The Intentions Of Government

This note does not relate to the Queen's Speech today but to the intentions of the new Coalition Government - what it would do if it had the power and resources. It follows directly on from the last note on the 'ideology' (such as it is) underlying the new Coalition.

Limitations

The Coalition Government admits from the beginning that it has two serious constraints on delivery:

• the budget deficit, the reduction of which now appears to be somewhat of a race against time as the markets begin to wobble seriously over the state of the Eurozone; and,
• its full acceptance of devolved powers to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales which means that many of its policies are applicable only to England.

If it meets its stated aim of decentralising executive power radically, the Coalition Government will also lose, over time, some of its control over the State's capacity to enforce action domestically (much of which power has been theoretical in any case).

The Nudge Approach

This helps to explain its overt appeal to the use of 'behaviourial economics and social psychology' in its Programme for Government, the so-called 'nudge' approach to managing the population.

This is most clearly expressed in the consumer choice and public health areas where Government will 'encourage behaviour change to help people live healthier lives'.

No mention is made here of the real problem - the lack of action to deal with the choices offered to people by manufacturers and retailers. The 'innovative techniques' are designed for us to take action, not the businesses who sell to us.

We have warned already that this belief in the efficacy of the new cognitive sciences in public administration is probably a case of 'clutching at straws'.

The public are probably not as easy to manipulate as the new wave of policymakers think but this is what the new Coalition believes is possible and so, efficacious or not, it will be attempted.

A Solid Popular Programme

As for the programme itself, most of it, perhaps two thirds of it, is unexceptionable by any standards - almost motherhood-and-apple pie stuff that expresses a very English irritation with an overweening State recently led by people who think we respond well to petty regulation.

This Government gets it right on the need for banking regulation, on taxation, on economic re-balancing, on government transparency, on international development, on social care and disability, on transport, and on consumer protection (subject to the caveat on the excessive faith on untested soft science)

It certainly gets it very right on deficit reduction, immigration, civil liberties and decentralisation.

There is no immediate quibble on Europe, political reform, policy on the NHS (though with caution on the detail), on environment, food and rural affairs, on crime and policing or justice and on defence (as a general principle rather than in regard to the political classes' obsession with Trident).

We are not qualified to write on the controversial education and universities policies at this early stage and the 'social action' programme, based on civil society assumptions that are far from proven, should perhaps be passed over in silence for the moment.

But where does the Government seem to have intentions that run counter not only to deficit reduction but to the limited state that it proposes? Where may we see strains as libertarians come up against those who still cling to Blairite glamour or Churchillian 'folie de grandeur'? Probably in four areas.

Government As Beacon of Culture

There is still a belief that Government has a role to play in 'excellence' in culture, media and sport. You do not have to be an avid reader of Friedrich Nietzsche to question whether Government can have anything to do with excellence, certainly not in matters of the imagination.

The promotion of 'excellence' has often involved massive transfers of funds from private budgets. It is arguable that personal choice is best when decisions are to made about art, games and the acquisition of information. Watching excellence is a lot less healthy than kicking a ball around a field.

What we appear to have here is an expensive continuation of public subsidy for a middle class elite that just happens to have a hold over the public policy agenda. This concession to Blairismo amongst radical libertarians is puzzling to say the least.

'climate change is one of the gravest threats we face'

In fact, graver threats may lie in serious economic dislocation and collapse of social cohesion. Government will be doing some very good things in the detail of environmental policy but it seems to be hinting that we will continue to be 'nudged' into environmentalist hysteria.

The question here is whether the new Government can resist the temptation to follow 'Blairismo' in using hype and fear as an instrument of policy.

Or whether we will see a pseudo-internationalism being promoted to effect a relatively few and sensible measures to deal with primarily national concerns - sustainability and food and energy security.

The Programme Statement suggests that hype has been locked into the mental model of the new Government from an earlier era and it may not be easily dislodged. Fortunately, the slashing of marketing and advertising budgets removes one of its tools at a stroke ...

