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Statistricks, part 4: how they lie to you with graphs

Lie detector reading

Was the United Kingdom the fastest-growing economy in the G7, as Boris Johnson claimed? Of course it wasn’t. It was a Boris Johnson claim

Lie detector reading
Visual lies slip past our defences more easily than verbal ones.

Part 1: ‘Trade with the EU is declining’ (no, it isn’t)
Part 2: ‘We send the EU £350m a week’ (no, we don’t)
Part 3: Why are all polling companies run by Tories?

On February 5 2021, Andrew Neil, once respected political interviewer, pundit and chair of the Spectator Magazine Group, posted this tweet:

At a glance – which is all Neil is counting on you throwing at it – it really looks as though the Spectator is upping its game. Further examination, however, reveals that, as has become depressingly normal among those on the right, Neil is lying to you with statistics.

Check out the y-axes on those images. (For those you’ve forgotten their year-five maths, the x-axis is the horizontal line and the y-axis the vertical.) Notice anything odd? For one thing, they start at different values. Second, they’re plotted on different scales (the values for the Spectator are further apart). Why might that be?

Because if you plot them all on the same scale, the results paint a rather less flattering picture of the magazine’s fortunes:

At the end of the day, though, this is hardly novichokking a kindergarten, is it? It’s just rascally old Uncle Andy, cheekily tweaking the data to make his grubby little publication look a bit more appealing to prospective readers and advertisers.

But if that was all people were using these tricks for, I wouldn’t be writing this.

I started this series of posts because while people aren’t too bad at working out when they’re being lied to with words, our numbers game is a little less surefooted. And that seems to go double (= two times as much) for data presented in visual form: graphs, charts and tables, collectively known as graphics, or data vis.

Pictures and graphs lend an authority to data that words cannot. Our internal logic goes something like this: “Surely, if someone’s taken the trouble of researching, compiling and publishing a graph or a chart, they must know their stuff – and they must be telling the truth!”

Here’s the rebuttal to the first part of your thesis, internal logic:

As for the second part: truth doesn’t pay the bills (case in point: this blog). When people take great pains over something, there’s a distinct possibility that murkier motives are in play. Below are some examples to show you what I mean.

Quarter pounders

Until recently, you couldn’t move online for Tories excitedly parroting the news that the UK was the “fastest-growing economy in the G7”. (You’ll notice that not many of them are still flogging that particular horse. We’re about to see why.) But few of them bothered to include the data on which they were basing their claim.

The main problem with data visualisation is that it’s rarely possible to fit all the relevant data into your visualisation. Presenting numerical information inevitably involves making choices about what to include and what to leave out. If you want to illustrate the performance of the top 100 companies on the Financial Times Share Index in your newspaper, for example, you physically can’t represent every data point going back to its inception in 1984 without some sort of gatefold. So you go back as far as space will allow, and present what you hope is enough data to paint a meaningful picture. For share prices, such cherry-picking doesn’t matter so much. GDP figures are a different story.

Below is the data on which the Tories were basing their uplifting, Brexit’s-so-brilliant claim. And sure, in itself, it’s quite correct. A bigger gradient means a higher rate of growth, and on that metric, the UK really was leading the world.

But there are two problems with extrapolating this conclusion from this data. First, look at the actual values of those lines. The UK is bottom of the heap, both at the beginning and the end of the period. What this means is that the UK economy was faring worse, relative to its performance in 2017, than all its rivals (the widely accepted explanation for this is that the UK was hit the hardest economically by the pandemic, and was therefore recovering from a lower base. It was bound to be “fastest growing” at some point).

The second issue is that this is the smallest possible range of data. It shows us how the UK fared economically against comparable countries over a single quarter. Zooming out a bit, the picture looks rather different:

On the longer-term trend – which is the only trend that matters here – the UK’s performance is woeful. And why wouldn’t it be, with all those lovely trade barriers it’s thrown up with its nearest neighbours and biggest trading partners?

To interpret this graph as “the UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7” is cherry-picking of the most outrageous order – straight up lying with figures – and yet practically no one ever calls it out.

Information dumped

In the next example, which was also shared with great enthusiasm by Tories in March 2022, once again, it’s not what the visual data is telling you, but what it isn’t, that’s significant.

Where’s that smell of roses coming from? Oh! Quelle surprise, it’s the UK again! What a world-beating nation it is!

The first thing that should set your Spidey sense tingling is the lack of any source on the graphic. (Turns out it was the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, who posted this tweet, but when challenged, they declined to reveal their workings. The write-up of their exchange is worth a read.)

But once again, the most urgent problem is that we are missing crucial information. We have no idea what these figures represent as a percentage of the total Russian assets invested in those territories. If £1tn of Russian assets are invested in the UK economy, and only £40bn in the EU, then who is doing the better job on sanctions? (Definitive figures on the amount of Russian capital sloshing around the world are hard to come by, but the UK has long been oligarchs’ favourite spot to invest in property, and the bulk of Russian financial assets will inevitably have been parked in or near the City of London, the world’s leading financial centre.)

If you made a chart comparing how well-travelled Jason and Arthur are, showing that Jason has only been to France and Arthur has been to 50-plus countries, surely you’d think it apposite to mention that Jason is 14 and Arthur is 62?

Y, MIA

Once you’ve checked the bottom of a graphic for a source, and ascertained whether the x-axis is really as wide as it should be, the next place to look is at the y-axis. Does it start at zero? Why not?

Stolen from Ravi Parikh’s blog at Heap

If you tinker with the scale by selecting a narrow range of values, you can make differences appear as big or as small as you like.

Rotten Apple

In 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook used the following graph as part of his presentation to mark the launch of the latest iPhone:

Tim-Cooking the books?

We’ve already seen that the omission of any units on an y-axis is a cardinal statistical sin. But that’s not all that’s off kilter here. Usually, when illustrating a company’s sales, you show the units sold in each time period. But this is a depiction of cumulative sales. Short of a mass product recall, cumulative sales never go down! Anyone armed with a jot of mathematical nous should spot that that decrease in gradient at the top right of the graph means sales are falling.

Chartjunk

Be wary of tables tarted up with bright colours, flashy fonts and pictorial elements. Yes, it might look more arresting, but it can also be harder to make sense of. The statistician, designer and artist Edward Tufte, one of the fathers of modern data visualisation, coined the term “data-ink ratio” to describe the proportion of a graphic that is essential to the communication of data. In his view, this should always be as close as possible to 1. The more bells and whistles a graphic has, the more sceptical you should be.

A common form of “chartjunk” is the use of images to illustrate the quantities involved.

According to the data in this graph, the amount of stupidity in Britain has doubled since 2015. To reflect this, the graphic designer (me) has made Daniel Hannan’s stupid head twice as tall at 2022 as it is at 2015. However, because images are two-dimensional, the second Hannan is actually four times as large as the first. The use of images here has created a misleading impression.

Porky pies

Even the humble pie chart is routinely mishandled. Here’s Fox News up to its perennial tricks:

Presumably, even some MAGA types are aware that the segments of a pie chart should add up to 100%. What Fox have probably done is ask a question and permitted multiple answers. The results of such questions should never be represented in pie-chart form; a bar chart would be more appropriate.

Some of the more ostentatious data designers like to show off their Photoshop skills with 3D pie charts that seem to leap out of the page. But while they’re more visually arresting than their 2D counterparts, they’re less useful for displaying information, because the perspective distorts the respective quantities, making the slices at the “front” appear bigger than they in fact are, and the slices at the “back” smaller.

Pretty patterns

Finally, just because two things are sitting together on a graph or chart, it doesn’t mean there is any relationship between them. You can plot anything against anything. Here’s just one example of researchers finding a correlation between two completely independent phenomena.

Even when there is a relationship, it doesn’t mean one thing is directly causing the other. Sometimes, a third, unmentioned force – known as a “confounding variable” – is at work.

It’s hard to see what role ice-cream consumption could play in the rate at which people drown, or vice versa. The true explanation for the relationship, of course, is the confounding variable of temperature. When it’s hot, people eat more ice-cream, and go swimming more often.

Similarly, a US study in the 1950s revealed that far more people were killed on the roads at 7pm than at 7am. “Goodness,” some wondered. “Why are there so many more bad drivers around in the evening than first thing in the morning?”

And the answer is: there are more drivers around in the evening than in the morning. The confounding variable here was simply the number of people on the road.

Apples and oranges

In the early 20th century, the US Navy launched a recruitment campaign based on the premise that serving in the navy was safer than being a civilian. And their statistics were sound: the death rate among serving naval officers was indeed lower than in the general populace.

The stumbling block in this case was that they were not comparing like with like. Sailors, almost without exception, are young and fit. The general populace, meanwhile, includes infants, old people and long-term sick people, all of whom (at least at that time) were far more likely to die than the average able seaman.

Graphic non-fiction v graphic novels

The watchwords for visual data, then, are pretty much the same as for verbal information: transparency, clarity, simplicity.

When deciding whether or not to trust visual data, your checklist should be as follows:

  • Source
  • Units
  • y-axis
  • Large range of values
  • Context: is there any other information, omitted from this visual element, that would be useful for a fuller understanding of the subject?

I’ll conclude this series soon with a round-up of all the other potential abuses of stats.

Wokeness: the far right’s last scapegoat

Barbarians enter gates of Rome

“Do-gooders” are no longer just a nuisance – their “decadence”, according to populist demagogues, is now an existential threat to civilisation

Barbarians enter gates of Rome
‘Why did the world end, Daddy?’ ‘Too much compassion, son.’

“Right on”. “Politically correct”. “PC”. “Social justice warriors”. “Virtue signallers”. Now “woke”. Rightwingers and authoritarians of all stripes have been sneering at liberals, leftwingers and anyone with a conscience for at least 50 years, and the onslaught has intensified in step with social media’s dominance of the infosphere.

But recently, there’s been a noticeable increase in stridency – and a worrying raising of the stakes.

Whereas not so long ago, people who discussed pronouns, chucked statues into rivers and sat on roads were merely a nuisance, of late they have evolved, if we are to believe some commentators, into a clear and present danger to our way of life. It turns out they’re not just a symptom of the collapse of democracy in the western world, but a root cause.

Current Tory party chair and former anti-culture culture secretary Oliver Dowden, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in February, talked of the west being “in the clutches of a painful woke psychodrama”, afflicted by a “dangerous form of decadence”; Sherelle Jacobs delivered a pale imitation of his pale speech in the Telegraph; while Matthew Syed in the Times bewailed the “poison introduced into the vitals of the system” (paywall). As usual, these talking points have been taken up and repeated, usually verbatim, across the political right.

But unlike the hordes of reflexive retweeters, I have questions.

1. What do they mean by decadence exactly? What form is this terrifying descent into depravity supposed to be taking, and how is it unfolding?

Decadence comes from the same root as the word decay, and as I used to understand it, means something not dissimilar: a marked deterioration in standards, of art, for example, or of the values of a nation.

And indeed, such matters have been the bugbear of small- and capital-C conservatives since time immemorial: think the original Cancel Queen, Mary Whitehouse, having an embolism over Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling (before presenting Jimmy Savile with an award for “wholesome family entertainment”), or Catholics soiling their cassocks over a collectible card game.

It has also, we should remember, been an obsession for some of the west’s bitterest enemies. Adolf Hitler outlawed all “degenerate” art as “cultural Bolshevism” (in his view, cultural degeneracy went hand in hand with physical degeneracy); Osama bin Laden demanded that the west “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest”; while Josef Stalin kept the peasants on side partly by issuing endless direful warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the west.

But it doesn’t seem to be that sense of decadence that Dowden, Jacobs and Syed are fretting about. Their diatribes make no mention of fornication, slovenliness or drug-taking, of violent computer games or the corruptive influence of the Teletubbies. In fact, you have to go through all three jeremiads with a fine toothcomb to find any examples of the hell-in-a-handbasket horrors they’re deploring.

Syed’s piece contains a throwaway line about the “infiltration of the universities” (for which he fails to provide any evidence, or indeed any hint as to what shadowy cabal might be masterminding it), but it’s mostly an attack on “me first” society, global finance and British foreign policy of the last 30 years. Can the blame for any of that really be laid at the door of human rights lawyers or Just Stop Oil, whose byword is “me last” and who are generally bitterly opposed to the financial and petrochemical giants and the concept of war?

Ordinarily, I’d presume that Syed was ordered to shoehorn in the anti-woke lines by his editor at the Times, but the writer himself chose to promote it on Twitter with the following quote:

While Xi Jinping was resetting the world order through his Belt and Road initiative and Vladimir Putin was recreating the Russian empire by annexing Georgia and Crimea, we were arguing over gender-neutral toilets

Matthew Syed, Twitter, 6/3/22

It’s certainly clickbaity, and, as was undoubtedly intended, duly generated its fair share of pop-eyed “debate” on everyone’s favourite social media battlefield. But as with most clickbait, it’s a bunch of shit.

For one thing, as a comparison, it’s up there with the far right’s very worst for sheer asininity. Are we really supposed to accept that the geopolitical policy decisions of the unassailable ruler of a major world power are equivalent to the bickerings of a handful of 19-year-old Durham University students? Mightn’t those worthy woke warriors be setting their sights a little higher than questions of bathroom access if they had the economic, cultural and military might of a nation of 1.3 billion people behind them?

Syed is also guilty of the same fallacy as the commentators who burst a blood vessel whenever they chance upon a new “woke” initiative in the police force: “Perhaps the police should spend less time filling in forms and more time solving murders!”

The latter point relies on the bizarre assumption that the police force is some sort of monolithic entity that can focus only on one activity at a time, rather than a heterogeneous organisation made up of multiple forces consisting of hundreds of thousands of individuals with different skills, responsibilities and specialisms. Syed’s zinger is predicated on the similar idea that the entirety of the United Kingdom is permanently engaged in trivial squabbles while all of China is Greatly Leaping Forward, when in truth the only people devoting more than a few seconds a year to these culture war issues are a small crowd of earnest lefties and the far-right commentators who’d be hunting down Jack Monroe recipes without them.

Dowden’s Heritage Foundation homily is equally free of substance, consisting mostly of 40-watt fire and brimstone about free speech, privilege, “cancelling”, “fashionable nostrums”, “policies inimicable to freedoms”, and people “seeking to expunge large parts of our past”.

In 2,300 words of hufflepuff, the only real-world instances of “dangerous decadence” that he drops in are the defacement of Winston Churchill’s statue during the Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 (someone spray-painted the words “was a racist” under his name; truly, democracy is finished), “obsessing over pronouns” (another surefire omen of doom) and “seeking to decolonise mathematics”.

I literally work in the news, and this last horseman of the apocalypse was news to me. After a more demanding than usual Google search, I’ve concluded that it refers to a minor kerfuffle in early 2021 over a paper by Californian academics suggesting adding an anti-racist element to the teaching of maths.

Maybe it was a bigger deal in the States. Even so, it didn’t seem to dominate the agenda of vast swathes of the US population for long, much less of anyone further afield.

Let’s be charitable for the moment and assume that these demagogues have simply chosen poor examples to illustrate their point. A second question still needs addressing:  

2. If western citizens are misdirecting their energies, what should they be doing instead?

Because if re-examining history, or hanging banners from Marble Arch imploring people to use less fossil fuel, constitutes “dangerous decadence”, if conversations about pronouns are a waste of time, then the implication is that individuals thus occupied should be channelling their efforts into more productive endeavours. Exactly what endeavours, our friends on the right are again reluctant to spell out (unless they’re seriously suggesting we should be spending our days planning multi-trillion-dollar global infrastructure projects and invading France).

My best guess is that what they want us to do is devote 100% of our time and energy to the betterment of the nation (and by nation, of course, what the far-right elites generally mean is them). We should be good little serfs, tilling the fields in the service of our masters, paying our tithes and dying young so as not to be a burden on the state.

And if there is any time left at day’s end after we’ve completed our designated duties, we should devote it to wholesome, morally improving activities, like athletics and shooting and unprotected sex (take that, Great Replacement!). None of this culture rubbish. Culture leads to reflection, and reflection leads to scrutiny.

The underlying message coming through to me, at least, is that we should shut the fuck up, and cease daring to question the status quo that is so endlessly lucrative for them and increasingly harmful to the rest of us.

But such a vast, sustained and coordinated anti-woke operation – even if its thesis is as weak as Dowden’s handshake – seems like overkill if all they are trying to do is silence a few plebs. Which leads me to my final question:

3. What’s really going on?

The irony here is that the narrative these prophets are trying to foist on us comes within shouting distance of the truth. Because there is some consensus among historians that decadence was indeed a factor in the erosion or implosion of many of Earth’s great empires (most of the commentators seem to have at least skim-read the Wikipedia entry on Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).

