Why can't we agree on data?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John O’Neill and Sam McPhail, the Spectator’s research and data team, join economics editor Michael Simmons to re-introduce listeners to the Spectator’s data hub. They take us through the process between the data hub and how their work feeds into the weekly magazine. From crime to migration, which statistics are the most controversial? Why can’t we agree on data? Plus – whose data is presented better, the Americans or the French?
For more from the Spectator’s data hub – which may, or may not look like the thumbnail photo – go to: data.spectator.co.uk
Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the many perks of being a spectator subscriber is that you can now register to listen to our podcasts without adverts. |
| 0:05.8 | We know that it all sounds incredibly complicated, so we've made it easy as possible. |
| 0:09.0 | Go to spectator.com.D.K. forward slash ad free, your step-by-step guide. |
| 0:18.7 | Hello and welcome to Coffee Airshots. |
| 0:21.9 | Now, today I'm joined by the Spectator's Director of Research, John O'Neill, and his |
| 0:29.3 | erstwhile deputy, Sam McPhail. |
| 0:32.3 | And we're here to talk about the Spectator Data Hub, which at various points in our Spectator lifetimes, all three of us |
| 0:40.0 | have worked on together. John, for those who don't know, what is the Spectator Data Hub? |
| 0:46.9 | Well, the Spectator Data Hub is a collection of a lot of the graphs that we put out, that inform |
| 0:53.4 | pieces that go in the magazine or that we use to illustrate pieces when people use numbers to make points and sometimes there's a bit more that we can add to those. And we put them all in one place online, so you've got some way to go and look at them. And where, let's get the plug in early. How do we find the data? And go to data.com.ukuk or I'm sure you won't have |
| 1:12.8 | missed the banner on spectator.com.uk either. And Sam, you've worked here a few years. How you were here, |
| 1:20.3 | I believe, at the birth of the data hub. How did it come about? How did it grow? Give us a bit of the |
| 1:26.0 | sort of journey behind it. Well, I think it was |
| 1:28.2 | started just before COVID. We were probably putting together several, you know, graphs, |
| 1:33.7 | data sets, you know, all very exciting things about economy, migration, health statistics at |
| 1:39.5 | time. But it really kicked off at the start of the pandemic about February, March, and really it's |
| 1:45.8 | almost the government set, if you remember, set up their own dashboard. Yeah. Tracking cases, |
| 1:51.0 | tracking hospitalisations. But ours was better. Ours was better, yeah. Was it? Probably. |
| 1:56.2 | Yeah, I reckon so. Well, look, the thing about the Spectator Data Hub is it allowed people to question the government narrative, right? |
| 2:03.8 | And that's, I think it's fair to say, that is the ongoing theme behind it is it's not us editorialising and saying, |
| 2:10.3 | you must think this or you should not think this. |
| 2:12.4 | It's saying, here's the data that might otherwise be a bit hard to find. |
... |
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