fully independent of it’. A new statistical watchdog would be created whose responsibility, enshrined in statute, would be to protect the statistical system’s integrity.
The news was afforded little more than a weary shrug, but the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 amounted to a rare but decisive victory for science over politics. The United Kingdom Statistics Authority (UKSA) was given the job of ‘promoting and safeguarding’ official statistics, including their impartiality, accuracy and relevance. It placed a duty on ministers and officials to comply with a code of practice drawn up by the authority, although the legislation specifically states that ‘no action shall lie in relation to any such failure’. Offending spin doctors would not be dragged off to the Tower.
Nevertheless, under the chairmanship of Sir Michael Scholar, a Whitehall mandarin who had been Margaret Thatcher’s Private Secretary when she emasculated the statisticians, the authority opened for business in April 2008. Any questions as to where Sir Michael’s loyalties lay, however, were quickly dispelled when he sent a public and censorious letter to Number Ten following the government’s use of ‘unchecked’ figures on knife crime (See ‘K is for Knives’). He called the affair ‘corrosive of public trust in official statistics, and incompatible with the high standards which we are all seeking to establish’. There was a sharp intake of breath across Whitehall. How would ministers and the civil service react to being openly ticked off by the anoraks in the stats department?
The reply from Gordon Brown, now at Number Ten, was revealing. His Private Secretary Jeremy Heywood wrote of how ‘the Prime Minister remains strongly committed to building public trust in official statistics and to the new measures he has put in place to safeguard their independence.’ Following the letter, the head of the home civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, reminded all his staff of the need to protect the integrity of official statistics.
The War of Numbers was not over, however. When the coalition government came to power, determined to reduce Britain’s budget deficit, conservative instinct and economic adversity led one Cabinet minister to suggest statisticians were an unnecessary luxury. ‘The money being spent on form fillers and bean counters could be far better spent helping elderly people to stay in their homes,’ Communities Secretary Eric Pickles argued, before adding, ‘or almost anything, in fact.’ True to his word, he then scrapped a number of statistical surveys in the face of vehement opposition from Sir Michael Scholar and the National Statistician Jil Matheson. ‘We are keen to move away from costly top-down monitoring and measurement of local policies,’ Mr Pickles said. ‘These surveys are a cosmetic exercise which never change anything,’ his ministerial colleague Grant Shapps explained. To many of the so-called bean counters, it was as if the ghost of Sir Derek Rayner was haunting Whitehall once more.
Shortly before his departure from the UKSA in 2011, Sir Michael Scholar responded to what many statisticians feared was a new attack upon their profession. ‘There are strong forces at work,’ he warned, ‘to demote rationality, analysis and the pursuit of knowledge within government.’ He spoke of Whitehall’s diminishing interest in neutral information and a growing interest in the persuasive press release, with its careful selection of facts and numbers, designed to communicate as effectively as possible some predetermined message.
Only one in six people in Britain thinks the government doesn’t manipulate official numbers. In a recent survey of public trust in official statistics across the twenty-seven member states of the European Union, the UK came twenty-seventh. ‘Right at the bottom of the class,’ Sir Michael said.
The War of Numbers grinds on. But what is becoming clearer to protagonists on all sides is that, when they lack credibility, all numbers add up to zero.
O is for Opium
Cultural orthodoxies are like piles of sandbags — resistant walls of principle and prejudice built up over time, which shape our democracy. Argument hits these solid barriers and is stopped stone dead. Further discussion is futile. Debate has reached society’s buffers.
Our leaders know the lie of the land, where Britain’s invisible ideological boundaries are placed. There is little point in entering territory upon which the court of public opinion has a settled view; indeed, to stray into such minefields may be regarded as political suicide. What actually tends to happen is that elected representatives, often aided and abetted by the popular press, add further layers to the existing bulwarks, reinforcing the external margins of conventional thought as they play to public opinion.
Our national conversation is conducted according to this geography, a narrative fixed by the co-ordinates of accepted wisdom. The mysteries of the news agenda are understood by those who can read the map. However, it is not entirely a one-way process. Gradually but inexorably, quietly but determinedly, nonconformist ideas can work away at the foundations of orthodoxy. New voices and ideas, with enough force, can start to undermine the status quo. The first objective is to open debate as to whether the wall should exist; once that has been achieved, and with often shocking speed, the whole edifice may collapse, the sandbags carted off to be piled up somewhere else.
When it comes to Britain’s relationship with opium and other recreational drugs, the walls of the debate have not shifted for half a century. A towering cultural orthodoxy has been constructed around an accepted view that such substances are evil, a malevolent force that must be eradicated by uncompromising use of the criminal justice system.
But it seems to me that we are witnessing an increasingly powerful challenge to this philosophy. Former Cabinet ministers and police constables, peers of the realm, academics, senior journalists, business leaders and celebrities — mainstream establishment voices from all quarters — are asking whether we need to test conventional thinking.
Recent governments have seen what is happening but dared not engage. A parliamentary exchange between a former Home Office minister and a Lib Dem backbencher in 2010 indicates the nervousness that has existed. Tom Brake asked Labour’s drugs spokesman Alan Campbell if ‘when sound, factual evidence is produced to show what is effective in tackling drug crime and addressing health issues, the hon. gentleman will sign up to that?’ Mr Campbell thought he detected a trap: ‘I cannot give the hon. gentleman the assurance he seeks because he is sending me along a route he knows I cannot go down.’ The route, of course, would have required the Labour spokesman to consider decriminalisation or legalisation of what were prohibited drugs. He could hear the sound of Joshua’s trumpets: the walls of conventional debate were threatened and chaos lay beyond.
I do not propose to debate the wisdom of legalising drugs on these pages; readers will have no trouble finding proponents on all sides of what is an increasingly noisy discussion (albeit conducted outside the Palace of Westminster). But I did want to offer an historical perspective to explain how we got here.
Taking the long view, a slogan to describe Britain’s attitude to recreational drugs would be ‘Just Say Maybe’. The United Kingdom has been a reluctant prohibitionist and, one hundred years after the original international drugs control treaty was signed, it should not come as any surprise that this country’s liberal and practical instincts are rising to the surface once again.
The first gangsters to use extreme violence and intimidation to control the supply of illegal drugs were associates of the British government. In the eighteenth century, the state-regulated East India Company secured a monopoly of opium production in India and, despite China’s determination to ban the highly addictive drug from its soil, smuggled hundreds of tonnes a year into the country. When the Chinese authorities tried to clamp down on the foreign traffickers, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Lord Palmerston sent in the gunboats. Royal Navy cannons ensured a swift victory for the British smugglers and dealers.
The consequence of the Opium Wars was that the drug became one of the most valuable commodities in the world and the British Empire took full advantage. By the 1880s, the Indian opium fields produced enough to satisfy the daily needs of around 14 million consumers in China and South East Asia, and the British Raj was reliant on feeding the addiction it had helped create.
Quantities of the drug arrived back in Britain. Mrs Beeton recommended readers of her
Domestic condemnation from religious groups grew, but the sparkle from 93 million silver rupees in annual Indian revenues prompted a more pragmatic than principled response. Gladstone, once a severe critic of the narcotics trade, appointed a Royal Commission on Opium which helpfully concluded in 1895 that the evil of the drug
