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British Law - Made in Brussels?
00:28:24
How much British law is made in Brussels - 75% as UKIP say, or 7% as Nick Clegg says?...
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- [00:00]
Tim Harford
Thank you for downloading More or less from the BBC. This is the version first broadcast on Radio 4. If you're a regular listener to the shorter World Service podcast of More or Less just letting you know that the final item in this program is one you may already have heard. Here's Tim Harford.
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Hello and welcome to a new series of More or Less, the show that takes the num out of numbers and the tat out of statistics this week, how an 18th century Presbyterian minister might help find a lost passenger aeroplane and the statistics behind this great achievement and what came after it.
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Narrator/Reporter
The tape is broken and so is the record athletes have long been dreaming about. But at first, Bannister knows little about it. He stumbles into the arms of his coach, completely exhausted by his magnificent effort.
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Tim Harford
But first, the parties are shaping up for elections to the European Parliament on 22 May. And it's good to see the UK Independence Party leading with a bold statistical claim on one of its posters. Much better than an airbrushed photograph of a party leader. That claim is 75% of our laws are now made in Brussels. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's been hitting back. He says the number is 7%. If the 75% figure sounds familiar to you, you may be a loyal, more or less, listener. We looked at it five years ago when UKIP told us that the statistic came from a speech given by Hans Gert Potering, President of the European Parliament, at the time. We listened to that speech so that you didn't have to. Here's what we said in the summer of 2009. So there you are. I think actually my German's not very good.
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Jonathan Arnott
Ruth?
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Ja?
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Tim Harford
How's your German?
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Nicht so schleschiglabe das mein Deutsch ganzscuthist.
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Tim Harford
Well, that's lucky. So what did Hansgert Pertering actually say?
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Wessenlichen NER sachte das von allen eurepersch.
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Tim Harford
No, no, no, I meant, can you translate, Jaabla?
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
I mean, of course. He's saying that of all European Union laws, the European Parliament is involved in 75% of them.
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Tim Harford
So what about European influence on British law?
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Well, he hasn't said anything about that. He's saying that the European Parliament is now very influential in drawing up European legislation relative to other European institutions, such as the European Commission and the Council of Ministers. It's nothing to do with European influence on British law.
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Tim Harford
Ok, well, danke schoen, Ruth Alexander, stop showing off. Let's talk to the UK Independence Party. I spoke to Paul Nuttall, Member of the European Parliament and chairman of UKIP. Was he aware that Mr. Pertring's comments had, shall we say, been misinterpreted in his party's video?
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Paul Nuttall
No, I'm not aware of that interpretation of those remarks.
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Tim Harford
But on the 75% claim, Hansgert Pottering's claim, you accept that you may have misunderstood that one.
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Paul Nuttall
I accept that. I mean, I don't speak German. However, the interpretation from the European Parliament, which is up on YouTube, comes from European Parliament interpreters.
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Tim Harford
The quote is sufficiently narrow. I agree there's a translation, but it's just a 10 second, 15 second slice of Mr. Pottering talking. Unless you know what he said just before and just afterwards, which we do, because we went and had a look, you would just misunderstand the meaning. But he meant, he clearly meant that this was increasing involvement of the European Parliament in European law, not the increasing involvement of European institutions in British law. And so you're misquoting him. If you want to make that case, that's fine, but surely you shouldn't be misquoting European officials.
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Paul Nuttall
Well, we're not misquoting the European officials. It was the interpreter in the European Parliament whose voice that you can hear on the YouTube video. Not a UKIP member. It is an employee of the European Parliament. It is in the European Parliament. Interpreter, not you, cib. So we're not misrepresenting anybody.
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Tim Harford
But you've edited it in a way. You've just taken this narrow slice in a way that allows it to be misunderstood.
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Paul Nuttall
Well, that needs to be looked into. There's nothing else I can say about that.
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Tim Harford
That was an edited extract from our program in 2009. So why is UKIP still using the figure of 75%? I asked Jonathan Arnott, general secretary of UKIP.
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Jonathan Arnott
This is a Commission owned figure as much as anything else. EU Commissioner Vivian Reading has said repeatedly that 75% of new laws affecting the UK now start life in Brussels. So our position is that that seems to us to be broadly accurate.