Hidden Petards For Social Cohesion

The emphasis on the family definitely comes from the Conservative side of the equation but it begs many questions about what precisely a family is in the modern age, while the welfare issue is somewhat skated over in generalities that imply a toughness that is not fully stated.

We might also raise questions about what the equalities agenda really means but this is a complex ideological area and we can leave that to another time. The implication of the Programme is that the Coalition Government has not abandoned the progressive ideology of its predecessors.

In all these cases, what we are really talking about is an attempt to maintain social cohesion through a claim of strategies of inclusion and of support for social institutions in a back-handed compliment to the previous regime.

But it is clear that the previous Administration never had a cogent plan to deal with the budgetary effects of the major social changes created by consumer choice and media-led social liberalism. It made full employment into a mantra, did nothing and the deficit just grew and grew.

Everything now depends on what precisely the new Administration actually means by family and by equality but there is no incentive for Liberal Democrats and Conservatives to rock the boat by having that dialogue now, certainly not in public.

The definitions in the head of the politicians, the ones in the expectation of different constituencies and the ones required by society may take some time to reconcile. Eventually, decisions are going to have to be taken and then, and only then, will we know if this Coalition can stick.

This is the area in which the State comes up hard against issues of social cohesion since most people at most times are not concerned with the planet or arts policy or even foreign policy but with basic survival.

The implication remains that, for some people at the margins of society, the State will be patronising you if you are not conventional, attempting to 'nudge' you into normality and giving preference to others because of some attribute like gender or colour despite your talents.

If you add to the pot a commitment to protect pensions and even improve the care system (a highly laudable social aim), then the financial and electoral pressure to push the young into one place in order to protect baby-boomers as they age in another may store up some serious social order problems.

This is the ethos of the progressive authoritarianism of the previous administration but it is now combined with a determined and necessary deficit reduction programme where welfare (far more than Trident) is the biggest target for significant 'savings'.

'Folie de Grandeur'

On foreign policy and security, there is no point in going over old ground (just track through our postings) but the Coalition wants to be a player in the world within the old Atlantic system and this is a very expensive choice to make (especially when we add Trident to the mix).

Alongside this is another inheritance from the previous regime in which a particular anti-terrorist definition of national security (as opposed to one based on national sustainability) is stated to permit 'action to tackle terrorism, and its causes, at home and abroad'.

Put this determination to be a player together with the threats agenda of some of the security establishment and you see the potential for a continued drain on the limited resources of the State in order to allow politicians to carry on their game of playing the role of eighteenth century statesmen.

The Pressures

This basically sound and popular Coalition Programme contains its own inner contradictions. Apart from the sheer lack of easy money and the over-emphasis on soft science that is still in its infancy to offset a deliberate transfer of powers to lower levels in society, there are troubles brewing.

The Coalition Government is a creature of history as are we all and the burden of big culture, big rhetoric and being a big global player on limited budgets will place further pressure on the place where the deficit can be dealt with most decisively - welfare.

On top of the apparent necessity to deal with welfare costs lies an ill-formed cobbled together ideology surrounding the idea of society that tries to reconcile libertarians in both Coalition parties with a form of communitarianism that places direct pressure on individual choice and rights.

All this is taking place in a context in which an aging population of self-centred individualists is expecting the young to pay for its old age as a matter of right despite leaving their world in a bit of a mess.

We are in an extended honeymoon period for this Government because it is cutting the fat left by New Labour but the next round of cuts is likely to be brutal and to have aspects that imply class or even generational war. Fairness will dictate some pain for the middle classes to make it acceptable.

Climate Change & Cold Fusion

It is probable that most people in the developed world respect scientific method, especially in modern Europe where few are impressed with creationist nonsense. And yet there is growing scepticism - not so much about science as scientists.

An analogy might be with traditional catholicism where a catholic can be faithful to the entire belief system and yet be anti-clerical in private, cynical about a particular priest yet never the Church.

The point is that the priesthood is sacred but a man in office may be accepted as flawed - an attitude that permits a believer to be resilient in the face of allegations of (say) child abuse in Ireland. The men in the Irish case were weak but their weakness has no effect whatsoever on the message of St. Peter.

