Thanks for downloading the Morales podcast from BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Halford.

Hello and welcome to Morales, a statistical water cannon that we're not afraid to use.

Over the next 27 minutes we'll try to answer one of the least pressing questions of the week.

When should you buy a lottery ticket to make it more likely that you'll win

than die before the draw takes place? But we'll also be dealing with the financial crisis.

And first of all, with the riots and looting across English cities this week,

why did they happen? Was it the cuts, soft policing, a broken society, and can look at the numbers,

tell us more? Here's Harriet Harmon, Labour's deputy leader.

There is a sense that young people feel they're not being listened to. That is not to justify

violence, but I think that when you've got the troubling of tuition fees, they should think

again about that. When you've got the EMA being taken away, when you've got jobs being cut and

youth unemployment rising and they're shutting the job centre in Campbellwell, well, you should

think again about that because this is going to cost money. This does not help. All of this does not

help reduce the deficit. Okay, well, let's try to figure this out. Here's Phil Kemp. Phil,

you've been hard at working all this. What have you found? Or Harriet Harmon seemed to be suggesting

that budget cuts were linked to the riots. But the journalist Toby Young writing in his daily

telegraph blog rejects that argument and he quotes figures to prove it. He says that average

monthly public expenditure in the year ending June 2011 was actually higher than the year ending

June 2010. So he's basically saying that there haven't been any cuts yet? Is that true?

Yeah, well, basically it is true that even adjusting for CPI inflation, the government

did spend more last year than Labour did the year before. So Toby Young, yeah, he's right about that.

Okay, well, I'd like to look a little closer at this. We've heard this kind of claim before and

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