E P Thompson on the electoral drift away from Chartism since 1848
Working under his inspir-ation, a team of ” New Reasoner ” researchers can now show that there has been 0.5% per annum drift from Chartism ever since 1848,and this can be correlated with the increase in public education
It took a large team, subsidised by the Milord Foundation, much arduous statistical fiddling to get this result. However, summarised on the back of an envelope it can be seen that: (a) 66.5% of the population in 1848 were Chartists and/or wholly sane, (b) the only wholly sane, and therefore Chartist, candidate in 1959 (Coun. Lawrence Daly)polled 11% of the total, (c) this gives us 1% per annum drift, with an error of 0.25%, probably attributable to leap-years. For a full sum-mary of our conclusions, see our forthcoming article in the ” American Journal of Communicational Guphology.
New Reasoner 1959
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