the meteorological (Dec to Nov) years which is clearly higher than these thresholds.  It’s only taken me four years of writing to conclude a new upward trend in UK temperatures has begun.

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Trophy Winners #4 – The GOATs in World Snooker (Mens) – 1969 to 2025

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Mark Selby has become only the 4th player in Snooker history to win 10 Triple Crowns after prevailing over Judd Trump in the 2025 UK Championship. Only Ronnie O’Sullivan (23), Stephen Hendry (18) & Steve Davis (15) have won more Triple Crown tournaments.  Mark’s GOAThood is already confirmed as I wrote about last year but is he as dominant as the other GOATs (Greatest Of All Time)?

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UK General Elections #10A – The Cursed Ratios of British Politics

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I used to be a commodity trader in the 1990s.  This wasn’t my day job, which was to forecast supply & demand, but I had the statistical skills to develop automated trading strategies for the traders I worked with.  These were either based on moving averages of futures prices (known as technical trading) or buy/sell signals based on the underlying supply & demand picture (known as fundamental trading).  I don’t trade commodities now but I’ve applied the stats skills I learned then to many time series since including those for elections and voting intentions.

Another trading strategy I could have used but didn’t was Chartism.  I vividly remember the training course I did on this and coming away gobsmacked.  How on earth were people being allowed to buy and sell millions using nothing more than astrology, spiritualism, numerology and other superstitions?!  I immediately swore of from Chartism and have managed to stay away from it until this year.  I hope you understand why it’s taken me many months to build up the courage to publish two articles where I use chartist superstitions instead of statistics to interpret long term trends in the vote shares of the major parties in the UK.

For this article, I explain why my charts show the Cursed Ratios of British voters are 52 : 26 : 13 : 6.5.  For my next article, I will have you fearing for my sanity…

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Electoral Trends #1 – The Fragmentation of the West

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Last month’s General Election in The Netherlands was won by a party with less than 17% of the national vote.  Dutch voters, politicians and pundits are now discussing what this means for a governing coalition which is likely to take a number of months complete.  For myself, the election was yet another data point showing the fragmentation of the electorate in the West is the key trend over the last 40 years.  As yet, there is no sign of this trend coming to an end and what the future holds I cannot tell.

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Pay Gap Case Study #8 – 33 London Councils – We Are One

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I am breaking a golden rule of pay gap reporting in this article, I am benchmarking the 33 London Borough Councils on their gender pay gap data!

Before you gasp in horror, let me say straightaway the outcome of this article is complete vindication of this golden rule.  Benchmarking of employer pay gap data is statistically worthless.  Pay gap data of all kinds is inherently multivariate and cannot be reduced to one number league tables.  The story I will tell of the 33 councils of London in 2024 proves this point in spades.  In effect, none of the councils have a gender pay gap despite all of them publishing data to the contrary.

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Pay Gap Data #8 – Where can I find gender pay gap data for 2024?

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This post was updated on 6th October 2025.  The next update is planned for early January 2026.

The government requires nearly all employers with a headcount of 250 or more on their snapshot date to submit gender pay gap data.  All data is available to the public and can be found on the government’s gender pay gap website.  I have downloaded this data and created a spreadsheet to present the data in a more user-friendly and visual format.

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