Get out your chequebooks – it’s Kim Jong-un

Does anyone seriously believe that the current wave of bellicosity from North Korea justifies Britain spending £20 billion-plus on renewing Trident?

David Cameron does. But then as David Grace points out, Cameron believes in three impossible things before breakfast:

1. North Korea wants to launch a nuclear attack against the UK alone, not involving the USA or anyone else.
2. North Korea is capable of delivering a nuclear attack against the UK.
3. North Korea, which is not put off by the US nuclear and conventional capability, will be put off by Trident or its successor.

In today’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins – no left-wing disarmer – demolishes Cameron’s spurious arguments and exposes them as nothing more than the self-interest of the defence lobby:

The lunacies of a Korean dictator halfway round the world is music to the ears of defence lobbyists, arms manufacturers, security consultants, generals and admirals. It should rescue a few billion pounds from the cuts. All cry with one voice, “the Koreans are coming. Spend, spend, spend”. And the politicians capitulate, Cameron and the coalition, Ed Miliband and Labour, the Treasury, the press. Kim Jung-un has them on the run. He must be laughing.

And anyway, how can the North Koreans unleash and let slip the dogs of war? They’ve already eaten them.

Have they no shame?

“HBOS: Regulator’s findings shame three executives who brought down a bank” says the headline in today’s Guardian.

I thought the point was that these bank executives had no shame to begin with.

Where is the evidence for evidence-based policy?

‘Evidence-based policy’ seems to be all the rage these days. And little wonder. Because it is actually fallacy-based policy that is all the rage.

Reactions to the Philpott manslaughter case are the most recent example. The tone was set by yesterday’s appalling Daily Mail front page. The airwaves have been full of Tory MPs – oblivious of the old adage ‘hard cases make bad law’ – claiming that the Philpott case is an argument for cutting back on welfare payments generally.

Nick Clegg’s immigration speech last week was informed primarily by a need to mollify popular irrational feelings about immigration.

The most notorious case was the MMR vaccine controversy, which led to a sharp drop in vaccination rates, resulting in several deaths. And as the news from Swansea shows, this 15-year-old groundless scare is a gift that keeps giving.

Fallacies are powerful. They are promoted by charlatans, whipped up by the tabloids, swallowed whole by a credulous and irrational public, and adopted by cynical politicians eager to follow rather than lead public opinion.

And these fallacies are not isolated cases. Their prevalence can be judged by the need for websites like Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog, Channel 4 News’s FactCheck Blog, and the independent fact-checking organisation Full Fact.

There is a rational answer to all these fallacies: evidence-based policy. Never mind fallacies, prejudices and dogma; just ask the experts what the evidence says and – hey presto! – there’s your evidence-based policy. And why stop there? If there is one evidence-based answer to every political question, why bother with elected politicians? We could simply be governed by unelected technocrats.

There’s just one snag. Technocracy has no place for morals. Which is important, because politics is ultimately about making moral choices. Evidence-based policy can tell you “what works” but even that is problematic. As Alex Worsnip explains on Prospect magazine’s blog:

The notion of “what works” is amorphous and vague. One can only assess whether something is working against some kind of a standard for what a well-functioning society looks like; for what it is that you want to work and how. As an economist might put the point, you have to have a utility function to maximise; you can’t just maximise.

Is a society “working” if GDP rises steadily but citizens are drastically unequal? What about if people of different races and religions have different access to opportunities and goods? These questions are ineliminably moral, and must be answered in detail before we can have a useable notion of “what works.” The attempt to find some value-neutral standpoint from which to assess what works – the aspiration for an escape from ideology altogether – is an impossible one. Deciding how to weigh up different social benefits and harms is hard; it goes to the core of what we want our society to be like. But these questions are just made harder by reducing a vast swathe of distinct and often competing considerations to a single, sweeping judgement of “what works.”

The error here is not just a philosophical one. When politicians talk about what works, they make tacit assumptions about various moral questions concerning the proper aims of public policy. But by presenting themselves as “non-ideological pragmatists,” they get away with leaving these assumptions unarticulated and undefended. And so we get a particular value-laden agenda – often, though not always, that of the ruling class – smuggled in, under the banner of anodyne pronouncements about the need to sometimes make compromises or to be sensitive to empirical evidence.

At its worst, this can amount to making a set of value-assumptions seem like incontestable and ineradicable features of the world; to what the sociologist Max Weber called the “routinisation” of value. Those who oppose a particular agenda are characterised as “living in the past” or as failing to recognise the facts of the modern world. Likewise, talk of “possibility” is frequently used to delimit the range of political options, without it being made clear in what sense and why a particular course of action is supposedly “impossible.”

In short, ‘evidence-based policy’ carries the risk that it can be exploited by politicians claiming that theirs is the only option. It can be used to deny alternatives and shut down debate. This outlook is the source of Nick Clegg’s dubious claims that he is not ideological but “pragmatic”.

On the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog, Professor Michael Bassey suggests that the problems with evidence-based policy are basically methodological, arguing that the best we can hope for is “what may work” rather than a definitive solution. He is correct up to a point, but ignores the moral dimension.

We should always insist that policies do not fly in the face of the evidence. But evidence does not resolve moral questions, and moral choices are what politics is ultimately about.

Wonks who don’t get out much

Coalition government is likely to become the norm in Britain because of the long-term decline in the combined vote of the Conservative and Labour parties (it peaked at 97% in 1951 and slowly fell to a postwar low of 65% in 2010).