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Tim Harford
Now what confuses me though is that these figures have emanated from Brussels before. Vivian Redding said it. I think most recently she said 70%, but neither here nor there. Hansger Petering, the President of the European Parliament has said it's 75%. They're talking about what percentage of EU laws originate from the European Parliament rather than from the European Commission or from the Council of Ministers. So that's really about where in the EU bureaucracy different laws come from. Not how many of these laws apply
- [05:24]
Jonathan Arnott
to the uk Actually, I think if you listen to what Vivian Reading has said, she's made that very clear that that is what she's referring to.
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Tim Harford
Okay, well, here's Vivian Reading of the European Commission speaking in London in February this year.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
The European Parliament is co decider with the member states on European laws and European laws then are integrated into national laws in the member states. So 70% of the laws in this country are made co decided by the European Parliament.
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Tim Harford
I'm none the wiser. She seems to change subject halfway through that. Why can't these Eurocrats all speak clearly, eh? Was Ms. Reading talking about European Parliament influence on the eu, which is our belief, or EU influence on the uk, which is what UKIP thinks? We wrote to Ms. Reading's press office
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
and they told us Vice President Reading was referring to the 70% of EU laws that are co decided by the European Parliament, underlining the importance of the democratically elected European Parliament in EU decision making processes.
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Tim Harford
So how do we work out how many UK laws come from Brussels? The good old British House of Commons Library published a report on this in 2010. Pretty much the first thing the House of Commons library report says is that there is no totally accurate, rational or useful way of calculating the percentage of national laws based on or influenced by the eu. Now there's a reason for this. There are lots of different ways to count what a law is. It could be an act of Parliament, for example, it could be rules from a Minister's pen, or we could be talking about regulations in general, many of which are from the EU and don't pass through the UK Parliament at all. And it's also not clear what it means to say a law is made in Brussels. Some acts of Parliament are devoted to implementing EU rules, while others simply nod to them. In subclause 114F, the House of Commons library produced a wide range of estimates for the percentage of UK rules that originate in Brussels. That range goes as low as 6.8% and as high as 50% depending on definition and assumptions. The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg's figure of 7% is presumably the lowest number he can possibly find in the of Commons research paper. But even the highest number, 50% is shy of UKIP's number of 75%. Jonathan Arnott of UKIP says the House of Commons library is wrong because it's including lots of British rules that shouldn't count.
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Jonathan Arnott
The vast majority of statutory instruments should not count, are not intended to be new legislation. And of course, if they were intended to be new legislation, they would be scrutinised properly through parliamentary procedure.
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Tim Harford
The whole argument seems odd to me. Though. Some laws determine our taxes, public services and fundamental freedoms, other laws specify how ingredients should be listed on a supermarket ready meal. Do we really learn anything from a simple headcount of laws? Jonathan Arnott argues that we do.
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Jonathan Arnott
I think it's important to put across how much decision making takes place in Brussels, because quite often people in this country don't realise what's going on. And when people realise the scale of that, that is an important factor in
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Tim Harford
the Jonathan Arnott of the UK Independence Party and thanks to various loyal listeners who've been asking questions about this and similar claims. The statistical annals of the world are full of record breaking sporting achievements. And next Tuesday is the 60th anniversary of what may be the most famous of them all.
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Narrator/Reporter
The most sought after target in athletics, the four minute mile, was achieved yesterday evening on the Oxford University track at iffley Road.
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Tim Harford
On 6 May 1954, a young student doctor named Roger Bannister caught the train from London to Oxford and visited friends for a lunch of ham salad. His aim was to run a mile faster than it had ever been run before. Much faster. If Bannister broke the four minute mark, he'd be over nine yards ahead of the previous record pace. But he kept a nervous eye on the weather. It was much windier than he would have wanted. Only late in the day did he finally decide the wind had dropped enough to run.
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Narrator/Reporter
Less than 3,000 people, mostly undergraduates, were there to see Roger Bannister break all mile records on the same ground on which he had run his first mile race.
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Tim Harford
Less than 3,000 people. Remarkable.