But it wasn’t the corruption of everyday folk that was the problem. In Rome, in the Mongol empire, in the Byzantine and the Ottoman, the rot started at the top. Think Caligula building a marble stable for his horse; the petty theological infighting that led to the downfall of the Byzantines; Kublai Khan’s extravagant spending; Suleyman shunning his official duties to spend more time in his harem.

Rome fell not because ordinary citizens were frittering away their days bickering about minor tweaks to the human rights framework, but because their rulers were spending too much time and money feasting, fucking and erecting ever bigger monuments to themselves to run their territories properly; and because, with inequality skyrocketing, the common folk, increasingly vexed at working for peanuts while their overlords bathed in asses’ milk and risking their lives on the battlefield for leaders who kept the lion’s share of the spoils, were less and less inclined to give their all in service of the “greater good”.

Remind you of anything?

If I asked you to point to anyone in the western world in the first quarter of the 21st century who could be said to be charging head first into the abyss of turpitude, where else could you begin but with our leaders? When it comes to lax morals, low standards and all-round malevolence, no student, judge or “wokester” can hold a candle to Oliver Dowden’s Tories and the corporations they serve.

Because in case you hadn’t noticed, the party presently running the UK is now packed to the rafters with councillors, MPs, aides, ministers and peers guilty of deporting longtime legal residents of the UK, plotting to drown and exile asylum seekers, slashing international aid, illegal lobbying, cronyism, filing false expenses claims, tax avoidance, lying, cheating, illegally carousing in a pandemic, excessive drinking, drug-taking, Muslim-bashing, gay-bashing, bishop-bashing, bullying, sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, treason and murder. These are people, for crying out loud, who have actually tried to depict “do-gooders” as the bad guys and have now described the head of the Church of England as a virtue-signaller.

(Another reason cited by Gibbon for the collapse of Rome – one the faux Christians on the libertarian right oddly seem to skip over – was the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. The devoutly anti-intellectual stance of the church, itself perpetually riven by theological disputes that really did weaken the state and distract people from external threats, stripped away the foundations of culture, philosophy and technological superiority on which the empire had been built. In other words, they’d had enough of experts.)

Ultimately, then, the war on woke seems to be just another deflection tactic.

Authoritarian governments have long invoked bogeymen to frighten the unwary into voting for them, and to give them someone other than the government to blame. But the current bunch are running out of scapegoats.

They can’t blame Labour for the precipitous national decline any more, because Labour hasn’t been in power for 12 years. Nor can they point the finger at the EU, because the UK is free of its “shackles” – not that they’re having much luck finding EU rules they want to scrap anyway. And while the smear campaign against immigrants shows no sign of abating, people are slowly waking up to the overwhelmingly positive net contribution they make to society, largely thanks to the catastrophic labour shortages caused by the exodus of EU workers.

So having exhausted the enemies without, they’re turning their fire on enemies within: charities, judges, lawyers, teachers, students, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and anyone else who has enough time at the end of their day to read a book or the temerity to ask a question. But it should be glaringly obvious to all but the most loyal Daily Mail reader that it’s not Greta Thunberg who’s plotting to usher in the Dark Ages 2.0. The self-appointed harbingers of doom are bringing it themselves.

Statistricks, part 3: how they lie to you with polls

Opinion polls are way off with their predictions too often to be of any use. So why are they such big business?

Are you diving into the data, or is the data diving into you?

Part 1: ‘Trade with the EU is declining’ (no, it isn’t)
Part 2: ‘We send the EU £350m a week’ (no, we don’t)
Part 4: ‘The UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7’ (no, it isn’t)

Not so long ago, you could go years without coming across a survey. A few folks were dimly aware of a company called Gallup, thanks to Top of the Pops, for which they compiled the charts, but otherwise polling companies were shy little leprechauns that only popped out once every four years to sound out the populace before each general election.

Now you’re lucky if you can go four minutes without seeing a snapshot of public opinion. Twitter polls, website polls, newspaper polls, polls by phone and email and WhatsApp; polls on everything from support for the death penalty to your preferred shade of toast.

What’s my tribe?

The appeal to us plebs is obvious. We can’t get enough of other people’s opinions, whether our response is to nod sagaciously or spit out our tea.

Interestingly, our egos are so devious, it doesn’t much matter whether most people agree with us or not. Because if, according to any given poll, ours is the majority view, we tend to sit back and smirk: “Well, naturally my opinion is the right opinion.” If, on the other hand, we’re in the minority, our response is usually “Gosh, I’m so clever, unlike all these sheep!”

Either way, polls are reassuring because they reinforce our place in the world. Our tribal, hierarchical nature, our teat-seeking need to belong, compels us to constantly reaffirm our sense of identity, and polls give us that in a neat package.

Views as news gets views

If polls are a novelty gift for the hoi polloi, they’re a godsend for newspapers, struggling as they are with dwindling resources, and for rolling news channels with endless airtime to fill. No time-consuming investigation, photography, writing or planning required – the pollsters take care of it all for free, right down to the covering press release with its own ready-made headline finding. And the public lap it up.

The pollsters, of course, are laughing all the way to the bank. Their services are in greater demand than ever before; the polling industry in the UK currently employs 42,500 people – four times as many as fishing.

So, surveys are win, win, win, right? People get entertainment, journos get clicks, pollsters get rich. What’s the problem? Because there’s always a problem with you, isn’t there, Bodle?

Blunt tools

As a matter of fact, there are two. The first is that polls are low-quality information.

Despite having been around for almost 200 years, and despite huge advances in methodology and technology, gauging popular opinion is still an inexact science. For proof, look no further than the wild differences between any two surveys carried out at the same time on the same issue.

In the week prior to the 2017 UK general election, for example, Scotland’s Herald newspaper had the Tories winning by 13%, while Wired predicted a 2% win for Labour. (In the event, May’s lot won by 2.5%; picking a figure somewhere in the middle of the outliers is usually a safeish bet.)  

The main headache for canvassers has always been choosing the right people to canvas. If you conducted a poll about general election voting intentions solely in Liverpool Walton, or took a snapshot of views on the likely longevity of the EU from 4,000 Daily Express readers (which the Express continues to do on a regular basis), then presented the results as a reflection of the national picture, you would rightly be laughed out of Pollville.

The key to a meaningful survey is to find a sample of people that is representative of the whole population. Your best hope of this is to make the sample as large as possible and as random as possible, for example by diversifying the means by which the poll is conducted (because market researchers wielding clipboards on the high street aren’t going to capture the sentiment of many office workers or the housebound, while online polls overlook the views of everyone without broadband), and sourcing participants from a wide area.

Even then, you have to legislate for the fact that pollees are, to a large degree, self-selecting. For one thing, people who are approached by pollsters must, ipso facto, be people who are easily contactable, whether in the flesh, by phone or online, which rules out a swathe of potentials; and for another, they’re likely to have more free time and less money (many polls still offer a fee).

Tories, trolls and tergiversators

Even if you do somehow manage to round up the perfect microcosm of humanity, there are further obstacles.

For one thing, people are unreliable. The “shy Tory factor” is well documented; people don’t always answer truthfully if they think their choice might be socially unacceptable. You can mitigate this problem somewhat by conducting your survey anonymously, which most pollsters now do.

Anonymity, however, only exacerbates a different problem. As anyone who has spent five minutes on social media will know, there are plenty of people around who just lie for kicks (or money). And if the questions aren’t being put to you in person, and your name isn’t at the top of the questionnaire, there’s even less pressure on you to tell the truth.

Furthermore, people don’t always know their own minds. If you’re faced with difficult questions in an area where your knowledge is sketchy, like trans rights or Northern Ireland, your honest answer to most questions would be “Don’t know”. But you’d feel dumb if you ticked “Don’t know” every time. Isn’t there a temptation to fake a little conviction?

And (Brexiters and Remainers notwithstanding), people’s opinions are not set in stone. Someone may genuinely be planning to vote Green when surveyed, then change their mind on the day.

Then there’s the issue of framing. Every facet of a survey, from its title to the introductory text, from the phrasing of the questions to the range of available answers, can unwittingly steer waverers towards certain choices.

Let’s say you want to study views on asylum seekers. If you ask 2,000 people “Do you agree that Britain should help families fleeing war and famine?”, you’re likely to get significantly different results than if you ask them, “Do you think Britain should allow in and pay for the upkeep of thousands of mostly young, mostly male, mostly Middle Eastern and African migrants?” (If this seems like an extreme example, I’ve seen some equally awful leading questions.)

Sometimes the questions don’t legislate for the full spectrum of possibilities. If no “don’t know” option is included, for example, people may be forced into expressing a preference that they don’t have.

Finally, the presentation of a poll’s results can make a huge difference. Few people have the patience to read through polls in their entirety, so what happens? Pollsters create a press release featuring the edited highlights – the highlights according to them.

When you consider all these pitfalls, suddenly it’s not so hard to see why pollsters’ predictions often fly so wide of the mark. But … so what if polls are inaccurate? They’re just a bit of fun!

This brings us to my second, more serious concern.

Market intelligence

While they’re passable diversions for punters and convenient space-fillers for papers and news channels, no one ever went on hunger strike to demand more polls. This constant drizzle of percentages and pie charts has not been delivered by popular demand. It’s a supply-side increase, driven by the people who really benefit from it.

Businesses live or die by their market research: the information they gather from the general populace. If you’re a food manufacturer launching a new bollock-shaped savoury snack, for example, it helps to know how many consumers are likely to buy it. But firms are also greatly dependent on their marketing – the information they send back into the community. And one of the best things they can do to promote their product is to generate the impression that by golly, people love Cheesicles!

We simply don’t have the time to do all the research required to formulate our own independent view on every imaginable issue. So what do we do? We take our cue from others: friends, or experts, or people we otherwise trust.

Hence the myriad adverts featuring glowing testimonials from chuffed customers. Hence celebrities being paid astronomical fees for sponsorship deals. Hence the very existence of “influencers”. Like it or not, our opinions are based, in large part, on other people’s opinions.

The only thing more likely to cause a stampede for Cheesicles than the endorsement of a random punter or celebrity is the endorsement of everyone. Why else would a certain pet food manufacturer spend 20-odd years telling everyone that eight out of 10 cats preferred it (until they were forced to water down their claim)? Aren’t you more tempted to give Squid Game a chance because everyone’s raving about it?

Even though some people quite like being classed among the minority – the brave rebels, the “counterculture” – those people are, ironically, in a minority. Most of us still feel safer sticking with the herd. So it’s in manufacturers’ interests to publish information that suggests their product is de rigueur.

(If you’re in doubt about the susceptibility of some people to third-party influence, look up the Solomon Asch line length test. As part of an experiment in 1951, test subjects – along with a number of paid plants – were shown visual diagrams of lines of different lengths and told to identify the longest one. The correct answer in each image was clear, but the stooges were briefed to vocally pick, and justify, the (same) wrong answer – and a surprisingly high proportion of the subjects changed their decision to match the wrong answer given by their peers. Later variations on the same study furnished less clear-cut results, but the phenomenon is real.)

And this is where all those flaws in polling methodology suddenly become friends. Polls can be inaccurate and misleading by accident – but they can also be misleading by design.

When businesses conduct a poll, they can (and have, and still do) use all the above loopholes to nudge the results in the “right” direction. They can select a skewed sample of people. They can select a meaninglessly small sample of people (still the most common tactic). They can ask leading questions, leave out inconvenient answers, present the results in a flattering way – or just conduct poll after poll after poll, discard the inconvenient results, and publish only those in which Cheesicles emerge triumphant.

Woop-de-doo, so businesses tell statistical white lies! Hardly front-page news, or the end of the world. If I’m duped into shelling out 75p for one bag of minging gorgonzola-flavoured corn gonads, well, I just won’t repeat my mistake.

True. But it’s a different story when the other main commissioners of polls play the same tricks.

Offices of state

It cannot have escaped your notice that the worlds of business and politics have been growing ever more closely intertwined. There’s now so much overlap of personnel between Downing Street, big business and the City (the incumbent chancellor, who arrived via Goldman Sachs and hedge funds, is just one of dozens of MPs and ministers with a background in finance), such astronomical sums pouring into the Tory party from industry barons, and so many Tories moonlighting as business consultants, that you might be forgiven for thinking that the two spheres had merged.

And as the association has deepened, so politicians (and other political operators like thinktanks and lobbying groups) have borrowed more tactics from their corporate pals. Public services are run like private enterprises; short-term profits and savings for the few are constantly prioritised over the long-term interests of the many; government communications departments have been transformed into slick, sleazy PR outfits. And one of the tools they’ve most warmly embraced is the poll.

While businesses carry out market research to gauge the viability of their products and services, political parties do so (largely through focus groups) to find out which policies and slogans will go down well. But whereas businesses only publicise polls to create the illusion of popularity, the practice has wider and scarier applications in the political sphere.

“Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense”

Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass (2009)

Loath as I am to quote the aggressively self-aggrandizing Hitchens, on this occasion, he may have stumbled across a point. A number of studies (pdf) have looked into this phenomenon (pdf), and while the findings aren’t conclusive, they all point in the same direction: people can be swayed by opinion polls.

There are several mechanisms at play. First, if there’s a perception that one candidate in an election has an unassailable lead, some undecideds will back the likely winner, because they think the majority must be right (the “bandwagon effect”); a few will switch to backing the loser out of sympathy (the “underdog effect”); some of those who favoured the projected winner might not bother voting because it’s in the bag, while some of those who favoured one of the “doomed” candidates might give up for the same reason.

Conversely, if polls suggest a contest is close, turnout tends to increase. Even if your preferred candidate isn’t one of the two vying for top spot, you might be moved to vote tactically, to keep out the candidate you like least.

Polling also has an indirect effect via the media. When surveys are reporting good figures for a candidate, broadcasters and publishers tend to give them more airtime and column inches, thus increasing their exposure, and, consequently, their popularity.

However these effects ultimately balance out, it’s clear that the ability to manipulate polling information could give you enormous political power. “But that’s absurd!” you cry. “I’ve never had my mind changed by anything as frivolous as a poll!”

Really? Can you be absolutely sure of that? Even if you’re immune, can’t lesser mortals be affected? If it works in the advertising world, there’s no reason why shouldn’t it work in the political sphere.

You might object at this point that pollsters are legitimate enterprises that have nothing to gain from putting out false information. To which I would counter-object: polling companies are businesses too. They exist not as some sort of public service, but to make money for their clients. And their clients’ interests do not always align with the public good.

A brief look at the ownership and management of the pollsters does little to alleviate these fears.

Savanta ComRes (formerly ComRes)

Retained pollster for ITV and the Daily Mail. Founded by Andrew Hawkins, Christian Conservative and contributor to the Daily Telegraph with a clear pro-Brexit stance. This year, Hawkins launched DemocracyThree, a “campaigning platform” that helps businesses and other interest groups raise funds and build support – ie influence public opinion.

“Democracy 3.0 helps you build a support base, raise the funds you need for your campaign to take off, and then we work with you to appoint professional campaigners – such as lobbyists and PR experts – who can bring your campaign to life.”

DemocracyThree website

ICM

Co-founded in 1989 by Nick Sparrow, a fundraising consultant who worked as a private pollster for the Tories from 1995-2004. Now part of “human understanding agency” Walnut Unlimited, which is in turn part of UNLIMITED – a “fully integrated agency group with human understanding at the heart”.

The sales pitches for these firms include the following quotes:

“Our team are experts in public opinion, behavioural change, communication, consultation and participation, policy and strategy, reputation, and user experience.”

ICM website

“We help brands connect with people, by understanding people … Blending neuroscience, behavioural science and data science, we uncover the truth behind our human experiences … Our mission is to create genuine business advantage for clients … by uncovering behaviour-led insights from our Human Understanding Lab.”

Walnut Unlimited website

Populus

Official pollster for the Times newspaper, co-founded by Tory peer Andrew Cooper and Michael Simmonds, a former adviser to the Tory party now married to Tory MP Nick Gibb, who has recently been added to the interview panel to choose the next head of media regulator Ofcom

YouGov

Founded by Nadhim Zadawi, the incumbent Tory health secretary, and Stephan Shakespeare, former owner of the ConservativeHome website and former associate of diehard Brexiters Iain Dale, Tim Montgomerie and Claire Fox.

Survation

Founded by Damian Lyons Lowe, who during the EU referendum campaign set up, at the request of Ukip’s Nigel Farage, a separate “polling” company, Constituency Polling Ltd, based in the Bristol office of Arron Banks’s Eldon Insurance. But its remit seems to have been less about asking questions and more about micro-targeting voters. “Interviews with several people familiar with Survation’s operations show that in addition to measuring public opinion, the firm’s executives also helped shape it.”

