We must stop 2019 being the year of the antidemocrats - delivering Brexit is only the start

"There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands." Plato

It begins.

"There are only a few weeks left now for the vast, sensible majority in the Commons to acknowledge that voters were wrong" Matthew Parris

I picked this one but it could have been any one of a hundred recent examples - not just in the UK but across the world: intelligent, educated, wise people saying that you can't trust voters or that voters are wrong. Each time this happens the advocates of a philosopher monarchy are reminded that it's this idea that drives the terrible populism (or, if you prefer, democracy) that Plato's latter day fan boys despise.

The most worrying thing about politics today is this belief that only educated people can be trusted to get things right. In the year when we in Britain marked the centenary of millions of our working class being given the vote, the narrative of elite political discourse has become ever more opposed to the ideas signalled by extension of the franchise. In case we forget, the central belief that led to a wider franchise was that not only can we trust the people but it is right to do so. We should also remember, while we're doing this, that the wider franchise not only meant we had a Labour government enacting all the things moderate centrist folk like but (given the absolute nonsense talked about the Northern Ireland border) probably led to Irish independence too.

The depressing thing about all this is that it is only going to get worse - 'despite Brexit' as the phrase goes. Indeed, it worries me that the response to us leaving on 29th March 2019 from putative philosopher kings with columns in the Times or the Guardian will be to double down on "don't trust the people" and to argue for more limits to democracy so such a terrible thing doesn't happen ever again. This tendency will be accompanied by faux-populism - everything from appointing a "waste food tsar" and banning plastic from schools through to stern lectures about diet becoming taxes and bans on anything affordable that has any actual taste. Plus an endlessly repeated patronising mantra - "stupid voters got it wrong, stupid voters got it wrong".

At the heart of all this are two linked beliefs - first, that most people (not you and I, obviously but most people) are too stupid to make the right choices; second that there is an absolutely right choice and it can be determined by looking at the evidence. Now it's plain that we all (not you, I know, but exceptions prove the rule) make stupid choices from time to time, it's part of the human condition and it's also true that looking at evidence helps to make better choices. But this doesn't mean that you can eliminate "stupid" choices or that the evidence you have will necessarily lead to a better choice.

But this sort of view - clever people will make policies and impose them on thickos for their own good - is the essence of Plato's philosopher kings thesis. And indeed the core premise for things like "United for Change" the new 'centrist' party that may or may not sweep everything before it:

United for Change, founded by the millionaire entrepreneur Simon Franks, wants to create a “true grassroots movement” that will practise politics without tribalism, confrontation, “yelling and finger pointing”.

The party has been developed in secret for almost two years by businesspeople and political donors who want to take advantage of anti-political sentiment in Britain.

We're told by Franks that we'll be getting policies drawn up by experts - doubtless to be promoted by eager salesfolk (or an "army of volunteers"):

We want to craft a commonsense policy agenda that’s informed by those with real experience and expertise. That’s why we’ve created a structure to allow experts, academics and experienced practitioners to contribute.

Now while this is a project (secret because they're "putting substance before style") from one wealthy bloke, it reflects the reality of where our politics is headed. Not that democracy will be abolished or the franchise limited but rather that, in the manner of the EU, complicated pseudo-democratic structures will be put in place to give the illusion that leaders are elected and decisions are democratic. Alongside all this the real leaders (or "senior leaders" as we now call them) will carry on in their appointed and unaccountable world - the police, NHS, social services and transport will be managed in a supposedly businesslike manner by boards of wise folk who aren't actually accountable to anyone.

The irony in all of this is that, in Britain, only the loopier parts of our politics understands just how the current system threatens democracy - a few of the Corbynistas (when they're not pretending to be communists) and the libertarian parts of the pro-Brexit right understand that the Brexit vote was about saving democracy. That vote - and the vote for Trump, Salvini or any of the other left and right wing populists - wasn't a cry of pain but a call for action. And the action we want is a restoration of democracy, accountability and the idea that, when all it said and done, we (The People) can kick out any philosopher kings before their self-importance and sense of righteousness gets too much.