But coalitions, now routine in local government, are still regarded as a novelty in national government. John Kampfner argues today on the Guardian’s Comment is free blog that, because coalition government is more likely, we need to learn to do coalitions better. He also suggests, paradoxically, that coalition could enable the parties to abandon “the Blairite straitjacket of triangulation that so stifles choice and debate”.

Kampfner acknowledges that the mistakes of the present coalition are partly due to the rushed procedure for coming to an agreement. But there is something else:

...there is a far bigger lesson, and it goes to the heart of the disconnect between the Westminster village and the rest of the country. The demographics of British politics are bad enough, but what happens when all the parties cleave towards similar policies and a small voting pool? On immigration, the three leaders find themselves dancing to Ukip’s tune. On criminal justice, drugs policy, Europe and elsewhere the recipes on offer, for all the rhetorical positioning that goes on, sometimes vary only at the margins.

Even on the burning issues of the moment – welfare, NHS reform and economic cuts – when it comes to the general election, how different will they sound when they are probed on the specifics of their commitments, and what these would commitments?

None of this should come as a surprise. Our rarefied political class is uniformly obsessed with the legacy of Tony Blair. The former prime minister bequeathed the art of triangulation – find out where your opponents are on any issue, and plonk yourself right in the middle. This is usually called “being on the side of the hard-working family”. It should be called the politics of caution. The hard worker/non-shirker/squeezed middle is a construct of wonks who don’t get out much. Voters have more variety, and are best served when given a choice.

Coalitions, far from limiting that choice, could – if done properly next time around – increase the options available. Parties could be required to set out before the election, as during any negotiations that take place afterwards, what they would be prepared to trade and what they would stick to: their “red lines”.

The risk-averse politics of triangulation does not offend voters but nor does it galvanise their support. It is why the Liberal Democrats remain stuck at 10% in the polls. Kampfner continues:

The Lib Dems, the beneficiary of coalitions, should rediscover some of their old radicalism, both for their own prospects and to reintroduce greater political choice. Clegg is correct when he juxtaposes the responsibilities of office against what he calls the empty wish lists of opposition.

Like any party, Clegg’s cannot and should not get all it wants. But the triangulation of the Blair era was little more than managerialism and safety first. It was the politics of a small minority of floating voters, and it was based in closing down areas of controversy. Paradoxically it was the Lib Dems who offered something different. Within Labour, the signals are mixed. Does the party think electoral success resides in an electorally self-selecting straitjacket, or does it have the courage to present something more galvanising?

Now, tragically, the only party that is refusing to play the game of cautious consensus is Ukip. Meanwhile, regarding the biggest issues of the moment – such as the failings of the financial system that led to the crash, the global shifts to the east and the rise of a new authoritarian model – mainstream politics is largely silent.

The reason Clegg repeatedly offends his party on issues such as secret courts and immigration is that he is being repeatedly advised to triangulate. To get out of this rut, he needs to set about his advisers and sack the “wonks who don’t get out much” – the merchants of triangulation, the believers in the “hard worker/non-shirker/squeezed middle”, the risk-averse advocates of converging on a mythical ‘centre ground’, the calculating cynics who believe you should construct policy on the basis of this week’s focus group data. If he doesn’t get rid of them but continues to triangulate, eventually the party will get rid of him.

The balance of Cameron’s competences

France and Germany have decided to have nothing to do with David Cameron’s review of the powers of the European Union. And they are quite right.

They consider that the UK government’s ‘review of the balance of competencies’, launched at the insistence of the Conservative half of the coalition, is a “domestic political exercise”, which it plainly is. If several EU member states had agreed that a comprehensive review were necessary, this project would have some legitimacy, but they haven’t, so it doesn’t.

The sole purpose of this review is to enable the British Conservative Party to mollify its eurosceptic wing sufficiently to avoid an internal split, while fending off the electoral threat from UKIP. To propose a review on these parochial grounds is imperial conceit of the highest order. Does anyone seriously believe that any sort of fundamental constitutional review for a 27-member union should be based primarily on the selfish needs of just one party in one member state?

France and Germany also point out, quite rightly, that you cannot have an “à la carte” approach to EU membership. When you join a club, you must abide by its rules. Of course, all the member states have a say in what those rules should be. The UK, as one of the larger member states, has more say than most, or would if the Tories were not so maladroit at making friends and influencing people.

The British Tories would rather the EU were simply a loose, free trade area. If that is what they really want, they need to build a coalition behind it by mobilising allies across the EU. Instead, they pulled out of the main right-wing bloc in the EU (the EPP, the largest group in the European Parliament) and formed a rival right-wing bloc (the ECR, a rag-bag of “nutters and homophobes” – Nick Clegg’s words, not ours).

And anyway, why should France and Germany care what David Cameron thinks? They know that he is unlikely to be able to leap all the hurdles he has set himself and won’t be around for much longer. As John Palmer points out:

The survey [the UK government’s review] is one part of a carefully orchestrated campaign designed to lead up to a possible referendum on EU membership, to be held towards the end of 2017. This, of course, will be well after the next general election and is designed to follow on what London expects will be a major new EU constitutional treaty to give the Euro area sweeping new powers.

The prime minister’s strategy therefore depends on him successfully clearing three critical hurdles. First: survive as leader of the Conservative party up to the general election. Second: win the next UK election with a clear overall Tory majority. Third: trading demands for the UK to be given a special semi-detached status in the EU in return for not blocking a new treaty for euro-area economic and political union.

There are obvious question marks over all three stages.

The irony is that all this nationalist posturing by the Tories is actually harming the national interest. As this morning’s Guardian leader argues, it is marginalising Britain and diminishing its influence. But then the Tories are so short-sighted and unimaginative that symbols of national pride matter more to them than the substance of national influence.