There have been plenty of strikes recently over pay. Teachers, postal workers, and fire-fighters have all walked out over in protest at the pay deals they’ve been offered. On Wednesday, several hundred thousand council staff became the latest disgruntled employees to down tools, resulting in schools and libraries closing, flights and driving tests being cancelled, and bins being left unemptied, among other things.

BBC journalist Evan Davis explains on his blog how the argument goes whenever he interviews union representatives in the midst of industrial action at the moment:

I put what I think of as the obvious points about strikes: “we have to avoid wage price spirals”; “if the money isn’t there for a pay rise, it isn’t there”; “there’s no entitlement to an inflation-matching pay rise” etc.

But on each occasion, the answer comes back that chief executives have not shown the same level of restraint, so why should workers?

Davis admits to being perplexed about how to take things from there. He seems to find the union representatives’ argument persuasive.

He shouldn’t. The union officials aren’t disputing the argument that he offers for pay restraint. Instead, they are attempting to justify workers ignoring the argument on the ground that executives have ignored it. This is a tu quoque. Just because the executives have taken more than they should doesn’t mean that everyone else can too. Pointing the finger at someone else who has done something wrong doesn’t get you off the hook if you’re doing it as well.

Admittedly the situation is a bit of a mess. The economy can’t sustain the pay rises that the unions are asking for, but the unions won’t stand for workers having to exercise pay restraint when executive pay is spiralling upwards. So what’s the best way out? What should the unions be calling for?

Lower executive pay would get the unions the consistency between workers’ and executives’ pay deals that they’re after without destroying the economy. They shouldn’t be striking for higher pay for themselves, but perhaps they could strike for that instead.

Swindon Borough Council are considering getting rid of their speed cameras. Roderick Bluh, the Council Leader, offered a truly awful argument for doing so on today’s BBC lunchtime news:

When you fine a motorist for speeding, he’s already been speeding. Would it not be best to invest and make sure that speeding is prevented in the first place?

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that it’s better to prevent a crime than to punish one. If we can implement measures (e.g. advertising, improved signage, etc.) to encourage drivers to slow down, then that’s great. However, whatever measures we take to reduce speeding are only going to be partially successful; there will still be some people out there who break the speed limit. So what should we do about them?

There’s no reason why, having done all we can to prevent people from breaking the law, we can’t also try to catch and punish people who break the law. The first problem with Bluh’s argument is therefore that it restricts the options, trying to force us to choose between prevention and punishment when we can in fact have both.

The second problem is that it ignores the fact that speed cameras act as a deterrant. If you know that if you speed you’ll get caught and fined, then there’s a good chance that you’ll slow down. Bluh’s argument thus generalises from the fact that speed cameras don’t stop some crimes (those that they detect) to the idea that they don’t stop any crimes. Speed cameras may not stop people who are fined from speeding, but they do stop plenty of people who aren’t fined from speeding.

Even without those problems, however, there would still have been reason to worry about Bluh’s argument. If its logic worked, and we should get rid of speed cameras because by the time we catch and fine someone for speeding it’s too late to prevent them from speeding, then we should get rid of more than speed cameras. When the police catch and imprison a murderer, his victim is already dead; should we therefore forget about trying to catch and imprison murderers? Bluh’s argument isn’t just an attack on speed cameras, it’s an attack on crime detection and punishment in general, so goes far too far to be plausible.

Whatever decision the Council reaches, hopefully they won’t get rid of the cameras on the basis of the argument above.

It’s been a long battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the next US Presidential race.

The process for choosing the nominee is complicated. The final decision will be reached by delegates at Democratic National Convention in August. Most of these delegates will have been sent by their States with instructions on who to vote for, and different States will send different numbers of delegates. How the States decide who their delegates will vote for varies; some States let people vote, others hold caucuses.

At the end of the selection process, though, it’s simple: whoever gets the backing of a majority of delegates at the National Convention wins.

For most of the selection process, Obama has been the clear favourite. In fact, for months there have been calls for Clinton to concede defeat, but she’s hung in there. Today, as Obama closed in on number of delegates needed to win the race, Clinton came out with a strangely positive statement: “We’re winning the popular vote.”

Winning the popular vote? She’s as good as lost!

This is one of those sneaky stats that dresses up a defeat as a victory. Here’s how it works:

Clinton isn’t claiming to have the most delegates (she doesn’t, Obama does); she’s claiming have the most votes, and she’s right.

By focusing on votes, Clinton gets to ignore several States that are sending delegates to vote for Obama. In States that held caucuses no votes were cast. In Colorado and Minnesota, for example, zero votes were cast for Obama and zero votes were cast for Clinton, but at their caucuses there was strong backing for Obama and the majority of their delegates will vote for him at the conference. In the caucus states, Obama has done much better than Clinton but without getting any more votes than her.

By focusing on votes, Clinton also gets to include some States that aren’t sending any delegates to the party conference at all. In an attempt to grab centre-stage, Michigan and Florida brought their votes forward so that they would be among the first to choose a nominee. In doing so, they broke party rules, and as a punishment were stripped of their delegates. They held their votes anyway, and both States backed Clinton. In California Clinton beat Obama by over 420,000 votes, and in Michigan (where Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot paper) by 328,000 votes, but none of these extra votes translates into extra delegates at the National Convention.

So that’s how Clinton was able to say that she’s winning the vote even as she loses the nomination. It just goes to show that you can put a positive spin on any set of data if you have enough ingenuity.