East-West diplomacy

According to Caitlin Moran’s tv review, that perceptive wordsmith, Alan Partridge, calls Norfolk ‘Albion’s rump: the Wales of the East’

I know somebody who had to be given a serious talking-to when he combined official figures for East Anglia with those for Wales, on the grounds that, since F-tests revealed no significant difference between them, pooling the data would produce an estimate with a smaller standard error.

A not unreasonable step from the purely statistical point of view.

But put yourself in the place of the politician explaining to public & parliament why they should be treated as if there were no real difference between them.