(I was unable to find any evidence of strong political affiliation among the leadership of Ipsos MORI or Qriously, and Kantar has changed ownership and CEO so frequently of late as for any such investigation to be meaningless. As a side note, there seems to have been a recent flurry of activity in this sector, with many companies being gobbled up into ever larger, faceless global marketing conglomerates, whale sharks hoovering up data, with ever more sinister specialisms: “consumer insights”, “market intelligence”, “human understanding”.)

I don’t know about you, but I’d expect the people who founded and run companies that were nominally about gathering and analysing data to be statistics nerds – people with an interest in objective truth – not, by an overwhelming majority, people with the same strong political leanings. Put it this way: CEOs of polling firms have final approval over which surveys are released. If you were married to a Tory MP, would you really sign off on a poll that was damaging to your husband’s party?

Someone of a more cynical bent might start wondering whether the hard right, having secured control of most of the UK’s print media and with its tendrils burrowing ever deeper into the BBC, was stealthily trying to establish a monopoly on data.  

So maybe they’re not all angels. But surely they can’t just pump rubbish into the public domain willy-nilly? In a stable(ish) 21st-century democracy like Britain, there must be checks and balances in place.

Well, here’s the thing. Businesses are prevented from publishing grossly misleading adverts by the Advertising Standards Authority, but there’s no such independent regulator for the polling industry. They police themselves, through a voluntary body called the British Polling Council, staffed entirely by industry members.

So, polls are bad information, they can influence people’s votes, the pollsters’ motives are questionable, and they’re accountable to no one. But what about journalists? Isn’t it their job to pick up on this sort of thing?

It is, but as I mentioned above, journalistic resources are so depleted now, and the pressure to get stories up fast so great, that they can ill afford to look gift stories in the mouth. And as I mentioned in my last post, journalism and broadcasting aren’t exactly brimming with Carol Vordermans. Even if they had the time and the inclination to carry out due diligence, they wouldn’t necessarily know how.

The bald fact is, when you look at a poll, whether it’s reached you through a newspaper, a website, a meme or a leaflet, you have no guarantee whatsoever that it’s been subjected to even rudimentary checks.

What can we do?

Surveys are – or were, originally – designed to present a snapshot of the popular mood. But even the most fair-minded, honourably intentioned, statistically savvy pollster, using the best possible methodology, can produce a poll that is complete and utter Cheesicles.

But judging by the vast amounts of money pouring into the industry, the political leanings of its ownership and management, and their alarming transformation from simple question-setters to behavioural change specialists, there’s a very real possibility that honourable intentions are an endangered species in the polling industry.

Polls aren’t going away any time soon. Businesses and politicos will always want to gauge which way the wind is blowing. But when it comes to the data they’re pumping back in the public domain – a tiny fraction of what they’re amassing – the rest of us don’t have to play along.

To journalists, I would say: please stop treating polls as an easy way of filling column inches. (Employees of the Daily Express, Mail, Sun and Telegraph, I’m not talking to you. I said “journalists”.)

This is the opposite of speaking truth to power; it’s speaking garbage to those who aren’t in power. It’s 1980s women’s magazine journalism, clickbait, guff, and you’ve repeatedly proven yourselves incapable of discerning good information from bad.

If you must run an article on a poll, then ensure that, at the very minimum, you ask, and get satisfactory answers to, these questions:

  • Who commissioned the poll?
  • Who carried out the poll?
  • What was the sample size? If it’s much less than 2,000 people, ignore it.
  • What’s the relative standard error? (A measure of the confidence in the accuracy of the survey. If Labour are leading the Tories in a poll by 36% to 35% and the RSE is over 2% – as it is on samples of less than 2,000 – then they may not be leading at all.)
  • What were the questions?
  • What was the methodology?

Then, when you publish the story, include all this information so that readers can draw their own conclusions about the poll’s reliability. Above all, include a link to the poll. If you don’t take all these steps, your story is worthless.

To the public, my advice would be: ignore polls. If you must read them, treat them as meaningless fun, fodder for a throwaway social media gag, and don’t for one second fall into the trap of thinking they’re conveying any sort of truth.

If you’re ever approached to participate in a poll, ask yourself: do you really want to be handing over your data to people who are likely to be using that data against you and enriching themselves in the process?

Finally, to the pollsters, I would say: we’ve got your number. 

How they lie with statistics, part 2: the value of nothing

Johnson playing tennis

The point was never whether EU membership cost £350m, £150m or a fiver a week. The question should have been: what does that buy us?

Numbers racquet: anyone for a £160,000 game of tennis with a former Russian minister’s wife?

Part 1: ‘Trade with the EU is declining’ (no, it isn’t)
Part 3: Why are all polling companies run by Tories?
Part 4: ‘The UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7’ (no, it isn’t)

Here’s a thought experiment. Picture a woman who’s two metres tall (about 6ft 6in). Easy, right? Now picture a second woman, standing next to the first, who is a millon times taller: 2 million metres, or 2,000km, tall. I guarantee you the giant you’re imagining is no more than 100 times the size of her neighbour.

Try approaching it another way. Say the six-foot woman launches a rocket, which travels straight upwards at 100mph (about the average speed of the space shuttle for the first minute after take-off). How long do you think you will have to keep mentally following that rocket before it draws level with the giant’s head? The answer is 12 and a half hours.

All of which is a rather long-winded way of showing that human brains are rubbish at processing large quantities. If everyday numbers cause a mental power cut in most of us, big numbers trigger a full-on meltdown. 

“The crooks already know these tricks. Honest men must learn them in self-defence”

Darrell Huff, How To Lie With Statistics (1954)

‘We send the EU £350m a week’

No examination of number abuses would be complete without a look at the granddaddy of them all: the slogan that, along with “Take back control”, arguably swung the EU referendum for Leave.

On one level, of course, it was just another example of populists making shit up. The true EU membership fee, after the UK received its rebate, was probably at most half that sum (Vote Leave’s Skid Row Svengali Dominic Cummings admitted in a letter dated April 2016 to Sir Andrew Dilnot of the UK Statistics Authority that “£237m per week was the net level of resources being transferred from the UK as a whole to the EU”) (pdf).

But the arguably more interesting point is why he chose this line of attack in the first place.

The following Twitter exchange from a couple of months ago (I failed to screenshot before the inevitable block came) is enlightening.

“We’ll save £350m a week by leaving the EU!”
“No, we won’t. The figure on the bus was a lie. The true cost of membership is about half that.”
“Well, £175m still sounds like a lot of money!”

Wait. So £350m a week is too much … and a 50% discount on that is still too much? What’s a reasonable amount then?

This is what Cummings and co were bargaining on. They knew the exact sums involved were immaterial; all that mattered was the emotional impact of the big number. “Eek, seven zeroes!” Critical faculties switched off, job done.

(Meanwhile, the other prong of Cummings’ propaganda assault – Turkey – was designed with similar intent: “Eek, brown people!” Primal fear of The Other evoked, rational brain bypassed, job done.)

Some of us identified the flaw fairly quickly. If I arrived in the pub and told you breathlessly that I’d just spent one thousand pounds, you might raise an eyebrow, but you’d probably reserve your final judgment pending further information. Namely, what did I spend it on? A house, a car, a watch, a hat, or a packet of crisps?

A moment’s reflection, which is apparently more than 52% of the electorate could spare, would tell you that the statement Quantity X costs a lot of money is meaningless in isolation. Before you can judge whether that expenditure is a good idea, you need answers to the following questions:

  1. Can the buyer afford it? What is this sum as a proportion of their budget?
  2. What do comparable items or services cost?
  3. Is it a reasonable rate? Are others being charged a similar amount?
  4. How much will it cost to get out of the contract?
  5. What exactly is the buyer getting for their investment? Does it represents good value for money? Can the same or better goods and services be obtained elsewhere, for less outlay?

“They said how much money we would save [by leaving the EU], but they didn’t say how much we would lose”

Rueful Brexit-voting ex-miner from Sunderland, speaking to Financial Times journalist

Let’s tackle those points one by one.

1) The UK’s EU contributions for the financial year to April 2020, minus rebate and EU funds received, came to £7.7bn. Total government spending for the same period is predicted to turn out a shade north of £900bn. So as a proportion of the UK’s overall spending, EU membership cost less than 1%. If you’re a taxpayer earning £30,000 pa, that means you’re paying about £43.53 a year towards the cost of EU membership, or just over a quarter of the TV licence fee. Does £150m a week (£7.7bn/52) feel so enormous now?

2) To put that £7.7bn in perspective, the government spends around £190bn a year on pensions (“We send economically unproductive old people £3.7bn a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”), £170bn on the NHS, £110bn on education, £43bn on defence, £15bn on civil service pay, £600m on running the House of Commons and the Lords, including £225m on MPs’ and Lords’ salaries and allowances, £67m on the royal family, and £80m on the Department for Exiting the EU. (Specific, up-to-date figures are not available for all these areas, particularly when it comes to the murky warrens of government, so I’m doing some approximating here, but they’re all in the right ballpark.)

To round off with a couple of other large-scale operations, the international aid budget stood at around £15bn a year (until the Tories slashed it), the BBC’s annual spend is around £4bn year, and membership of the United Nations and the World Health Organization sets the country back £100m and £10m a year respectively.

Does £150m a week feel so enormous now?

3) You’ll often hear Brexiters complaining that “the UK is the biggest contributor to the EU”. Again, that’s not true; Germany, France and Italy all pay more. Moreover, there’s a good reason why Britain chips in more than most, which is that Britain is one of the most populous and richest countries in the EU. If you work out the contribution per head, ie, divide the fee between us, the UK is bang in the middle of the field. Norway, which isn’t even a full member of the EU and has no say in passing its laws, pays in more per person than the UK does.

Besides, in most societies, taxation is organised such that richer people pay more than poorer people. It’s hardly crazy to suggest that the same logic should apply to economic blocs.

Does £150m a week feel so enormous now?

4) Calculating the economic cost of extricating Britain from the EU is fiendishly complex, because it touches on so many areas of government, business and personal life, so many of the costs are yet to be borne, and we can’t know for sure how things would have panned out if we’d stayed. But if we’re lacking all the pieces of the jigsaw, we have enough side and corner segments to give us an approximate idea of its size.

The costs come in the form of costs to the government, to businesses and to citizens, but since the government is funded by taxpayers and businesses have little choice but to pass on most costs to customers and employees, they will all, ultimately, be borne by you and me.

(There’s bound to be a bit of double-counting going on here, but I strongly doubt whether that will amount to more than the stuff I’ve missed. Speaking of which, if you’re knowledgeable in this field and you find anything missing or startlingly amiss, please point it out – politely – in the comments, and I will amend ASAP.)

Costs to government

Holding referendum: £130m

Government information campaigns: £50m on Get Ready For Brexit in October 2019; £93m on Get Ready 2: Check, Change, Go, from July 2020

New customs infrastructure to monitor trade: £700m

No-deal Brexit agreement with ferry company that had no ferries: £87m

Consultancy fees: £150m

Paying 27,500 extra civil servants to plan and execute Brexit-related changes: £825m a year (conservatively assuming a salary of £30,000 per civil servant) (plus recruitment costs, benefits, pensions)

Assistance to exporters in training and hiring 50,000 customs officers: £84m

Festival of Brexit: £120m

Extension of Fujitsu contract to service old customs system: £12m

Building 29 lorry parks to hold lorries without correct paperwork: no hard figures yet available because work is ongoing, but the town of Warrington alone received has £800,000 from the government just to help with the costs of running them.

By the end of 2021, the government estimates that it will have spent £8.1bn just on making Brexit happen. And the haemorrhaging of cash isn’t magically going to stop then; businesses will still need support, negotiations for a new trading relationship with the EU will need to continue, and the government will likely have a lot of expensive court cases to fight.

Costs to business

Re-registering all UK-produced chemicals under new licences: £1bn (one-off)

Processing new customs paperwork: £7bn per year (including, I assume, the salaries of the abovementioned customs officers)

Extra admin, traffic delays and lorry parks for haulage and freight firms: £15bn per year

New customs declarations: £17bn-£20bn a year

Costs to you and me

(These will of course vary from person to person, depending on your lifestyles and life choices.)

  • Travel visas
  • Health insurance
  • Mobile roaming charges
  • Credit card charges abroad
  • Kennelling fees, as pet passporting now defunct
  • Higher prices abroad due to lower value of sterling
  • Fall in value of pensions due to lower value of sterling
  • Rise in prices of imported food and other goods due to lower value of sterling
  • Reduction in portion sizes (loss of value)

Plus, of course, the loss of our freedom to live, study, work and retire in 31 countries, which to my mind is incalculable.

Finally, falling upon the nation as a whole is a hotchpotch of unknown and unquantifiable losses, which while impossible to nail down exactly, will without doubt all be sizeable negatives: the talented immigrants put off from coming to the UK; shortages of labour, skilled and unskilled; the brain drain of EU citizens and disillusioned Remainers leaving because of Brexit; the effect on the mental health of millions; the dire consequences for the economy of having a fanatical, incompetent, mendacious, anti-intellectual far-right government in charge; the social costs of a divided and disinformed citizenry; all the governmental, parliamentary and civil service time wasted on Brexit; the value of EU laws on workers’ rights, the environment, and health and safety; the huge blow to Britain’s global reputation and soft power.

All these factors feed into probably the best indicator of a country’s material wealth: its gross domestic product (GDP). When a country is spending so much time and energy on negotiations, and unnecessary infrastructure, and form-filling, and stuck in queues of lorries, it has less time and energy to make things. Meanwhile, tariffs and non-tariff barriers never fail to reduce the volume of trade.

Estimates of the long-term hit to the UK’s GDP vary from 2% to 9%, with only Patrick Minford’s discredited Economists for Europe group predicting any improvement, and that at the cost of the UK’s manufacturing industries. Two per cent of GDP is £42bn per year. Nine per cent is £189bn.

Does £150m a week, or £8bn a year, feel so enormous now?

5) Now to the crunch question. What did the UK get for its money? Even if not everything about the EU was desirable, some of it was clearly worth having, or the UK and every other member state would have quit long ago. Can all these bounties be sourced elsewhere? If so, at what price?

Here’s a list (far from exhaustive – again, please pipe up with any glaring omissions) of some of the basic, and not so basic, functions and programmes provided by the EU.

Frictionless trade, frictionless travel, trade negotiations, Horizon 2020, Natura 2000, Marie Curie programme, EHIC, Erasmus education programme, Erasmus+ sports programme, Galileo, Euratom, European Arrest Warrant, European Medicines Agency, European Banking Agency, European Youth Orchestra, regional development funds, research grants, pet passports …

Some of this is plain irreplaceable. The UK has already given up on developing its own alternative to Galileo, because it has neither the money nor the expertise. Erasmus and Erasmus+ are dead and gone, with only the spectre of a promise of a … UK-only version to succeed it. And if we want to be part of Euratom and the European Arrest Warrant again, we’ll just have to swallow our pride, beg for acceptance, and pay, doubtless over the odds, for the privilege.

Some is replaceable, but under the Tories, highly unlikely to be replaced. The government is going to give Cornwall a measly 5% of the funding it received from the EU, in breach (naturally) of its promise to match the sum in full.

Instead of a plaintive whine of “Lies!”, the Remain campaign’s response to the Bus of Bollocks should have been a bigger bus (Megabus? MAGAbus?) emblazoned with the slogan “£150m a week? Less than 1% of GDP? For all this? Bargain!”, and a word cloud listing all the positives of membership listed above.

Not as catchy, of course, but unfortunately for the good guys, the truth rarely is.

  • Next time: I dunno, probably something about surveys and comparing apples and oranges.

Statistricks: how they lie to you with numbers (part 1)

If we’re going to fight back against the populists’ calculated assault on truth, we need to raise our numbers game

Part 2: ‘We send the EU £350m a week’ (no, we don’t)
Part 3: Why are all polling companies run by Tories?
Part 4: ‘The UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7’ (no, it isn’t)

Maths is scary.

There are plenty of maths wizzes out there, of course, and most of us, when the necessity arises, can perform basic calculations. It’s just that these operations don’t come naturally to human beings. For most of our species’ history, there was little need for any more mental arithmetic than “one/two/many” and “our tribe small, their tribe big”.

If your brain isn’t adequately trained, maths requires serious mental effort, which most of us will go to any lengths to avoid. As a result, when confronted with a differential equation or trigonometry problem, we curl into a ball and whimper, “Oh, I’m rubbish with numbers!”

