Sheffield Council has been forced to declare their belief in a flat earth after applying the same statistical analysis to a recent on-line poll of a group of Sheffield residents on the shape of the earth as they did to their survey of a small sample of residents’ views on tree felling.
The council recently used the results of an appallingly flawed survey of 26,000, out of Sheffield’s 575,000, residents to justify their controversial programme of unnecessary street tree felling. The Council’s statistical analysis was essentially that ‘only 1,800 opposed the felling, therefore everyone else in Sheffield agrees with it. So pretty much 99.5% of Sheffield supports the council and our lovely plan which is the best plan for trees in the whole world ever’.
However, their attention has been drawn to a post by Ted Tintwistle on a Sheffield residents Facebook page ‘Only In Meersbrook’. The post read ‘So, is the Earth flat or what?’ Out of the group’s membership of 6,700, only 31 people commented that the Earth was not flat. Mr Tintwistle commented “This is clear evidence that 6,669 people out of the sample, (and, by the council’s logic, approximately 99.5% of all Sheffield residents) consider the earth is flat.”
Sheffield Council were quick to react to the survey. Newly installed Cabinet Officer for Flat Earth Issues, the ironically globular Clr Byron Grudge said “We must act to deliver a policy based on this overwhelming mandate. We at the Council are now utterly convinced that the earth is flat and that the easternmost rim lies somewhere just beyond Scunthorpe. We therefore advise Sheffield residents to leave the M18 at junction 5 to avoid driving over the edge, like bizarre motorised tin lemmings, to their doom at the flippers of the giant turtles.”
Directors of both Sheffield football clubs have advised the FA that, should Hull City be relegated, they will not be prepared to fulfil an away fixture there next season. Meanwhile, in Nether Edge, a man has been stoned to death for claiming to have been born in Cleethorpes.
Professor Brian Cox commented “I have read Clr Grudge’s flat-earth policy and would not trust him to sit the right way round on a toilet. The world is not flat, you drooling simpleton.”
