As racing and sport prepare for the new rules there are fears that the punters themselves will be ignored
The Royal Statistical Society published the results of an interesting survey of MPs last week, having asked 101 of the people who make our laws a fairly basic question about probability: if you toss the same coin twice, what are the chances that it will be heads both times? Forty-eight per cent of them got it wrong.
To be fair to our current crop of MPs, that was an improvement on the result when the society conducted a similar survey a decade ago and 40% got it right. The performance of
Labour MPs has definitely improved, from 23% getting it right 10 years ago to 53% – 1% in front of the Tories – this time around. But even so, the results reflect quite poorly on the basic numeracy of our elected representatives.