In journalistic writing, ‘with’ is threatening to become the only connector in town. Whatever happened to good old ‘and’?
Photograph: Andrea Piacquadio
Every pedant has a pet hate. Whether it’s Oxford commas, Americanisms, lost participles or absent apostrophes, every armchair grammarian has one particular slip that grinds their gears. Several leagues clear at the top of my shit list is “with”.
Firefighters are battling to contain a massive blaze moving “like lightning” on the outskirts of Athens, with authorities evacuating people from towns, villages and hospitals as flames rip through trees, homes and cars.
OK, you say, it might not be exactly how I would have phrased it, but it hardly merits a pop-eyed 2,000-word blog post. Does it?
Well, let’s take a look at what’s going on here. The writer of the offending passage is trying to convey two pieces of information in one sentence. One, that firefighters are tackling a serious wildfire near Athens; two, that people have been evacuated from the area. So they’ve written two separate clauses, and joined them. With “with”.
Now English has a class of words designed to perform exactly this function. They’re called conjunctions. You know: “and”, “but”, “when”, “because”, and all those other linking words. My problem is that “with” does not fucking number among them.
In any dictionary you care to check, “with” is listed as a preposition: a word that shows direction, location, or time, or some similar figurative sense. Off my rocker. Up the wall. At my wits’ end. Even when erroneously pressed into service as above, with is still a preposition. You can tell because it still wants to behave like one.
The Austrians urged their EU counterparts to continue the effort to stamp out the tragedy in the Mediterranean, with more than 2,000 people suffocating or drowning last year.
While conjunctions will happily segue into full clauses (I read the paper and my jaw dropped), prepositions can only take nouns* as an object. That’s why the verbs in the sentences above suddenly have -ing at the end: the writer has, probably without realising, had to turn “suffocate” and “drown” into participles — verbs that act as adjectives by modifying the preceding noun — in order to meet the grammatical demands of “with”.
(*Technically noun phrases, but now is not the time to get bogged down in technicallies.)
Even so, my imagined detractors cry, this is hardly the most heinous of crimes. Why should we care?
For five reasons.
1) Eww
Rowley became commissioner in September 2022, having retired in 2018 after a career in several forces, with him first joining the Met in 2011 as an assistant commissioner.
This reporter has tried to squeeze three pieces of related information into one sentence, which is a perfectly respectable and achievable aim, but sheesh, couldn’t they have done so with a little panache?
As well as the usual grammatical contortions, they’ve ended up with three different verb forms and had to refer to the subject twice in the space of a few words (“Rowley” and “him”). Wouldn’t something like this be simpler and clearer?
Rowley became commissioner in September 2022, having joined the Met in 2011 as assistant commissioner, served in several forces, and retired in 2018.
2) Huh?
The prime minister has already pledged to establish closer ties with the EU, with the new minister for European relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, travelling to Brussels for an introductory meeting with Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic on Monday.
This article was published on a Friday. The grammatical whims of “with” have denied us some important information: the tense of the subordinate clause. Did Thomas-Symonds go to Brussels last Monday, or is he going next Monday?
> Following the prime minister’s pledge to establish closer ties with the EU, the new minister for European relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, will travel to Brussels for an introductory meeting with Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic on Monday.
3) Shrug
Holly Willoughby leaves ITV with questions to answer over Phillip Schofield lying
Hold on. Does Holly Willoughby have questions to answer? Does ITV? Or are these questions anyone can take? Has some action by Holly Willoughby led to questions being asked of ITV? A year later, I’m still not 100% sure what this Sunday Times headline was getting at.
With is a busy little word bee. Even though it’s only a preposition and not a fucking conjunction, it’s the 15th most commonly used word in the English language (according to the Oxford English Corpus) and the OED lists 96 separate meanings for it.
These myriad functions are already a common cause of confusion; consider the sentence “I shot with the man with the gun”, and why this regular column in the Guardian is the only one that has a comma.
