I'm pretty sure this argument is a logical fallacy...

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...but then Malcolm Bruce is a Liberal Democrat so we shouldn't be surprised:

Nigel Lawson is a climate change denier so anti EU stance should be judged with that in mind.

I think it's fair to say that Lawson isn't a 'climate change denier' merely someone who asks difficult questions about the sacred cow of AGW and the economic presumptions associated with the public policy response.

 We should note that the central plank in the Liberal Democrat defence of EU membership - repeated to the point of obsession - is that it is essential if we are to respond to climate change.

Presumably by nationalising seed production and distribution?

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Public health research and the appeal to motive fallacy

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A week or so back, I had an exchange on twitter about Kate Fox and SIRC (Social Issues Research centre) – essentially, I was told, we should dismiss Ms Fox’s arguments because she (or rather the organisation that employs her) was receiving significant income from the drinks industry.

The question I want to pose relates directly to this argument – that, if I am paid to study something by those with an ‘interest’ (however defined), then my results, opinions and conclusions are to be ignored as tainted. Indeed, the first resort of those defending the Church of Public Health from criticism is very often to question the academic honour of the source cited by critics.

In Kate Fox’s case the attack – directed at the organisation employing her - comes from a BMJ article from 1999 (yes, that’s 12 whole years ago):

But on closer inspection it transpires that this research organisation shares the same offices, directors, and leading personnel as a commercial market research company called MCM Research. Both organisations are based at 28 St Clements, Oxford, and both have social anthropologist Kate Fox and psychologist Dr Peter Marsh as directors, and Joe McCann as a research and training manager.

The scenario becomes even more interesting when one reads the list of MCM's clients. These include Bass Taverns, the Brewers and Licensed Retail Association, the Cider Industry Council, the Civil Aviation Authority, Conoco, Coral Racing, Grand Metropolitan Retail, the Portman Group (jointly funded by Bass, Courage, Guinness, etc), Pubmaster, Rank Leisure, and Whitbread Inns, as well as several Australian brewing concerns and several independent television companies.

The implication of all this is that, when Ms Fox writes about drinking culture (a subject on which she is undoubtedly expert) we should ignore what she says since much of her research was funded by the drinks industry. The problem with this is that there cannot be a wholly independent research funder – all funders, whether commercial, governmental or charitable begin with a brief or a statement of mission.

What we are doing is creating a false dichotomy of objectives between different funders and different research. In most cases we dismiss commercial research, assuming it is partisan and must be ignored, whereas we do not ascribe the same constraints to other funding sources and especially government funding sources. We presume that government and the “third sector” are inevitably benign with unchallengeable motives whereas business is malign with motives always open to question.

Not only does such an approach imply that researchers undertaking projects for business organisations are dishonourable, it also suggests that the process of research – the methods, the data analysis and the reporting – are also open to question. Yet researchers – whether in academia or elsewhere – cannot afford to ‘fix’ results or hide data especially where there are risks of what might be termed ‘commercial contamination’.

Yet the most comprehensive passive smoking study, some of the most interesting research into drinking behaviour and much of the detailed study of links between ingredients and obesity are ignored by the Church of Public Health because of links to the tobacco, drink or food industry.

This, of course, doesn’t stop various organisations researching the effects of tobacco, drink or food taking funding from the pharmaceuticals industry. Nor does it stop organisations such as ASH shamelessly plugging the products of their pharmaceutical industry sponsors.

Of course we should know about the source of funding. But we should also be prepared to accept that good research is just that – good research. And rather than (as we saw with Stirling University recently) hiding detailed data from other researchers, we should encourage replication of studies so as to broaden our understanding. Seeking to damn the research through association is lousy science and pretty poor public policy making.

Plus of course appeal to motive is a logical fallacy!


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In which I explain logic to lefties (plus a little bit on taxes and benefits)

There are a lot of welfare cheats. This isn’t me being some kind of rabid, right-wing nutjob but a matter of uncontestable fact. It may be only about 3% or so out of the total budget (although how on earth this is calculated , God alone knows) but that represents a lot of people fiddling the system.

Speak with anybody who works with poor communities and they will relate stories of families taking the benefits system to the cleaners. They’ll also tell you about people who the system seems to leave high and dry for no apparent reason. Quite simply the system doesn’t work and hasn’t been working since at least the mid-1980s when Carla Lane wrote ‘Bread’.

What fascinates me in all the debate around this issue is the tendency of some observers – let’s be frank, observers who learned their logic from the Ladybird Book of Marxim-Leninism – to instantly draw a parallel with tax ‘dodging’ (this term avoids the need to make any distinction between ‘avoidance’ and ‘evasion’). Now let me try and explain how this argument is crap (a technical term for ‘without any coherent logical basis’).

Let’s start with the premise that both fiddling benefits and dodging taxes are wrong. We’ll return to the tax point in a minute but right now we’re assuming that this is the case. Surely it is right and proper for Government to take action to catch wrongdoers – whether they are welfare cheats or tax-dodging businessmen? So criticising the decision to try and reduce welfare fraud on the basis that not enough is done to reduce tax fraud is plainly an utter nonsense. It may be the case that not enough is being done to catch tax dodgers – you might me entirely right to criticise the Government for this inaction. But this debate is entirely unrelated in any way to the debate about catching people who fiddle benefits.

It is possible to scope a series of possible ‘positions’ on the two subjects but they are not connected. The Government deciding to clamp down on benefit fraud does not result in a few hundred tax dodgers elsewhere breathing a sign of relief knowing they’re now off the hook! And it is perfectly possible for Government to clamp down on both tax dodgers and welfare cheats (they may or may not be doing this but it is perfectly possible).

And just for the record the taxman’s been getting pretty good at reducing routine tax evasion (which is very different from ‘closing loopholes’, the use of which, ipso facto, isn’t tax avoidance):

“The money gleaned from reluctant taxpayers, both personal and corporate, has risen from £1.13bn in 1991-92 to a staggering £9.17bn in 2006-07. The money has come from a wide range of sources: from individuals and companies who had simply failed to fill in their forms, to investigations of outright tax dodgers.”

If you’re going to criticise the targeting of benefit fraud, can you at least do it on the basis of logic rather than just shouty prejudice?

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