Tom Calver
@TomHCalver
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Data Editor and Columnist, @thetimes
London
Joined November 2013
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It's absolutely bonkers how much more marginal Britain has become.
With most results in, the average seat majority looks to be about 6,700, down from 11,200 in 2019.
We have a Labour landslide, yet at the constituency level seats are tighter than any point since 1945
#GE24
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South Africa's case fatality rate falls again to 0.5%. The theory that Omicron causes milder symptoms is becoming very hard to ignore...
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NEW: Who are Britain's 9m benefits claimants – and is our system fair?
Some MPs believe benefits are too high. Here are some facts about the UK's welfare system. A thread 🧵📊
@thetimes
1/12
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NEW: If the Tories lose Wakefield on Thursday, one reason will be that women are set to vote 2 to 1 against them. Why are women in Britain becoming more left wing – and why didn't it happen sooner?
My analysis in tomorrow's
@thesundaytimes
1/8
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361
2K
NEW: One in six Tory voters are likely to be dead by the next election
Assuming nothing else changes, the total impact of demographic change alone would mean +29 seats for Labour and -34 for the Conservatives
@Smyth_Chris
@thetimes
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🧵NEW: Who are private schools for in modern Britain?
Private schools are keen to suggest their pupils are from middle class families, who would have to pull them out if Labour stuck 20% VAT on fees.
The data paints a different picture…
@thetimes
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NEW: For the first time in decades, the number of young women not working to look after family is starting to rise
As 1/3 of women barely break even after returning to work, Britain's childcare costs are pushing women out of work
@PregnantScrewed
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Interesting. The number of London Covid patients has risen about 50% in two weeks – but around 44% of that rise has been people admitted for other non-Covid reasons...
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A cursory reminder that under-25s are in the office more than any other age group
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The PM has seized on our research suggesting 130k votes (in theory) separate a 200-seat Labour majority from a hung parliament
But I should also point out that 200k going the other way could leave the Tories with ZERO seats.
Welcome to marginal Britain.
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🥑 Debunking the avocado toast myth (from yesterday’s
@thetimes
piece)
Twenty years ago, under-30s were the joint-biggest spenders on restaurants and hotels
Now, it’s 50-64-year olds
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🧵 NEW: Should junior doctors get a 35% pay rise??
Most unions are timid about broaching double figure pay rise demands: not the BMA.
But the fact is, the NHS doesn’t have the pull it once did - and doctors can double their salary overseas
@thetimes
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🧵 EXC: Just *9% of people* agree with the government that Brexit has been a success, while 62% believe it has failed
That includes a plurality of leave voters, and some of its biggest proponents. Where did it all go wrong?
@thetimes
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🧵 NEW: Why are salaries so much higher in the US than in Britain?
Both nation’s economies are going in very different directions - but there is more to headline differences than meets the eye…
@thetimes
@KeiranSouthern
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🚨 In today’s
@thetimes
I looked at the real swing voter groups who will decide the next election:
Clarkson’s Farm, Ru Paul and Strictly fans
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New with
@estwebber
: the Conservatives’ multi-billion pound “towns fund” was supposed to give money to the most deprived towns in England. Instead, it looks like a gift to Tory marginals
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I wrote about the health consequences of Covid lockdowns. They saved thousands of lives, but disrupted, damaged and permanently altered millions more
Two years on, some of those secondary consequences are coming home to roost.
@thetimes
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Why are we talking about vaccinating teenagers when the net benefit to an individual 12-year-old is low?
One key reason: because the Indian variant is so transmissible, we need all the population immunity we can get
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Looks like there were three big transfers of seats on the night
🔵🔴 179 Con -> Lab
🟡🔴 35 SNP -> Lab
🔵🟠 57 Con -> Lib
(kudos to
@narottammedhora
for this brilliant sankey chart)
@thetimes
#ge24
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🧵 NEW: How do we solve the nurse's pay crisis?
Nurses have finally had enough – but the government is not budging on its 4.75% offer. How do we fix this mess?
Enjoyed writing about a subject close to my heart (my mum's a nurse of 30+ years!)
@thetimes
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🧵 NEW: How much should you get paid to run the country?
