The cake is a lie

There is a bigger problem than Brexit that is demolishing the public trust in political promises. The pervasive problem affecting all sides of the Brexit debate is that politicians have been making policy proposals and selling them to the public with neither any analysis nor any admission of the trade-offs they entail. This corrupts and degrades political discourse and leads to a public that rates politicians below gutter journalists in trustworthiness. And the result is that real problems of any sort (never mind Brexit) can never be tackled or solved.

The betrayal of British voters started long before Brexit.

As the British parliament struggled with choices about how to do (or not do) Brexit and voted Theresa May's deal down a second time, radio phone-ins were bombarded by vox populi assertions that the political class had betrayed their decision and were trying to subvert their choice to leave the EU. Pro Brexit politicians have repeatedly asserted that saboteurs are undermining the democratic choice of the British electorate and that any result other than leaving will destroy a generation's faith in the trustworthiness of their politicians. Even a second referendum would be a breach of faith in the democratic system (a bizarre argument on many fronts but particularly hypocritical from some of the Brexit camp who, when they thought they were going to lose, were arguing we might need a second vote if the first vote were close).

I'm a remainer. But the point of what I'm going to say here isn't to argue we should remain. It is to argue that the problem with British democracy and voter's trust in it is far deeper than anything to do with Brexit. And, whatever we end up doing on Brexit, far more worrying. This problem will damage British politics long after Brexit is settled, unless we do something about it.

The problem isn't that MPs are not giving voters what they voted for: the problem is politicians have kept making promises without being honest about the trade-offs of those policies.

Paul Johnson, the boss of the IFS has made this point many times. Here are a few summaries of his view from an article originally published in a Times article in 2017 (link to civilservant.org.uk version):

"It is a fact insufficiently acknowledged that making good public policy is difficult. Really difficult....

Making good public policy is just about the hardest thing there is. If it is being made by people who really do believe that we can have our cake and eat it, then we really are in trouble...

It may be Boris Johnson who is famous for telling us we can have our cake and eat it, but he only made explicit what far too many politicians do implicitly: offering up goodies without mentioning the costs. Yet it is rare indeed that such trade-offs can be avoided."

As many computer gamers will know, The cake is a Lie. We should repeat this phrase every time a politician makes some excellent-sounding policy but fails to explicitly outline the trade-offs. Every promise should be honest and open in admitting the costs as well as the benefits; itemising the losers as well as the winners. Every policy choice has a downside as well as an upside. Except, apparently, in the world of political rhetoric where there are no downsides and where you can always have your cake and eat it too.

This is not a Brexit-specific point. Labour have been guilty of pretending they can fund their extra spending plans by taxing the "rich" when every balanced analysis says everyone's taxes will need to rise to achieve their promises. Sure, abolishing student fees would be popular, but they omit to mention that the biggest beneficiaries would be the wealthy not the poor and that, if they don't stump up billions of extra funding for universities every year, the university attendance rates of the poor would be severely hit. If they ever get into government with this policy, they will suffer the same fate as the ill-advised LibDem promise not to raise fees for which they were duly punished by the electorate. The conservatives promised that austerity could be done without hurting key popular services like the NHS. Look how well that turned out.

Rhetorically policies that are sold as having no downside sound promising but are dishonest. Or perhaps the problem is deeper? Maybe the policy champions have no idea what the downside is because they have never commissioned any actual analysis of the trade-offs. They look purely at how their idea will play in the headlines with no concern for the real effects. This, if anything, is worse than downright dishonesty. As frankfurt argued in his seminal rant On Bullshit:

"...bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are"

The more politicians bullshit us, the less able they are to solve real-world problems. Worse, the more they promise easy solutions that don't work, the less the voters trust them.

The Brexit campaign is characterised by several examples of this from both sides. The remain campaign argued that a Brexit vote would be economic armageddon. Since it clearly wasn't, our trust in them has declined even though the real issue was always what happens when the UK actually leaves not when it voted to leave. The Brexit camp promised that the UK could retain all its privileges in EU trade and that negotiation would be easy and quick. Now negotiations have proved hard and slow they have often doubled-down on the bullshit promise that things would be easy by blaming the problem on saboteurs not their own manifest inattention to the details of international trade negotiation.

But this isn't an argument about whether Brexit is good or isn't good. The problem of bullshit promises has been pervasive in British politics for a long time. And it is those bullshit promises that are sending an exocet into the unwisely inflammable, aluminum clad hull of HMS Political Trust. If the people don't trust politicians to do what they say they will do, that is deadly serious. But the root cause is the bullshit the politicians promise in the first place. Bullshit promises bear no relation to real world problems so can never be fulfilled. You can't have your cake and eat it too even if your policy is pro having cake and pro consuming cake.

The pro-Brexit electorate may well be disgusted that parliament has failed to do what they promised and deliver an easy, quick exit from the EU. But it isn't the violation of that promise that has led to this: it is the fact that such a bullshit promise was made in the first place. Voter disgust in the failure of political promises is a direct product of badly thought through promises not of the failure to deliver them. And those promises are pervasive in current political debate on both sides and on every topic.

We can't solve real-world problems without honest analysis. And we can't buy public support for good policy if we don't clearly admit both the benefits and the costs, the upside and the downside, the winners and the losers of our policy choices. We should stop worrying about the impact on voter trust of failing to deliver political promises when the promises themselves are the problem. Unless voters are given a clear view of the trade-offs inherent in the policy they can have no basis to make a rational choice and no basis to complain if the policy turns out to be undeliverable. You can promise every voter a pink unicorn for their birthday, but is is insane to complain that the problem is a failure of politicians to fulfil their promises when that unicorn doesn't turn up. The problem is making the promise in the first place.

Paul Johnson summarised things well when he said:

"It’s making well-informed, balanced choices and acting on them that’s difficult: to do one thing when it means you can’t do another, to make some people better off at the expense of others, to make the judgment that this is more important than that. Any politician who doesn’t feel that difficulty, who doesn’t feel it viscerally, who doesn’t recognise the costs and risks as well as benefits and opportunities created by their decisions, is likely to be a seriously dangerous politician."

Unfortunately, those dangerous politicians now dominate the political class running the country and the opposition. Even if we somehow resolve Brexit, we will still suffer the consequences of their bullshit in every area where real problems have to be solved.

The only solution is for the public to stop complaining that politicians don't do what they promise and start insisting that all promises come with a clear explanation of their downside. If the politicians can't articulate that, you can't trust anything they say.