Warning - Contains Maths

Business Secretary John Hutton has delivered a speech saying that people in Britain should “celebrate the fact that people can be enormously rich in this country.”

Affirming Labour’s “fundamental” commitment to business, he said that “Aspiration and ambition are natural human emotions. The same applies to the natural human emotional need of the haves to step on the faces of the have-nots and rub their noses in the dirt. This is what the founders of trade unionism and the Labour movement struggled for a century ago, although perhaps they may not have thought so at the time.”

The Business Secretary, who said that “more millionaires” were needed, also claimed that defeating poverty – which would be achieved by shifting taxation from corporations onto ordinary wage-earners – would lead to “a society where no child lives in a family whose income is below the poverty line - 60% of median average income - but where there are also people at the top who are very wealthy,” adding that: “In fact, not only is it statistically possible - it is positively a good thing.”

A statistician armed with an outdated ‘O’ level and a calculator, however, pointed out that, since the media average income was defined as the middle one if every income in the country were ranked in order, adding more wealthy people at the top actually had the effect of shifting the median – and the poverty line - significantly upwards. Therefore, if more people were wealthy, more people would be defined as poor.

“Try it with two sets of sample data,” said our business editor. “If two people are on £100 a day and three receive £10, then the median is £10, the poverty line is £6 and nobody is impoverished - that’s Mr Hutton’s so-called statistical possibility. But if we follow his argument, and say that now three people get £100 and two get £10, the median is now £100, the poverty line is £60 and therefore 60% of the population are now living in poverty - proving that John Hutton is either incapable of simple arithmetic, or just a bare-faced liar who cynically assumes the public and the press can’t count.”

However, by this point all our readers had either fallen asleep through boredom, or logged out in search of something more interesting.