Leopards Changing Spots?
It is a fairly common maxim that a leopard never changes its spots, meaning that the very nature of a leopard is such that it will always look the same. A little closer to home, in the finance business we tend to cite that someone is statistically more likely to get divorced than change their bank account. In the interest of assessing the likelihood of certain things happening, I was wondering to myself “how often do constituencies change party hands?” Snow leopard – also not known for changing their spots. The answer to this was not easy to find. There are records of elections on the Office for National Statistics website spanning back to 1918, but oddly enough there didn’t seem to be a dataset focusing on changes in party affiliation. The data is definitely out there, but it doesn’t seem to be easily accessible. I decided therefore to do some legwork myself to answer that question. Methodology I started with a raw document outlining the votes received in each constituency between 1918 and today. From this, I applied a lookup function which matched the largest proportion to the column header for that party, which allowed me to easy work out the winning party for each constituency. I then used ChatGPT to produce a list of constituency creation dates. I have checked some of these, but not all, so this is a definite area of uncertainty. The final step was to create another lookup function to check the winner in an election year and identify whether the winner was different in a previous year. Due to the difficulty of including by-elections, this table only looks at the results during a General Election, so if party A was replaced by party B in a by-election, but then by party A again at the next General Election, this data would assume continuous loyalty to party A. The Data – “How Often do Constituencies Change Party Hands?” After analysing the data, I came up with the following table of results, so here’s the answer to the question “how often do constituencies change party hands?”: Importantly, this data shows that of the 650 current constituencies, 295 (45.38%) have either never changed party hands or have not changed hands since 1918. How might we fix this? With my favourite proposal – Proportional Representation.
Guido Fawkes, you ok?
Those of you who follow my blog – all three of you – may already have seen that Guido Fawkes did an article about me in which the anonymous author attacked me for, among other things, respecting the anonymity of people providing testimonials. This felt like it should already be the lowest point in their “investigation” of me, but they found a way to descend even lower. In short, they posted another article which stated that I had launched my campaign from the wrong constituency. The glee that they demonstrated by “finding out” that the video was shot in South Ruislip rather than Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner was palpable. Unfortunately for them, this wasn’t a discovery. The video of my campaign launch included a mention in the description that I was filming in South Ruislip since it was first uploaded in June. In fact, it even gives a partial explanation of why I was filming there, though clearly there are more details than that for anyone genuinely interested. I promise, it’s not an interesting story. Importantly, this description has remained unchanged since the day that I uploaded the video, which can probably be tested using things like the Way Back Machine if anyone is actually interested. So once again, Guido Fawkes latched on to what they thought was an easy “gotcha” and didn’t even bother to do a cursory bit of research to make sure that they were actually discovering something rather than repeating something I had announced months before. If this is the quality of their research, then they have absolutely no credibility as a news source. On the other hand, I have been 100% open and honest about what I am doing and why I am doing it. I can definitely see why that would be terrifying to someone with a poor record for honesty.