We don't dare say it, but Britain grossly underpays its senior civil servants
Directors are paid half their private sector equivalents – making them incredibly hard to recruit
@thetimes
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NEW with
@Gabriel_Pogrund
Britain's 85 hereditary peers have cost the taxpayer more than £47m since 2001. They claim more but contribute less to debates
As calls grow for their abolition, our investigation sheds light on the men who were born to rule
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Here's another weird consequence of FPTP.
Because so many seats had 3-4 competitive parties, it often took a weirdly low vote share to win.
The average winning vote share this time was just 42%, down from 54% last time. In SW Norfolk, the winner won with 26%
#GE24
@thetimes
It's absolutely bonkers how much more marginal Britain has become.
With most results in, the average seat majority looks to be about 6,700, down from 11,200 in 2019.
We have a Labour landslide, yet at the constituency level seats are tighter than any point since 1945
#GE24
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One of the many perks of running a data journalism team is that you can run sweepstakes with lots of very smart people.
Here are the average
@thetimes
data team seat predictions for Thursday (n=11)
🔵 Con 96
🔴 Lab 446
🟢 Green 4
🟡 SNP 16
🟠 Lib Dem 63
🟣 Reform 5
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🏅 Presenting the only medal table that really matters – the GDP Olympics 💰
We're only at the end of day 2, but will Fiji's impressive $14.1 billion (ppp-adjusted) per medal be topped??
#Olympics
1/2
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🧵 NEW: The nightmare a million of us can't shake off
Covid's death rate has plummeted in Britain. Yet with infections set to stay high for the foreseeable, will the number of long Covid sufferers keep on rising?
1/9
#LongCovid
@SessionsTlc
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Drive to work x Reform vote share. Does public transport make you woke, or do I need a nap?
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NEW: How does Labour win a majority? 🌹
With memories of the 90s, some think an election win is in the bag – but history shows they cannot be complacent.
I looked at the voters Labour needs to woo to stand a chance in 2024, in today's
@thetimes
🧵📊
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This has accelerated recently. One reason is that our population is sicker than it was. In the past 3 years, the number of people who have left the workforce because of long-term sickness has risen by *400,000*
Long-Covid and a 7m NHS waitlist are almost certainly to blame
8/12
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The real question – which this chart cannot answer – is whether
a) the fall is just because there is much more immunity in the population than in July: people have become better at dealing with Covid
or
b) Omicron intrinsically causes milder symptoms than previous variants
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🚨 NEW - Who will win the next election?
Delighted to launch
@thetimes
Poll of Polls. Our latest estimate gives Labour a 20 point lead
🔴 Lab 44
🔵 Con 24
▶️ Reform 13
🟠 Lib Dem 9
🟢 Green 6
Bookmark this page, we'll update it weekly.
Thread 🧵
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NEW: Why ending the two-child limit on universal credit won’t stop child poverty
Child poverty in Britain is stubbornly high - particularly among large families - but a range of factors are to blame…
@thetimes
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So low-paid work is a key reason why so many are on benefits. Another third of claimants, though, have no work requirement – most of whom are disabled and unable to work.
The share of people too ill to work has been rising dramatically...
7/12
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Ok I know it sounds bonkers, but the idea of *some* form of national service is actually quite popular
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I talked about consultant's pay on
@TimesRadio
this morning – here are some charts to go with it
1. Consultants' pay has fallen about 21% in real terms since 2010. Their pay has been eroded more than that of other medical staff, and considerably more than the average salary
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Around 15% of voters are still undecided. Which way are they leaning?
For months there was an assumption that these undecided voters – of which plenty voted Tory in 2019 – would lean Tory again
Yet
@Survation
's latest MRP suggests when pressed, they're breaking for Labour
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How right-wing is the new parliamentary Conservative party?
About as right wing as it was in 2019, according to
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NEW: Labour is on course for one of the most efficient election wins of all time
Polls point to a huge majority. But if just 130,000 voters in 100 seats switched to the second-place party, there'd be a hung parliament
@Smyth_Chris
@georgegrylls
@thetimes
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NEW: The rise of the local MP 🗳️
Chances are, your MP was born down the road. Local representation has never been stronger.