Modern science is slipping into the same situation as it matures into our shared social consensus. If few doubt scientific method, many now doubt, thanks to increased knowledge of psychology, sociology and even anthropology, that scientists are anything other than as flawed as the rest of us.

The Roots of Scepticism

Scepticism comes from a variety of sources. The first source of scepticism is our contemporary awareness that paradigms change and supplant one another much as Thomas Kuhn initially proposed in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' (1962).

The Social Darwinist, racist and eugenicist nonsense of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was scientifically valid in its time but vicious and ultimately proven to be wrong. Naturally, an intelligent sceptic asks: "if such models were so flawed then, why not current models equally so ..."

The partial answer, of course, is that we know more now than we did then to which the reply will be - " ... and we will know more in the future so let us be cautious in accepting any theory while a single anomaly continues to exist".  An attitude about which we will have more to say later ...

The second source of the sceptical caste of mind is everyday human experience. People have 'interests' and will 'talk their book' - and they are quite capable of deluding themselves in order to maintain their livelihoods and status. This is true in business, politics and the churches so why not in the sciences?

Any biography of a scientist of note will show the reader that science is very social - who you know and what you belong to will often dictate success and patterns of behaviour.

Scientists are also quite capable of inordinate ambition, negativity towards others, competitiveness and even downright malice. They can also be surprisingly cunning, selfish and stupid - just like the rest of us. Though great scientists often are great men or women, the scientific community can be small-minded.

If scientists are no better than priests, civil servants or local newsagents in terms of their moral worth and scientific communities are as 'human' as Parliament or the Institute of Directors, then it is no surprise that the public are wary of trusting to their authority more than anyone else's.

Interest and Climate Change

Alongside suspicion that no paradigm is certain and that scientists are flawed even where their methods are not, we have patronage. In a system where a patron (now generally a State which has a political agenda) makes it known what it wants, scientists will gear research to meet that expectation.

A proposal on (say) monkeys in the Amazon becomes a proposal on the effects of climate change on monkeys in the Amazon because funding bodies are more interested in climate change than monkeys and the monkey scientists need funds to study their monkeys. Ergo, they study climate change.

The leak by Wikileaks of e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia was a reminder of all these 'softer' aspects of scepticism - climate change just might be a questionable paradigm constructed by experts with an interest in the subject. For example, an observer might wonder ...

• why the climate change movement was taking experts on trust in ways that were closer to a faith-based movement than rational discourse: most people in the street are arguing from faith in scientists (authority) or from political interest as ideological environmentalists;
• whether the merging of scientific evidence and the ideological movement behind action on climate change should create concerns about what was not being discussed - the silences as well as the assertions;
• whether those with a dissident view were being deliberately excluded and why the ideological claque committed to a deal at Copenhagen were descending to insult and ridicule, terming opponents 'deniers' (in an analogy with Holocaust revisionism) or as little better than creationists?

Faith-based arguments from authority, a single line that excluded debate and insult and vilification of heretics, positioning scientific critics as little better than creationists, suggest something closer to the worst excesses of the early Church rather than rational scientific debate.

What was not being discussed with the same fervour were the costs of action for developed countries, the historical injustices to developing countries and whether adaptation might be a more sensible strategy than political fixes designed to get a global commitment to a policy at Copenhagen.

What we had here was a movement in which the primary driver was not rational investigation of facts and anomalies or an objective debate about costs and solutions but a coalition where politics was dictating posture and language. Politics is, as we will see, not science.

Cold Fusion - A Case Study

We are not arguing against the propositions of the climate change lobby. We do not know who is right or wrong but we retain our right to a degree of scepticism about the assertion of claims from 'experts' that go beyond their own area of competence or are taken up by faith-based movements.

Our own working model is that there may well be global warming taking place but that the best way forward is not to spend vast resources trying to resist change or get a unified global response but that we should, as a nation, begin to invest in a necessary adaptation to change.