So when it comes to statistics, just as with molecular biology and nuclear physics and translating ancient Phoenician, we tend to leave things to the experts. The catch is, the main conduits of this knowledge from professors to public – the media – are as clueless about maths as we are.

As a veteran of journalism of 25 years, I can let you in on a scary secret: reporters – even reporters who are specifically charged with writing about business and science and trade – rarely have any sort of background in maths or economics. Most of those who aren’t media studies or journalism graduates studied humanities (English, modern languages, history, politics, law), and the same goes for the subeditors and desk editors whose job it is to check their work. In the average newspaper office, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who tell an x-axis from a y-axis, a percentage point from a percentage or a median from a mean. And TV interviewers, judging by their performance before and since Brexit, are no better.

Most of us aren’t too bad at figuring out when people are trying to mislead us with words or facts or pictures. But because we’re useless with numbers – and the gatekeepers are too – we’re much more susceptible to numerical shenanigans. Statistics can be massaged, manipulated, misrepresented and murdered as easily as words can. And it is this human weakness that the populists are counting on.

What I want to try to do in the next few posts is look at some of the more common examples of statistical chicanery that you will come across, in the hope that at least a few more people can start calling out the bastards who are trying to rip our society apart. (If I miss any obvious ones, please add your suggestions in the comments.)

(If you have no time to read on, I beg you to consider buying or borrowing a copy of Anthony Reuben’s Statistical: Ten Easy Ways To Avoid Being Misled By Numbers (Constable, 2019). It’s clear and concise and bang up to date, covering Brexit and Trump (but not coronavirus), and an easy read even for the fraidiest maths-phobe.)

The truth, the half-truth, and nothing like the truth

Sometimes, of course, as our present government demonstrates on a daily basis, populists are perfectly happy to forsake real numbers for entirely imaginary ones.

Think Owen Paterson’s assertion that only 5% of Northern Ireland’s trade is with Ireland, when the true figure is at least 30%; Jacob Rees-Mogg merrily retweeting the Sun’s innumerate bollocks about how much cheaper your shopping basket will be after Brexit; Dominic Raab overstating the cost of the CAP to British agriculture by a factor of 1,600%; Daniel Kawczynski’s ludicrous lemons claim; Matt Hancock counting pairs of gloves as two individual items of PPE; Matt Hancock including coronavirus tests on the same person and testing kits put in the post in the 100,000 total of tests carried out; Matt Hancock counting nurses who haven’t left towards the total of extra nurses employed; Boris Johnson, and thus, subsequently, the entire Conservative party, repeating until blue in the face that the Tories are building 40 new hospitals, when in fact they have committed to only six; Boris Johnson’s claim in January 2020 that the economy had grown by 73% under the present Tory government, when in fact the data covers the period back to 1990, which includes 13 years of Labour; Boris Johnson’s brazen and still unretracted claim that there are 400,000 fewer families in poverty since the Tories came to power, when in truth there are 600,000 more.

The chief drawback of straight-up untruths, of course, is that they’re easy to check and challenge. Most of the fictions above were exposed as such fairly quickly (though not before they’d burrowed their way into a few million poorly guarded minds). A far more effective way of misleading people is to present numerical information that is not incorrect, per se, but which tells only part of the story. To offer up, if you like, a fractional truth.

11/10 for presentation

If you’ve ever used a dating app, chances are you didn’t upload as your profile picture that zitty red-eye selfie you took in the Primark fitting room. You hunted through old snaps, maybe asked a camera-handy friend over for a mini-shoot, possibly even added a flattering filter, did a bit of Photoshopping, and judiciously cropped out the boyfriend. In short, you went to reasonable (or extreme) lengths to paint yourself in the best possible light.

This process – statisticians call it “cherry-picking”, but I prefer “Instagramming” – is the populists’ most common way of abusing numbers (it can also be applied in reverse, to show something in its worst possible light). If the absolute figure (say, 17.4 million) is the most impressive, use that. If the percentage best advances your case, use that (but if it’s, say, only 51.9%, poof! It’s gone). If neither of those works to your advantage, what about the trend?

Which brings us to our first example.

‘Trade with the EU is declining’

OMG! Trade with the EU is declining?! Tomorrow, our trade with them will be nothing! We must end all commerce with them now!

That’s clearly the reaction this claim was designed to elicit, and there were enough people lacking either the ability or the inclination to check it that it succeeded in its goal.

While it wasn’t one of the primary arguments advanced by the Leave campaign, it’s a drum that rightwing politicians, commentators and newspapers have been beating since day one. It was also one of the central planks of the “failing EU” narrative, which you still hear to this day.

Still, if the UK’s trade with the EU is shrinking, surely it’s a point worth making?

The first problem here is that the statement is not true. UK trade with the EU has grown steadily since we joined, as even House of Commons figures show:

(I couldn’t find an HoC graph covering the whole period, but the figures are all out there.)

Which shouldn’t come as a colossal surprise, as these are our closest neighbours, with whom we have enjoyed ever closer ties for almost 50 years. Of course trade with them is always going to grow.

So what is Thickinson wittering on about? It turns out what she meant is that the UK’s trade with the EU as a proportion of its overall trade has been decreasing (slowly) since 2000. Trade with the EU is still growing, but trade with other countries is growing faster.

(The trend was bucked in 2019, when the share rose to 46%, which is why they bit their tongues on this one for a while.)

So, not exactly a precipitous decline, but if trade with the EU as a proportion of overall trade is shrinking, shouldn’t we be a little worried?

Well, no, for two reasons.

First, trade outside the EU has increased precisely because of EU trade agreements with other countries and blocs, such as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Canada, Mercosur and South Korea. In other words, trade with the EU has (proportionally) fallen because of trade through the EU. (For the benefit of those who have been living under a rock for five years, the UK will cease to be a signatory to all those deals as well as its EU agreements from January 1 2021. Sure, we might renegotiate some after exit, but there’s no guarantee of that, and even if we succeed, they’ll almost certainly be on less favourable terms, as the UK now has a lot less negotiating clout than it did as part of a bloc of 510 million people.)

Second, the countries with which the UK’s trade is growing more quickly are on the whole much smaller; they are developing countries. Trade with developed nations, and with nations with which trade relations are already well established – such as those in the EU – is never going to grow particularly fast, because it’s all grown up already.

Let’s take, as a hypothetical example, the nation of Arsendia. If you were to tell me that trade with Arsendia had increased by 1,000% over the past year, while trade with the EU 27 had grown by only 0.2%, I’d think, “Whoa! Maybe Arsendia is the future!” But if I then discovered the somewhat relevant supplementary information that trade with Arsendia this year was worth £110, compared with £10 in 2018-19, while the value of trade with the EU stood at £668bn, I might come to a slightly different conclusion.

To take a real-world example often cited by Brexiters, over the last 20 years, trade with Commonwealth nations has increased by a factor of more than three.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the value of UK trade with EU countries has merely doubled.

But now look at the absolute figures. Exports to the EU in 2019 were worth £300bn (43% of the UK total), and imports from it £372bn (51%). Meanwhile, UK exports to all the Commonwealth nations combined in 2019 were worth £65.2bn, while imports from those countries had a total value of £64.5bn. That’s less than a fifth of the EU total.

Again, pretty much what you’d expect when countries tend to do most of their trade with their neighbours, and most Commonwealth countries are half the fucking world away.

Adversely comparing the rate of growth of trade with established trade partners with the rate of growth of trade with tiny, brand-new buddies is the equivalent of a father taking a tape measure to his 18-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, then saying, “Sorry, Kev, but Lisa’s grown three inches this year and you’ve barely sprouted at all, so I’m afraid she gets all the attention now.”

This is a common statistical misapprehension called the base rate fallacy, or ignoring the baseline. Expect it to make a reappearance, as it is one of the populists’ favourite subterfuges.

(The United States’ share of global GDP is declining for the exact same reason – less developed nations are eating up the pie because they have more scope to expand quickly – but you won’t find any of the Brexit zealots shouting about that.)

Let’s try to boil this down into something so simple that even the average Tory MP can understand it. Trade with the EU is growing. Trade with some other, much smaller countries is growing a little faster, because they have more capacity for growth, but that’s unlikely to continue for long. The EU, the UK’s closest neighbour, is, and will always remain, the UK’s most important trading partner.

A recurring theme of these posts is going to be: whenever you see pat statistical statements like Dickinson’s, by politician or commentator or journalist, they are not giving you the full picture. It’s not necessarily their fault – there isn’t enough space. But the space shortage gives them an excuse to Instagram the data; to present only the facets of the information that best supports their agenda.

For a full understanding of the situation, you need to a) read beyond the headline or tweet, and ideally trace the source of the data; b) do further research, or at least read some rebuttals; and if neither of those is possible, c) ask questions. In the particular case of “Trade with the EU is declining’”, the relevant questions would be: “What level is it declining from?”, “How fast?”, and “Is this trend likely to continue?”

As we’ll see time and again in the coming posts, without the proper context, numerical information is useless. However great the emotional impact on you, you must not draw any conclusions until you see the wider picture. If you can’t overcome your fear of numbers, you must at least stop meekly accepting them.

Next time: let’s fund the NHS instead!

The 3M test: how to upgrade your bullshit detector

Graphic: bullshit meter

In the time of coronavirus, the ability to tell good info from bad is more vital than ever. How do you sort the gold from the garbage?

Graphic: bullshit meter

Minds greater than mine have been grappling with the reasons for society’s gaping divisions for years. Convincing cases have been made for the role of shorter attention spans, echo chambers, smaller families and spoiled kids and “me” culture, inequality, consumerism, the rise of lowest-common-denominator infotainment at the expense of grown-up news.

But from my perspective – a language graduate who has spent 30 years working in media and communications – the main problem is bullshit.

As individual, ephemeral human beings, we can’t possibly find out all the information we need at first hand. We have to rely on input from other sources: parents, teachers, friends, newspapers, TV, social media. But a lot of that input is contradictory. Some sources are clearly more reliable than others. In the time of coronavirus, the ability to tell good info from bad is more vital than ever. So how do you sort the gold from the garbage?

NBC report: 5G mobile phone masts set on fire amid bogus coronavirus theories
Not content with waging economic warfare on innocent civilians, Putin’s goons have now upgraded to biological warfare.

In the SnapChattin’, TikTokin’, Lyftin’, Zoomin’, Zooskin’ 21st century, whenever we come across a piece of new information, we tend to respond in one of two ways: automatic belief (“Yeah, that sounds about right, retweet”) and automatic disbelief (“Bollocks, obviously biased/brainwashed/stupid, block”).

That’s your system 1 brain – your primeval, emotional, semi-automatic brain – barging to the front and bellowing, “Don’t panic, everyone, I’ve got this, piece of piss,” when you should, it hasn’t and it isn’t. New information is precisely what your system 1 brain sucks at.

If you want to navigate your way through the morass of conflicting input, you’ve got to cast off this binary good/bad mindset, and prod your system 2 brain into activating a process called scepticism.

Scepticism (from Greek skepsis, “inquiry, doubt”) involves suspending your belief and disbelief and looking at things neutrally. (That’s as distinct from cynicism, which is closer to the wholesale rejection of everything.) Scepticism means checking, comparing, investigating – essentially, asking questions. And the questions you need to be asking when you encounter new information you find fall into three categories: medium, message, and marketplace.

Medium (the source, or context)

Believe it or not, there was a time not so long ago when most media, and even most politicians, could broadly be trusted. They might screw up; they might have vague ideological leanings one way or another. But they’d rarely blatantly tell you, with a straight face, that black was white or up was down.

Then the cutthroat chase for advertising revenue and votes and clicks began, leading to a rapid erosion of standards. Formerly august news organs gave us the Hitler diaries, the Sun’s reporting of the Hillsborough disaster, phone hacking and the fake Abu Ghraib torture photos, and trust in the “mainstream media” withered away. At the same time, ever larger numbers of news organisations fell into the hands of unscrupulous, openly partisan kleptocrats, who whittled the concept of editorial independence to the bone.

Paradoxically, this paved the way for even more unreliable purveyors of “news” – thinly disguised state-sponsored propaganda outlets, contrarian tweeters and YouTube demagogues – who snapped the bone clean in two. Accountable to no watchdog, bound by no editorial code, subject to no scrutiny, untouchable by law, never compelled to publish corrections or give right of reply, they used the shield of “free speech” to publish what they goddamn pleased. The increasingly erratic, sometimes biased, but still mostly principled news organisations had been abandoned in favour of shamelessly partisan hucksters.

In theory, it’s wrong to dismiss information purely on the basis of its source. That’s the crux of the ad hominem fallacy: it’s logically unsound to state that someone’s character or history has any bearing on the value of what they say. Just because Tony Blair says two plus two equals four, doesn’t mean the real answer is nine.

But in practice, we don’t have the means to verify every assertion. And some individuals and organisations have such abysmal track records with the truth, and such transparent agendas, that it is now not just permissible but a damn good idea to inspect the messenger as carefully as the message.

So the first thing you should do when you come across new information is check where that information came from. If it’s an article, find out who owns the newspaper or website. Are they widely trusted? Do they have a clear political agenda? Is all or most of their output devoted to a narrow range of subjects? (How can anyone who stumbles across one of those cesspit Twitter accounts that consist of nothing but retweets of negative stories, real and fabricated, about Muslims, really think they’re curated in good faith?)

If you’re looking at a post on a random social media account, check the author’s bio. Does it seem authentic? Does it mention where the story came from – the original source (the urtext)? If not, place it firmly in the holding category labelled “DODGY AF”. In the absence of verification, a news “story” is just that: a fable.

If you can find the ultimate source, ask the same questions you would of a news organ. How long has the platform been around? Is it approvingly cited by other respected media outlets?

Now do your due diligence on the writer, if one is credited. What else has this person written? Do they have any experience of or expertise in the field they are writing about? What are their credentials other than a glib turn of phrase and a cool byline pic?

Reminder: columnists are commentators. Radio shock jocks are commentators. Vox-popped pensioners in seaside towns who voted for Brexit are commentators. Representatives of thinktanks are commentators. Populist politicians, because they listen only to the advice they want to hear, from the lickspittles they surround themselves with, are no better than commentators. And commentators are not experts. They might have a way with words, but they have no such dominion over facts; they deal in opinions, and those opinions are often based solely on what sounds or feels good.

If we’re talking about an epidemic, I want to be hearing from epidemiologists. If we’re talking about international trade, I want to be hearing from economists. Not from failed fucking fashion students.

If you can’t quickly establish the identity, background and financing of a source, then suspect (but don’t assume) the worst. No reputable media organisation has any reason to withhold where their money comes from – if you’re acting on behalf of private interests, then you’re not acting in the public interest – and most journalists would happily take credit for a fart at a funeral.

Lastly, is your source Donald Trump? Well, if you’ve decided to give the slightest credence to that 50-faced, triple-chinned, flint-hearted, atom-brained, snake-tongued, gossamer-skinned, matchstick-spined, lily-livered, mushroom-cocked lardass, then the chances you’re reading this – or indeed anything – are infinitesimal; but in that vanishingly unlikely event, know this: Trump’s mis- and disinformation has already killed people, and may yet kill tens of thousands more.

Message (the story, or text)

The focus of your inquiry, of course, should be on the information itself. Putting the content aside for a moment, you can garner some clues from the presentation. Is this a polished, professional product, or does it feel … tossed off somehow?

Are the spelling and grammar of a high standard? (Again, it’s a mistake to write something off solely because of a stray “your” for “you’re”, but if someone is sloppy with something as simple as an apostrophe, it does raise a question mark over the accuracy of their statements.)

Is the tweet or article or passage of speech delivered clearly, accurately and succinctly, with specifics rather than generalisations? Are the words all used in their correct senses?

Is the use of language fresh and original, or cluttered with clichés and buzzwords? Is the meaning clear and unambiguous? Does the author or speaker illustrate their point with relevant examples? Does the piece contain any obvious inaccuracies, or things you know or suspect to be untrue? Is it internally consistent?

If the author uses statistics, are they sound? (I know it’s hard for those without the appropriate background to rigorously examine any particular numerical claim. And unfortunately, since even most trained journalists and interviewers don’t know their bell curves from their bell-ends, they’re not often a great help either. My next post will deal with a few of the most common abuses of statistics.)

Have any of the people mentioned been approached to give their side of events (this is regarded as good practice by traditional news outlets)? Have any dissenting voices been quoted? Has the background to the developments been fully expounded?

If there are any pictures or video accompanying the story, are they attributed to anyone? (Photographers and filmmakers, even amateur ones, are no shier about taking credit for their work than writers.) Has this picture or video been used elsewhere, and if so, are there any differences between the two versions? If not, has it independently been verified as authentic?