But there are downsides – especially now that the government needs to get things done. In today's Sunday Times
@thetimes
🧵
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NEW: I wrote about what I think is an overlooked point in polling on Israel and Palestine
Most of the strongest Israeli sympathisers in Britain also have a lot of sympathy for Palestinians, and vice versa. It is not a zero-sum game.
@thetimes
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NEW: Was Britain smart with Covid, or just lucky?
Ministers have all but declared the pandemic over: just one in 2,000 infections leads to death
But how much of our apparent success is down to “following the science” – and how much of it was luck?
1/8
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🧵NEW: Who deserves a pay rise the most?
They present a united front – but in reality, unions are competing for spoils, esp in the public sector.
And as the data shows, those with the best case are not always the ones shouting the loudest...
@thetimes
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Britain has a "long tail" of relatively low-paid work, says
@tonywilsonIES
. A tenth of households make just £7,000 a year before tax and benefit adjustments.
Without benefits, some 21% of people would be below the poverty line in Britain, according to
@OECD
figures
6/12
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A few may (oddly) believe that reducing real-term benefits would encourage more back to work
Yet ultimately it would be *very* unpopular: by 61 per cent to 19 per cent, voters overwhelmingly want to benefits to rise w/ inflation
12/12
Full piece here
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Pay has been stagnant since the financial crisis, with especially poor growth in the public sector
But plot the real-term wage growth of striking workers on a chart, and it's clear teachers and nurses have had a particularly rough ride...
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The peaks on this chart are when case numbers are low, so the data is skewed by people who actually caught it weeks earlier
But South Africa's last big Covid wave was in July, when the case fatality rate was about 2-2.5%
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Secondly, the risk profile for
#longCovid
is *completely different* to dying of Covid
Covid is much more deadly to the old – yet long Covid seems more likely to impact people in their 30s and 40s
6/9
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📍 I’m delighted to have been appointed Data Projects Editor at The Times and The Sunday Times!
I’ll still be writing data-driven journalism for
@thesundaytimes
, and making sure our long-term data projects are of the highest standard across both papers
1/3
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Covid deaths starting to fall quite quickly (*whispers* especially among the over-80s 👀)
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"We have far too many people who are fit to work, who are able to work, and should be working," Braverman said last week.
Yet DWP data shows 41% of claimants *are* actually working. Why?
5/12
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And at the end of the day – for all the talk of 'Benefits Street' culture, and despite our increasingly unwell population – Britain actually has more people in work than most other rich countries
11/12
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This matters economically. More than 205,000 people say their long Covid symptoms impact their ability to do day-to-day activities "a lot"
Nearly 3% of teachers and health & social care staff report symptoms – industries already beset by staffing problems. 7/9
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What effect do bursaries have? Research has shown the representation of households in the poorest third has gone from 1% in 2000…. to 2% in 2015
In reality, private school attendance looks like a hockey stick: very low across the board, unless your family earns six figures
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🚨 NEW: Undersea Britain 🗺️🔌🐟
How cables and pipelines connect us to the world – and leave us vulnerable. 97% of the internet flows underwater: could saboteurs cut us off?
Big
@thetimes
data project w/
@CjtClover
@mkeith
@ryanleewatts
@venetiamenzies
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Last year I decided to read a book a week. It's the only new year's resolution I've ever stuck with, and it made me fall in love with reading again 📚
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Pretty surprising that 50% of 16-year-olds in England have Covid antibodies, according to the
@ONS
– despite no widespread vaccination
It suggests immunity could be higher than expected in younger age groups
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Two key things make the
#LongCovid
pandemic different to what we thought we knew about the virus
Firstly, the severity of the initial infection *does not* seem to impact on whether or not you get it. Just 75,000 of the 1.1m with long Covid initially went to hospital...
5/9
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Our low wage growth for teachers and nurses makes us something of an international outlier.
Nurses' pay has grown in nearly every other
@OECD
country since 2010; not Britain. And as
@JackWorthNFER
has shown, teachers' salaries have stagnated more than in any other rich nation
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🧵NEW: Who is the backbone of the welfare state?
In the cold fiscal treasury view, it might as well be the 47-year-old male solicitor from Surrey on £85k - for those in the top tenth pay 60% of income tax (and are set to be squeezed even more)
@thetimes
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EXC: Ahead of tomorrow’s strike, support for junior doctors goes… up!
