From 2050 Labour will be in power all the time – or not

By Chi Onwurah MP / @ChiOnwurah

Disraeli is reputed to have said there are lies, damned lies and statistics. But he forgot to mention they are most dangerous when masquerading as objective analysis.

Anyone who has seen one of the leadership hustings knows that the election is doing what the party wanted it to do – stimulating debate about the kind of party we are, the kind of leadership we need, who we exercise power for and why.

And of course part of that has to be an analysis of the past, what we have achieved, where we have gone wrong and what that might mean for the future.

The different leadership candidates are doing this in different ways, and obviously coming to the conclusions that best fit their strengths. One of the reasons I’m supporting Ed Miliband is that I think he’s got the mix about right between analysis of the past and vision for the future.

But I’ve also heard more negative conclusions, and one particularly damning one – Labour was only in power for twenty years in the 20th century. We’ve already had a decade in power this century, we could be out of power for the next eighty years – unless we make a ‘safe’ leadership choice.

Well this is the kind of sloppy analysis which annoys the Engineer in me. So I thought I’d spend some of my summer holiday seeing if my statistical prowess could improve Labour’s relationship with the past. Within a couple of hours I’d ‘proved’ that we are set for continual political domination from 2050 (see below).

But in reality, the only relationship which matters is the relationship we have with the voters. Whether we win power depends on how well we set out the right progressive future for the country.

Now I know there are some in the Labour Party who prefer the moral high ground of opposition to the messy compromises of power. I am not one of them. We have to win back power, that is what the country needs. And I believe that everyone, whether without out of work, or on low, middle or higher incomes, benefits from a fairer society. It means more opportunity, more security and shared sense of purpose and responsibility. So yes, we not only need a wide appeal, we deserve a wide appeal. But we must appeal on the basis of our vision of the future and our values – not out of fear from a misinterpretation of the past.

Labour’s years in power, a statistical perspective

Labour was in majority government for 23 years in the last century.

What does this mean for this century? Well the short answer is – nothing. If we only have the 20th century to go on, that’s one data point. You can do absolutely nothing with one data point. Those who foresee eighty years in the wilderness should remember that.

We could cheat a little and use the 19th century too – it’s cheating because the Labour Party didn’t exist so it would have been pretty impossible to be in power, but it gives us something to ‘anchor’ our analysis.

So now we have two data points, zero years in power in the 19th century, 23 in the 20th century. What does that tell us about the 21st century? Well, again, not much. But we can play around a bit with different possibilities. It all depends what kind of relationship you think there is between the different figures. There are some common ones.

If it follows a saw tooth function (Figure 1) then things are looking pretty bad – we should have been out of power for all of this century:

Figure 1 Labour years in power [Sawtooth]

If it is a step function then we’d basically repeat the last century and have 23 years in government:

Figure 2 Labour years in power [Step]

If it is a straight line then we can expect 46 years – things are getting better:

Figure 3 Labour years in power [Straight Line]

If we are on an exponential trend than we can look forward to 529 years in government in the 21^st Century. That’s the one I like best though clearly we’d also have to invent time travel.

Figure 4 Labour years in power [Exponential]

What it really shows is that when it comes to something as complex as British government, the last two centuries can tell us very little about the future.

But what if we look decade by decade? The Labour Party has existed for 11 decades, that’s 11 data points, not a huge amount but enough to start getting some interesting graphs.

Figure 5 shows the years in which Labour was in government in each decade. It’s a hell of a graph. A stuttering sine wave is what I would call it. How can it possibly be used to predict the future? Well there are some great statistical tools to do just that.

Figure 5 Labour years in power, decade by decade

In statistics, linear regression is used to try and find underlying trends. It is horribly complex. But fortunately it’s available in Excel at the press of a button. As you can see below:

Figure 6 Labour years in power – the underlying trend

If I were a dishonest statistician I would say that not only is the trend line increasing but by 2050 Labour will be in power ten out of every ten years. Permanent government. I’ll settle for that.

Of course I’ve broken most of the rules of honest statistics. I haven’t explained all the factors involved, and the assumptions on which ‘linear regression’ is based. I haven’t even proven that there is a real relationship between time and the Labour party being power. But this analysis is just as valid as asserting that we have already spent half our expected time in power this century. The only thing an honest statistician could say about that stuttering sine wave is – the trend is up.