Yep, they tried to claim that Obama was a Black Panther.

Now look more closely at the language used. Is the piece relatively free of adjectives, adverbs and otherwise emotionally loaded words? It is a reporter’s job to tell readers what has happened, not what opinion to have on what has happened; they’re reporters, after all, not explainers or influencers. When someone is introduced as “terrorist sympathiser Jeremy Corbyn”, you can be fairly sure you’re not listening to a neutral voice.

Good news organisations take great care to draw a thick line between objective news reporting and subjective interpretations of the news. Opinion pieces are clearly badged as such, and published in a separate section of the paper or website.

But bad practice is proliferating, and more and more media outlets, particularly those under the control of moguls, are beginning to see as their duty as being not to inform, but to influence. They, the openly partisan “news” operations funded by God knows who and self-appointed champions of truth like Tommy Robinson and Paul Joseph Watson have abandoned all pretence of balance and neutrality.

Good news reporting is not fun or edgy or stylish or provocative; it is dry. Functional. Dull, even. The text should have no subtext. Scroll to the end for some recent examples.

If you don’t have time to go through this rigmarole every time you come across new information – and let’s face it, you don’t – one little short cut will often point you in the right direction. Read the story, and re-read the headline. Now do your best to consider this objectively: does the headline accurately reflect the content of the story?

Once upon a time, headlines had a single purpose: to pithily summarise the words beneath it. But as the media ecosystem became more competitive, headlines evolved. Accuracy was no longer enough; they had to be quirky, grabby, funky. The Sun enjoyed some success for a while by crowbarring in terrible puns (but trust me, guys, that era is long past). Meanwhile, the Mail (and all newspapers, to some extent) got round the problem by stretching, or sometimes breaking, the truth. Take this gem from last August.

If you read the article, the reasons for the billionaires’ departure are, in fact, purely the opinion of a single lawyer – and her exact words are, “Brexit uncertainty is driving out many of the wealthiest non-doms … The prospect of a Labour government is also very unappealing to high net worth people.” So Corbyn isn’t even mentioned, and fears about Labour (in the opinion of this solitary lawyer) are only a secondary factor in capital flight. The headline grossly misrepresents the article, to the benefit of the Mail’s anti-left agenda.

Much as I hate to be even glancingly fair to the chuntering ninnyhammer that is Daniel Hannan, his recent wankpiece for ConservativeHome, headlined “Alarmism, doom-mongering, panic – and the coronavirus. We are nowhere near a 1919-style catastrophe”, wasn’t quite as irresponsible as it first seemed. The text actually reads, “You’re unlikely to die of coronavirus,” which is quite true – if perhaps not the most useful message to be sending to society at this time.

But to return to being deservedly harsh on the chuntering ninnyhammer that is Daniel Hannan, he then chose to tweet the following link to his own story, with a headline of his own devising that said something completely different, purely in the interest of harvesting more clicks. Instead he harvested widespread vilification, and deleted the tweet.

Just before the 2016 EU referendum, InFacts did a round-up of the most misleading stories on the issue published in the rightwing press. In most of the cases, the offence involved not an outright untruth, but a duplicitous headline.

But the last word in headline shenanigans goes to this Express story from 2016, to which I dedicated an entire post (and for which trouble I was threatened with legal action). Accurate headlines are more important today than they’ve ever been because much of the time, people simply don’t read any further – and even when they do, the headline is what they take away with them.

One more little thing to look out for: if what you’re reading is online, has the author provided any external links to something that might corroborate it? If someone believes their information is legit, they’ll be happy to share their source. (It should go without saying that links to opaque websites with clear political agendas don’t count.)

The marketplace (the metatext)

So, you’ve carried out a full background check on the potato salesman. You’ve examined his potatoes. Now you need to check to see what other consumers are saying about his potatoes, and how rival tradesmen’s potatoes compare.

First, look to your fellow spud seekers. What rating have people given the merchant on ChipAdvisor? If it’s a tweet, what are people saying in the replies? If it’s an online article, what are they saying in the comments underneath? If it’s an interview, did the interviewer challenge the remark, or ask any follow-up questions?

One-word responses can be safely ignored. “Bollocks”, “Nonsense”, “Twat”: that’s just the opposing side’s system 1 brigade reflexively rubbishing the point because it threatens their world-view. Pay no more heed to those trying to dismiss the article with reference to the platform or writer. “Typical Remoaner”, “You expect me to believe something published in the Guardian?!!”, etc.

The comments worth considering are the detailed, level-headed, rational ones: people pointing out factual errors, highlighting contradictory evidence, logical flaws, providing relevant context. Pay special attention to those who can actually back up their points with evidence from a reputable third-party source. Do these responses, individually or collectively, cast any doubt on any of the claims in the original article or post?

Now consider the rival salesmen. If there’s any substance to a story, then the chances are, other individuals or news outlets will have picked up on it. So hunt down some other versions. (Word for word repetitions don’t count. What you’ve found there is not a separate source, but one source copying a second one, or two sources copying a third, which suggests an orchestrated propaganda campaign rather than an independently verified scoop.)

Now, how reliable is this source? Is its information usually of high quality? Once you’re satisfied that it has no connection with the first source and upholds basic journalistic standards, compare the two takes. Do any of the details in the new version contradict any of those in the first? Does it omit any details, provide any additional context, or interpret them differently? Why might that be?

Let me stress: none of these red flags, in and of itself, is sufficient reason to dismiss any piece of information outright. But each one should push the needle on your bullshit-meter further to the right.

I know this seems like an awful lot of work do to just to establish some approximation of the truth; but the truth is under attack as never before, and it’s the only weapon we have short of actual weapons against the dark forces of illiberalism and authoritarianism. And while Finland’s response to fake news has been to launch a nationwide campaign to educate and protect its citizens, their British counterparts have instead chosen to become its most prolific purveyors.

The task of saving democracy falls to you and you alone.

Starmer chameleon

Now let’s put those principles into practice and examine the different approaches of various media outlets to the same news item. On the day I went out to mass-buy the papers, April 4th, one of the main non-coronavirus stories was the news that Keir Starmer was poised to win the Labour leadership election.

Guardian: Keir Starmer poised to be announced new Labour leader

(900 words, page 27 of 35 news pages)
Thrust of story: Starmer likely to win, Corbyn supporters fear they will be purged
Introduced as: Keir Starmer
Referred to subsequently as: Former director of public prosecutions, shadow Brexit secretary
Background/context: Age (57), election defeat, antisemitism inquiry, forthcoming NEC elections, efforts to unify party wings, likely shadow ministerial appointments
Other people cited: Unnamed allies of Starmer, unnamed allies of Corbyn, one former Corbyn aide, Tulip Siddiq, associate of Rebecca Long-Bailey
Subjectivity: “Devastating 80-seat defeat to Boris Johnson”
Errors: “After … an ongoing inquiry”, incorrect dashes, “Starmer’s had successfully targeted”
Bullshit factor: 2

Daily Mail: Sir Keir and a question of cowardice

(2,700 words, p32/45; badged as “special investigation”)
Thrust: Starmer has not done enough to combat antisemitism in the Labour party, according to several conversations with unnamed party sources and a cursory analysis of 340 online articles
Introduced as: Party figure more moderate than Jeremy Corbyn
Referred to subsequently as: Shadow Brexit secretary, hot favourite to succeed Corbyn, Sir Keir, QC and former DPP
Background/context: Starmer’s Jewish family, leadership candidates’ records on condemning antisemitism, first elected to parliament in 2015
Other people cited: Unnamed sources in Jewish community and on far left of party, “a friend of a rabbi”, “a source”, “a source at the Jewish Chronicle”, “another Jewish former Labour politician”, “one former Labour MP”, “prominent members of the Jewish community”, “a friend of Luciana Berger”, “one of Starmer’s former colleagues”. In an article 2,700 words long, consisting mostly of quotations, not a single source is named
Subjectivity: “Cowardice”, “troubling issue”, “Sir Keir’s surprise promotion of his previously discreet Jewish ties”, “desperate for leadership votes”, “deeply disillusioned Jewish membership”, “cosy interviews”, “hardly gladiatorial tone”; “these mild critiques”; “sympathetic interview”, “Left-leaning New Statesman magazine”, “previously shrouded Jewish ties”, “Sir Keir replies, no doubt sadly”, “habitual fence-sitting”
Errors: Incorrect punctuation around speech; missing quotation mark; missing final full stop
Bullshit factor: 8/10

Sun: Labour’s Keir and present danger

(p24/36 news/celebrity gossip pages, 230 words)
Thrust: Corbyn will cause trouble from back benches
Introduced as: Millionaire barrister Keir Starmer
Referred to subsequently as: Former chief prosecutor
Background/context: Age; a podium has been sent to Starmer’s house so that he can practise his acceptance speech
Other sources cited: “A source”, Jeremy Corbyn’s Facebook page
Subjectivity: “Bitterly divided party”; “Marxist policies”
Errors: “While we exist on lockdown”, “bitterly-divided”, stray full stop
Bullshit factor: 7/10, plus a bonus 1 for that godawful must-pun-at-all-costs headline

Times: Labour’s women will rise again under Sir Keir

(p18/31, 400 words)
Thrust: Several MPs who were overlooked or declined to serve under Corbyn are likely to be called to the shadow cabinet
Introduced as: Sir Keir Starmer
Referred to subsequently as: Sir Keir, exclusively
Background/context: Shadow cabinet will not meet in person until social distancing rules relaxed; Corbyn allies will be discarded
Other people cited: Lord Wood of Anfield. Lots of speculation couched in terms of “X might/could/is expected to …”
Subjectivity: Article is basically all guesswork
Errors: None
Bullshit factor: A surprising 3/10

Telegraph: Corbyn plans ‘farewell tour’ as Starmer takes reins

(p16/20, 400 words)
Thrust: Corbyn may become Tony Benn-style thorn in Starmer’s side
Introduced as: Sir Keir Starmer
Referred to subsequently as: Sir Keir, former director of public prosecutions
Background/context: Starmer’s efforts to rebuild relations with marginalised elements of party; rebellious tendencies of Benn and Corbyn
Other people cited: Corbyn, “close ally of Angela Rayner”, “one insider”
Subjectivity: Purports to know Starmer’s vision for party; idea of “farewell tour” appears to be invention of reporter
Errors: Double “as” in opening sentence
Bullshit factor: 4/10

Tweet: Kier Starmer is a charmless posh sod

(31 words)
Thrust: Keir Starmer is a charmless posh sod
Introduced as: Sir Kier Starmer QC
Background/context: Former director of public prosecutions
Other people cited: None
Subjectivity: All of it
Errors: Can’t even spell the guy’s fucking name right
Bullshit factor: 10/10

Apples and oranges: how bad metaphors mess with your mind

Some apples and oranges

The far right’s awful analogies helped swing Brexit – and now they may threaten your life

“Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician” – Winston Churchill

For too long, too many people have been listening to populists: know-nothing blatherskites offering simple solutions to complex problems. As a result, the UK has left the EU, nutsacking the economy and the opportunities of the young and triggering a massive rise in racial and class hatred; Jair Bolsonaro has laid waste to the Amazon rainforest; and Americans have elected an incompetent, incontinent, incoherent pussy-grabbing golf cheat as president.

How did the far right achieve this coup? With lies, mostly; but blatant lies most people can see through. Subtler tinkerings with the truth are far more effective.

In 1987, the French scholar Françoise Thom wrote an essay describing the Newspeak-style “wooden language” that the totalitarian regime of Soviet Russia used to fob off, confuse and pacify its citizens. (Orwell’s Newspeak was based on a similar idea of language as an instrument of control.) She identified four main characteristics:

  • use of abstract terms over concrete – attractive-sounding but empty slogans (think “Brexit means Brexit”, “Global Britain”, “Take back control”, “Get Brexit done”, “levelling up”), and vague terms like “sovereignty” and “democracy” and “freedom” that sound great but signifiy nothing;
  • Manichaeism – nuance-free, black and white thinking that paints everything as a battle between right and wrong, good and evil: “You’re either with us or against us”, “Enemies of the people”, “You lost, get over it”, “Get behind Brexit”;
  • tautology – repetition of the same idea: “20,000 police officers”, “40 hospitals”, most of the above catchphrases;
  • bad metaphors.

Since the first three are all pretty self-explanatory, it’s the last one I want to look at.

You may recall learning about similes and metaphors in English lessons. Quick refresher: a simile is a figure of speech that compares one object to another using the words “like” or “as”; a metaphor does the same thing, but by saying the two things are one and the same. So “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile, while “Love is a battlefield” is a metaphor.

(While, strictly speaking, similes, metaphors and analogies are different things, their difference is largely in form, not function, so I’ll be using the terms more or less interchangeably.)

But it turns out metaphors aren’t just for Robert Burns and Pat Benatar. They underpin the very way we think, and if misused, can actually change what we think. A bold claim, I know. Bear with me.

Why do we use metaphors? In 99.9% of cases, they’re an explanatory tool. Metaphors tend to describe something that is less familiar to the listener in terms of something that is more familiar. The unfamiliar quantity – what psychologist Julian Jaynes (pdf) called a metaphrand, but which is now usually referred to as the target – might be an abstract concept (say, love), a complicated or disputed thing (the EU), or a brand-new thing (like coronavirus). The familiar quantity – the metaphier, or source – will generally be something concrete, which we regularly encounter in everyday life: a rose, a football match, influenza. So in “Love is a battlefield”, “love” is the target, the unfamiliar thing, and “battlefield” is the source.

The point is, we can easily summon a mental picture of battlefields and roses and football matches, and most people have some experience of the flu. We have much more trouble visualising abstract, complex and new things, like love, the EU and coronavirus, so people naturally turn to analogies to demystify them. The catch is that some metaphors do not work as advertised.

Two things determine the quality of a metaphor: the accuracy of the comparison, and its richness – the number of ways in which the things resemble each other. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” is a good metaphor because there are parallels galore between the stage and everyday life (not that surprising when you consider the stage was created as a representation of the world). Bill explores some of them himself: men and women are like actors, playing roles rather than living out their desires; they enter life, and they leave it, just as actors enter and exit the stage; the various phases of life are a bit like the acts of a play.

If, on the other hand, you’d never heard of sulphuric acid, and I explain it to you by telling you it’s a bit like water, you’ll be justifiably mad at me after you drink it (and survive). Ditto if you encounter your first snake, and I say, “Don’t worry, it’s just a big worm.” Bad metaphors can bite.

If anything ever called for a judicious analogy, it was Brexit. Few people – myself included – understood the full detail of how the EU worked, what the benefits of membership were, what the trade-offs were between sovereignty and trade and geopolitical harmony, and how integrated the UK was in EU supply chains. The far right was quick to fill this gap; two of their metaphors have framed much of the Brexit debate.

1. Oppression/confinement/freedom

“EU dictatorship.” “EU shackles.” “Take back control!”

2. Sport/war

“You lost, get over it.” “You just want a replay until you get the result you want.”

Daniel Hannan quote-tweeting Gary Lineker: "If every football match were replayed until you got a result you liked, England would romp home"

These are superficially powerful lines, which conjure vivid images and cut straight to our sense of self. But as soon as you interrogate them in any detail, they fall apart.

In what respects does the EU resemble a dictatorship? Well … it does take some decisions on its members’ behalf; but it consults its members on those decisions. Members vote on all laws and can veto them. And oftentimes, those members ignore the decisions without sanction.

There are no votes in a dictatorship. They’re run by self-appointed tyrants who tend to reign for life, and they’re characterised by the use of force, propaganda, and an intolerance of opposition and independent media. Dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. And crucially, no one is free to leave a dictatorship.

None of these things apply to the EU, and yet the Brexit gibberlings would have you believe that Guy Verhofstadt is Hitler reincarnated. The propagandists tried to persuade us that the worm was a snake, and a lot of us swallowed it.

Now, in what respects did the EU referendum resemble a football match? A few simple follow-up questions – “What have you won? What have I lost that you haven’t lost too?” “What role did you play in this glorious victory?” “Where do the people who voted leave but have since change their minds fit in, and the handful of remainers who have swung the other way? Are they winners, or losers?” “If your team gets beaten by another one, do you suddenly give up on your team and start supporting the other side?” – expose this comparison as equally flimsy.

When remainers pointed out the possible pitfalls of Brexit, the populists pooped out yet another crap analogy. “Millennium bug!” they chirped. “People issued dire warnings about that, and nothing happened!” Yes, it’s true that then, as now, some people prophesied doom. But that’s literally the only parallel between the two situations. The actors were different, the conditions were different, the entire realm of knowledge was different, the problem was different, and the solutions were different. And crucially, in the case of Y2K, steps were taken to mitigate its effects, without which catastrophe might well have struck.