So when we leave the EU that should just be the start. The other shibboleths of our state need democratising too - from the House of Lords and the judiciary through the NHS, police and civil service, to the legion of unaccountable local council chief executives, social services directors and planning managers. If you are looking for a 2019 project, this should be that project - Brexit ought to be the launch pad for a renewed democracy. I fear the great and good - those with most to lose from more democracy and more accountability - will do their utmost do make Brexit into a vehicle for less democracy: they should be stopped.
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Trust the people (but only the smart, well-educated, urbane ones)

Some of you will have had the dubious pleasure of seeing broadcaster Terry Christian on the BBC's Question Time programme. Mr Christian is an ardent enthusiast for the UK remaining a member of the European Union and, in broad summary, considers everyone who doesn't agree with him to be imbeciles. One of our intrepid broadcaster's shticks is to chatter about how the Brexit vote was cooked up by (anonymous) very rich people who then conned the working class. In simple terms, Mr Christian believes that the working class are too stupid to be allowed out in public with something as explosive as a vote.

This belief that ordinary people do not have agency - can't be trusted to make decisions about their lives - is widespread. Here's a chunk from a post at Tom Paine's blog talking about an academic psychologist from UCL's Centre for Behaviour Change:

He doesn’t mean to be a monster and I don’t want to see him as one, but in his presence my blood ran cold. I was afraid of him. I was even more afraid of the way the earnest folk in the room laughed as he joked about the unintended consequences of various programmes to clean up the act of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed, I realised that I might be the only one there who included himself in the category of “the people” to be shaped as opposed to the smug elite doing the shaping.

What we have here is an entire research centre - indeed something close to a whole academic discipline - dedicated to the idea that people should be stopped from making (what the academics consider to be) bad choices. These are, as Tom Paine observed, nice people - smart, well-educated, urbane, the very sorts you'd want your son or daughter to marry. The problem is that they believe they know better than you do and, they argue, have the research to prove this. They also believe that, because they know better than you do, you should be prevented from making a choice that the smart, well-educated and urbane don't approve.

It is odd that, at a time when we celebrate the widening of the franchise in 1918, a whole bunch of people are putting serious effort into removing choice, freedom and agency from people. The Brexit vote, for many of the smart, well-educated and urbane, has been the tipping point as they rush headlong away from the idea of democracy (while bizarrely trying to pretend that a polity where voting can't change the people in charge is a democracy) or at least from the thought that ruddy-faced older folk - gammon is the term our smart folk use - from slightly tatty northern towns should have a say in what happens.

The result is illustrated by the BBC - home to lots of those smart, well-educated and urbane folk - 'debating' the proposal from one of their number that old people shouldn't be allowed to vote:




How dare people say they won't vote for politicians who ignore their interests!

There are two things going on here but both of them reflect a new version of Plato's philosopher kings - a superior cadre of leaders who are intelligent enough to direct society. In the case of behaviour - poor lifestyle choices, for example - these overlords want, in the manner of Brave New World, to make you have a (long) life of unstressed, bovine contentment and this requires them to direct the choices of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed.

With democracy - whether you're Terry Christian saying working class folk were conned or Jeremy Paxman suggesting old folk hold politicians to ransom - the problem is that people have started making electoral choices that our Philosopher Kings don't agree with. The only way out of this is to either have less democracy or else to limit the way in which democracy operates most obviously by limiting the franchise. Following the referendum there was a great deal of chatter (from those who didn't like the result mainly) about how this shows how referendums are a really awful idea and we should stop having them. We elect politicians (nearly all smart, well-educated and urbane Philosopher Kings) and they should make all the important decisions so as not to cause upset or headaches among the masses.

