Today I’m putting up short series of posts that have been prompted by the sacking of Professor David Nutt by the Home Secretary Alan Johnson. What was that all about? I’m supposed to be an expert on the boundaries of authority in science (‘boundaries of authority’ is in the title of my PhD thesis) so I should be able to tell you ☺.
The short answer is Alan Johnson is a lazy stupid politician who thinks the role of science in policy development is to save him from having to actually do politics. He’s by no means alone in his view of science. He wanted the expediency of an evidence-based policy with all the advantages of a popular policy. When the evidence-based policy didn’t deliver what he wanted he should have said: 'There's more to this issue than mere epidemiology. I'm basing the Government's policy on wider criteria'. He didn't do that, maybe because it would have required leadership.
I had forgotten that I gave a damn about the role of science in policy development – I thought all that was behind me – but watching politicians screw up the response to climate change as completely and utterly as they have has forced me to re-visit the topic. Never has it been more important to understand what science is. Stupid, lazy, arrogant, unimaginative politicians will probably never get it.
The following posts cover some of the points that the David Nutt affair has brought up for me:
Why stupid lazy politicians like science
What is science and what is science taken to be?
The boundaries of science
The public relations definition of science
Why it’s OK to be unscientific