Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
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This is not because we hope to get any money or votes from doing so - you don't get a lot of extra kudos for supporting something which all your rivals also support - but because we believe that the UK steel industry getting it's coking coal from Cumbria rather than the other side of the world will actually reduce the net carbon footprint of the steel industry and help the environment, and because we know how desperately one of the poorest communities in Britain needs four or five hundred more jobs.
With about three exceptions, nearly all the opposition to the mine comes from people who live at least an hour and a half's driving time away on the other side of the mountains. Indeed, some of the messages I have received opposing it come from the other end of the country.
The second related point you seem to have missed is that, while WCM is now claiming that 100% of Javelin's 100% offtake will be premium High Volatility A Grade Hard Coking Coal, they are also asking for a relaxation of the specification of what they would be allowed to supply to Javelin. Now Javelin associates itself with a mineral ratings agency called Platts, which reports on coal prices so it knows what the market calls HVA HCC. Just one of the several measures proves how problematic this is: Sulphur content, where HVA HCC is <.75% according to Platts and where WCM are asking for <2%.
Perhaps the answer is a simple condition, suitably phrased so it can be enforced, that none of the product of Woodhouse Colliery whatever its chemical and coking qualities can be exported?
1) how dreadfully ignorant about West Cumbria he or she is, and
2) how horrifically misleading an average figure can be if it is quoted or read by people who do not understand the distribution around that average.
About a quarter of the working population of Copeland - approximately though not exactly corresponding to those who work in the nuclear industry - is very well paid indeed.
Sufficiently so to raise mean income figures for Copeland to the levels referred to in the comment above.
However, the other three quarters of the working population, if they have jobs at all (which many do not) are not well remunerated at all.
If you use more meaningful measures of deprivation other than mean income, such as the Index of Multiple Deprivation, (IMD) parts of Copeland such as Mirehouse and Woodhouse rank well within the 10% of most deprived areas in England.
You can find this explained in detail on a CCC Observatory report which is in the public domain and available on the internet at
https://cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/536/671/4674/17217/17223/422771749.PDF
All you politicians ever do is talk the area down.
2) Since Mr or Ms anonymous did not provide a precise source for the figures he or she was misusing to derive conclusions which anyone who is well acquainted with West Cumbria knows to be utterly mistaken, I was forced to guess how he or she arrived at those conclusions.
3) Mean income figures are particularly badly distorted in West Cumbria by the impact of the nuclear industry, but you also have to deal with pockets of wealth and pockets of deprivation even within local authority areas - for example, the division I represent on the county council includes both the village of St Bees and the surrounding area, and half the Mirehouse estate.
I'm not for a moment suggesting that everyone in St Bees is wealthy and everyone in Mirehouse is deprived, but any intelligent person who lives in St Bees or Whitehaven will understand what I mean when I write that a local authority area average figure which includes both those two areas is not going to be terribly useful, and that applies to median and mode statistics as well as mean ones.
4) Since Mr or Ms anonymous has not shared who they are or where they live I am not in a position to say for certain why they don't understand this, but I'm guessing he or she either does not live in Cumbria at all or hails from somewhere at least 90 minutes travel time away from the proposed mine on the other side of the West Cumbrian mountains, where they can virtue signal in favour of their idea of what will protect the environment without ever having to meet the people whose community they want to throw on the scrap heap.
Median - a value or quantity lying at the midpoint of a frequency distribution of observed values or quantities, such that there is an equal probability of falling above or below it.
Again talking the area down.
They include the arithmetic mean (which is what most people will assume you are referring to if you say average, so much so that I regard it as very bad practice to use the word "average" of any of the others without specifying which you are using,) the geometric mean, the median, and the mode.
All have in common that if you use any of them to represent a population which contains two or more very different sub-populations, it is almost certain that the number you quote will bear little resemblance to the actual characteristics of at least one, and possibly even most, of those sub-populations.
Again, to take the example of the division I represent, It is not running down any of these villages or the estate to say that an "average figure" for almost any statistic covering St Bees, Bigrigg, Moor Row, Wood End and Mirehouse West is unlikely to be particularly representative of any of them and very likely to be way out for several parts of my division.
That is just as true whether you're using the median, the arithmetic mean, or any other form of average and recognising it is not running any of those areas down, it just proves that you are not totally ignorant of how diverse those areas are.
The same thing is even more true of West Cumbria as a whole.
I've already given a link to a recent report which details areas of significant deprivation in Cumbria, including several parts of the Whitehaven area which are in the 10% most deprived areas in England. That's not running the area down either, it simply recognises a fact.
If anyone is running the area down it's the people who are trying to prevent the approval of a proposal which would bring hundreds of jobs into West Cumbria, not people like me who support it