John Redwood blog comparing Brexit concerns to Millennium bug

(It’s not just the far right that is guilty of this; the populist, pro-Brexit far left also seems to have a predilection for teeth-grindingly terrible comparisons.)

Paul Embery: crap analogy about Labour and shopping
Rachel Swindon: terrible analogy about Corbyn and football

Remainers did hit back with some counter-metaphors – membership of the EU is more like belonging to a golf club, they said: if you stop paying your dues, you no longer get to play on the course or drink in the bar. But it was all too feeble, too late. The right’s shit metaphors had forced their way into enough people’s heads, put down roots, and become unassailable truths.

And as if that wasn’t enough for them, the populist demagogues and disinformants, emboldened by their Brexit “success”, continued to wheel out their cack-handed comparisons in response to the coronavirus.

Hodges tweet: if a mad passenger tried to take over a plane because he didn't trust the pilot, would you help?

Mail on Sunday dross geyser Dan Hodges can’t help himself; he genuinely seems to consider himself a maven of metaphor, the Svengali of simile.

Dan Hodges: coronavirus strategy = football strategy
Football comes up a lot, doesn’t it. Wonder why?

But in their perpetual, desperate quests for attention and relevance, Trump and Brexit party banshee Ann Widdecombe had to go one further.

Trump: coronavirus is no worse than flu (March 9th 2020)
Widdecombe: coronavirus will be like Aids - not as devastating as feared

Covid-19 and influenza are both contagious respiratory illnesses caused by a virus, but that’s as far as the similarities go. The symptoms are different, the infection rates are different, the morbidity rates are different, and the treatments are different. The viruses aren’t even part of the same family.

As for the Aids comparison, where to begin? Aids isn’t even a goddamn virus (it’s the final, often fatal stage of the illness caused by HIV).

Graphic comparing stats/characteristics of flu, Covid-19, Sars and Mers

Trump and Widdecombe’s offhand disinformation goes beyond simple irresponsibility and borders on criminal negligence. Hard though it is to credit, there are people out there who have faith in their wisdom, and they’re repaying their fans by putting their lives in grave danger. (The Express presumably figured this out eventually, or caved in after massive outcry, as it took the Widdecombe column down, which is why I could only screenshot the New European’s response.)

They’ve been at it in America for a while, of course. Anyone who has politely suggested to a gun nut that US gun laws might be a tad on the lax side will be familiar with this retort: “Well, cars kill people too, and no one talks about banning them!”

The problem with this analogy, once again, is that it is fucking shit. Cars are not expressly designed to kill people. Their primary purpose – conveying people and goods from place to place quickly and efficiently – is so damned useful that society has reluctantly decided tolerate the occasional accidental death. Besides, driving is subject to all sorts of rules and regulations. You can’t drive under a certain age, you can’t drive drunk, and you have to obey speed limits and the rules of the road.

“Hold your horses, Bodle – aren’t you getting your panties in a bunch over what are, at the end of the day, just words?” you cry, mixing three metaphors.

But as Hitler and Goebbels knew, as Orwell knew, as the Russian security services and Cambridge Analytica have long known and as others are finally slowly realising, words matter. In an ever more compartmentalised and specialised world, we’ve become unprecedentedly reliant on others for information. On matters we haven’t personally mastered, we have to trust someone. And terrifyingly, a large swath of the population has stopped trusting experts and instead turned to populists and their sloppy, misleading, and often downright dangerous metaphors.

Why am I so concerned about metaphors in particular? Because they’re sneaky. When you encounter a fresh metaphor, it brings you up short. “That’s odd,” thinks your brain. “Not seen that before,” and you take a closer look. If I say, “British shoppers in 2020 are locusts,” you’ll probably spend a couple of seconds weighing it up before deciding whether or not you agree.

If enough people agree with a metaphor, it might catch on, and pass into wider use. So when you read “The elephant in the room” (a metaphorical phrase that dates to the 1950s) or “Take a chill pill” (early 1980s), it’s familiar enough that it no longer has the same jarring effect – you don’t for a second imagine that anyone’s talking about a real pachyderm squatting in your lounge – but still novel enough that you are aware of its metaphorical origin. Now it has become a cliche; if it’s lucky, it might even get promoted to idiom. And when idioms stick around for long enough, a further stage of evolution occurs, and they become part of everyday speech.

The language of abstract relationships – marriages, friendships, etc – almost exclusively borrows the vocabulary of physical relationships. So we talk about the ties between people, breaking up with someone, being close to someone and growing apart. We talk about grasping an idea and beating an opponent and closing a deal. You’ve probably rarely, if ever, reflected on the metaphorical origins of these phrases when using them.

And if you talk about time in any meaningful sense, you will find yourself drawing on the lexicon of space. You simply can’t conceptualise it any other way. You go on a long trip. You were born in the 20th century. You look back on your youth. Time passes by.

Julian Jaynes’s theory – and I’ve never seen a better one – is that humans have a “mental space” (not a literal one, obviously), a sort of internal theatre, where we visualise things in order to make sense of them, and that without this spatialisation, we can’t properly think about things at all.

Metaphors are not just for bards and bellettrists – they’re part of everyday speech and thought. A huge number of words we use, especially those for abstract concepts, started life as metaphors, but have become so widely used that they have developed meanings of their own. Our dictionaries now contain hundreds of thousands of definitions that have separate entries for the literal and figurative meanings of words.

In fact, if you look up the etymology of any abstract concept you can think of, the chances are, it originated from a word or words for tangible things or everyday actions. The word “understand”, for example, derives from under- (Old English “among”, “close to”) and standan (stand). “Comprehend”, meanwhile, comes from con- (with) and prehendere, to gain hold of: to take within. “Money” can trace its family tree to Latin moneta (“a place where coins are made; a mint”), while the verb “to be” ultimately comes from the Sanskrit bhu, meaning “grow”, while the parts “am” and “is” come from a separate verb meaning “breathe”.

Metaphors, it turns out, are fundamental to our conception of the world. They play a massive role in shaping the way we think.

Suddenly, the populist far right’s strategy comes into focus. By putting out misleading metaphors like “EU dictatorship” and repeating them until blue in the face, they’re trying to normalise them. To make people forget that they are in fact just opinions, and mould them into self-evident truths.

(It turns out that there is a crucial difference between metaphors on the one hand and similes and analogies on the other. Similes and analogies are upfront about their intentions – they explicitly admit that they are comparisons, subjective judgements, up for dispute. Metaphors, meanwhile, brook no dissent.)

Never trust an analogy from a populist. How can they explain things to you when they’re totally unversed in the subject-matter? How can Ann Widdecombe possibly know how similar coronavirus is to Aids when even she would admit she knows nothing about either? Only recognised experts know the target domain (in this case, epidemiology) well enough to judge what source makes a good or bad metaphor. Populists just pull things out of thin air that feel right, regardless of their accuracy or utility. This is why popular science books are written by scientists, not populists, why popular economics books are written by economists, not populists, and so on.

“Understanding a thing,” according to Jaynes, “is arriving at a familiarising metaphor for it.” So if people are pushing duff metaphors on us, we’re going to misunderstand things – and as we’re seeing with Brexit, Trump, and especially coronavirus, the consequences of that can be grave.

What can you do about it? Well, the next time someone wheels one of these similes or metaphors or analogies, don’t let it pass. Ask them directly: in what respects is the EU like a dictatorship? When they inevitably fail to answer, point out the differences. Extend the analogy until it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Even if you can’t get through to them, you might just help prevent someone else who happens to be following the exchange from falling into the same deadly trap.

To finish on a more positive note, here’s how metaphors should be done. Kudos to @ptp335:

@ptp335: "Brexit is an underlying condition that none of the other nations has"

Fascipedia: your guide to calling out populist bullshit

Chinese propaganda poster

Resisters gonna resist. Remoaners gonna remoan. It’s called democracy.

Chinese propaganda poster
‘Memorise important statements and apply them repeatedly!’

1. “You hate democracy”

2. “But Remain lied too”

3. “World war three/recession/austerity budget”

4. “We’re leaving. Get over it”

5. “You lost. Suck it up”

6. “They need us more than we need them”

7. “But we’re getting our sovereignty back! We’re taking back control!”

8. “We managed just fine before the EU!”

9. “We’ll be free to trade with the world!”

10. “But look at what the EU has done to Greece!”

11. “Trade with the EU is declining!”

12. “Ask young people in Europe what they think of the EU!”

13. “The floods are all the EU’s fault!”

14. “But we only joined a trading union!”

15. “Have you got some sort of crystal ball?”

16. “Millennium bug!”

17. “Your patronising attitude is exactly why we voted out”

18. “I can’t be racist. Islam isn’t a race”

19. “I can’t be racist. I have a black friend”

20. “Liberals are all hypocrites”

21. “How many refugees have you taken in?”

22. “Everyone who disagrees with you is a fascist”

23. “Ha! ‘Tolerant liberals’!”/“Liberals are the real fascists”

24. “‘Racist!’ That’s the only argument you have”

25. “The Nazis were socialists”

26. “We voted leave to gain control over immigration”

27. “Immigrants are benefit scroungers”

28. “Immigrants are stealing all our jobs”

29. “Immigrants are driving down my wages”

30. “Immigrants put a strain on social services”

31. “Those Syrians aren’t refugees, they’re economic migrants”

32. “Why don’t the refugees stop in Saudi Arabia?”

33. “Why don’t they stop in Poland or Germany or France?”

34. “All the refugees from the Middle East are men of fighting age”

35. “Mohammed was a paedophile”

36. “Islam is a religion of hate”

37. “All Muslims are rapists/grooming gangs”

38. “Spirit cooking/Pizzagate”

39. “But Benghazi”

If you’ve taken part in enough online discussions with a diehard Brexiter, a Trump supporter or any other species of fascist, you may have noticed certain phrases cropping up with tedious regularity. The wording doesn’t vary much; it’s almost as if the phrases were lifted directly from a playbook – or a Paul Joseph Watson tweet.

The thing is, they’re all rubbish. While some of their lines are superficially valid, they’re all predicated on either on a logical fallacy, or false information. And even though most of these lines of reasoning have been demolished time and time again, there are still plenty of basement-dwellers smugly regurgitating them as if they’re the last word.

So for those of you still fighting the good fight, I thought I’d put together a handy reference guide – a liberal playbook, if you will – setting out exactly why the far right are wrong, on basically everything, and how you should respond.

“Stop trying to overturn the democratic result, you anti-democratic democracy-hater!”

Referendums are about the closest thing we have to true democracy – government by the people. However, the western world worked out long ago that true democracy is not a very effective system. For one thing, we don’t all have the time to be voting on every single issue. For another, people aren’t, on the whole, very well informed about things. This is why we have politicians; we need people who know their stuff, or can designate other people (the civil service) to find out about the stuff. That way, they can make what they think to be the right decision based on the best evidence available.

The belief that a view must be correct because the majority of people hold it is a fallacy called the argumentum ad populum, about which I’ve already written at length. In brief, crowds are not famed for their wisdom. You think a million people can’t be wrong? Well, there are 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and they sure as hell can’t all be right.

For this reason, the system of government we’ve ended up with in the west is not true democracy, but parliamentary democracy, under which the people appoint representatives (MPs) to make decisions on their behalf. And as systems of government go, it’s worked pretty well. Most of the world has tried to emulate it.

For much of its history, the UK has fought shy of referenda, for the exact reasons above. They’ve also been banned in Germany since Hitler used them to arrogate so much power to himself. Plebiscites violate the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.

In referendums on matters of great constitutional importance, a supermajority is usually required – a minimum turnout, and a minimum threshold for change (say 66%). This makes the result binding. But no such parameters were set for the Brexit vote – a simple majority only was required – which means it was only advisory. Someone (*cough* Steve Baker MP *cough*), somehow, lowered the bar for a Brexit vote, but then insisted that the result be imposed as if the bar had been higher.

That, plus a bit of gerrymandering – banning 16- and 17-year-olds from voting, plus EU citizens and UK expats (what was the criterion for eligibility? Residence, or nationality? How can you justify excluding people on both?) – was enough to drag Leave over the line.

As news emerges every day of further suspected tampering with the result – funding restrictions broken, illegal cooperation between campaign groups, Russia-sponsored disinformation campaigns, harvesting of data and microtargeting of voters – one has to ask: was this really democracy in action?

Democracy of any stripe only works when the decision-makers are properly informed. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the level of information going into the June 23 vote was risible. The Leave campaign was a snot-soaked tissue of lies, and far too many people swallowed it.

“But Remain lied too.”

The EU referendum campaign is likely to go down as one of the dirtiest of all time. But the hardcore Brexiters insist that, since both sides were as bad as each other, the Leavers can be excused their shameless lies.

First off, most of the Remain “lies” weren’t lies at all. Most were simply attempts to predict what would happen if the UK left the EU. Some may turn out to be inaccurate (although that looks increasingly unlikely), but that doesn’t make them lies; it makes them inaccurate predictions. Why would you even campaign for Remain if you didn’t believe the consequences would be awful?

Leave, meanwhile, were cynically and systematically mendacious, saying things they knew to be untrue. Turkey is not about to join. The EU didn’t ban bendy bananas. We don’t always get outvoted in the European parliament, and we sure as hell won’t have £350m a week to spend on the NHS. (There’s a more comprehensive, authoritative list here.)

“What happened to world war three? Instant recession? Austerity budget?”

Contrary to popular belief, David Cameron, almighty dickwad that he is, never claimed that a Brexit vote would lead to an apocalyptic global conflict. That was, in fact, Leave campaigner Boris Johnson, straw-manning Cameron’s much more reasonable point. (Don’t just read the headline – read the story. Idiot subeditors.) Although it’s salutary to note that within hours of questions arising over the sovereignty of Gibraltar, a former Tory cabinet minister was on a war footing.

Most of those who forecast a recession said it would happen after we left the EU, not the day after we voted to leave it. That prediction is looking increasingly safe.

As for the austerity budget, you may or may not have noticed that the man who threatened to impose it was sacked.

“We’re leaving! Get over it!”

The “There is no alternative” fallacy in action. As often as not, this is literally the only argument Brexiters have, and it’s not even an argument.

Of course Brexit can be stopped; if it couldn’t, your tone wouldn’t be so histrionic. There are a number of ongoing legal cases, and we might yet get a referendum on the exit deal with an option to remain. Even if we do leave, there’s nothing to stop us rejoining soon afterwards, and the demographics suggest that’s exactly what we’ll do.

YouGov poll

“You lost. Suck it up.”

If this is Brexit (or Trump) we’re talking about, and you’re not Arron Banks or Donald Trump or any of their billionaire friends, so did you. We’re all going to be poorer, many of the brightest and best minds are already leaving or cancell
ing plans to work here
, and the UK and US’s global reputations have taken a hammering from which they could take decades to recover.

So, as long as there’s any prospect of Brexit being reversed and Trump being impeached, or at least of the damage being reduced, that’s what all true patriots – those who stay, anyway – are going to continue to fight for. Resisters gonna resist. Remoaners gonna remoan. It’s called democracy.

Besides, the ardent Brexiters didn’t shut up for the 40 years of our EU membership, and arch Republicans bitched about Obama from day one. Why should the losers this time round conduct themselves any differently?

“Now we’ll be free to trade with the world!”

We are already free to trade with the world. Who do you think accounts for the other 56% of our exports?

“They need us more than we need them.”

I find it hard to believe that there are still people out there still regurgitating this bilge, but apparently there are –

Dumbass tweet

– so here goes:

The UK exports around £240bn worth of goods to the EU every year. The other EU member states, meanwhile, export £290bn  of goods to the UK (2015 figures).

This means the UK has what economists call a trade deficit with the EU (of £50bn). We buy from them more than they buy from us. And Ray, along with a few others of Leave’s clueless wang elite, seems to conclude from this (after some nudging by the Daily Express) that the EU has too much to lose to permit trade barriers to spring up.

True, the loss of our custom would be an annoyance to the continentals, and doubtless they would rather avoid it. But however glorious our empire may once have been, Ray, we are far from essential.

See, it’s not the absolute figures that matter, here, Ray; it’s the relative ones. The £240bn works out at 44% of the UK’s total exports. The £290bn, meanwhile, is just 10% of the EU’s total. Who’s going to suffer more if trade ceases, Ray? The country that just lost half its trade, or the 27 countries that lost a tenth of theirs? (Especially when you consider that they have dozens of pre-existing free trade agreements in place with which they can replace our custom, while we will have none, and that much of our services industry is relocating to EU countries as we speak. Come Brexit Day, our exports will already be significantly lower.)