With is already buckling under the strain of its multiple duties. Surely it makes no sense to add to them?
4) Grrr
One of the oddest things about this linguistic oddity is that it’s almost entirely unique to journalists. Barring a few instances that have leaked into the real world, you’ll never find “with” moonlighting as a conjunction in novels or poems or everyday speech.
There’s a word for language that’s unique to one class of people: jargon. Jargon marks out a group as special and, whether intentionally or not, alienates non-members. Which is fine when that group are specialists, like engineers or soldiers or gamers, talking mostly among themselves.
But journalism is all about conveying information to the wider world. It should be intelligible to as many people as possible. To use forms that are alien to the reader is to throw up walls in an arena that should be wall-less.
(The phenomenon may, incidentally, have been born from good intentions. Because the best reporting is neutral, eschewing value judgments, loaded terms and assumptions of guilt and causation, and because exact sequences of events are not always immediately known, it’s not always appropriate to use more specific connectors like “because” or “after”. This leaves us with bland old “and”, which can quickly become repetitive.)
5) Aaarrrrgghhhhh
If “with” was occasionally being wheeled out in an innocuous attempt to stave off monotony, then yes, I’d still be swearing, just not publicly.
But it’s everywhere. You’ll struggle to find a news (or especially business or media) story without at least one conscripted “with”. While subediting, I’ve come across as many as three in one paragraph. Sometimes it feels as if “and” has become an ex-conjunction.
Fortunately, other connectors are available.
Sometimes the meaningful conjunctions, like when, because or amid, are perfectly fine. Sometimes a pronoun like “which” or “who” will do the trick. Simply dropping the “with” and running with the participial form is another option, as are semicolons and full stops.
There will no doubt be some diehard descriptivists out there who can reel off a string of sentences by giants of literature using “with” as a fucking conjunction. All I have to say to you is: they could have done better.
Here are some examples I’ve come across in recent years, and suggested improvements.
The rear door of a restaurant in Ormeau Road was also kicked in, with racial slurs shouted at the workers inside.
> The rear door of a restaurant in Ormeau Road was also kicked in, and racial slurs were shouted at the workers inside.
As of Saturday, 779 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, with 349 of those charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
> As of Saturday, 779 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, 349 of whom had been charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
The tone was set by Boris Johnson, with the British prime minister opening the Cop26 talks with a stark warning …
Oh, come on.
> The tone was set by Boris Johnson, who opened the Cop26 talks with a stark warning …
The left-back was a free agent after leaving Tottenham, with the north Londoners having paid around £25m to buy him from Fulham in 2019.
> The left-back was a free agent after leaving Tottenham, who had paid Fulham around £25m for him in 2019.
ONS data showed a strong performance in the second quarter, with the service sector helping drive growth.
> ONS data showed a strong performance in the second quarter, driven partly by the service sector.
The EPC is designed to facilitate the strengthening of ties between EU and non-EU leaders in an informal setting, with previous conferences held in Spain, Moldova and the Czech Republic.
> The EPC, which has previously held conferences in Spain, Moldova and the Czech Republic, is designed to facilitate the strengthening of ties between EU and non-EU leaders in an informal setting.
With brands the driving force behind the industry’s growth, they account for £1bn of sales and 2.5bn bottles.
> Brands are the driving force behind the industry’s growth, accounting for £1bn of sales and 2.5bn bottles.
Sales of no- and low-alcohol beer are seeing a summer surge, with brewers boosting production to meet growing demand.
> Brewers are boosting production of no- and low-alcohol beer after a summer surge in sales.
Freer’s comments come 10 years after the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act achieved royal assent on 17 July 2013, allowing same-sex couples to marry and convert civil partnerships into marriage, with Freer converting his civil partnership with Angelo Crolla to marriage in 2015.
