The politics of fudge and muddle (centrist politics and the pretence of evidence-based policy)

Tony Blair and his acolytes used the idea of political triangulation to create what they dubbed the "third way". This always brought to mind the old joke about the priest sternly imploring his congregation to "keep firmly to the narrow path between good and evil". The term comes originally from Dick Morris one of Bill Clinton's top campaign advisors:

“Take the best from each party’s agenda, and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party. So from the left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the right, take the idea that they have to work for a living, and that there are time limits. But discard the nonsense of the left, which is that there shouldn’t be work requirements; and the nonsense of the right, which is you should punish single mothers. Get rid of the garbage of each position, that the people didn’t believe in; take the best from each position; and move up to a third way. And that became a triangle, which was triangulation.”

This is, of course, good politics since whenever people are asked their position on a left-right political scale they mostly plump for somewhere near the middle - we all consider ourselves centrists and the other guys extremists. So camping out in a position deliberately distanced from both left and right makes for good political tactics.The question is, however, whether this approach makes for good policy or is merely an effective marketing strategy. There's also an issue when more than one campaign adopts the approach - the centre becomes crowded and the arguments become dominated by details rather than setting a vision.

The policy consequences of this approach tend to fall into two camps - technocratic fixes and populist, often media-driven interventions. In the former camp sit things like universal credit, HS2 and city-region devolution while the latter encompasses such ideas as banning the sale of energy drinks to children, fixing energy prices and charging 10p for plastic bags. Where this centrist ground is contested, the game becomes a battle between impressive sounding technical solutions to apparent problems and a shopping basket filled with gimmicky policies, "quick wins" as the campaign advisors like to call them.

Nowhere in all of this is there any room for even the most modest consideration of policy utility because what we're concerned with is not being painted as ideological or dogmatic. Instead we're encouraged to consider how the policy feels, how it will "play out" with one or other group of voters, not whether it will actually achieve the outcome desired. The ban on energy drinks enjoys popular support (as do most proposals founded on "won't someone think of the children") so it doesn't really matter whether such a ban has any positive health outcomes. The government has responded to popular concerns (or more accurately concerns that became popular because a high profile celebrity chef used his platform to make them popular) and this is enough.

This process repeats itself in every part of government, transport policy is driven by railway nostalgia, health policy by emotional attachment to "Our NHS", and education policy by a seemingly endless list of further things that children should be taught at school (on top of proper subjects like maths, English and science). Charities create moral panics over the environment (check out the absolute froth over plastic straws), children (see the Children's Society's latest "teenaged girls are under too much pressure" report) and public health (witness the anti-sugar campaigns from Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall). What links nearly all of this policy-making is that it's government "doing something" that matters not whether the outcome of that action is positive, or for that matter measurable.

Meanwhile the technocracy of bureaucracy, academia, third sector and consultancy excludes lay involvement other than in the form of 'consultation', a process designed either to produce corroboration of the expected technocratic solution or else to give the impression of taking note of what the people the policy is affecting might think about the matter. Every now and then (as we saw with the 'consultation' on the EU's Tobacco Products Directive) the technocracy comes clean by, in effect, saying that representation and input from ordinary people counts for less than responses from organisations linked to the technocrats.

All of this means that there is little clarity to political decisions, that those decisions are made on the basis of sentiment rather than evidence or outcomes, and that these sentiments are given credence by the misuse of social science. None of this means that sensibility is altogether a bad thing, we need to care, but it does mean that too many policies are just mushy virtue-signalling rather than robust, evidenced and effective. It is the politics of fudge and muddle presented to the public as "evidence-based policy-making". Moreover the policies don't work thereby requiring (in the eyes of the technocracy) more extensive, intrusive or comprehensive policies to meet the deficiencies of the earlier policy. At no point does anyone say, "enough of all this, let's start again at the beginning" since that would be an admission of error and bureaucracy does not err:

One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.

....