Let’s run with an analogy you might understand, Ray. Say you join a club with 27 members, bringing the total to 28. The time comes for the whip-round for the Christmas do. The other 27 members put in £3-£4 each, raising a total of £100. When the hat reaches you, what amount do you put in? By your bizarre reasoning, because “you” and “everyone else” are somehow equivalent entities, you’d put in £100.

The UK and the EU are not equivalent entities, Ray. The population of the UK is 64 million people. The population of the 27 other EU states is 444 million. They can spread the pain more thinly. A cessation in trade between us would damage the EU, but it would crucify the UK.

Oh, and while I’m here: the German automotive industry, despite what the Express may have told you, does not even set German foreign policy, much less that of the EU. Here’s evidence, from the, er, Express.

Besides, if businesses really have so much political clout, how come the UK voted to leave despite the fact that twice as many British businesses were in favour of remaining in the EU as against it?

“We’re taking back control from the EU dictatorship! SOVRINNTYYYY!”

The UK was never a subject of the European Union. It was a fully fledged member – and among the most influential of them, to boot.

The UK had a hand in drawing up most EU legislation, and a power of veto over the stuff it didn’t like. We were very rarely on the losing side of a vote, and we always had the threat of leaving as a last resort. (Now that we’ve played that card and are on our way out, we no longer have any such clout.) It wasn’t about 27 other countries telling the UK what to do; it was about 28 countries deciding together what to do, and then abiding by that decision.

In any case, the legislation passed by the EU was generally trivial, technical stuff. Laws about industry regulations, manufacturing standards, safety protocols, environmental targets. Little of it was controversial (unless you were a Daily Mail leader writer); it was oil for the wheels of commerce. We’ll still need to pass equivalent laws in our own country – by ourselves. Now we’ll be footing the bill for that (this work accounted for a lot of our annual membership fee).

In no real sense is anyone in the UK “taking back control”. We’re simply taking it from one set of faceless bureaucrats (the EU commission and parliament) and handing it to another (Westminster – to all intents and purposes, the Tory party). And of those two sets of bureaucrats, I know which I believe has the interests of ordinary working people closer to their heart.

“But look at what the EU has done to Greece!”

Greece’s financial problems date back to long before its membership of the euro. Its economy was in poor shape when it joined the then European Community in 1981, a fact that successive governments went to great pains to conceal. Structurally weak and plagued by corruption and waste,  it would have tanked during the economic crash of 2008 whether it had been in the EU or not. Things may not have been managed as well as possible since, but the fact remains that Greece would be in just as much financial trouble, if not more, if it had stayed outside the EU.

In any case, Greece’s fate is irrelevant to any discussion about the UK’s place in Europe. The UK has not adopted the euro, has a stronger economy, and was much better placed to ride out the recession, as a quick glance at any statistics will tell you. While Greece has record youth unemployment, the UK is currently enjoying its highest employment levels ever.

Finally, if the EU really has made things so bad in Greece, how do you explain the fact that the majority of Greeks consistently want to remain a member?

“Trade with the EU is declining!”

No, it isn’t.

“Ask the young people in Europe what they think of the EU!”

The Pew Research Centre did, in July 2017. Across the 28 EU nations, support for the union among 18-29-year-olds stood at 73%. All other surveys of the same subject have reported similar figures.

“The floods are the EU’s fault!”

The recent (February 2020) flooding across the west of England and Wales prompted a predictable outpouring of complaints that EU laws prevented the UK from dredging its rivers, which would have alleviated the problem. Two points.

1) Dredging of waterways falls within the purview of member states, and in the UK’s case is a matter for the Environment Agency. The EU Water Framework Directive (2000) does specify some restrictions on its application – if the operations pose a significant threat to local wildlife, for example – but these can be overridden in the event of imminent flooding or drought. Besides, if dredging in the EU is banned, why is the European Dredging Association celebrating its 27th year?

2) There is no consensus that dredging is even particularly effective at easing or preventing flooding. While it may stop a river from bursting its banks in one area, that floodwater is just going to barrel further downstream and cause problems in another – probably a larger town, with less drainage, and more structures along its banks.

“We only joined a trading alliance! We never signed up for closer political union!”

Yeah, you did. You just didn’t read the small print. Or, indeed, the large print. The goal of closer political union has been made explicit in every major ECSC/EEC/EU treaty since the Schuman Declaration of 1950.

Closer political union was the entire raison d’être of the European project. It was specifically designed to bring nations closer together, in order to prevent a repeat of the second world war. Trade was just the means to that end.

And as numerous records of comments by Britain’s leaders prior to the 1975 referendum campaign prove, this was repeatedly made clear to the British people. If you prefer to absorb your information via Twitter threads, then this is the link for you.

“Have you got some sort of crystal ball?”

Frequently offered as a mocking retort to any suggestion that Brexit may have adverse effects (even though it’s now beyond any doubt that Brexit is having exactly the adverse effects Remain campaigners said it would). As an analogy for Brexit predictions, however, it suffers from one fundamental flaw: fortune tellers are full of shit. While crystal balls offer zero useful information regarding future events, the predictions of economic, political and social problems after Brexit were based on sound and thoroughly researched analyses by the most eminently qualified people in their fields.

“These warnings about a hard Brexit are Project Fear. Look at the scaremongering about the Millennium Bug!”

I’ve been hearing this particular “argument” from a suspiciously wide range of sources lately (August 2018) – almost as if it’s on some official briefing paper being distributed to everyone with an IQ below 70. It is so colossally, obviously flawed as an argument that I scarcely know where to begin, but since it’s being wheeled out as an attempted smackdown so frequently, I suppose I had better.

Bug: About 20 years ago, a number of IT experts raised concerns about the possibilities of some older computers experiencing problems with their internal clocks as the date changed to 01/01/00. This might, they pointed out, cause some issues with things like flights, hospital equipment and power plants. Because ordinary folk knew nothing about computers, they trusted the experts’ view – even though said experts had much to gain from the emergency, and might have been overstating the danger for their own gain. As a result, somewhere between £300bn and £500bn was spent fixing the problem worldwide. In the end, disaster was averted, although the “bug” did still have some adverse effects.

Brexit: A number of experts in the fields of economics, trade, business, science, politics and diplomacy raised concerns about massive damage being done to the UK’s businesses, economy, international relations, and world standing. They stood to gain nothing from such an emergency. Few people fully understood the issues at hand, but, after decades of the rightwing press undermining faith in intellectualism, only a minority trusted the experts’ view. As a result, nothing was done to avert any negative consequences.

Apart from the fact that experts issued a warning, there are no similarities between the two situations. The people involved were different. The conditions were different. The entire realm of knowledge was different. The problem was different, and the possible solutions are different. (Perhaps the most worrying divergence is that between the amount of preparation completed in each case.)

Next time someone squeals “Millennium bug!” in response to the sounding of the Brexit alarm, try gently pointing out to them a few of the occasions when experts issued warnings, and were right: the Titanic. Fukushima. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s. The Lusitania. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. The 2018 Genoa motorway bridge collapse.

Experts are not always wrong. In fact, they are rarely wrong. That’s why they are occupying their positions, and not you.

“Your patronising attitude is exactly why we voted out”

Really? You voted to wipe out 10% of GDP, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of jobs and turn the UK into a global laughing stock because a stranger on social media was insufficiently sensitive while schooling you in economics 18 months in the future? Come on. That’s kind of petty. If quantum-mechanically impressive.

Tweet by dickhead(What they’re really doing here, of course, apart from flailing pathetically, is attempting to tone-police you: to shoot down your argument on the basis of its character, rather than its content. Because they can’t find any obvious flaws in the content to attack.)

“Britain managed just fine before it joined the EU!”

It really didn’t. You, my friend, are guilty of rosy retrospection: a common cognitive bias that leads us to remember things as better than they in fact were. Sure, you were younger then, with hopes and dreams intact, and still enjoyed occasional sex.

But the blunt truth is that in the early 1970s, the country was up shit creek. As the last tendrils of its empire withered, growth and productivity were slipping, industries declining, poverty increasing. Strikes left large parts of the country paralysed. Power cuts were commonplace. For over two months in 1974, the UK was operating on a three-day week.

The new members of the European Economic Community, meanwhile, were surging ahead, leaving the UK with the “Sick Man of Europe” dunce’s cap. Successive British governments, Conservative and Labour, begged to join. Charles de Gaulle vetoed the British application twice, warning that it would lead to the breakup of the union. Membership, when it came in 1973, was a huge relief – and marked the beginning of a new era of prosperity for the UK.

UKgdpEU

But more importantly, in 1973, the UK had its own trade arrangements and supply lines in place. It has spent the 45 intervening years frantically reshaping its economy to function as part of a frictionless trade bloc. If those arrangements are ended, and no substitute system is introduced – fat chance of that in six months – then the country will, quite simply, cease to function.

“I can’t be racist. Islam isn’t a race.”

If you’re being face-achingly pernickety, then yes, attacking a religion does not technically make you a racist. However.

Strictly speaking, no one can be a racist, because there is no universally agreed definition of the set of characteristics that constitute a race, or where to draw the lines between them. It’s pretty obvious, however, that plenty of people treat others differently based on the colour of their skin, that they discriminate, and it’s generally agreed that these people are scum – hence your strenuous objection to being called racist. (Let us also note, in passing, that the overwhelming majority of followers of Islam are brown.)

Second, those who set out to discredit Islam might have a different target from a racist, but their methodology – or rather, their error – is identical. They’re still discriminating, just on the basis of religion instead of colour.

English speakers haven’t quite settled on the right word for this yet – I’ve seen “faithism” and “religionism”, but those give us the rather clunky derivatives “faithist” and “religionist” – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. On far right websites the world over, it clearly does.

You may not, by the strictest definition, be a racist for demonising all Muslims because of the actions of a few of its adherents, but you’re no better than a racist. You may not be a racist, but you most certainly are a cunt.

“I can’t be racist. I have a black friend”

You only have one black friend, and you claim you’re not a racist?

“The Nazis were socialists. It was even in their name!”

The full name of the Nazi party was, indeed, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German National Socialist Workers’ Party. But things don’t always do what they say on the tin. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea isn’t democratic, run by or for the people, or a republic; Panama hats aren’t from Panama; and tin cans aren’t made of tin.

This is just a ham-fisted (albeit remarkably persistent) ploy by those with evil far-right views to distance themselves from the evil far-right demagogues of the past.

Hitler had a different definition of socialism from the one we understand today, as this quote from him explains: “Communism is not socialism. Marxism is not socialism. The Marxists have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take socialism away from the socialists.”

That’s exactly what he did, and the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands were the first opponents he took out; he banned them the day after he won absolute power. His actions in the summer of 1941 were also a subtle hint as to his true feelings towards those on the left wing of politics.

The Nazis may have paid lip service to socialism in order to appeal to a wider demographic. But they were first and foremost, and far and away above any other consideration, nationalists. And it is that evil, not cosmetic socialism, that we face again today.

For a more authoritative explanation, see Mike Stuchbery’s consummate demolition of alt-right urethral swabs Paul Joseph Watson  and Ian Miles Cheong on the same issue.

“Liberals. You’re all such hypocrites!”

I’ve dealt with this point before, but here’s a recap.

Accusing liberals of hypocrisy is probably the far right’s favourite pastime. “Do as I say, not as I do,” they sneer, despite having no clue as to how you spend your day. Apparently, because they lack even a scintilla of empathy for their fellow man, everyone else must be similarly handicapped.

Well, this may come as a surprise, buster, but a lot of us actually back our words up with action. We give to the homeless and to charity; we raise awareness of, and funds for, good causes; we volunteer; some of us even actually take in refugees.

But even those who don’t spend every minute of their spare time doing disabled veterans’ shopping are not wrong to speak their minds in the hope of influencing public debate. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what all the alt-right seems to spend all its time doing; I’ve yet to see one of them putting his money where his mouth is and jetting down to the Levant to fight Isis, or unilaterally deporting a family of Muslims.

I’ll continue to “virtue signal” as much as I like, thanks, if you’re going to carry on evil signalling.

“How many refugees have you taken in?”

The most tiresomely common example of the above. Again, I’ve talked about this. We cannot physically do all the things we wish were done, and it’s not up to us anyway. We can, however, draw attention to problems we think are not being allocated sufficient resources (in fact, it seems to be Twitter’s sole raison d’être these days).

“Everyone who disagrees with you is a fascist.”

I’ve disagreed with plenty of people. Muslims, Jews, socialists, conservatives, doctors, teachers, plasterers, feminists, vegetarians. And none of them were fascists. (OK, maybe the doctor was a bit of a prick.)

The difference was, they made their arguments politely and reasonably, and were willing to listen to what I had to say. We usually found some common ground, and learned something from each other.

The far right, meanwhile, for all their bleats of “free speech”, do everything they can to silence opposition. They make (ahem) liberal use of ad hominem and smear tactics, they lie, they fabricate stories, and when given half a chance, they kill. I have yet to learn anything from a fascist, except a creeping disillusionment at the coldness of some of my fellow men.

“Ha, liberals, they say they’re so tolerant, and yet they won’t tolerate any views that don’t agree with theirs.”

AKA “Liberals are the real fascists”. Occasional variation on the above. Liberals can, and do, and have, for years, tolerated differences of opinion. There’s only one view that we won’t tolerate, and that’s any view that involves silencing others’ views. Such as, for example, fascism.

“‘Racist!’ That’s the only argument you have.”

It’s really not. It’s just the most obvious, important one, and often the only observation of substance I can fit in 140 characters.

If you fancy a change of insult, I also have unimaginative, unoriginal, gullible, backward, reductive, simplistic, binary, ill-informed, mendacious, misleading, and utterly lacking in compassion.

“We voted Leave to regain control over immigration.”

The UK government has always had full control over immigration from countries outside the EU. It simply failed to invoke those powers. The vote to leave the EU will have precisely zero effect on the numbers of, for example, Pakistani Muslims coming to live and work in the country. (It might even lead to an increase, as if EU migrant numbers fall, certain sectors will still need a workforce, and many trade deals, such as the ones we hope to strike up with India and the Philippines, are dependent on visa quotas and/or free movement of labour.)

It’s true that under freedom of movement laws, any EU citizen can come and live in the UK, and many have chosen to do so; but even they are under restrictions. They can only claim benefits for a limited period, for example; they can be asked to leave if they do not find work within three months or otherwise have means to support themselves.

What’s more, EU law does not prevent us from deporting criminals from outside the UK. Anyone considered a sufficient threat can be chucked out, and those powers have been beefed up in recent years.

Why did the government not make more of an effort to reduce immigration? Because, along with just about every economist, it knows that immigration benefits the economy. Attracting the best minds from all over the world has a hugely positive effect on GDP.

“Immigrants are benefit scroungers.”

Bollocks. EU immigrants pay far more in tax than they take out in benefits. As I mentioned above, their access to welfare is limited. In fact, the proportion of UK natives claiming benefits is higher than the proportion of EU citizens doing the same.

“Immigrants are stealing all our jobs.”

Let’s gloss over the fact that this assertion totally contradicts the last one. Immigration is not a zero-sum game; the number of jobs to go round is not fixed. The more people come into the country and earn and pay taxes and spend, the more jobs get created. It’s no coincidence that two of the most migrated-to countries in the world, the United States and the United Kingdom, are also two of the richest; or that the most insular – North Korea, Cuba, Somalia – rank among the poorest.

By way of illustration, unemployment in the UK, now host to more immigrants than at any point in its history, is at an all-time low.

“Immigrants are driving down wages.”

The data is not conclusive, but on the whole, this seems to be a myth. One study found that large-scale immigration can exert a slight downward pressure on pay in certain sectors, but most think the impact is negligible. For the most part, what’s kept workers’ salaries down in recent years is spiralling executive pay, rising rents, and the economic crash of 2008.

“Immigrants put a strain on social services.”

The great majority of immigrants – from all countries, not just the EU – are young, healthy net contributors to the economy. If services are under strain in certain areas, that’s the government’s (or the local council’s) fault, not the immigrants’ (and it certainly has naff all to do with the EU).

In any case, given that so many immigrants work in the very social services they are allegedly destroying, our infrastructure would be a lot shakier without them than it is with, as we are seeing with the mass exodus of EU nurses and doctors from the NHS.

“Those Syrians aren’t refugees, they’re economic migrants.”

Really? They’ve abandoned their home country and everyone they love, given their life savings to people traffickers, risked death several times over and lived in a filthy camp for months, just so that they can claim £60 a week? Isn’t it more likely that their homes have been turned into warzones and their loved ones have been killed, or they’ve been the victims of religious persecution, and that their only choice, if they want to live any sort of worthwhile life, is for a fresh start in another country?