> Freer’s comments come 10 years after the Marriage Act, which allows same-sex couples to marry and convert civil partnerships into marriage, achieved royal assent on 17 July 2013. Freer converted his civil partnership with Angelo Crolla to marriage in 2015.
Ministers have said they want to tighten the law on glorifying terrorism, with the conduct of a minority of people on the pro-Palestine demonstrations in recent weeks, including the chanting of the controversial slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, prompted pledges of change.
(Here, it’s been so long since “with” wrote its unwieldy grammar cheque, the reporter’s forgotten to cash it.)
> Ministers have said they want to tighten the law on glorifying terrorism, a pledge prompted by the conduct of a minority of people …
The typical London rent also hit a new high of £2,633, with average costs in the capital now 5.3% higher than 12 months earlier.
The cack-handed use of “with” here has forced the writer to use not just London and a synonym for London in the same sentence, but also typical rent and a synonym for typical rent! Isn’t “Average London rents hit a new high of £2,600, 5.3% higher than 12 months earlier” less annoying to read?
A desert planet is also featured prominently, with comparisons between Tattooine and Arrakis able to be drawn thanks to their basic geography.
> Tattooine and Arrakis are both desert planets.
The majority of reviewers gave Dune: Part Two a 10-star rating, with only five reviews ranking it below five stars, with many complimenting its blend of “visual splendor and narrative depth.”
> I’m actually shaking too much to attempt this one.
The cost of borrowing has soared in the past two years with retail businesses finding it particularly difficult to raise debt amid concerns about consumer spending amid a surge in the cost of essentials such as food and energy bills.
The mountainness of this molehill is not so much that “with” as a clause connector is flat out wrong and should never be allowed — although it is, and it shouldn’t, because it’s not a fucking conjunction — but that it’s clumsy and lazy and vague, that it’s already doing more than its fair share of jobs in English, and that there are countless ways of producing the same effect with none of these drawbacks.
Language changes! some will say. Keep up, you old duffer! Well, yes, it does, but the changes that stick are generally for the better, offering some nuance or functionality that wasn’t there before. This one blows from every angle.
Journalists: dispense with ‘with’ with immediate effect
The number of people obtaining their news from decent news sites is falling off a cliff. Moreover, their visits are getting shorter; the average time spent reading a news article on the Guardian website (and, I’m sure, on all the others) is less than a minute.
The reasons mooted for this include increased competition and dwindling attention spans driven by instant-gratification culture. But I propose a further cause: a drop in quality.
To an extent, this was bound to happen. Newspapers have far fewer resources than they used to, having lost much of their advertising revenue to the internet, and the all-consuming need for speed means there’s less time for primping. But lazy, confusing, repetitive, cut-and-paste prose is not the magic bullet that will bring the readers swarming back.
“Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write” – Samuel S Wilks, 1951
Authority figures can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. And since most of the news media is now in the hands of private owners with conspicuous agendas, and the few remaining outlets with a shred of integrity are running on fumes, journalists can no longer be relied upon to catch those authority figures out.
Which means there’s really only one gatekeeper left to protect you from disinformation: you.
The lies we’re most familiar with – and therefore the best at seeing through – are the verbal kind: sequences of words that bend, break or obfuscate the truth. But as I hope my last few posts have illustrated, those who wish to mislead us are just as adept at manipulating sequences of numbers, and it turns out we’re not half as good at spotting that.
This is a problem. And since these lies have real, measurable impact (if they didn’t, no one would bother lying), it’s your problem.
No one’s asking you to sign up for a master’s in statistics. You just need to know enough to be able to spot the red flags. So my last post on this subject will be a recap of my previous warnings on the subject, plus a wee list of other common examples of statistical chicanery.
Beware big numbers
We can all easily imagine what 10 items looks like. With a bit of effort, 100. And most of us can probably conjure a vague picture of 1,000 things. But when it comes to millions and billions and trillions, our mental gearboxes just seize up. This is what the propagandists are counting on.