59% of the public now back strike action, vs 34% against
It comes as the country’s top doctor warns tomorrow’s action will be the “worst in NHS history”
@YouGov
@Ben_Spencer
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Rather than the effect of individual politicians, it is likely wider demographic shifts are combining with the effects of austerity – including sky-high childcare costs – to finally push women away from the Tories.
Full analysis in tomorrow's paper
8/8
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Here's the median constituency majority over time - it's made even more bonkers when you consider how the electorate has grown...
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Nothing in Britain works: how do we know it’s thanks to Brexit?
We can guess the economic impact, as
@JohnSpringford
has done, simulating Britain’s performance against a “doppelgänger” of countries. This method finds the economy is 5% smaller than it could have been….
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It is true that welfare is expensive. Welfare costs hover around 10% of GDP, ~44% of which – £87bn – is spent on people of working age
Bar Covid and the financial crisis, that spend has stayed relatively stable since the 1990s
3/12
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It's the myth that won't die. When C4's Benefits Street first aired in 2014, many Tories were enraged that people on benefits were able to afford luxuries like "widescreen TVs"
Last week Suella Braverman said Benefits Street culture was still a "feature" of modern Britain
2/12
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🧵 Using most conventional measures, the city of Doncaster is no more “full” than the rest of Britain, contrary to the claims of one of its MPs
Yet it raises the interesting Q: why are local perceptions of migration often at odds with the data?
@thetimes
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🚨 NEW: Is this the end of the full-time family doctor?
GPs say the job is no longer feasible full-time. Every morning patients are stuck for hours on hold. Many are put off booking appointments.
What went wrong with primary care – and how do we fix it?
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🧵 NEW: Why did people vote the way they did on July 4 - and why did so many not bother?
Starmer’s new voter coalition is built on pragmatism, not ideology. He will be judged heavily if he doesn’t deliver…
@UCLPolicyLab
@Moreincommon_
@thetimes
#GE2024
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Johnson’s final approval ratings, as others like
@robfordmancs
have noted, were among the worst of any recent PM. But the real surprise is that - compared to previous PMs - his peak was pretty low too. He was never that popular to begin with, with worse ratings than May in 2016…
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It wasn't always that way: for most of the 20th century, women were more likely to vote Tory.
In fact, in the 1910s some liberals were wary of giving women the vote, fearing it would give the Tories a clear advantage. It was only in 2017 and 2019 that the pattern reversed
2/8
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Who are these claimants? About 56% are female, and they're more likely to be in their early 30s.
But exclusive data from the
@BESResearch
also shows they're far less likely to vote in elections, and were about half as likely to vote Tory in 2019
4/12
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NEW with
@Ben_Spencer
What will Omicron Britain look like? With the variant expected to overtake Delta within weeks, how much will our lives have to change?
(hint - it might not be as bad as you think🤞)
Our analysis in tomorrow's
@thesundaytimes
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🧵 NEW: How HS2 became a £100 billion money pit
The endless chopping, changing and deliberating has helped make HS2 one of the most costly railway lines in the world. Why is it so expensive?
With
@NicholasHellen
in today's
@thetimes
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Good news: the vaccine ethnicity gap is starting to close!
A month ago black people in their 80s were half as likely to be vaccinated as white people. Now it's two-thirds and rising, as those who first refused it are coming forward
w/
@HannahAlOthman
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Who goes to private school?
Not many of us. They account for about 1 in 10 schools in Britain, but educate 1 in 15 pupils. That share has stayed between 6-8% for half a century. The decline of boarding & arrival of 31,000 foreign students has done little to shift those numbers
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🎉 I am over the moon to win Data Journalist of the Year at the
@wincottfound
awards!!
A huge thank you to all my editors, colleagues and sources 🙏
Wincott’s Data Journalist of the Year was
@tomhcalver
from the Sunday Times, who produced a crisp combination of data and words covering benefits, pensions and nurses’ pay - "a model of the genre"
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Here, though, women have been getting more socially liberal since the 1990s, and at a faster pace than men. Data from
@NatCen
shows how women became tolerant of homosexuality much faster than men did, for example
5/8
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Is our system fair? the UK has one of the lowest "replacement rates" in the
@OECD
: people who lose their jobs face huge initial pay cuts
Yet those benefits remain static, regardless of how long you're unemployed: Britain is a better place to be long-term unemployed
9/12
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For property purchases in Greater London, the average first-time buyer deposit is now a whopping £125,000
Most people who do buy in the capital, therefore, are turning to their wealthier parents...
