UK's collective innumeracy adds up to a big problem

For a huckster in possession of a 2p piece, there is merriment and money to be made in the corridors of Westminster. Fewer than half of British MPs can correctly calculate the probability of two heads being tossed in a row. Our lucky chancer could profit not only from betting on flipped outcomes, but also by extorting hush money from politicians embarrassed to have fluffed a basic maths question.

To encourage the 2015 intake to do better, Britain's Royal Statistical Society has launched the #ParliamentCounts campaign, offering all MPs a free training course on statistics. So far, 145 candidates have pledged to attend if elected in May. The society would like such training to be routine for MPs and senior civil servants. As Hetan Shah, its executive director, points out: "When it comes to the women and men elected to run the country, who make decisions on billion pound budgets and hold government to account, it is surely reasonable to expect they have a basic grasp of the numbers." If politicians cannot compute the chances of flipping two heads, then we must wonder at their ability to regulate the artful number-crunching that goes in on the City of London.

To be fair, the dismal counting skills exhibited by sitting MPs, uncovered in an Ipsos Mori poll of 97 members, may well be shared by the electorate. (The answer to the coin-flipping question is 25 per cent - 40 per cent of MPs called it correctly.) The UK comes 26th in the OECD's most recent numeracy rankings of 65 economies. That is comparable to France but predictably behind table-topper Singapore. Lee Hsien Loong, the city-state's prime minister, holds a first-class maths degree from Cambridge university; he succeeded Goh Chok Tong, an economist. In contrast, the UK political premiership has been mostly occupied by those educated in the arts and humanities. Margaret Thatcher, a chemist, is a notable exception. David Cameron, a philosophy, politics and economics graduate, has cited as his preferred successors a historian (George Osborne), a geographer (Theresa May) and a classicist (Boris Johnson).

Numeracy has come to the fore with this election as traditional ideological battles over the National Health Service, the economy and welfare are being fought largely in numbers, with unprecedented scrutiny of how tax and spending commitments add up. An impressive group of blogs and organisations such as the crowdfunded Full Fact, stand ready to take scalpels to the sums.

Numeracy - and its close cousin, rigorous scientific thinking - is cropping up in the international political conversation, too. Hillary Clinton launched her 2016 US presidential campaign with climate change as a central issue. This is momentous: climate change has long been pigeonholed as an ideological question, when it has really been a matter of understanding the (admittedly difficult) numbers. In India, Narendra Modi has created a ministry dedicated to alternative health, including ayurveda and homeopathy. Alarmed doctors complain that ayurvedic practitioners will not submit to randomised controlled trials to measure efficacy - and that the prime minister's move is really a vanity project to stoke nationalist pride. Everywhere, numbers are becoming a political battleground.

There is no shame in struggling with maths. I especially applaud those who attempted to work out the date of Cheryl's birthday in a problem that went viral last week - and went on to contemplate the oddly uncommunicative companionship that binds Cheryl and her new friends, Albert and Bernard.

There is, however, scandal in allowing innumeracy and sloppy thinking to flourish unchecked. Parliament risks becoming a destination for articulate, power-hungry people who cannot add up. We already have one MP, David Tredinnick, who believes in the healing power of astrology and advocates its use in healthcare. We must do more than simply look to the heavens in despair.

The writer is a science commentator

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