Part of the problem is that the smart, well-educated and urbane simply don't ever get near to the lives of most people - they live in a snobby world where no-one goes to McDonalds (junk food is bad and unhealthy) except, it seems, by accident:

I was at a workshop on Friday, and whilst driving back home, I stopped off at one of their restaurants in a service station. I'll put this comment upfront, especially given that I work in Public Health; I am not advocating fast food consumption. The options available in service stations are rather poor, especially when looking for hot food (I have found a way around this which I'll mention at the end!). What caught my attention though was the way in which McDonald's understand how to influence behaviour, strategies that we could look at when working in Public Health...But they also understand - in very fine detail - how their systems work, how each component part operates, and how these parts can be refined to maximise efficiency.

For the smart, well-educated and urbane, McDonalds is the enemy - despite (or maybe because) the ubiquitous hamburger chain serves about 3.5 million customers every day in the UK. McDonalds and its franchisees know far more about the ordinary folk of Britain than most academics - this is because it really matters to them as a business, getting the detail right means happy customers. The problem is that our visiting academic doesn't see a great business delivering good food to happy customers. Like Terry Christian with Brexit voters, our academic sees wrongness, exploitation, manipulation - a con. How dare ordinary people make such bad choices and, worse, be happy doing so.

What the Brexit vote uncovered and Corbyn's surge confirmed is that the smart, well-educated and urbane people aren't really all that keen on democracy. They're very keen on votes but these orchestrated events should be like electing the supreme soviet - everyone gets a vote, we're really excited about voting, there are campaigns, speeches, debates but in the end nothing much changes. Democracy should entail the possibility of - people should be able to hope for - a change in the rulers but this doesn't suit the courtiers.

At the core of this is this belief that people (other people who aren't part of your smart, well-educated and urbane circle) don't know what's good for them. These folk are the living embodiment of Douglas Jay's unintentionally honest comment back in 1937:

"...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves".

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"You're not entitled to your opinion": Plato, proto-fascism and the cult of the expert

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You're not entitled to your opinion insists philosophy lecturer, Patrick Stokes:

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Let's get the first thing out of the way. You may be entitled to your opinion but that doesn't stop it being a stupid opinion. And Stokes is right when he observes that students in his class have to argue for their opinion (it is, after all, a philosophy class) The problem is that, as is common in this argument about the value of opinion, Stokes then invokes Plato to substantiate his opinion on who else is allowed to have an opinion. This invocation is backed up with a particularly egregious example of bad opinions being given too much credence.

My problem with this isn't that (using Stokes' example) arguing against vaccination programmes has much validity but rather the wider difficulty in deciding who is or is not an expert. In the case Stokes cites, the distinction is easy but this is seldom the case when it comes to argument. Let's take economics and the example of Paul Krugman. Now Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the very acme of the expert, he is - in Stokes' view - entirely entitled to his opinion. Yet what we get as a result is statements made purely on the basis that 'I am an expert ergo my opinion is valid, you are not an expert ergo your opinion is not valid'.

I wrote about an occasion of Krugman's approach to being an expert a year or so ago:

When confronted with the moral argument that debt means having something now rather than later - meaning of course that we, given the likely timescale for debt repayment, are taking that from future generations - Krugman chooses instead to talk about the lack of graduate job prospects. Rather than addressing the real issue raised - government debt as deferred taxation, Krugman chooses to talk about a relatively minor labour demand issue.

And then when Angela Leadsom raises supply side considerations - how to help the economy create jobs - Krugman lapses into accusations that Ms Leadsom and others are ideologically motivated and using the current crisis to shrink the size of the state. At no point in this does Krugman respond to or consider whether there are any supply side constraints. He waffles vaguely that there's no evidence of supply side constraint (in the US) and states baldly that the whole problem is a matter of demand. More seriously - from the point of debate - he accuses others of insincerity and exploitation without evidence.

What we see here is a 'cult of the expert'. Krugman is right because he is an expert not because, as an expert, he has set out his opinion and refuted (with reason) the arguments from others that challenge that opinion. This is the core ideal of Plato's politics - that society would be better if its management wasn't left to the ignorance of everyman but determined by ruling philosophers. This proto-fascism is the prime cancer in European thought since it seeks to deny the ignorant agency while at the same time deciding ignorance on the basis of an ideology - "I am an expert and you are not".