But rather than argue though what is only a belief based on concern that the scientific community has been pushing their luck in allying with particular political interests, I think we might usefully look at another case where science has shown itself unreliable in its political reactions - cold fusion.

Again, we have no idea if cold fusion will bring us unlimited safe energy in the future. Somehow we doubt it. But it is not absurd to consider the idea that chemical reactions at 'room temperature' might generate the same conditions for fusion that high temperatures can create as a hypothesis, no more.

In 1989, two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they had achieved cold fusion. The 'achievement' was recognised as limited by themselves but, as so often, they were bamboozled by university PRs into endorsing a news release that claimed more than they had a right to.

Cold Fusion - Fifteen Year Pariah

These were not young graduate students but serious scientists with a track record and what happened next is a lesson in how science really works - remember, the two scientists had merely undertaken an interesting experiment. It was an ambitious university that had over-promoted it.

The claim was tested by the US Department of Energy and they were negative. Pons and Fleischmann, the most experienced in the field, were treated as pariahs, no funding was forthcoming - and no bright young graduates dared to go into the field, certainly not ask for funds on their own account.

From an initial blunder, the entire machinery of the scientific community moved against these two scientists and their careers were ruined. Cold fusion was widely regarded as a joke. And yet ...

A rare moment of praise for the military-industrial complex and an argument for diversity in science ... the US Navy continued to explore cold fusion on the quiet, renamed as 'anomalous effects on deuterated systems', and, sure enough, another scientist Melvin Miles reproduced Pons' and Fleischmann's result.

Unfortunately, reproduction of these results proved a hit and miss affair and, when naval money dried up in 1996, Miles became, according to Michael Brooks, effectively unemployable - because of his association with 'cold fusion'.

Another very prominent scientist Julian Schwinger became a figure of near contempt because of his scientific interest in the theory of 'cold fusion'. In 1991, three years before he died, Schwinger wrote:

The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.

More Than Meets The Eye

So far so unfortunate, but so what - maybe Pons, Fleischmann and Miles were not quite so good as they thought they were and Schwinger had gone a bit weak in the head in his latter years. Maybe the ruling scientific 'paradigm' was so strongly established that these people were no better than creationists.

But Schwinger was simply thinking like a scientist should. He did not say that there was or was not something called 'cold fusion'. All he said was that there was an anomaly and that the anomaly should be investigated. Could nuclear energy be produced through chemical (atomic) manipulation?

He tried eight theories and none quite made the grade but still he tried. Oh, by the way, Schwinger had co-shared a Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics but, well, let's just put that to one side, shall we?

Finally, in 2004, a decade after Schwinger's death, the Department of Energy changed its mind - there might be something in this anomaly, an awkward fact on the ground, after all!

Things had changed. The naval research was now available in full and it turned out that one of the original and most damning reports on which the original Department of Energy had made its funding assessment had been ... flawed.

Interestingly, a blunder in 1989 that led to the resignation in protest of MIT's then chief science writer meant that an MIT report of the anomaly did not appear in the original report until after it had been presented to Congress. So that was that then ... the politicians had decided. End of story until 2004.

Lessons For Science and Politics

With subsequent research showing that the anomaly is real - that some kind of nuclear reactions are going on - we find ourselves wondering what had been happening here. Science was not happening. Politics was happening. Cold fusion was pariah. The consensus had decided.

We can be pleased that, in the end, the facts on the ground eventually led to opportunities for research being reopened some fifteen years after the first misreported experiment and Americans can be gratified that American bureaucracy permits multiple agencies to compete on establishing the truth.

But careers were ruined or placed into doubt and scientists were deprived of funding not because these were bad scientists or cranks but because the weight of community opinion had witch-hunted some into a corner on the basis of surmise and a misreading or distrust of what few facts were available.

It is not that cold fusion will solve our energy needs (it probably will not) but it is a fact on the ground that needs explaining. Science is not served by ignoring anomalies or forcing scientists into some paradigmatic, conceptual or ideological straightjacket - in the liberal West any more than Stalin's Russia.