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Narrator/Reporter
Up till yesterday, the world record for the miles stood at 4 minutes 1.4 seconds. But as Bannister lined up for the start in this race between the three A's and Oxford University, he knew that he had two colleagues with him who'd help him beat that time. 250 yards to go and Bannister takes over. Watch his giant stride take him to the front as he races the last lung bursting furlong to the finishing post. This was it, the final effort against the seconds that have kept him and
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Tim Harford
many others from the four minute mile despite intense competition. The record of 4, 4 minutes 1.4 seconds hadn't moved for nine years, adding to the sense that breaking through the four minute barrier would be a huge achievement.
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Narrator/Reporter
The tape is broken and so is the record. Athletes have long been dreaming about. But at first Bannister knows little about it. He stumbles into the arms of his coach, completely exhausted by his magnificent effort. And that's how Roger Bannister, the 25 year old medical student became the first man in the world to run a mile in under 4 minutes. 3 minutes 59.4 seconds to be exact.
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Tim Harford
A famous record for the man we now know as Sir Roger Bannister. His achievement is an inspiration to people around the world striving to do what seems impossible. It's particularly popular in the world of motivational speaking. I'm just opening up my well thumbed copy of Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within. Robbins says that Bannister destroyed forever a forbidding belief barrier. Almost as soon as he'd demolished that barrier, others poured through after him. Within one year of his triumph, 37 other runners also broke the four minute mark. 37 within a year. That really would be a testament to the power of positive thinking. Tony Robbins. Are you sure about that? After Roger Bannister ran that four minute mile within two years, 37 people ran a four minute mile. Ah, 37 within two years. So you're absolutely sure about that Tony? Well somebody said 37. The real number is 24. 24 people within a year. I love the fact Tony's now dissing his own claim. So 24 people within a year, is that the final offer? Once that happened, 24 people went a four minute mile within a few years. And now high school students are in four minute miles.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Right?
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Tim Harford
Well we were all allowed to change our minds of course, more or less. His James Fletcher is here armed with his book of running statistics. So James. 37. 24. One year. Two years. A few years.
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Well Tim, 37 in one year is way off the mark. In the 12 months after Roger Bannister broke the four minute barrier, only one other athlete managed it and it was his great Australian rival, John Landy. Just six weeks after Bannister set his record, Landy lowered it by almost two seconds. The two of them then met on the track at the Empire Games in Vancouver. And you can imagine the only two men ever to break four minutes facing each other. This generated huge interest and in a thrilling race, Bannister overtook Landy on the final bend to win. That race has become known as the miracle mile and both men finished under four minutes. But that's it for that first 12 months. Roger Bannister plus John Landy.
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It's not exactly pouring through the barrier as Tony Robbins put it. What about after that?
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In the following 12 months, four other men beat the four minute mark and it was another five in the year after that. But it was more than six years before 24 people had run sub four minutes. And it wasn't until the 21st of August in 1962, over eight years later, that that 37th person broke four minutes for the mile.
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And where does the record stand today?
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The current record is 3 minutes 43.13 seconds set by the Moroccan runner Hitcham El garouj back in 1999. That was 15 years ago. So that record has stood for a fair bit longer than the supposedly impossible record that Bannister broke.
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Well, thank you, James. It's part of the folklore surrounding Bannister's run. That four minutes was considered some sort of impossible barrier. Was it really a psychological brick wall or just a nice round number? Who better to ask than the man himself, Sir Roger Bannister. And if you're listening on a portable device, you could time yourself over the mile as you listen, because this interview lasts exactly as long as Sir Roger Bannister's Most famous mile. 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. On your marks.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Three Swedes, Arne Anderson, Gunda Haig and Leonhard Strand. They brought the record down to 4 minutes and 1.4 seconds. That was in 1945 and then there was no improvement for nine years after the war. And it seemed incredible that the record was seemingly stuck. I think the reason was that the Swedes were declared professionals and that was the end of their careers. And the rest of the world was catching up with the troubles with rationing and other difficulties of a post war recovery. And it wasn't until 1954 that I realized that the 4 minute mile was absolutely possible. As a medical student I realized that there could not be an absolute limit. There was no portcullis that came down. It was possible to find some errors in training of previous runners or find better conditions on the day and so that the four minute mile could be broken.
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Tim Harford
It turns out Sir Roger had an extra motivation to break the four minute barrier. His failure to win a medal in the 1500 metres at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
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Sir Roger Bannister
I had bitterly disappointed myself and the press and the public by not winning the gold medal in Helsinki. Had I won that gold medal, I would have retired because it was getting difficult to combine my sport with my life as a medical student. But had I won that, I would be one of 20 holders of a gold medal for the 1500 meters in the 20th century and would be, I suppose, relatively Forgotten.