The argument that Stokes puts forward - "equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse" - might have some validity if experts were limited by their expertise. We have no issue with a scientist making clear that ceteris paribus vaccines are safe and providing scientific evidence to support that opinion. Indeed decision-makers would be foolish to disregard such an opinion unless there was a substantial and evidenced challenge to it.

The problem is that relatively few things within public discourse are as clear as the example that Stokes is using. This means we either have competing experts or else a situation where there is no valid expert opinion. And we still face the problem as to who defines the expert - here's a good example.

A few days ago two academics, Sara Kalkhoran and Stanton Glantz, published a 'systematic review and meta-analysis' of ecigs and smoking cessation concluding that ecigs reduced rates of smoking cessation. Now these are experts (I think we can state, for the sake of our argument, that an academic publishing research is de jure an expert) so, using Stokes argument, we should be giving credence to their opinion. Indeed the World Health Organisation has done just that - using Glantz's research and comment as a core element in its published advice to policy-makers on ecigs.

The problem is this:

"The problems with the authors’ interpretation of the two papers mentioned above are as follows: The first study (Adkson et al) is not longitudinal as has been reported here – e-cigarette use was measured at follow up, the same time as quit status was ascertained. The second study (Hitchman et al) included smokers who were using e-cigarettes at baseline and therefore included smokers who may have tried to use e-cigarettes to quit and failed, and excluded smokers who successfully used e-cigarettes to quit. The authors of this meta-analysis had been previously informed by the authors of the Adkison paper that they were misreporting the findings.”

Such a damning response doesn't, of course, stop the 'public discourse, from presenting Glantz's work without challenge or question. Were Glantz simply an ideological advocate in the manner of Meryl Dorey (Stokes' anti-vaxxer) then he could be dismissed in the same manner. However Glantz is a tenured academic as well as an ideological advocate - his expertise remains even when other researchers present effective challenge. The same - which is why Stokes' position is wrong - applies to Paul Krugman. Without the possibility of some little boy pointing out the emperors lack of clothes, we have the prospect of rule by an ever less accountable 'intellectual' clique conforming to the central Platonic error - that society can be managed by clever men.

Since we're arguing here about the distinction between 'the man in Whitehall knows best' and 'trust the people', it makes sense to enquire which of these two positions manages society best. And there's lots of evidence - some scientific, some historical and some based in reason - arguing both sides. Indeed there are many supporters for the 'philosopher king' model of rule by experts despite the evidence from Soviet Russia, from Germany and, more recently from Cuba or Venezuela that such a model will always (you can't think of everything) result in sub-optimal outcomes. Including some sub-optimal outcomes that result in millions dying painful and premature deaths.

Today this cult of the expert more and more governs our decision-making:

Right across government we see decision-making that should be done by people accountable to the public being done by the unelected - local enterprise partnerships, schools forums, probation boards, a veritable host of the unelected and unaccountable. This is post-democracy - consultation, partnership and the 'professional' have replaced the tried and tested process of electing people to make decisions on our behalf. We have decided that democracy - elections, MPs, councillors and so forth - are a bit of a pain. Or rather we haven't decided, the system has gradually sidelined politicians - the people's representatives - to the stage where the only way for us to effect any change is for us to join in the game, to play at post-democracy.

Democracy isn't modern and it runs counter to our cult of the expert, our obsession with that unreachable ideal of 'evidence-based policy'. So the powerful have emasculated democracy and replaced it with a pretty spectacle, a place of sound and fury. Great fun, as observers of parliament know, but ultimately pointless. The decisions are made somewhere else.

And so long as men like Patrick Stokes, for noble reasons and using egregious examples like Meryl Dorey, promte that cult of the expert to students will will continue to undermine liberty in the cause of better government, to take a few more baby steps towards the Platonic ideal of a fascist autocracy where all-knowing philosophers order society in the interests of a supine unquestioning (for questioning the expert is a sin) mass of the population.

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