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.

Cameron's EU draft deal makes a two speed Europe a fact and gives the European Union a chance to move forward

For progressives, the bright side of Cameron's renegotiation for two speeds of membership is that it keeps Britain at the heart of the EU, where they can continue to campaign for better, more democratic, system.

David Cameron has got, in draft form, his deal on Europe (Sparrow & Smith, 2016). The deal came with an unequivocal statement that the Prime Minister would, if Britain where not part of the EU, join if these were the terms. The Cameron deal, negotiated and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council (chair of the council of EU member states) came to a short list of agreements.

Member states to have the right to use an 'emergency brake' on providing social security to migrants when movement was above ordinary levels, that those outside bodies like the Eurozone should not be expected to fund them, a commitment from the EU to better regulations and more efficient administration, and for national parliaments that make up 55% of seats on the European Council to represent a veto on European legislation (Sparrow, 2016). What these concessions most clearly establish is a two speed Europe (Verhofstadt, 2016).

Romano Prodi, former Italian Prime Minister and former President of the European Commission (Europe's executive branch), had previously foreseen this outcome (CNN, 2004). An attempt had been made to bring together the various European treaties to create a clear Constitution for Europe, only for it to be rejected at referendums in both France and the Netherlands (BBC, 2005; The Guardian; 2005).

Prodi accepted that, with the failure to establish a constitution for Europe, to make progress the European Union must now move at two speeds (EurActiv, 2007) - so that those who do not want to move forward could have their choice respected, without it overriding the choice of others to move ever closer. Without some formal resolution on that direction, however, Europe has seemingly spent the last decade stalled.

Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the liberals in Europe, praised the chance the renegotiations offered for clarity (Verhofstadt, 2015). Verhofstadt stressed that their was common ground in Europe for clearing up the messy boundaries and agreements, so that all countries could align themselves with a sure understanding of where they were headed.

Making the European Union a two speed institution essentially realigns Europe into two groups: some countries pursuing ever closer union, while others stay at arms length. The first group will accept the Eurozone, Schengen, joint border agencies, and the pursuit of better political and economic governance. Those at the edge will continue to have a seat at the table and important relationships and votes on governance, but there will be opt-outs rather than a veto.

For those in the UK who favour European Union membership, this seems to be the best deal on the table for now. What it certainly does offer is a chance to remain close. As Romano Prodi put it (EurActiv, 2007), "a two-speed Europe does not mean that countries that are in the second group cannot move to the first".

To the UK's progressives, this means the chance to renew efforts for a more social Europe (Shaheen, 2015), for the positive impacts that the EU can have in the fight for a greener world (Vidal, 2016), and to engage with continental campaigns for better democracy, like that being launched in Berlin next week on 9th February by Yanis Varoufakis to improve democracy in Europe (Varoufakis, 2016).