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Tim Harford
The landmark has actually got its own slightly odd place in the personal growth or the personal motivation industry. So it's cited by motivational speakers such as Tony Robbins as having been this tremendous psychological barrier. And it's testament to the power of positive thinking. And Tony Robbins says, it was only after you broke the four minute mile, suddenly everybody realized it was possible and dozens and dozens of people immediately went out and broke the four minute mile, which we, we know isn't true. Do you feel there was something psychologically problematic about the four minute barrier or was it actually more of a motivation than an obstacle?
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Sir Roger Bannister
I think it was a psychological barrier. John landy, after running 4 miles each in 4 minutes and 2 seconds, reached a position of disappointment, saying, it's like a brick wall, I shan't attempt it again. And of course he did. He came to Europe and then broke my record. So I think that if a runner actually attempts it and misses it by a couple of seconds, then he does feel dejected. My mind doesn't instantly return to reflect on the details of that four minute mile, but I like to think it does still make athletes slightly breathless when they attempt it. Although many, many have now done it,
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Narrator/Reporter
the tape is broken and so is the record athletes have long been dreaming about.
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Tim Harford
Sir Roger Bannister. As of mid April 2014, 1,300, 338 runners have broken four minutes. If you're keen to join them and want to find out exactly how you break a world record, training for just half an hour on your lunch break and eating ham salads, Sir Roger has just written an autobiography. It's called Twin Tracks. You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. And if you'd like to email us about anything, please write to more or lessbc.co.uk.com this week, the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced that the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will now be concentrated on the ocean floor. But just how difficult is it going to be to find the plane? Charlotte MacDonald's here.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Mr. Abbott says they're now focusing on an area of around 23,000 square miles, which is almost three quarters of the size of Scotland.
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Tim Harford
And the plains on the ocean floor, which, like Scotland, is very hilly.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
The plain could be nearly three miles
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Tim Harford
below the surface, so there's a hu area to search. But never wanting to be defeated, we've rifled through the mathematical toolkit and identified a branch of statistics that could help. One that's been used in a very different context.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
In the spring of 1943, the Second World War was raging and German U boats were sinking ships in the Atlantic. Desperate to find the submarines before they could strike, the Americans and British developed a model to find them, using what's called Bayesian statistics, named after an 18th century British Presbyterian minister called Thomas Bayes.
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Tim Harford
This type of thinking allows you to assess various scenarios at once, put a number on each of them and revise those numbers easily when new information comes along. Mathematicians working for the American and British navies thought about the different scenarios of where the U boats could be.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
They then devised a method of assigning a probability to each scenario to work out the most probable location of the submarines, adapting their model as they went. Today, those methods are still being used to find everything from missing people to missing planes.
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Tim Harford
So could techniques from the Second World War be used to help find a missing aeroplane on the ocean floor? Well, yes, they could, and we know they could because they've been used before. An extensive search has so far failed to find any trace of an Air France plane thought to have crashed. Flight AF447 should have landed here several hours ago.
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Sir Roger Bannister
But no one knows where the aircraft
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Tim Harford
is, nor the fate of its 216 passengers and 12 crew. This was June 2009, five days after the plane went missing. Debris from the aircraft was found floating on the surface of the Atlantic.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
But the relatives of those on the plane still didn't know why their loved ones had died. They didn't know why the plane had crashed. That question could only be answered by finding the black box and the cockpit voice recorder.
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Tim Harford
You might think that having found the debris, it would be easy to find the rest of the plane. It's not that simple. The wreckage on the surface had been drifting for five days. That part of the Atlantic Ocean near the equator, it's known for unpredictable currents. There was no way to be sure where the plane itself had hit the water. Ships, planes and submarines searched for the airliner, but they couldn't find it.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
At this point, the French authority responsible for investigating aviation accidents, the bea, made a call to a group of statisticians in the U.S.
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Colleen Keller
my name is Colleen Keller. I'm a senior analyst at Metron Incorporated, which is a consulting firm that has expertise in search theory.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Colleen Keller went out to France to help the search with her colleagues. They went through all the available information and assessed the uncertainties of each piece of data, all the different reasons why the plane might have crashed, and applying Bayesian principles of probability to work out the most likely location of the plane.
