Against Factoids

As most reading this will know, recently on Question Time Jacob Rees Mogg attempted to defend British concentration camps in the Boer war. He did so by claiming that the death rate in the camps was comparable to Glasgow's at the time. This, of course, is entirely false, as shown by this excellent article here. But by the time this and similar articles were put out, the damage was already done. A much larger number of people will have seen Mogg's defense than the refutations; moreover, the audience he is targeting is precisely the one which will not read the latter. The desired effect is achieved, and Mogg will almost certainly be able to avoid all too much further scrutiny of that particular point.

Why did this work? The easy explanation would be to blame the other members of the panel. Couldn't they have called him out on this in real time? This would be almost impossible without taking a significant risk. In order to assert, without prior preparation, with confidence that Mogg's comments were false, you would not only have to be someone with a good working knowledge of the Boer war, you would also have to be someone who happened to know rather a lot of precise information about the demographics of Glasgow at the turn of the 20th Century. I am not sure how many people in the world fit this description. I would not be surprised if the answer was zero.

This is of course not the same as being able to sense right away that his comments are dubious. When I first saw the clip, my initial reaction was that the comparison sounded rather implausible. But I had to wait for a while to be able to confirm that it was definitively false. A participant in a televised discussion like Question Time would have to act on that hunch, and in doing so take a significant risk themselves. They might well be able to tell that something is not right about what is being asserted, but it is very difficult in that situation to know if the remark is false per se, or merely misleading (imagine, for example, that there was a particular outbreak of disease in Glasgow at that time). In this sense Mogg's claim was a factoid par excellence. It is almost impossible to falsify on the spot, as without some time researching, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to say exactly what is wrong with it.

This strategy is quite a common one in televised discussions. The strategy is to use a fact that, even if it were true, would be so obscure that nobody will be able to refute it in real time. Mogg has done this several times before. In March 2017, he claimed on the Daily Politics that a no deal Brexit was nothing to fear because of a little known paragraph in a WTO agreement allowed for a new party to maintain any existing trade relations for up to 10 years. Once again, this was, eventually, refuted, and you can read the refutation here. But once again, nobody could realistically have done this in real time. How, after all, can you be certain that there is no paragraph in any document in the history of the WTO which might contain something which loosely fits his description? You would either need to exhaustively search databases or find something directly in contradiction.

These incidents paint a disturbing picture. It is quite possible to achieve your desired aim in a televised discussion by bamboozling your opponent with statements designed to be for all intents and purposes irrefutable. This has become a standard strategy of the alt-right. The only defense against it requires a change in broadcast culture. It requires broadcasters to either refuse to have on air participants who repeatedly and maliciously use this kind of factoid, or, at the very least, they should face real and specific scrutiny every time they appear on air subsequently and be taken to town on previous false or misleading statements. The latter is probably not even enough, as it gives further publicity to these individuals. But even that would be an improvement on the status quo.

Is a nuanced public discussion about Churchill possible?

One thing that struck me most when I lived in Germany is the difference between discussions about national history there compared with the U.K. This of course has a lot to do with the unique horrors of 20th Century German history. The development of public discussions, or 'Vergangenheitsbetwältigung' (overcoming the past) on these was slow, fraught with generational politics and driven at times only by major events (public trials of Nazis in the 1960s, publication of particular articles by historians etc). But the long term result has extended beyond discussion specifically of Nazism and to a popular public discourse on history which is less inclined to thinking about national heroes. Yes, there are figures like Konrad Adenauer who hold a place in national mythology, but I doubt there would much of an uproar if a major politician criticised Adenauer. This has more than once led me to wonder: however disanalogous the horrors of empire may be, might it be worth having a more open discussion about recent British history?

The events of the last week have at shown that this can have unintended consequences, or at the very least that the legacy of Winston Churchill might not be the place to start. There has rightly been uproar at Jacob Rees Mogg's comments on Question Time in defence of concentration camps in the Boer War. Robert Saunder's has written a excellent refutation of his remarks here, though others have too. What Mogg's comments show is precisely how these discussions can go wrong. It seems entirely reasonable to ask for a nuanced discussion about Churchill which includes aspects of him which we should not be comfortable with. But what if the result of that is not nuance, but simply that people now feel obliged to defend even the most horrific things he is associated with? Perversely, this could actually be worse than not having had the discussion at all. If  public discussion of a national figure is limited to a selective national mythology, the bad bits are just omitted. This may actually be more conducive to progressive attitudes than the situation in which they are actively defended.

And what kind of nuance are we hoping to achieve anyway? Deciding whether Churchill's role in the second world war on balance allows him to still be a hero in spite of the Bengal Famine is not really a useful analytic question. Sometimes totalising judgements are necessary, like when deciding who to elect. But for the most part, they are of little analytic use, and we are probably better off trying to avoid taking a position about an individual overall. If discussions about Churchill mean people feel obliged to actively and consciously take a position on this question, we might all be the worse off for it. It might be better to leave public discussion a ritual very few put much thought into, and those who do think about these questions just ignore. Honest public discussions of the brutality and cruelty of the British Empire might better start elsewhere.