The example I chose, because it is arguably one of the best known and certainly one of the most damaging, was the “£350m a week” claim by the Brexit campaign.
The Remainers were quick, ish, to point out the falsehood. But the battle was already lost. People were no less outraged by the true figure of £150m a week, because all that mattered was that it was a bafflingly large amount.
Big numbers in isolation are meaningless to the average person. To get an idea of their true significance, we need context: in this case, the cost of things of a comparable scale, like, say, the NHS budget (£2bn a week), or defence spending (£1bn a week). Most of all, we needs to know exactly what that money bought. Sure, EU membership cost a lot of money, but did it offer value for that money?
Since its wildly successful field test in the Brexit debate, this tactic is deployed on a daily basis. Whenever something within state competence is revealed as being even slightly less than ideal, the response from the state press officers is the same: trot out a big number.
“A spokesperson for the DfE said education was a top priority for the government, with an extra £2bn for schools for each of the next two years included in the autumn statement.”
Ooh, two billion! That’s a lot! Everything must be fine then.
But without the proper context, this means nothing. An extra £2bn on top of what? Was the annual increase in base funding, if it existed at all, in line with inflation? How does the total compare with the funding levels last year, or 10 years ago? How much is being spent per pupil, and how does this compare with other countries’ efforts? Most importantly of all, is this money enough to meet the current needs of the education system?
To sum up, don’t let your brain switch off when it sees big numbers. If anything, it should move to high alert.
Be on your guard against glitter
Advertisers have long made liberal use of “glitter” – words or phrases that make things sound superficially attractive, but are devoid of substance. Two of the more popular zingers are “more than” and “over”. I once saw a billboard ad for a breakfast cereal that proudly proclaimed: “Contains more than 12 vitamins!”
The reason this works (on the unwary, anyway) is the anchoring effect: the tendency of the human brain to evaluate everything with reference to the first value it encounters. In this case, the anchor value is 12, and “more than 12” signals the set of all numbers greater than 12 – loads! – when a moment’s reflection will tell us that the true figure is 13.
Now it seems politicians and journalists have learned a trick or two from copywriters, and no figure is deemed complete unless it comes with a side of comparatives or superlatives.
Recently, in the course of my subediting duties, I happened across an (unedited) article containing the line “the family were awarded over £8,129 11s 5d in reparation”. My God! Are you telling me those lucky sods received compensation of 8,129 pounds, 11 shillings and six pence?
Another word that sounds great but never survives scrutiny is “record”.
“That is why, despite facing challenging economic circumstances, we are investing a record amount in our schools and colleges.”
Well, Department for Education, I should hope you were investing a record amount every year, given that the population rises every year and that inflation is a thing.
One of the truth-twisters’ favourite buzzwords in the early days of Brexit was “fastest-growing”. Never mind those tired old European countries; we’re going to concentrate on trading with countries that actually have a future!
Here again, crucial context is missing, and the context is that these wonderful new trading partners are growing so fast because they’re starting from a much lower base. As even one prominent Brexit advocate once admitted (about a year before it became their favourite go-to gotcha), the real meaning of “fastest-growing” is “tiny”.
“Of course, if you start from nothing, it’s not hard to become the ‘fastest-growing’ campaign” – Isabel Oakeshott, 20/11/2015
The top five performers on this metric are Guyana (GDP $15bn), Macao ($24bn), Palau ($233m), Niger ($15bn) and Senegal ($28bn).
The GDP of the EU (even without the UK that it desperately needed to survive) is $17.2 TRILLION. That’s more than 200 times the GDP of those five countries combined. Not to mention that they’re all a lot closer and they make a lot more things that British people actually want to buy. Who is it more important to have barrier-free trade with?
If this were a sustained trend, it might tell us something significant. But the period over which the data was measured is three months. This is more likely just a course correction after a rough patch for the UK economy than a sign of sunlit uplands. At the very least, we should wait a while before leaping to any conclusions.
