Facts Illuminate: Trump can write his own story but it won't change the facts - he stood for exclusion, while his opponents march for a more egalitarian and inclusive America

Demonstrators in Washington DC. Photograph: DC Women's March by Liz Lemon (License)

Facts are what we can verifiably say about reality. We know that the sky is blue and the grass is green - or that the sky is grey and the pavement is also grey - because we can see them and can discuss it with others to reach a consensus.

We know, for instance, that in reality humans are very likely the cause of global warming, because a large body work exists on the subject. A lot of people have looked at it and discussed it with others to reach that consensus.

If you're not inclined to change your mind away from a preconceived position, having facts differ from your own views can be an inconvenience. But in politics this is usually treated as an inconvenience that can be negotiated - and 'perceived' reality is frequently rewritten.

The most recent part of reality that Donald Trump has found inconvenient is that not as many people as he wanted showed up for his inauguration - not even half as many as showed up to see Obama the first time around and maybe less even than the second. His ludicrous response was, with the collusion of his Press Secretary, to try and 'set right' reality - claiming the highest attendance anyway and denying photographic evidence to the contrary (BBC, 2017).

Those defending him spoke of 'alternative facts', a phrase that shows a profound misunderstanding of both the word 'alternative' and the word 'facts'. But facts in public life are not a hand at a poker table, inconvenient cards to be arranged, bluffed and played to your best advantage.

Romano Prodi, reminded us (Popham, 2006) - when he used the Scottish poet Andrew Lang's words to describe his opponent Silvio Berlusconi, another populist political opportunist - that the facts are there to guide us, not the other way around:

"He uses statistics like a drunk uses lamp-posts, more for support than illumination."

So in that spirit - instead of making the facts fit in a way that suits us - let's ask: what do the facts tell us?

Well, the turnout at the respective inaugurations of Obama and Trump indicate that perhaps the election of Barack Obama was the more significant milestone - one that perhaps even outstripped his own Presidency.

Yet Trump's election also says something. There is a lot of dissatisfaction in America. A lot of people bought Trump's salesmanship - he is, after all, more of a brand ambassador than a property tycoon. His pitch was above all was exclusionary, offering an exclusive society to people who felt they had been dispossessed - and his nationalistic rhetoric gave those people, predominantly white and male, scapegoats.

However, the day after his inauguration, millions turned out under the Women's March banner in direct opposition to the attitudes, particularly towards women, that he has espoused - even as many as one in a hundred in America alone. The people united under the Women's March banner were of all genders and ethnicities, many of them Trump's favoured scapegoats, and they turned out in what may be (real) record numbers in support of equality and inclusion on Saturday (Frostenson, 2017).

America is large and diverse. If Trump wants to pitch the idea of an exclusive America, the facts suggest he should get used to his opponents outnumbering his supporters - his opponents did win the popular vote in 2016, after all. Those opponents, the real alternative, are rallying to the idea of an a more egalitarian, inclusive America. They're being led by the facts (Scanlon, 2014; Wilkinson, 2011).

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.