“Why don’t the ‘refugees’ stop in Saudi Arabia?”

They do. The reason official statistics list Saudi Arabia as having taken zero refugees from Syria is that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE never signed up to any UN protocols on refugees. Ergo, it has a different classification system: anyone from a nearby state who turns up seeking a haven in Saudi is not registered as a refugee, but as an “Arab brother or sister in distress”. It’s estimated that around 500,000 such distressed siblings from Syria are currently benefiting from Saudi hospitality.

“Why don’t they stop in Poland or Germany or France?”

Again, many do, but not many of them speak Polish or German or French. One of the side-effects of being a great commercial and cultural power is that a lot of people abroad learn your language, and it just so happens that English is the most widely spoken European language in many parts of the Middle East. Furthermore, some of the refugees have friends or family already in the UK, so it makes sense for them to head somewhere they have contacts and support.

“All the refugees from the Middle East are men of fighting age.”

In a bid to stoke up fears of terrorist infiltration, or of “white genocide”, the far right are for ever banging this drum: “If all these people trying to get into the country are genuine refugees, why are they all young and male?”

They’re not. According to UN figures, 50.5% of all refugees worldwide are women, and a further 17% are aged under 18. Males aged from 18 to 59 make up just 22% of all refugees worldwide.

It’s true that a higher percentage of recent refugees from the Middle East to Europe appear to be male; a UNHCR report estimated that 72% of the 400,000 people known to have crossed the Mediterranean in 2015 were male. But this isn’t so sinister when you think about it for a second. How many children, women and old people do you think could survive that perilous crossing, a walk of thousands of miles, and countless nights without shelter and food?

It’s also worth remembering that because of the lower life expectancy, a higher proportion of Syrians are young males. The average age of a man in the UK, with its relative peace and prosperity, is 39.3. The median in Syria is 23.7.

“Mohammed was a paedophile.”

According to the Qu’ran, when he was in his 50s, the Prophet married a nine-year-old girl. Extremist rightwingers take inordinate glee in repeating this point at every opportunity, using it as “proof” that Islam is a corrupt and evil religion.

First, debate is still raging among Muslim scholars about the actual facts behind this story. Mohammed certainly seems to have been betrothed to a girl, but no one knows when the relationship was consummated.

Second, this is seventh-century Arabia we’re talking about. Times were different. Puberty was regarded as the onset of female adulthood. Marriage to, and sexual intercourse with, young girls were commonplace – and not just in the Middle East. Here are a few examples of other historical figures who are believed to have had what would today be considered improper associations:

  • Joseph, “stepfather” of Jesus (married Mary when she was 12)
  • St Augustine, father of the Christian church (betrothed to a 10-year-old girl)
  • Edward I (his bride, Eleanor of Castile, was eight, according to Britannica)
  • Isaac II Angelus, Byzantine emperor (took a nine-year-old wife)
  • Richard II (married his second wife, Isabella of Valois, when she was seven)
  • Giralomo Riario, Lord of Imola (took a 10-year-old wife)
  • Thomas Jefferson (strong evidence that he had a relationship with an underage slave)
  • Even in the modern era, we have Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin, Elvis Presley dating a 14-year-old Priscilla, and Bill Wyman preying on the 13-year-old Mandy Smith. As recently as 1984, the Paedophile Information Exchange was an active campaigning group in the UK. Times change. You can’t judge yesterday’s men by today’s standards.
“Islam is a religion of hate.”

Trust me, if Islam were a religion of hate, and all 1.6 billion of its adherents were hellbent on destroying western society, I would not be here to write this, nor you there to read it. Most respected estimates put worldwide membership of jihadi groups at about 100,000. That’s 0.006% of the Muslim population. Almost all of them are in their native lands or nearby, and the battle with Isis in Syria and Iraq will have put a dent in that figure.

For the record, the vast majority of liberals hate those evil bastards just as much as the far right do. We just don’t want to tar the 99.994% with the same brush.

“Muslamic rape gangs!”

A proportion of men commit sex crimes, and Muslims are no different. But some high-profile cases, such as the Rotherham child abuse scandal, which involved abuse on a huge scale from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, have given fascists plenty of ammunition for their anti-Islam smear campaign.

True, the proportion of Muslims in UK jails (15%) is higher than in the civilian population (4%), but that corresponds almost exactly to the profile for black people (12% versus 3%). Muslims are more likely to go to prison largely because they’re statistically more likely to be from poor areas with higher crime rates, and they’re more likely to be stopped and searched. The authorities may have turned a blind eye to wrongdoing in Rotherham, but the wider pattern, it seems, is one of racism as usual.

It’s also probably worth a reminder at this point that a lot of the stories of rapes of white women by Muslims are either exaggerated, endlessly repeated to make them seem more common, or just plain made up.

The fact remains that most sex offenders, by a huge margin, are white men. And no one is proposing to deport all white men.

“Hillary Clinton took part in ritual sacrifices and ran a paedophile ring from a pizza parlour.”

There is literally no evidence to back up this ridiculous assertion. If there were, Donald Trump would have been able to follow through on his promise to “lock her up”.

“But Benghazi.”

Mistakes were undoubtedly made in the run-up to the attack on the US embassy in Libya, but a hearing at the House of Representatives in October 2015 largely cleared then secretary of state Hillary Clinton of any direct responsibility for the tragedy.

***

Next time you catch anyone trotting out any of this guff, don’t waste time Googling and copy-and-pasting. Just reply “BS” and paste a link to this page. (If you right-click on the relevant link in the intro and select “copy link address”, it will link them directly to the relevant entry.)

I’m sure I’ve missed a few out, and that more will arise. Please chip in if you have any far-right bollocks you’d like debunked – I’ll keep this updated, and maybe, if I get enough time, some day turn it into a wiki.

Legacy

Empire poster

Rorke’s Drift and Culloden, and Waterloo:
WILL ALL BE RESTORED WHEN WE LEAVE THE EU!

A paean to Brexit

Old poster glorifying British Empire

Furlongs and fathoms and gallons and perches,
Schools re-equipped (with canes, slippers and birches),
Time at the bar at 11pm,
Ladylike skirts with an ankle-high hem.

Antimacassars and old music boxes,
Legal permission to maim and kill foxes.
Coal mines and coal fires and smog and black lung,
Horses and coaches and streets full of dung!

Rattles on match day, not them vulvazelas,
Sensuous foot rubs at camp from Akela,
Skipping and hopscotch and conkers and jacks,
Pubs that are free of dogs, Irish and blacks!

Washing the dishes by hand, not machine,
Pogroms and blackshirts and Combat 18!
Checkout staff who call me “Sir” and not “Bruv”,
Films without swearing and homes without love!

Typewriters, pencils – or better, a quill!
Thirty per cent chance of death when you’re ill!
Andersen shelters and Spitfires and Spam!
Frankly, dear Scarlett, I don’t give a damn!

Bring British justice back home from the Hague!
Bring back red squirrels! Bring back the plague!
Rorke’s Drift and Culloden, and Waterloo:
WILL ALL BE RESTORED WHEN WE LEAVE THE EU!

You may not want this, but I won the vote;
And democracy says that we’re in the same boat.
As I depart through the heavenly doors,
That past I requested, my son – now it’s yours.

When Sammie dumped Barry: a cost-benefit analysis of Brexit

CBAs may be a flawed and oversimplified way of looking at Brexit, but they’re still more than most Leave voters have bothered to do

You’re a business owner. An opportunity arises for expansion. The risks are daunting – but the potential boost to income is huge. How do you decide whether to proceed? The first thing any halfway competent company director will do in this situation is undertake a cost-benefit analysis.

Essentially, you note down all the anticipated dividends of the project, alongside all the costs, risks and drawbacks. Assign values to each dividend and cost, then add up both totals. If the figure in the first column is greater than the figure in the second, expansion is officially a Good Idea, and you should crack on. If the opposite is true, you can the plan.

The technique has two main weaknesses. First, benefits and costs can be hard to evaluate. How much is an hour of your time worth? What about stress? Environmental impact? Reputational damage to the company? Can you put any meaningful value on things like job satisfaction, or the feeling that you’ve made a positive difference to the world?

Second, the universe loves delivering nasty surprises. It’s impossible to factor in every eventuality, and even the best-informed predictions can be undone by twists of fate. What if demand for your product suddenly fizzles? What if interest rates shoot up immediately after you take out that huge loan? What if your product is implicated, however unfairly, in a national scandal?

But while it might be an inexact science, taking any decision that may have far-ranging consequences without some sort of attempt to estimate its chances of success is downright irresponsible.

Hang on, you interject. Isn’t “cost-benefit analysis” just a fancy economese way of saying “making a list of pros and cons”? Superb observational skills, I reply. While the term comes from economics (coined by the French engineer Jules Dupuit in the 1840s, it didn’t catch on until the 1950s), it does bear some similarities to an operation that humans have been carrying out for millennia.

In fact, your brain is conducting CBAs all the time; it just does most of them – ones involving familiar situations – at a subconscious level. “Shall we go to work today?” your automatic, system 1 brain asks itself. “Uh, yeah, if we want to carry on putting food on the table.” “Shall I dodge this falling rock?” “Duh!”

Sometimes, though, when we find ourselves in novel situations, or ones where the arithmetic is not laughably simple, the reflective system 2 brain steps in.

Say you’re in a relationship, but things are getting a bit stale, so you’re umming and ahhing about ditching the boyf. Some in this predicament will go with their gut; others might talk to a friend or family member; still others will actually hunt down a pen and paper and tot up the pluses and minuses of giving poor Baz the heave-ho. The finished report might look something like this:

Like the business owner’s, Sammie’s calculations are bedevilled by uncertainty – what if it turns out she misses the action movies and tongue-clicking? What if Liam doesn’t fancy her after all? – but now there’s an extra complication. Whereas a businessperson can at least attempt to assign a monetary value to each cost and benefit in order to make them easier to compare, Sammie has no such option.

While the business assessment would read something like “New office = £100,000 per year, extra staff = £80,000 per year …”, Sammie’s is a mess of question marks. “No more Saturday nights of the lads just popping round for one beer” = ??, no more stupid fucking action movies = ?? …”

Since there are no objectively established units for “value”, all Sammie can do is compare the two lists and try to get a feel for which wins out.

The same problems beset CBAs in the public arena. And as the decisions of local councils, military commanders and national governments can affect millions, the need to properly evaluate the ramifications of any new operations or policies is all the greater. Let’s take two examples.

List of pros and cons of cars - Useful for transporting people & objects v environment, accidents

If there were some way to “score” these quantities objectively, there would never be any dispute over whether a particular policy was right or wrong. But the awkward truth is, if you asked 100 people to rank the costs and benefits listed above, you’d get 100 widely varying results. While some people attach great importance to the environment, others are more concerned with personal liberty, the economy, and their personal comfort and convenience.

It so happens that in the case of cars – powerful environmental movements notwithstanding – most countries have come to broadly similar conclusions. While mass motorised transport has many sizeable drawbacks, one of its benefits is considered so great that it outweighs all the negative considerations (although more and more countries are taking steps to minimise the downsides by encouraging the design of safer, more environmentally friendly vehicles, imposing speed limits, criminalising drink driving and using phones while driving, and so on).

Now for a more contentious and tragically topical issue.

Pros and cons of guns. Freedom, occasional prevention of crime, v millions of innocents killed

Cost-benefit analyses should not be one-shot deals. If the circumstances or risk factors change, you need to run the scenario again. And this is one reason why policies on gun controls across the modern world are so polarised.

What’s interesting about this case is that technological and social change have altered the calculus. When guns were first invented, they were inefficient and limited in their capacity for damage, capable of firing only single bullets. Today, of course, they are far more sophisticated, with some models able to fire 100 rounds a second. Even an amateur gunman can kill 10 people and injure 26 more in under 30 seconds.

Perhaps just as importantly, times have changed. When America first adopted its lax stance on gun laws, people lived in much smaller concentrations. The world was more lawless – state security was patchy, scrappy and corrupt – so it was more important for citizens to be able to defend themselves; and there were fewer people (in absolute terms, if nothing else) with serious mental illness or bitterness born of social isolation. Run the cost-benefit analysis in the southern states of the US in 1776, and you might well conclude that giving everyone the right to bear firearms was a reasonable proposition. Run it again today, and most people come to a very different conclusion.

The majority of civilised nations have decided, in light of these developments above, that the balance has shifted decisively. The benefits of arming the populace have dwindled and the risks have increased a thousandfold. Mass shootings in the UK and Australia, for example, prompted draconian clampdowns on gun ownership (and as a consequence, no mass shootings have happened there since). It’s only a hardcore of psychopaths in America who refuse point blank to rerun the cost-benefit analysis in 2019.

What about another highly controversial topic, immigration? Well, this post from last November was essentially one big cost-benefit analysis of freedom of movement, so I won’t repeat the arguments here. To summarise: minimal costs, lots of benefits.

Now, let’s cut to the chase and do Brexit.

Big list of (seven) pros (with major provisos) and 48 cons of Brexit

(This is to say nothing of the various laws beneficial to safety standards, workers’ rights and the environment that have been passed by the EU, which we cannot strictly count as costs since they may theoretically survive Brexit. However, if the party leading the UK out is the Conservatives, whose chief motivation for delivering Brexit was precisely the removal of such “Brussels red tape”, you can kiss those goodbye too.)

I’ve done my level best here to make an honest assessment. Despite asking Leavers for tangible upsides of Brexit well over a thousand times, I’ve rarely had any (rational) answers that aren’t covered in the seven points listed. I listed some of the looniest ones here. As for the cons, the evidence for all of them is only a Google search away. But for the exceptionally lazy, many are covered here and here.

There are very few ways you can conclude that column A outweighs column B. But first, let’s be honest: most people, when they voted on 23/6/16, were not aware of the sheer number of items in column B (not even most remainers). For this, much blame must be laid at the feet of the half-hearted and disjointed Remain campaign.

But even now, 38 months later, there is still a sizeable rump of individuals who insist, while generating biologically unfeasible amounts of spittle, that the rewards of Brexit outweigh the costs. How is this possible?

One form of mental gymnastics I regularly encounter is the wholesale dismissal of column B as “Project Fear”. “Of course the European Medicines Agency won’t relocate,” they babble, weeks after it has gone. “Of course there won’t be a hard border in Ireland,” they froth, despite being unable to offer an alternative solution.

Another is to attempt feebly to recast the costs as benefits in disguise: “We can just train our own doctors … The bankers deserved punishment anyway … I preferred it when you could only get raspberries in October.”

But probably the most common attempt at an argument is that you can’t put a price on sovereignty. No matter how numerous or how valuable the entries in column B, sovereignty trumps all. Half of leave voters over 65 said as much in a YouGov survey published in August 2017.

They might have had a point if Britain were actually shackled to a dictatorship and enjoyed no independence at all. But the fact is, the UK only ever pooled a small amount of its competences, in minor areas of law. And it’s not as if it even surrendered those completely; it still had a say – many would say a disproportionately large say – in the drawing up of that legislation, and a powerful veto.

The UK government certainly didn’t think the country had forfeited much sovereignty when it published its Brexit white paper in February 2017: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership to the EU,” it said, “it hasn’t always felt like that.”

Screenshot of white paper

And judging by the polling carried out by Ipsos MORI every year, neither did you, until 2016. If you did, it clearly wasn’t very high on your list of priorities.

Graph showing result of polls 2006-17 on how important people thought EU membership was as an issue (v low until late 2015)

No Brexiter has yet been able to put their finger on any specific negative outcomes of this partial sacrifice of sovereignty; few can name a single law passed by the EU that even mildly inconveniences them. If you’re lucky, they might mumble something about fishing (0.12% of the economy); but they don’t seem to understand that the UK will still have neighbours. If we stop Europeans fishing in “our” waters, they’ll retaliate – and most of the fish that Britons like to eat swim far from British shores. Exporting fish (most of our native species are more popular in other EU countries than they are here) will be harder. And quotas will still need to be observed in order to prevent overfishing.

If sovereignty is really so important to people, why did we hear practically nothing about it before the referendum? Why were they not marching in the streets? The simple answer is, it wasn’t an issue. It’s a buzzword, a revisionist escape clause, a superficially respectable fig leaf for the true underlying drivers of Brexit: unfounded British exceptionalism and full-fat racism.

To anyone whose perception is unclouded by hatred and nostalgia, there’s only one way to interpret this cost-benefit analysis. Half the country made the correct call in 2016. Let’s hope we can persuade enough of the rest to stop chanting “Project Fear” before it becomes clear just how terrifyingly right we were.