Nigel Marriott's Blog

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

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UK General Election 2024 #1 – Going beyond the swing

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Labour is on course for a crushing landslide later this year… or are they?  Many parallels with 1997 are being drawn at the moment but it’s too early to be making detailed forecasts.  Instead, I want to lay the foundations for my election forecast later this year by looking at what 100 years of UK electoral history is telling me.  I tell this story by assigning probabilities to 10 specific outcomes of interest and finish by explaining why 2024 is more likely to be a repeat of 2001 than 1997.

I remind you I was deemed the most accurate forecaster of the 2019 general election.  This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of articles which lead me to hold on to that accolade!

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Pay Gaps #30 – Why Disability Confident is the Template for Mandatory Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting

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In July 2023, the UK government’s finally published its response to its 2018 consultation on whether #ethnicity #paygap #reporting should be made mandatory for UK employers.  A number of paragraphs from this response were quoted in an article published at the time in The Voice newspaper.

I want to go through two of those paragraphs because they highlight what is wrong with the current debate. I think the debate can be reset in a more productive direction if campaigners and the government were to focus on Action 71 of the Inclusive Britain action plan instead of Action 16.  In short, those who wish to implement mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting should use existing Disability Confident reporting scheme as a template to build on and not copy and paste Gender Pay Gap Reporting.

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UK Weather Trends #29 – Annual Temperatures in 2023

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The 2023 calendar year was the 2nd hottest year on record in the UK just behind the hottest year ever in 2022.  Last year, I showed how a technique known as a Control Chart could be used to decide if the UK is now in a new warming trend and after adding 2023, my answer is now “a step change upwards has taken place but the pace of change is not yet clear“.

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Pay Gap Trends #7 – UK Ethnicity Pay Gap 2012 to 2022

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In November 2023, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) resumed publishing estimates of the UK Ethnicity Pay Gap after a 3 year hiatus for the Covid19 pandemic.  I have organised this data into a user-friendly (hopefully!) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which allows you to see how the median hourly pay has changed between 2012 & 2022 for a variety of ethnicities & other categories.  This article explains how you can use this spreadsheet and why you must look at ethnicity pay gap data in a different way than you would for gender pay gap data.

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Voice Referendum #2 – My Forecast Reviewed

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Australians rejected the proposed constitutional amendment known as The Voice in a referendum on 14th October 2023.  NO won the national vote by 20.1 percentage points and the state count 6-0 but the more important question is was my forecast right?

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