Politics
With our money, they hide the truth
Published 20 March 2000
Nick Cohen fears that new Labour has continued the Tory habit of trying to doctor research to suit its political agenda
No one who has had to live next to noisy neighbours can give the government anything but credit for getting tough with nuisances whose wall-shaking squawks make nearby homes torments rather than sanctuaries. If it had dealt plainly with the howlers while protecting the innocent from malicious denunciations, the most extreme libertarian would not have bothered to raise a protest stronger than an eyebrow.
But as with so many other policies, there is a whiff of lazy authoritarianism about the sanctions on antisocial elements. Ministers are expert condemners, master punishers, but third-rate administrators. Last year, Caroline Hunter and Judy Nixon, academics at Sheffield Hallam University, examined councils and housing associations to see if they were jumping to the orders of the hard men of Whitehall. They were, with vigour. A middle-aged couple were being threatened by a housing association, to quote their most extreme example, although the complaints came from a neighbour who had taken against them from the day they arrived. Others in the street said they did not cause any trouble or keep them awake until the small hours. The couple had been model tenants for years in their old house. Yet eviction beckoned.
Instead of promising to prevent abuses, David Blunkett went wild when their findings made the press in November. The kind of academics who argued with his party would not live "within a million miles" of anti-social families, he said. "If this is what our money is going on, it is time for a review of the funding of social science research."
Blunkett's working-class, conservative menace and his threat to cut support unless he got news he could use left Hunter and Nixon gasping. His sneers were misplaced, Hunter told me. The salaries he paid lecturers prevented them enjoying the peace of a Country Life estate. They hadn't spent "our money" (and we will have more later on who Blunkett includes in that "our"), but grants from the independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation. "In any case," she said, "councils and housing associations are the responsibility of the Department of the Environment; they have nothing to do with the Education Secretary."
Ah, but they do.
The approval of an impartial academic compels respect in an undeferential age when virtually every other voice of authority is greeted with grunts of: "Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?" Research is rigorous and untainted by prejudice - in theory, at least. "New research proves that the government is enviably right in every respect" is a trump-card that most ministers would like viewers of Newsnight or colleagues in the Commons to see wagged in the faces of critics. Research, in short, has too much authority for the authorities to leave it alone.
For the past three months, Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, has been digging out the restrictions that the government places on the research it commissions.
In a series of Commons answers, he extracted the following:
- Of the 15 departments that agreed to answer parliamentary questions on the suppression of research, 12 said that they included the power to veto publication in their contracts with academics;
- Of the 12 ministries that replied to questions on censorship, nine said that politicians and bureaucrats instructed authors to rewrite. The caveats were often followed with a licence for selective quotation. "The minister shall have the right to disclose, copy or otherwise distribute to the public or use in any way, any information arising out of the project as he sees fit" [the Ministry of Agriculture]";
- Of the 16 that were prepared to discuss access to the media, 13 obliged academics to seek the permission of the Civil Service before talking to a journalist about their work, not just in the days before and after publication, but for the rest of their lives. Lecturers must not do anything "which may bring the standing or reputation of the department into disrepute or attract adverse publicity [Blunkett's Department of Education and Employment]".
The forest of prohibitions is both more and less sinister than it seems. The government has always owned the copyright on public research, the vast majority of which is technical and uncontroversial. The election of Tony Blair provided a relief from an increasingly hysterical Tory government, which demanded that social studies should contain nothing that might upset the editor of the Daily Mail after a long and angry lunch.
Michael Howard's Home Office, in particular, became notorious. A report showing that refugees tended to be industrious and patriotic when they were finally given permission to work in Britain was released only after a minor scandal about its conclusions being hidden. In 1995, Nigel Norris from the University of East Anglia conducted a study on the pressures on the universities to conform. It says much about the climate of the times that his colleagues would agree to talk only if they could remain anonymous.
"The facts were still there, it's just that you read it differently," said one. "They are very sophisticated in the area of control, actually."
"The officials went through it with a red pencil on the instructions of ministers," said a second. "In every case we tried to change it, while still being true to the data, but toning it down."
Results-driven Blairism, by contrast, was based on the academic freedom to audit programmes and discover what worked. New Labour was meant to be filled with tough-minded pragmatists who revelled in experiencing just how real the "real world" could be. Yet something has turned sour. Perhaps ministers are confronting what others always knew: no amount of exhortations to follow best practice can get them out of the difficulty that they want to revive public services but to do so without increasing public spending. Perhaps they then felt the urge to compensate for their submission to Thatcherism by relapsing into an ersatz prolier-than-thou invective when confronted with academics who demonstrated how little had changed from the days when they and others had higher hopes.
For whatever reason, lecturers have joined Jack Straw's "BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers" and "woolly Hampstead liberals" and Blair's "cynics" and "forces of conservatism". They are now targets of a contrary political elite, which adopts the pose of the working-class hero and accuses its powerless enemies of being "elitists".
