In a quest for greater transparency in government, and in the midst of claims of widespread abuse, MPs’ expense claims will be published this summer. We will then discover to what extent MPs have been using the expenses system to top up their salaries. Some details of apparently unjustified claims have already leaked out, and politicians are already getting defensive.

Various defences of MPs facing allegations have already been offered. Two in particular shouldn’t be found persuasive.

The first defence is that a claim was made within the regulations, with the implied conclusion that the MP making the claim has therefore done nothing wrong.

One of the complaints against MPs, however, is not that they have made claims in breach of the expense claim guidelines, but that the expense claim guidelines are too lax and that they have taken advantage. Noting that a claim was in accordance with the guidelines doesn’t answer this charge, and so doesn’t support the conclusion that the MP making the claim has done nothing wrong. To get to that conclusion, the specifics of the claim need to be examined so that it can be shown to be reasonable.

The second defence is that the allegations against our politicians pale into insignificance in comparison to those against politicians in other countries. As Harriet Harman put it, “In our system we do not have the level of corruption that obtains in many other countries.” Our politicians may be slightly corrupt, this argument goes, but relatively speaking they aren’t that bad, so we shouldn’t get too upset about them exploiting the expenses system.

Of course, greater corruption in other countries doesn’t justify lesser corruption here any more than the Tiananmen Square massacre justifies police assaulting protestors at the G20 summit. Corruption is corruption, and it’s a bad thing; this defence commits the tu quoque fallacy.

There’ll be plenty more said about MPs expenses as more information comes out. It’ll be interesting to see just how many times these fallacious arguments are wheeled out, and just how persuasive people find them.

The fight against drugs cheats in sport goes on. One of the sports where doping has been widespread is cycling. Today, another two riders were found to have used banned substances to gain an advantage in this year’s Tour de France, taking the total to six.

It’s always difficult to know what to think when news of a failed drug test comes through. It’s possible to put a positive spin on it, as the German cycling federation (BDR) chief has done:

“It is a shock, but it is also good news,” said BDR president Rudolf Scharping. “The ever tighter net of the anti-doping investigators is making sure that practically no-one is getting through anymore.”

[Source: BBC News, Tour rocked by new positive tests]

As Scharping says, one explanation of an increase in failed drug tests is that the tests are getting better. If we take this view, then although a failed drug test may be bad news in the short term, at least it can reassure us that we have effective tests and give us hope that the sport will soon be clean.

An alternative explanation of an increase in failed drug tests, though, is that there’s been an increase in drug use. Our tests may be no more effective than before (the tests may have improved, but the methods used to evade detection may have improved too), and the reason that we’re catching more riders may be that more riders are taking banned substances. In that case, each failed drug test just shows that cheating is prevalent.

There does seem to be a new determination to clean up cycling, but despite what Scharping says it isn’t obvious that drug tests coming back positive shows that we’re succeeding.

The price of fuel (gas in particular) is going up rapidly. There’s a lot of concern that people won’t be able to afford the higher prices. In particular, there’s concern that higher heating costs will hasten the deaths of tens of thousands of pensioners who won’t heat their homes properly as a result.

To monitor the situation, the government measures what it calls ”fuel poverty”. A family is fuel poor if adequately heating its home would cost more than 10% of its income. (For next time your family argues about what to set the thermostat to, for non-pensioners “adequately heating your home” means heating your living room to 21 degrees and other rooms to 18 degrees.)

Because this definition ignores how much money people have left after they’ve paid for their heating, being fuel poor is neither necessary nor sufficient for being poor. Some households might be left short of money having spent 8% of their income on fuel; others could be left with plenty having spent 12% on fuel. There’s no ’poverty threshold’ that’s crossed when and only when your heating bill reaches 10% of your income.

Because of this, we need to be careful about using fuel poverty figures to draw conclusions about poverty. Following a rise in fuel prices, it may be that some of the newly fuel poor can afford to spend more than 10% on heating and aren’t poor at all. Certainly some of the newly fuel poor will already have been poor before their heating bill went up and so aren’t newly poor. And although there will be people who are newly poor but still not fuel poor, there’s no reason to think that this number will exactly match the number of newly fuel poor.

What all that means is that a rise in fuel poverty needn’t mean a corresponding rise in poverty.

Some people aren’t careful enough in how they use the figures. This is how This is Money reported on new fuel poverty figures in March 2007:

The number of households facing a choice between heating and eating has almost doubled in the past two years. Spiralling gas and electricity bills have left nearly 4m having to spend at least 10% of their disposable income on heating and lighting – the definition of ‘fuel poverty’. This is an increase of more than 1.7m…
[This is Money, Millions in 'Fuel Poverty' Trap]

To be fair, the article does give a definition of fuel poverty, and the definition is almost correct (fuel poverty relates to income, not disposable income, but at least they had a go). However, it reasons that because the number of fuel poor has gone from ~2.3 million to ~4 million, the number who have to choose between heating and eating has almost doubled.

This reasoning only makes sense if being fuel poor and having to choose between heating and eating are the same thing (if they aren’t, then why think that a near doubling of one would mean a near doubling of the other?). We saw above, however, that they aren’t the same thing. The result of the passage’s conflation of fuel poverty and facing a choice between heating and eating is therefore that the statistics don’t support its main claim.