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Tim Harford
And they Assessed historical data from previous crashes, noting, for example, that planes were usually found very close to where they were last known to have been.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
They took the last known location of the plane and estimated it couldn't have flown more than 40 nautical miles in any direction from that point.
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Tim Harford
Putting all these pieces of information together using Bayesian search theory, Keller and her team created what they call a probability map of the search area.
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Colleen Keller
You take that area and you grid it, you divide it into cells, depending on how fine grained you want to get, and then you run your scenarios. And your scenarios might say, it flew this way, it flew this way. Each of those scenarios has a terminus of where the airplane might have ended up. And those areas get probability based on how much you weighted that scenario.
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Tim Harford
This map didn't stay still. It kept changing. Because each time a particular grid was searched and nothing was found, Keller's reduced the probability that the plane was in that area.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
Keller and her colleagues gave a map to a search team indicating the areas they thought the plane was most likely to be in. A team went to look, but they didn't find anything.
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Tim Harford
It seemed the Bayesian statistics couldn't help after all.
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Colleen Keller
So at that point, everybody was throwing up their hands, like, what do we do next?
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Tim Harford
The months passed, and the French and Brazilian authorities tried a few more things, but still no luck. And then Colleen Keller's company, Metron, got another call.
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Colleen Keller
So they came back to us one last time, and they said, well, we have enough money to do this once again, but this is probably the last chance. Metron did the analysis and factored in all the searches they'd done to date.
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Tim Harford
The Bayesian methods underpinning their model made it easy for Keller to input all the new bits of data from the most recent searches. And while they were looking back on their work, they decided they weren't happy with one of their first assumptions.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
That assumption was that the black box was still working, still emitting a signal that searchers could hear. Historically, that has been true nine times out of ten. So in early searches, the teams have been sweeping the areas close to the plane's last known location, Listening for the ping of the black box or voice recorder.
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Tim Harford
They'd heard nothing. So Keller and her team decided there was a very low probability the plane would be found there, and they hadn't searched those areas again.
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
But what if the black box and voice recorder weren't sending a signal that would totally change the probability map?
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Colleen Keller
When we went back and said no, those searches maybe weren't effective at all because there was no target to hear. So all of a sudden it was like, well, we got to go back and hit that area again.
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Tim Harford
A team returned to the scene and this time they found the plane. The mystery of the crash was solved. The black box and voice recorder data showed that the pilots were given faulty speed readings, responded inappropriately and lost control of the plane. Even though air France Flight 447 was found, perhaps this story should be seen as an example of just how hard it is to find a missing aircraft.
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Colleen Keller
It still was a minor miracle that we found it. I mean, we don't want to take full credit for it. We just kept them from looking everywhere haphazardly. But it was so lucky that the wreckage for Air France was on the bottom in a very sandy open area. There were some areas in there that looked like the Himalayas in terms of mountains and, you know, crags and valleys and, you know, a side scan sonar being towed by a submarine might not see over the next ridge and it could have been undetected forever, but it just happened to be right where they looked. You know, it was fairly miraculous.
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Tim Harford
Going back to what we know about missing MH370, they're currently looking at an area that covers 23,000 square miles. The Air France search covered only a quarter of that area and it took
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Ruth Alexander / Charlotte MacDonald
two years to find Air France Flight 447. Colleen Keller is not optimistic.
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Colleen Keller
It's a big world out there and I know a lot of people are saying, how could you possibly hide or not find a 777? And I think the answer is it's easy. I think it's very likely if we don't get any major breakthroughs, it could be in the bottom of the Indian Ocean and we'll never find it. Sadly.
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Tim Harford
Colleen Keller of Metron and Charlotte MacDonald. Thank you, Charlotte. And that's all we have time for today. Please keep your questions and your comments pouring in like freshly inspired four minute milers. We're at more or lessbc.co.uk and as always, there's further information and a downloadable edition of the show and available@BBC.co.uk more or less. We'll be back next week. Until then, goodbye.
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More or Less was presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist. The producer was me, James Fletcher with Charlotte MacDonald and Laura Gray. And the programs made in association with the Open University. You can download many more programs for free from Radio 4. You can find them at BBC Co UK Radio 4.