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A 35% payrise sounds absurd when compared with the demands of other unions; 19% is a better measure of the amount needed to restore doctors to 2008
Yet the reality is junior doctors can earn much more elsewhere - and there is less and less to keep them
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Campaigners say childcare costs – made worse by a cost of living crisis – are to blame.
Britain already had one of the highest childcare costs in the world, according to the OECD. Most parents' childcare now costs the same as their rent or mortgage, says
@PregnantScrewed
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But given the broad national swing away from the Tories, what's quite interesting is just how little movement there has been among those who backed Remain in 2016 - whereas among Leave voters, Tory support has more than halved
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Some astonishing charts in the latest Warwick modelling update
If we didn't have any immunity at all – and under current behaviour – one person with Omicron would infect about 12 others 🤯
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Another is physical health. Childhood obesity had been hovering at around 10% for years – then surged to 14.4% during lockdowns. Decades of policy failures show how hard it is to get those numbers down again
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I almost didn't publish this chart as I was convinced it was wrong – but Scotland is the only part of Britain where Labour's vote share went up by double digits.
It fell in Northwest England, Wales and London, and barely moved in the rest
#GE24
@thetimes
John Curtice: "Actually, but for the rise of the Labour Party in Scotland... we would be reporting that basically Labours vote has not changed from what it was in 2019"
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The real mystery is why more women continued voting Tory until 2015.
In the US, women have been consistently more likely to vote Democrat since 1980. Experts point out that women's healthcare and safety issues are much more politicised in 🇺🇸 than in 🇬🇧
4/8
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🧵 NEW: Can private healthcare really save the NHS?
The Tories want to "turbocharge" private hospitals to make them take more NHS patients and cut waiting times. Yet history – and the data – shows it is no silver bullet
@thetimes
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But how do US workers spend their extra cash?
Quite underwhelmingly, actually. Take away healthcare, housing and transport, and actually annual spending by both countries looks quite similar.
More in
@thetimes
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There has been a panic among private schools over their declining oxbridge share, which has gone from a third to a quarter since 2010
But if it was more representative of the state sector, it would be much, much lower. Private pupils are still much more likely to apply & get in
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I’m glad someone wrote this.
Yes, data from last year suggested young people - particularly men - were surprisingly open to the idea of voting Reform. Turns out hardly any actually did
Young people led surge for smaller parties but no Reform ‘youthquake’, says UK election survey via
@ConversationUK
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Nursing is an international market: nearly half of all nurses who joined the NHS last year were from overseas.
Yet by international comparisons, Britain's nurses are not that well paid when adjusted for purchasing power. Nurses can get much better salaries in 🇮🇪🇪🇸🇺🇸🇦🇺
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🧵 15-minute cities: are they a fad or the future of urban living?
Conspiracy theorists aside, new polling shows the policy is popular. But outside of dense cities like London, their scope may be limited
My feature in today’s
@thetimes
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Poor education – closely linked to future health – is perhaps the biggest secondary consequence. In 🇬🇧 a third of 5-7-year-olds were ~3 months behind on reading last year
In 🇸🇪 –which mostly kept primary schools open – a study of 97,000 pupils found *zero* Covid learning loss...
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NEW - for a month the NHS Covid app was missing thousands of infections because it was set at the wrong sensitivity. Officials say a "shockingly low" number of Android users were being told to self-isolate before an update last Thursday w/
@Gabriel_Pogrund
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Experts like
@RosieShorrocks
and
@ProfRosieCamp
say the trade union movement binded men to Labour, and that women were more likely to be religious
Since the 70s, though, female employment has risen. Women moving from the "private to public realm" has shifted them leftwards
3/8
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Yet in that time, fees have grown astronomically. Since 2000, boarding and day rates have gone up by 66 and 77% respectively
The average wage? Not so much
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Ludicrously happy to be shortlisted for Data Journalist of the Year at the
@EditorsUK
Press Awards!!! 🍾📊🎉
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