IF YOU have a tricky bit of policy you need to sell, try reaching for some scientific words – whether or not research actually backs up your claims.
This tactic has been a favourite of the UK government in recent years. At the start of the covid-19 pandemic, it resisted calls for social distancing measures, as had already been implemented in some other countries. The reason given was that policies such as lockdowns would be unworkable because people would experience “behavioural fatigue”, a sciencey-sounding concept supposedly based on research in psychology, but which scientists advising the government later disowned. “If you look in the literature, you won’t find it because it doesn’t exist,” one told the BBC in July 2020.
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Now, the UK government is using the same playbook for its new policy towards asylum seekers, which calls for “scientific methods” to assess whether those who are unaccompanied and say they are children are under 18. These are age-assessment methods with a veneer of science, involving X-rays or DNA methylation, that probably sounded fantastically scientific in the corridors of power, but when it comes to proving they work – what some might call “the science bit” – they are sorely lacking.
It’s not just politicians in the UK who wield the stamp of pseudoscience. The European Union’s peculiar carbon accounting allows it to claim that biomass is a renewable energy source, when in plain language it generally means burning trees, a practice that actually fuels climate change. And last year, law-makers in Texas banned abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy if a doctor could detect a “fetal heartbeat”, a medical-sounding term that .
It is right that democratically elected politicians should make decisions by weighing scientific evidence as a factor, rather than simply “following the science”. But as Fiona Fox, head of the UK’s Science Media Centre, says on page 27, government science must truly be science, not just political spin. Throwing in a few choice phrases to “science things up” isn’t good enough.