Use of evidence

Its a long time ago but there used to be a course in Law at Oxford called "use of evidence" (at least I think there was...). And in our adversarial system of law that means cleverness in selecting facts to support a predetermined thesis (usually - it wasn't me, gov...). But at least there there is a judge and jury to try to adjudicate between two competing half-truths.

But it's interesting how that approach to evidence has morphed into the public arena - again a product of adversarial government - between parties but also between competing government agencies who feel a need to "campaign" at other bits of government - or the public. I was reminded of this at the weekend by reviews of a book on the Aids epidemic ("The Wisdom of Whores" by Elisabeth Pisani) - where describing the competition for Aids funding UNAids had to beef up data to suggest that there was likely to be mass spread of Aids into the general population in the developed West in order to attract funding and political attention. Horrific numbers of deaths among marginalised communities and across marginalised continents were not enough.

There is a tendency to do the same now where evidence is selected to back a thesis - rather than allow the thesis to emerge from the evidence - a point put very nicely (as it were) by the head of Public Health at NICE in a seminar we had recently at Defra. Their comparative advantage - he claimed - was that they reviewed all the evidence - rather that find the evidence that worked. And the good news there is that - even with a very limited evidence base - most public health interventions they have looked at are incredibly cost-effective.

But if the temptations within government are to pick the evidence to back a thesis, the temptation in NGOs is near irresistible. NGOs see themselves as advocates - they are there to make a case. Bjorn Lomborg (squeals of anguish...not least at the fact that he dared to question these paragons of public virtue) has done much to expose some of the half-truths of some of the environmental movement - but my favourite example came from the case of the Canadian Cancer Society where employees were banned form mentioning the number of cancer deaths in Canada - because the top of the organisation realised that in a war to the death with the Heart Foundation they would lose if people realised that coronary disease was still the top killer. Not much chance of a rational debate on health priorities there...

If everyone treated NGO evidence with a hearty pinch of salt, none of this would matter. But people don't. Evidence suggests that most of the pubic regard NGOs as more trustworthy than government and certainly than politicians. They may be nicer people (though not sure there is any evidence of that), but it is naive not to recognise that they are less held to account even than government and have more incentives to abuse evidence to support their one-sided view of the world - and to panic the rest of us into financial support for them.

One of the interesting political developments over the past thirty years is how NGOs have changed form being regarded as "pressure groups" - the language of the 1970s where they were seen as a peculiarly US phenomenon to be studied with a degree of haughty distaste as nasty self-interested people trying to influence legislation for their own ends into being "stakeholders" - nice, fluffy people who deserve an inside track in forming government policy. Of course there is a world of difference between the tax lobbyists trying to reduce their clients tax bills - and the public interest lobbyists trying to put up other people's. But there still needs to be a sceptical approach. The latter's motives may not be selfish - but they do still have a high degree of organisational self-interest - and simply claiming you are acting in the public interest does not mean you necessarily have an - unelected - right to determine what that is.

So we need more intelligent consuming of NGOs by government and the media; better recognition of their pluses and minuses; more holding to account of them and tier trustees for what they say - and for government to make clear it has a very high standard of evidence - and that others need to meet it if they are to be taken seriously.