Ideology in politics is unavoidable, but transparency should be as well - we need the facts to scrutinise policies and the societal ideal they are designed to build

As Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission and Prime Minister of Italy, put it: the incorrect way to use facts is as a drunk uses lamp posts - more for support than for illumination. Photograph: Lamp Post in Rome from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

Yesterday, George Osborne went before the Commons Treasury Committee to answer more detailed questions on the budget he announced last Wednesday (Sparrow, 2016). The Chancellor and his budget came in for some difficult questions.

During the hearing it was disclosed that, since the Coalition ended, the Chancellor had stopped analysis that would have showed, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) analysis shows, that the budget appeared to be redistributing money from the poorest to the richest (Stone, 2016). The Chancellor's defence was that he believed that the statistics provided could be misleading, and make deficit reduction look like "a bad thing".

According to both Iain Duncan Smith and the IFS, the welfare changes will disproportionately - for the obvious reason that welfare is mostly needed by those in lower incomes - hurt the poorest 20% (Inman, 2016). It was this fact that Osborne was accused of attempting to hide by changing the way the Treasury analysed the budget impact.

Playing with facts to suit political purpose is bad enough on its own. But this was also the suppression of facts - showing austerity and deficit reduction, at the present time and by the present methods, appear to be disproportionately damaging to the poor - in order to protect an ideological political project (Dudman, 2016).

Yet the problem is not so much the ideological motivation. As Romano Prodi put it, the incorrect approach to using facts is as a drunk uses lamp posts - for support rather than illumination.

In order to reduce so called 'welfare dependence', Osborne has ignored the data in order to treat welfare as the problem in and of itself - rather than a symptom. That means ignoring the fact that high welfare bills are the result of its corrective role.

In reality, welfare at its best is a safety net that helps to guarantee basic freedoms and at worst can be criticised as a form of corporate welfare, when policies like tax credits or the personal allowance subsidise companies paying low wages - but either way it is a redistributive mechanism that anchors the affluence of the rich to the wellbeing of the poor.

In both cases a high welfare bill is a symptom. It represents people struggling with low or no incomes, a lack of access to affordable housing and a lack of opportunity (Johnson, 2015). But as conditions improve, as the low incomes turn into living incomes, housing becomes more affordable and greater opportunity spreads, the welfare bill decreases.

Ideology is an inescapable aspect of politics. It is the philosophical view of what the world is, the ethics of how to behave on a personal level and the shaping of society around those beliefs to enhance them and produce the ideal outcomes. But that is no excuse for a lack of transparency.

If the Chancellor believes that there is a positive outcome in the changes he is making, he should have no fear in these statistics. He should be able to explain how his changes fit his ideological narrative, and produce, from his perspective, a positive outcome.

Instead of trusting people with the facts, the people are shown fragments designed to fit a narrative. If people are to hold those in public office to account they need the facts. Vigilance can only do so much, without access to the facts and openness from public office holders and parties as to the big picture, broad context narrative, that they see written in the data.

References

'Budget 2016 summary: Key points at-a-glance'; on the BBC; 16 March 2016.

Andrew Sparrow's 'MPs quiz Osborne on budget as poll says his approval rating never been lower - Politics live'; in The Guardian; 24 March 2016.

Jon Stone's 'George Osborne defends blocking analysis that shows how much money he takes from the poor and gives to the rich: The Treasury no longer publishes a core part of its distributional analysis'; in The Independent; 24 March 2016.

Philip Inman's 'IFS analysis chimes with Duncan Smith's budget warning: Research shows budget preserves income of wealthier households, while poorest could lose 12% of their income by 2019'; in The Guardian; 21 March 2016.

Jane Dudman's 'Ideology is no basis for decisions on policies that affect people’s lives: George Osborne has an A-level in maths, but it’s obviously no guarantee of a well-thought-out economic policy'; in The Guardian; 22 March 2016.

Paul Johnson's 'Why is the UK's housing benefit bill so high?'; on the BBC; 21 September 2015.