By Simon White, LGB Business Forum
What’s the smallest ‘big number’? By that, I mean a figure that looks impressive on paper, but shrivels into insignificance when one applies the most cursory statistical analysis.
I’d like to suggest 100,000. Sure, it seems big — look at all those zeroes! And in some contexts, it can be consequential. You wouldn’t want to share a hotel room with a hundred thousand mosquitoes, for example. But just as often, it’s a deceptively unimpressive number.
Take the recent open letter by Not In Our Name (NION) Women “in support of the trans community” which decries the “false feminists” who dare to fight for their sex-based rights. So far, this letter has garnered — you guessed it — over 100,000 signatures from self-described “cis” women.
That’s more than enough to fill Wembley Stadium! (The unlucky 10,000 who couldn’t get a seat can take a trip across town to watch Leyton Orient).
But politics isn’t a football match, especially when it comes to national issues such as the fight to retain single-sex spaces. Here, stadium-size numbers might sound grand, but they give no indication of the popularity of a particular issue.
Compare NION’s letter to some other recent petitions, such as the campaign to give officer status to police dogs and horses which garnered over 127,000 signatures. Or you might remember those feverish post-Brexit days when almost 200,000 people supported a call for London to become an independent nation. Even Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister managed to get 50,000 votes in just a few hours.
We’re not taking a stand on the merits of any of these campaigns (OK — there definitely needs to be a bank holiday for Eurovision). The point is, if you genuinely want to know how much of the population supports a policy, petitions tell us nothing. For that, you need polling.
And that’s where trans activists are in a bind. The numbers are against them across the board, including a clear majority of the public agreeing that trans rights claims pose a genuine threat to the rights of women and girls. And worse news for NION’s “cis” women signatories: support for their cause has been going backward ever since this issue exploded into the mainstream.
NION’s letter reminds me of that Mitchell & Webb “Apprentice” sketch, where one TV producer asks a colleague, “What’s the smallest ‘large’ amount of money? The sort of amount that an idiot would consider it worth totally humiliating themselves for?”
“It’s a hundred grand,” comes the reply. “The smallest large amount of money is a hundred grand.”
That’s a good rule of thumb for petitions, too. There are almost 35 million women and girls in the UK, around 82% of them over the age of 16. One hundred thousand certainly sounds a lot, but it represents a third of one percent of this population. The only thing it confirms is that you can always find enough kooks, fantasists and fringe-believers to fill Wembley Stadium.