I’ve mostly always associated political dishonesty with the right. It’s not that the left is never dishonest, but thoughtful evidence-based policymaking has always felt more of a ‘progressive’ value.
Distortion of fact and populist appeals to emotion – that’s supposed to be the right-wing game. Fox News in the US is perhaps the clearest example of this.
On criminal justice and the ‘war on drugs’ in particular, evidence is rarely the primary driver of public policy. In both the EU and AV referendums, the framing mattered more than the reality. Several bills going through parliament right now contain serious practical and logical flaws, even without the moral considerations – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Elections Bill – and it’s clear that on some level the Conservative government know this as demonstrated by the weakness in their justifications for them. Scrapping the Universal Credit uplift, that made no logical sense either – I mean, if it was so necessary to increase it during the pandemic because it wasn’t enough to live on, it hasn’t suddenly become enough to live on post lockdown either; that decision was made entirely for ideological and cost-cutting reasons. You could fill books with this stuff.
And you could do the same with the liberal left – or what seems to be passing for the liberal left these days. It’s as if they read George Lakoff’s famous work ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ but only understood half of it. From politicians and their advisors to academics to lobbying groups to the media, confected outrage and motivated reasoning have become the driving forces of much of supposedly progressive thought. A liberalism where evidence can be ignored if it doesn’t fit the ‘correct’ narrative and those you disagree with can be reduced to nothing but a foil for your own virtue is not a liberalism I recognise. It is liberalism with the brains removed.
Serious and complex subjects require serious and complex thought. Man cannot legislate on feelings alone. It makes for bad policy.
TRANS CONVERSION THERAPY – HOW CAN YOU BAN WHAT YOU CAN’T DEFINE?
There’s no better recent example of sanctimony over substance than the reaction to the government’s decision not to ban conversion therapy for trans people.
The framing of the entire bill is misleading anyway, with phrases like “torture” and “finally banned” uttered by politicians and journalists who should know better. The reality is that gay conversion therapy is already illegal and the government’s own study in support of the bill found very little evidence of it actually happening in the UK. Now that’s not to say there aren’t things that further legislation could cover, but the bill was always more symbolic than anything else.
The problem with the bill has always been the shoehorning of transgender into it about a year ago. We’ve just had a consultation period and the government appears to have listened to the evidence presented to it (which is supposed to be the point of a consultation). The draft bill failed to define either transgender or conversion therapy and conflated sexual orientation and gender identity (which is also undefined). It ran the risk of criminalising normal exploratory therapy and causing serious harm to those it intended to protect. For those wondering why, they could try reading the Cass Review interim report, the Equality and Human Rights Commission consultation submission, and the testimonies of Tavistock whistleblowers and detransitioners – I’ve covered some of these things in a prior blog.
This interview with Nikki da Costa is a perfect summary of the issues – as she puts it – legislating for a slogan is very different to the detail of that legislation.
Yet not a single ‘trans rights’ group, political party or politician decrying the government’s decision appear willing to even acknowledge their existence (apart from the EHRC, who are of course evil ‘transphobes’ now). Constructive criticism or evidenced arguments have been entirely absent from the hyperbolic response. There has been no effort made to articulate what effective legislation might look like or even to clarify what it is they actually want to ban, instead simply a collective tantrum.
Perhaps the only thing resembling an actual evidenced argument put forth by anyone at all is that ‘other countries have already done so successfully without problems’. Aside from ‘other people are doing it’ being a pretty poor reason for enacting policy by itself, it’s not entirely true. A small number of countries have only very recently passed conversion therapy bans so it is too soon to properly quantify the impact of said legislation, the bills were not all worded the same way and not all countries had the same level of protections to begin with, and they’ve not been passed without criticism – in Canada’s case, the bill is terribly written, exploratory therapy is exempted – but effectively only as long as therapists don’t question anything a patient says.
The very worst thing that could happen now is for politicians to simply nod along to a badly written amendment in an effort to placate screeching ideologues. They need to engage their brains and come back to such legislation only when they can explain, with evidence, what it is they think actually needs to be banned. Vague slogans won’t cut it for this one.
There has been a similar reaction to the EHRC’s guidance on single-sex spaces, with even some senior HR and Diversity professionals in the NHS stating their intention to ignore it – despite the guidance being nothing more than a clarification of the law as it already stands. On self-ID, the Scottish government remain determined to push it through, with genuine scrutiny from other parties almost entirely lacking. The unwillingness to engage with anybody who has concerns over the policy has been made abundantly clear – government claims of wanting a ‘respectful debate’ aren’t even lip service when one of its ministers then compares women’s rights campaigners to anti-semites and falsely claims they are being funded by right-wing American groups. The inability of its advocates to answer even basic questions about the bill honestly (if at all) is telling. Public opinion polls consistently show a lack of support for self-ID, yet ‘progressive’ heads remain buried in the sand.
The BBC expose of Stonewall, The EHRC’s statements on self-ID and conversion therapy, the interim Cass Review, Maya Forstater’s tribunals – each has vindicated those smeared as ‘transphobes’. So just what exactly will it take for a bit of self-reflection? Lobbyists and activists are one thing, the elected politicians enabling them are something else.
But then these are the same politicians who have taken their cue from those who have spent years flat out lying about the ‘spousal veto’ and demanding its removal. As the government clarified last month, there is no such thing. A more accurate descriptor would be ‘spousal exit clause’ – it doesn’t mean that a spouse can prevent their partner from obtaining a GRC and it never has, it simply acts as a safeguard to allow the non-transitioning partner to decide whether they want their marriage to continue or not after its nature has been fundamentally changed. These are also the same politicians who treat with reverence the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance as if evidence of trans ultimate victim status – ignoring the fact that no trans people have been murdered in the UK for nearly three years and the global total (375 in 2021) is largely made up of South American sex workers whose deaths didn’t have a whole lot to do with being trans.
