Workers Solidarity Movement

After years of clinical research, a team of researchers in Harvard have finally devised a way to measure smugness in politicians which will be adopted by the International System of Units (SI), which will be published in Nature later this week.

Researchers hope that this measure will echo the success of Mohs scale for mineral hardness (which measures from talc to diamond) or the Scoville scale which measures the level of heat in spicy food.

Smugness in politicians will now be measured on the Rabbitte Scale, which will measure smugness from the lowest level of zero to a maximum of 100, with each increase change in smugness denoted by either an increase or decrease in smugness units called Rabbittes.

Professor Arthur Albiston of the political research unit in Harvard said “Our hope here is that what once was a tricky thing for anyone to measure will give anyone a clear idea of exactly how smug a particular politician actually is. For example, once you use our equations analysing a politician and work out how smug and arrogant they are. Ghandi, for example, scores zero Rabbites. The maximum smugness that can be generated by anyone, 100 Rabbittes, a figure we in the team, simply referred to as ‘Pat’”.

Professor Albiston randomly gave an example of how the scale would work by showing that Leo Varadkar scored highly on the Rabbitte scale, but was still 16 Rabbittes short of the Omega Point of Pat. “Clearly a politician has two options here: become more humble and reduce the Rabbittes they generate or go full throttle and generate as much arrogance as humanly possible.

At present very few human beings can actually tolerate that much arrogance even in themselves, and Professor Albiston cautions against such an approach: “unless the politician in question has a colossal ego, they are likely to randomly starting punching themselves in the face when they start talking”.

However, not all is rosy for the research team in Harvard and their attempts to have their smugness scale adopted by the International System of Units. A team of researchers led by Professor Emma Strachan at the University of Wisconsin claim that the use of the Rabbitte Unit clashes with research they have carried out for the last four years in relation to the "punch-ability" of politicians.

Professor Strachan and her team have spent years documenting reactions members of the public have to politicians and claim their research, which will be published in Science next month, will revoltionise how people can describe just how nauseous their political representatives are. The controversy in the “punch-ability scale” is that it is also proposed to be measured in Rabbittes.

“Our scale has been applied through rigorous years of research and clearly gives us a framework to measure exactly how much a politician annoys you. It goes from apathy at zero Rabbittes right up to apoplectic rage, at the maximum recorded level of 100 Rabbites, whereby mild-mannered citizens assault their own televisions should a politician of that level of punch-ability appear on the screen”

Professor Strachan has said that before approaching the International System of Units, the teams from Harvard and Wisconsin should see if there is a way that both systems could be used in conjunction “which would allow Rabbittes to measure smugness and punch-ability at the same time”