Be vigilant with visuals
Graphical representations of information – data visualisations, or datavis – are useful ways of communicating a lot of information quickly. And because creating them requires a modicum of expertise, they are often deployed as gotchas: “Quiver, mortal, as I blow your puny argument out of the water with my BAR CHART!”
Polling firms are businesses. Businesses serve the needs of customers. And customers have political, or commercial interests, which do not necessarily align with yours, or society’s. (Moreover, it seems an increasing number of polling firms have agendas of their own.)
One of the questions in the survey was “Have you ever tried alcohol?” 57% of 15-year-olds in the UK said they had. The WHO then quoted this answer, in the press release (which is all most time-strapped journalists ever read), under the heading “Alcohol use widespread”.
Suddenly, sipping a shandy once on a family visit to a pub garden is lumped in together with downing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s a day. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing whether these answers were completely honest. How many British 15-year-olds would be embarrassed to admit they’d never tried booze?
Polls can be tools to shape opinion as much as reflect it, first because they can influence government policies, and second because waverers in the general populace can be won over to what they perceive to be the majority view.
I could caution you to be wary of surveys that aren’t upfront about their methodology, surveys with a small sample size, surveys conducted by firms with murky political connections, or surveys whose funding is not declared. But to keep things simple: ignore polls.
Are those figures really significant?
Something else that should set the alarm bells ringing, along with big numbers, is long strings of numbers, as seen in this article.
“The data released on Monday, from the Chinese ministry of public security, showed the number of new birth registrations in 2020 was 10.035 million, compared with 11.8 million in 2019.”
The second figure in this sentence is expressed with three significant figures: 1, 1, 8. So why is the first given to five significant figures? Did data collection methods become a thousand times more reliable in a year?
Most sums bandied around in the public domain – especially those derived from polls, but also anything involving average values, like fuel prices, which are also estimated using samples– are only approximations to begin with. That is, the true value may deviate from the estimated value by 1% or more.
Say 78.5% of 1,000 people surveyed think Dominic Cummings is a giant Gollum-faced twat, and about a third of those want to punch him in his stupid Gollum face. A sizeable proportion of reporters these days would whip out their calculators and proudly conclude that 26.1666666% of all people want to assault Specsavers Boy. While that’s mathematically precise, it’s not accurate (it can’t be, unless there’s a fraction of a person out there somewhere who wants to lay Cummings out). To say anything beyond 26% is meaningless and misleading.
“A slew of commercial and critical hits, including The Super Mario Bros Movie, which made $1.36bn (£1.094bn) at the global box office, has led to market experts comparing them to Marvel adaptations.”
Long strings of numbers are invariably a sign of false precision. If a politician, journalist or broadcaster is being hyper-precise with their figures in this way, they’re not necessarily consciously lying to you. But they are conveying an important truth: while they may know how to to type numbers on a keypad, and even use basic mathematical operations, they haven’t a clue how statistics works, and therefore can’t be trusted to properly understand, verify or convey the information they’ve been given.
On a related point, thanks to the uncertainty inherent in big data, running news stories about a “rise” or “fall” in something when the change is infinitesimal is just. Plain. Wrong.
That’s a whopping drop of 0.2%. But there’s no way there isn’t at least 0.5% room for error in these figures – so it may well be the case that unemployment has risen slightly. What you’re looking at here is not a news story; it’s a rubber-stamped government press release.
Why aggregates don’t add up
A few years ago, a newspaper I worked for (rightly) banned the practice of adding together jail sentences in the headlines of articles on court cases with multiple defendants. You know the sort of thing: “Members of Rochdale paedophile ring sentenced to total of 440 years”. The reasoning was that it was a) sensationalist and b) meaningless.
Because, uh, how many people were involved? (Sure, you could work it out by reading the article, but that’s an extravagance that fewer and fewer people seem to willing to stretch to.) Moreover, how do those numbers break down? If 48 people were involved, did four get put away for 55 years, and the other 44 for five? Or was the punishment more evenly spread, and they got just over nine years each?
