Evidence week, or weak?

The tail end of June saw Parliament’s first ‘Evidence Week’ - important, sure, but isn’t this head slappingly obvious?

During the week, the first of its kind, Sense about Science – an independent campaigning charity – attempted to bring together MPs, peers, parliamentary services to talk about ‘why evidence matters’. Seems important, right? Yet at the same time, I’m sorry to be blunt about this, isn’t this obvious?

In a time where no cause, worthwhile or otherwise, could possibly go with out an ‘awareness raising’ campaign – you know the kind of thing; ‘Don't step on a bee day’, ‘National Picnic Month’, ‘Ingrowing Toenail Afternoon’ (… FYI, only one of these is made up, answers on a postcard please) ­– can it really be that the idea of basing decisions on evidence is something that requires a campaign? Honestly it wouldn’t have even dawned on me that elected members of the legislature would genuinely not make evidence the central pillar of their thinking on a given social policy.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t afford blind trust to politicians, or indeed any trust. I am fully aware that one of their favourite past times is to bend the facts to their own will, but they must be aware that there is such a thing as facts in the first place? I mean how where they making decisions before? It can’t all have been posturing and snivelling self serving skulduggery.

Still, the campaigners didn't give this, potentially caricatured, view any credence and for holding it I could be accused of a certain cynicism. Cynicism which is absolutely not the fault of Sense for Science – who seem to be doing a stand-up job of instilling evidence in policy – but rather the fault of the politicians. They haven’t exactly bathed themselves in trustworthy grace of late… if ever. As such I can’t shake the nagging feeling that this is just lip service by Westminster. ‘Look,’ they can now say, ‘we do care about evidence, even when it tells us something we don’t like, because we had a whole week dedicated to it’.

To which the correct response is, of course, ‘why would you need to be convinced to consider evidence for goodness sake.’ A week is no good – the importance of evidence should be the default setting. And if it takes a week to convince you, march immediately to your electorate and hand in your papers.

This, though, should not take away from the work of Sense about Science. Bringing together community groups, MPS, peers, scientists and parliamentary staff really was something of a herculean effort by Director Tracey Brown and her team. And a decent portion of the week was actually a look at methods of discriminating the evidential wheat from the chaff – no bad thing at all.

It is deeply frustrating, and in fact outright dangerous, when science is ignored in policy making. But when it is used as a pawn for political machinations… that is not just dangerous but also deeply insulting to those attempting to remind the body politic that when navigating the world around us, evidence really is the only game in town.

Phil Prime, Editor