Blunkett's spat with the Sheffield researchers wasn't an isolated tantrum. On 2 February, he told the Economic and Social Research Council that universities which wanted "our" money must get on message with the programme. Too much research was "seemingly perverse, driven by ideology paraded as intellectual inquiry or critique". They were setting out "with the sole aim of collecting evidence proving a policy wrong".
The dreary feeling of a return to the Conservative years is accentuated by the continuity of personnel. Chris Woodhead has Blair's ear and has denounced educational research on the effects of class and race on children's prospects as "dross". He was responding to a study conducted by his associate James Tooley, of Newcastle University, who has little time for the fashions of the 1960s. Tooley's assaults on permissiveness are perhaps even more disorientating than those of a chief inspector of schools who said that teachers' affairs with pupils might on occasion be "educative".
Tooley is the British promoter of the Edison Project, which wants to take over state schools. In its American home, Edison owned Channel One, which gave free audio-visual equipment to dreadfully poor schools in return for their forcing a captive audience of eight million children to watch its "educational" programmes. Teen idols present shows stuffed with adverts for burgers, sweets and trainers, and clips of satanic, heavy rock combos.
The Guardian reported last month that Downing Street and Blunkett were strongly influenced by the criticisms of British education research from the pulpit of this stern upholder of traditional values. I can well believe it. The last time I spoke to Tooley, he moaned that the Conservatives had not given public money to educational corporations, but that new Labour's plans to privatise the management of state schools filled him with hope.
At no point in Blunkett's, Woodhead's or Tooley's rants do they ever conclude: "But, of course, we control all the publicly funded research. We can veto it, delay it, rewrite it and selectively quote from it with the reassurance that the authors won't appear on the Today programme and expose us."
For the Liberal Democrats, it is the licence to spin that needs to be brought into the open. Evan Harris believes that the gagging clauses and rejigging of findings is another example of control-freakery. "Our money" was not the money of a public that might want lecturers to tell it the way they saw it, but the secret fortune of a state that behaved as if it were a private citizen or company able to demand what it wanted from the servants it hired.
He points out that ministers who want to censor have no need to do anything so brutal as ban a research paper. Suppression could be managed with subtlety. Many MPs are, to take a small instance, worried about the New Deal and its provisions for removing the benefits of teenagers who refuse to participate in mediocre workfare training schemes. Vast numbers drop out. They might take jobs without telling bureaucrats, or turn to crime and the black economy, or slump on their beds. Tessa Jowell, the employment minister, has been reassuring all who wonder whether she is creating a lumpenproletariat of the disappeared with a soothing survey. "A recent evaluation report has told us that 57 per cent of those leaving for an unknown destination moved into work," she says, repeatedly.
Jowell did not cite the title of the research, so you had to be a bit of a detail fanatic to find it. An MP's aide who admits to being "a total anorak" spent days tracking it down. The study found that only 29 per cent of the disappeared had jobs. Fifty-seven per cent had indeed worked, but many only survived a few days before returning to the streets.
Just nailing this one self-serving evasion was a stiff effort. Imagine trying to do that with each of the hundreds of suspect figures and assertions that pound out each week. You would either go mad or conclude the system was rigged against fact-checkers and give up.
One prima facie case of mendacity became so convoluted that I repeat it here solely to show the size of the state's advantage. As ministers introduced tuition fees in the spring of 1998, they denied that mature students would be deterred from signing up to full-time courses. At that precise moment, the government was receiving the results of a poll which showed that one in three mature students would be less likely to study full-time if fees were introduced. The poll was leaked in November 1999. When the government was accused of suppressing it, Baroness (Tessa) Blackstone, an education minister, said that it had been in the Commons library for months. A visit to the library revealed that it had been rushed there the day the denial was issued - a careless civil servant had typed that day's date on the top of the page. The BBC tried to run a story. They dropped the idea when its journalists were told that the government, in any case, wanted part-time, not full-time, mature students. A subsequent announcement from Blunkett - of grants for full-time mature students - appeared to contradict this pretty blatantly, but by then the few interested hacks had given up.
In 1995, at the height of Howard's pomp, a contact in the Prison Service phoned me. "We're about to lie to Jack Straw," he said.
"How so?"
"He's asked if there's any research on boot camps for young offenders and we're going to pretend there isn't. I've got a report our people did in America which shows that military jails were useless. Do you want a copy?"
Straw opposed the camps and so did I. Just about everyone else wanted an end to Toryism. I sent him the report and he was able to berate Howard for misleading parliament and supporting a worthless policy. He then became Home Secretary and introduced the boot camps he had previously deplored.
I suppose those who expected anything better were foolish. But consider the position of the triumphant Labour government. It won the greatest election victory in its history because the public believed Conservatives were sleazy twisters. In just three years, it has burnt its political capital by developing such a reputation for manipulating and fixing that it's not believed even when it tells the truth. This is folly on a suicidal scale.
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