Currently, research is just interested in the anomaly, that is all. Current thinking is that a nuclear reaction does take place under certain conditions and that this has yet to be explained - it is not by any means necessarily a sign of extra energy, heat production or nuclear fusion.

Brooks' quotes the Economist of 1989 with approval - whether right or wrong, Pons and Fleischmann's experiment was 'exactly what science should be about'. But what does all this have to do with the climate change debate?

The Politics of Science

A consensus in science only expresses a probability until all anomalies have been explained. While there are legitimate scientific critics of the prevailing consensus, who are independent of special interests and with insights from their field, we should assume nothing. Crushing dissent is bad science.

At the moment, a sort of existential panic has set in - especially on the centre-left. The fear is that if we do not do anything now about 'climate change', we will all end up on the film set of 2012. History tells us that such hysteria usually leads to serious and often irrecoverable and expensive policy mistakes.

But this is about politics, not science. It is about a centre-left that has lost its way and is desperate for a universal cause (and why not the 'planet' as substitute for humanity!) and about Western governments trying to retain their influence in the world while their populations grow restless.

[The facts of the cold fusion story were culled from '13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of Our Times' (2009) by Michael Brooks but the opinions are entirely those of TPPR]

The US Attempt At Seducing China ...

The first of a set of US-China bilateral meetings are taking place in Washington as we write. From a US perspective, they are part of a programme to get Chinese buy-in to collaboration with the US in policing the world’s troubled economic and strategic order.

The logic of this is global co-dominion as Chinese power increases. The primary focus, of course, is currently economic. Past US assertions about Chinese currency manipulation have been largely forgotten. The US now needs China to help it climb out of its financial crisis.

Some observers suggest that the Chinese are now locked into an economic  ‘death embrace’ with the US and must co-operate in order not to be harmed - much to their own frustration. There may be some truth in this. The other main agenda items are:

• the creation of a sufficiently shared position on climate change in advance of the Copenhagen Summit
• US encouragement for China to make the structural changes that would increase domestic consumption more quickly
• collaboration in bringing North Korea into line
• encouraging China to trust that the White House can control Congress in avoiding increased protectionism
• getting back some mutual trust in the investment by the corporations of each in the other.

The US is also offering to assist more vigorously in getting China greater representation at international organizations such as the IMF.

The Chinese are more cautious about all this than the US where Obama’s bouncy enthusiasm for deeper ties must be seen for what it is – an attempt to take advantage of a high point of mutual dependency to suck Beijing into a role as East Asian regional ally.

The idea is that just as India is recognised as Indian Ocean regional hegemon and partner in promoting free markets, so will China be in East Asia. A deal also offers security stability for the more politically liberal pro-Western economies that line China’s Eastern maritime border.

The US see this mutual dependency becoming ever stronger so that China becomes locked into its hegemonic system. The alternative is that China consciously takes a more nationalist and independent route.

A neo-nationalist stance, despite frustrations over the conduct of Western economic policy, seems unlikely under China's current leaders but nationalist feeling is growing in the younger generation.

Interdependency may imply greater partnership now and co-dominion later but it also implies an acceptance of China’s junior status for some time to come and the loss of an opportunity to compete aggressively on equal terms now.

Obama is flattering China by saying that the 21st century will be shaped by the US-Chinese relationship. Under this model, India, Russia, the EU – and perhaps later Brazil, Indonesia, the Gulf and some supposed African Union – act as out-riders within the US hegemonic system or just outside it.

China is implicitly being offered the choice of its inclusion within the tribe or an implicit isolation outside it, although (at least) Russia, the Gulf, the African Union and perhaps other ‘blocs’ may not always choose the American way.

Under current conditions, with acceptance that the Western system will not collapse over night and following the US-Indian rapprochement and a probable US-Russian entente, the Chinese leadership may consider this is a good deal which draws maximum benefit from America's temporary weakness.

However, we must suppose that China will not be seduced by Obama's charm - it will continue to invest in its strategic naval capability, be cautious of excessive interdependence, be sensitive about Western attempts to tell it how to run its empire and continue its economic incursions overseas.

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