This abandonment of critical thinking can result in the repeated utterances of some extraordinary errors of fact, like: intersex is as common as red hair (it isn’t, not by a long way); the Equality Act recognises that ‘trans women are women’ (it doesn’t); self-ID is a minor administrative change (it isn’t); and trans people have already been eligible to compete as their new gender in the Olympics for 20 years (when the criteria was full surgery and legal recognition of that gender for at least four years prior – yes, but those conditions were removed for the 2020 games and have been changed again since).
It can also cause allegedly intelligent people to endorse, tacitly if not sometimes explicitly, utterly bonkers beliefs, such as: a penis may be a female sex organ; you can’t tell what sex a person is without inspecting their genitals; science shows there are more than two biological sexes; the rise in children identifying as trans is just the same as when left-handedness became socially acceptable; male puberty confers no advantages in sport; a middle-aged man who identifies as a six-year-old girl is a trans ‘woman’; ace-people are a vulnerable and marginalised minority that need to be protected by the Equality Act; and hormones can make you grow a cervix.
There’s a reason why gender identity theory can’t even entertain scrutiny, let alone withstand it. Draping it in civil rights garb and the language of inclusivity doesn’t make bad policy any less so. As former Green Party MSP Andy Wightman wrote after his resignation from the party in 2020, “I have never understood why one needs to subscribe to queer theory and gender identity theory in order to improve the lives of trans people”. And that’s the problem in a nutshell. Rigid adherence to ideology in the face of reality also brings with it a wider credibility problem – because if you can’t be trusted to tell the truth about really obvious things, then why should you be trusted on anything else?
MISOGYNY AND LAW – SOUND-BITES ONLY PLEASE
For British politicians who are unable to define what a woman is to also be demanding further protections for women is somewhat ironic (if I’m being generous). Making misogyny a hate crime has been a key campaign for several political parties and they’ve been vocal in their disappointment and criticism of the government’s decision not to ban it earlier this year. And by ‘criticism’ I am being generous.
The independent legal experts at the Law Commission rejected the proposal, arguing that there were problems in defining misogyny and a law would fail to achieve its intended aims – the government accepted their advice. Beyond that, several feminist groups argued that it wouldn’t actually address the problem of violence against women and was little more than gesture politics. And many women expressed concern that Baroness Newlove’s amendment to the Police bill was written in such a way as to redefine women to also include men – which would be somewhat undermining to the whole point of the law. Never mind the problems with existing hate crime law being entirely based on self-perception rather than any objective test and the now numerous examples of rather dubious things that have been investigated as such.
Has there been acknowledgement of any of these things from the politicians demanding misogyny be made a hate crime? No.
Prior to the government’s decision, some politicians – notably Sadiq Khan and Ed Davey – made reference to the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa as proof of the need to legislate against misogyny. With good intentions, absolutely. But misogyny being a hate crime would not have made any difference to what happened to them. Nor would it have made any difference to the sentences given to the men responsible.
It is entirely reasonable to want misogyny recognised in law, but when advocates of a policy are unwilling to even acknowledge the reasons given for rejecting it, let alone address them – then such advocacy feels little more than performative. It suggests that any law will do as long as you can take credit for it.
LIBERALISM SHOULD NOT BE A PERFORMANCE
I’m mindful of the length of this article, so I’ll try and keep this brief.
I’ve previously written about the Labour Party’s propensity for performative justice pronouncements. I’ve also written about the misleading way in which rape statistics are presented in the media – and done so in such a way as to be entirely counterproductive to the intended aims of those doing so. Not understanding the things they wish to legislate on is most certainly not a ‘liberal politician’ thing, but for a side that thinks itself morally superior, it is definitely more frustrating.
The reaction to the Sewell report on race and ethnic disparities last year is also interesting in the quickness many displayed in condemning it – before they had even read it in some instances – simply because it didn’t conclude the things they wanted it to. That’s not to dismiss concerns about its conclusions, but when perspectives are formulated entirely by a self-righteous belief that you have the ‘correct’ opinion so those who don’t share it must be ‘bad’, then a consequence is an unwillingness to accept that opposing perspectives can both contain some elements of truth. Policy becomes symbolic rather than guided by critical evaluation of evidence – hence the most tangible ‘gains’ when it comes to race equality in the last year or so relating to statues and kneeling.
In America, the right are not the only ones dealing in alternative facts. The Democrats have been largely responsible for the entirely false narratives surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse case, the Don’t Say Gay Bill (or the Parental Rights in Education Bill – to give its actual title), and claims that ‘trans kids’ are being banned from sport – no longer are things just flawed or misguided, they now have to be ‘hateful’ and the reality must simply bend around that narrative.
One of the things that I’ve always found appealing in Liberalism – and I refer here to the Liberal Democrats also – is as a counterpoint to the extremes. Not the god awful ‘not left, not right… but stand in the centre and get run over’ sort of centrism as pitched in the 2015 general election campaign – and I was certainly to the left of much of the party during those coalition years; but in the sense that good, effective policymaking is supposed to involve critical thought rather than thought control. Liberalism is supposed to value free enquiry and rationality – evidence-based policymaking – and the occasional bit of moderation and compromise. It’s more than simply a performance.
Politicians need to ignore the howls from ideologues, stop completely outsourcing political opinions to lobbying groups, ignore the natural inclination to say only what they think makes them look good – and start insisting on proper legislative scrutiny and a bit more objectivity. Just as policy shouldn’t be made for tabloid headlines, it shouldn’t be made for Twitter likes or cheap applause from echo chambers either – you get bad policy either way.
Democracy Coma 
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