In a recent speech to scientists working in the civil service, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, argued that:
‘There is I believe a pernicious tendency at the moment to equate pseudo-science, the cherry-picking of information, essentially scientific nonsense, with proper science. … [We should be] grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method…. We should not tolerate what is potentially something that can seriously undermine our ability to address important problems.’
This was not the naive realism of an academic who thinks that facts are all that should matter in politics but, in arguing that we should show intolerance of the pretence that there is some kind of scientific validity when there is none, was the CSA also thinking about the misuse of statistics by the government? In the context of massive cuts to research and evaluation budgets, was there an underlying message for ministers?
The government is misleading the public by its misuse of social statistics. David Cameron is the antithesis of those who think that facts matter and his ministers are experts at either ignoring the evidence or selecting only facts that suit their political project. Politicians have always selected information to suit their argument. The current problem is that bias in the selection of ‘facts’ appears to have developed into a coherent anti-scientific methodology.
This is particularly true for health, housing and employment, but it extends to all corners of government. There are a number of anti-science methods at play: changing the meaning of key concepts to suit the argument of the moment, cherry-picking facts and ignoring trends, and comparing apples with pears.
I have already argued that government has captured progressive concepts, redefined them and harnessed them to their ideas about the ‘big society’. Words come to mean what ministers want them to mean but, as anti-science is developed in this Wonderland, definitions change for different places and over time.
Polly Toynbee has already pointed out that when Nick Clegg claims that Sheffield will lose only 270 jobs, he means that 270 workers will be sacked. Sheffield is in fact losing 700 jobs (or posts), the majority of which will be by natural wastage and voluntary redundancies. In the deputy prime minister’s view of the world, posts lost by natural wastage and voluntary redundancy in Sheffield do not count as job losses.
In contrast, when the government attacked Manchester City Council for cutting 2,000 jobs for political effect, they ignored the fact that Manchester is trying to achieve this loss of ‘posts’ without sacking any workers. For the sake of consistency, the deputy PM should have been praising Manchester for achieving their swingeing budget cuts without any ‘job’ losses!
Another tactic is to select two static figures from different times, instead of using trends. If, for example, housing trends are showing improvement from 1997 to 2008 and then they dip following the financial crisis, the two figure that are selected for comparison are the one at the top of performance in 2008 and the second one is when the Labour party left government in the wake of the crisis.
Another aspect of this approach, as Ben Goldacre pointed out in The Guardian, is to point to international comparisons that show that Britain is doing worse than other nations (eg in heart attack deaths) but omitting to say that the gap has been narrowing since 1997 and that the trend was towards closure.
From the international to the local level, it is also important in anti-science to ensure that you are not comparing like with like. In response to local government cuts, affluent ageing communities are praised for taking over their rural pubs and post offices and held up as a model for young residents of communities suffering job losses and benefits cuts in deprived urban areas.
When Grant Shapps compares the job cuts in Labour Manchester with nearby Tory Trafford, where he claims there will be no job cuts, he fails to say that Manchester’s budget cuts will be much worse than those of Trafford – and we do not know whether a higher proportion of Trafford services have already been outsourced to private contractors, meaning that any private sector job losses will not count as public service cuts.
When political analysis is reduced to a combination of changing the meaning of key concepts, ignoring trends and making invalid comparisons, government statistics becomes subject to a coherent anti-scientific attack. Beddington and his social scientists should be able to tell us if the government‘s growing anti-science is undermining, in his words, their ‘ability to address important problems’.
See also Kate Green MP‘s take on Tory comparisons of Manchester and Trafford
Indeed, and it will be interesting to see what smokescreen is applied when hospitals start laying off medical staff, NHS waiting lists return to there pre- 1997 level, crime starts to rise, social care is limited and the various “hidden” tax hikes arrive, to think of but a few ‘hits’ expected soon. Tories like to blame others for their disasters. Anybody for immigration and the ethnic minorities to take the blame? No, no, of course not as we are all in this together although some are more ‘in it’ than others. Therefore, it will be all our fault. All of us. Some more than others.
WHAT are you saying? that foreigners are to blame for our financial position ? perhaps you don’t realise how much work they do Paul.And yet again……how much we have benefited in the past and still do from ‘foreign’ countries ! The world has not stopped turning you know ,new technologies can deliver,in time ,and the world can develop . Resources are vast,there’s fierce competition at the moment but when in History has that not been the case its solutions we need and not minnymoany its their fault blah blah.