'Facts' can't be pinned down. We all look at them from different perspectives. Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images
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‘Why won’t someone just tell us the facts, to help us make up our minds?’ was a common lament during the EU referendum. I heard it repeatedly, on radio phone-ins and online, in the posted comments from readers in newspapers.
‘Why doesn’t a group of them just get together and sort out what’s best for the NHS/foreign policy/how to teach English in schools [delete as applicable]?’ is another manifestation of the same desire. ‘Politics’ should be removed from the process, because ‘facts’ — as agreed upon by an apolitical committee — will tell us the truth.
This lament speaks to latent beliefs which are widespread : (1) that political assertions (such as ‘We should remain within the EU’, or ‘Putin affected our election result’) can be logically interrogated, with reference to evidence (‘facts’), such that their absolute truth or falseness may be deduced, and (2) that ‘they’ should do this evidential sifting for ‘us’.
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Neither belief is correct; adherence to the second is politically dangerous. That danger is no longer theoretical: the hysteria over ‘fake news’ has led to a new German law to fine social media platforms which don’t remove news deemed to be fake (as well as hate-crime-speak; but these issues, conflated everywhere, are not quite the same). President Macron of France — the ‘why can’t we take politics out of politics’ desire made flesh — is proposing something similar: to criminalise parties deemed to spread fake news during an election.
Even absent legislation, there are similar urges in the UK. During last year’s general election there was no arbiter more powerful than the Channel 4 News fact-checker. Statements by mere politicians could be verified or nullified with reference to the decision of the makers of a television programme. It’s not that great a leap to imagine the creation of a Truth Committee to determine the claims which may or may not be made in a British general election.
No-one asks about the political proclivities of these fact-checkers: facts are independent of politics, is the theory. I’m going to argue that the theory is wrong. Before you dismiss me as an anti-evidence, irrational conspiracy nut (“It’s Channel 4 News, guv! Out to get me!”) let me say that I worship evidence and facts (if not Channel 4 News), and explain how I teach statistical inference to the scientists and physicians with whom it’s my blessing to work.
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