Similar practices, however, still abound in other areas.
Wow, that’s going to put a dent in the holiday fund! Oh wait, they mean all UK mortgagors combined. But … context. How many people even have mortgages in the UK?
Recent figures suggest about 15.5 million homes in England and Wales are occupied by their owners, of which just under half are mortgaged. (There are separate figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland, but they’re relatively small and for our current purposes can be disregarded.) That means on average, mortgage payments would rise by about £2,600 per year per household, or £217 a month. Woop. That’s how much my rent just went up by.
A deeper dive into the figures reveals that fewer than a million households were facing monthly rises of £500 or more by 2026. Not half as sexy as the £19bn figure (and certainly not deserving of the lead slot on the front page of a global news provider), but twice as informative.
Unhappy mediums
People toss the word “average” around a lot, but as you may dimly recall from your schooldays, in the mathematical sphere, there are three distinct types: the mean, the median, and the mode. While they often give similar results, there’s sometimes significant divergence, and one kind of average is often more useful than another.
Take wages. Using the mean on a given group of people (adding up all the salaries and dividing that figure by the number of subjects) isn’t always terribly informative, because if the variance in wages is high, extreme figures skew the picture. Let’s say you have 10 people: two earn £10,000 a year, seven earn £20,000 a year, and one earns £200,000 a year. Calculating the mean would give you ((2 x £10,000) + (7 x £20,000) + (1 x £200,000))/10 = £36,000, which is a million miles from what any of the participants actually earn. The median, however – the figure in the middle if you line them up from smallest to largest – gives you £20,000, which is a much better reflection of the situation. (The mode – the figure that occurs most frequently – in this case gives the same result.)
So it’s vital to know, when someone is talking about averages, which kind they median.
Pushing your panic buttons
Barely a week goes by without the Daily Mail’s health pages shrieking about the latest thing that gives you cancer. They’re usually drawing on a “landmark report” – that is, a press release from a no-mark university – and they’re almost always lying with numbers.
The headline “Eating bacon increases your chances of getting cancer by 18%” is quite alarming, but remember, this is a relative risk, compared with the chances of someone who doesn’t eat bacon. It turns out that the absolute probability of succumbing to cancer among non-bacon eaters is pretty low – about six in 100 will get bowel cancer in their lifetimes – so an 18% increase on that doesn’t actually represent that big a jump. The unimaginable will strike only seven in 100 bacon eaters.
(There’s a fab and doubtless far from complete list of everything the Daily Mail says can give you cancer here, although the links are a bit screwy.)
Proportional misrepresentation
Some news organisations have improved their efforts in this department lately, but it’s a pit they still fall into depressingly often.
Before it was spotted and corrected, an article published in 2021 about the impact of Covid on education said: “While there was an across-the-board fall of a fifth in the proportion of children working at a level consistent with their age, those pupils in year 1 in 2019-20 appear to have suffered the most significant losses … 81% of year 1 pupils achieved age-related expectations in March 2020 … by the summer of 2020, this had dropped to 60%.”
The reporter is starting from the wrong baseline. The actual numbers are irrelevant, but for the sake of argument, let’s say there were 100 kids. If 81% of them (ie 81 kids) met the requirements in March and only 60% in June, that’s a fall of 21 percentage points, not 21 per cent. Comparing the new figure with the baseline, 81, gives a drop of a quarter rather than a fifth.
If you lack confidence in your ability to check percentages, use an online percentage checker, like this one: https://percentagecalculator.net/
Unusual? Suspect
I’m singling out the Mirror here, but virtually all the major news outlets reported this story in the same uncritical fashion. “The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has raised more than £200,000 in a single day … Its donations had increased by 2,000% from Tuesday, when it raised just £100.”
The alpha numerics among you will notice that the Mirror – and most other news providers – got their basic maths wrong here: £200,000 is an increase of not 2,000%, but almost two hundred thousand per cent on £100. But that’s not my main gripe.
The Mirror reporters (or should I say, the writers of the RNLI’s press release) have compared the latest figure with the figure from the day before – which ordinarily would not be a problem. However, we’re dealing here with not one, but two highly unusual days. Later in the piece, we discover that the average daily donation to the RNLI is not £100 (a very low outlier for the lifeboat folk), but £7,000 – a much more instructive figure against which to stand today’s total.
The most useful way to present the information would be “£200,000, around 30 times the average daily donations that RNLI receives”– but once again, the drive for a sexy headline has trumped all considerations of sense.
Finktanks
It doesn’t matter if it’s a study, a survey, a graph or a sweetie. Show nothing but scorn to anything that comes from a self-declared “thinktank” that refuses to declare its funding. The list currently includes, but is by no means limited to, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, Civitas, Policy Exchange, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute for Economic Affairs. All, front organisations set up to advance the cause of neoliberal economics by whatever means necessary, are proven experts in weasel words, sharp practice and low-quality “studies”.
Things that should make you go “Hmm”
If you’re baffled as to why I’ve spent so much time droning on about this tedious statistics malarkey, it’s because it’s really fucking important to know when people are lying to you with numbers.
An awful lot of what’s wrong with the UK today – high prices, low pay, crumbling services, the erosion of workers’ rights, medicine shortages, rivers full of shit – has come about at least in part because people have failed to robustly challenge the falsehoods and of politicians, thinktanks and the media.
Some will shrug and say, “Meh, politicians have always lied, and things have always worked out OK.”
Campaign organisations and rogue nations are pouring unprecedented resources into their propaganda ops, much of it targeting people directly through social media and thus bypassing all scrutiny. Soon AI will be churning this stuff out faster than checkers can find it, never mind check it. All at a time when our traditional defences against disinformation are collapsing.
And because of our lack of confidence with numbers, it’s the statistical lies that are most likely to slip through.
If that sounds scary … well, good. You should be scared. But don’t panic. What I’ve been trying to communicate with these posts is that spotting this sort of deviousness isn’t as hard as you think.
Just bear the above points in mind. Don’t assume that something’s true just because a source you personally approve of published or repeated it. Is the source reliable? Does this claim tally with what others say? Do these numbers support a particular political agenda rather too neatly?
Or to boil it down to one rule of thumb: if a number seems too good or too interesting to be true, it almost certainly is.
On February 5 2021, Andrew Neil, once respected political interviewer, pundit and chair of the Spectator Magazine Group, posted this tweet:
The Spectator’s remarkable subscriptions growth over the last 5 years is bucking the trend in a declining industry. Try a month for free today and find out why. You might also be our 100,000th subscriber and win a prize worth £5,000. https://t.co/BtiecikZc1pic.twitter.com/ANQZDlHMRS
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
possiblerange 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.
Some in the UK seem desperate to see the worst in the UK…frantically tweeting nonsense about UK ‘inaction’ on Russia. It is the opposite of the truth. Ukraine knows how solid our support has been & for how long. I’ve seen that for myself meeting Ukrainian reps at UNEP this week https://t.co/LyQlCxEdX1pic.twitter.com/FgjwUSofkL
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?
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.
“Do-gooders” are no longer just a nuisance – their “decadence”, according to populist demagogues, is now an existential threat to civilisation
‘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.
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?
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.
(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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.
(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.
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:
Can the buyer afford it? What is this sum as a proportion of their budget?
What do comparable items or services cost?
Is it a reasonable rate? Are others being charged a similar amount?
How much will it cost to get out of the contract?
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”
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.
(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.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 reporterswho 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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.”
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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.
“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 –
– 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.
“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?
“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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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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.
(What they’re really doing here, of course, apart from flailing pathetically, is attempting to 