Keeping truth and power in the family

The dangers prevention scientists face whenever they venture to "speak truth to power" was the theme of the eminent Leftist UK journalist Polly Toynbee [1]'s weekend column for The Guardian.

It was a meditation on the fate of David Nutt [2], the unpaid UK government drugs adviser "fired" last month for making too free with the evidence on the relatively small risks associated with cannabis and ecstasy.

"Nutt was right to speak out," she wrote. "Social scientists have been too quiet about what they know, when they have a scientific duty to air concern about wrong policies."

Much of the rest of her article was as clear description as you are likely to find of the difficult intimacies that pass between science, politics and, as it has turned out, informed journalism.

It was based on a résumé of the experience traded a week or so ago when The British Academy [3] called together social scientists and statisticians to consider the impact of social research, and a pivotal question: “how do you get ministers to pay attention to evidence that warns they are doing the wrong thing?"

The star turn appears to have been the eminent child psychiatrist and Academy Fellow, Sir Michael Rutter, whose contribution to the day’s short history of chronic policy error was to bring perspective to one of the murkiest corners: the family.

The research that followed John Bowlby's discovery in 1944 that divorce damaged children had uncovered a more telling truth: that family discord caused great harm, but separation by itself did not. The quality of parenting mattered most. A bad or antisocial father was much worse than none at all for his malign influence in a child's behavioral development.

Polly Toynbee also reported the moral: "'The original risk was misidentified,' Rutter said. 'Focus on family conflict and the quality of family function – not on family structure’.

"If 'broken Britain' is not caused by broken homes but by bad parenting then Cameron's marriage bonus is a complete nonsense,” she continued. “Happy coupledom may be desirable, but bribing the unwilling to stay together might do more harm than good."

And, speaking “truth to power,” in anticipation of UK opposition party proposals to recognize the value of marriage in the tax system [4], she added: “Would a Conservative government consider this evidence for a nanosecond? Of course not”.

On Monday power spoke back to truth [5] with faintly disconcerting promptness. The Guardian reported on its news pages that Labour was about to publish a Green Paper that "will assert that children's welfare is not necessarily best protected through marriage, but instead through "stable and lasting relationships between parents".

"The green paper is expected to look at why many relationships break up around the birth of the first child, and what more can be done to bind fathers, especially younger ones, into the family at a stressful time. Currently one in three children live apart from their father by the time they reach 16."

To judge from Polly Toynbee's account of the British Academy meeting, the Labour Party has Sir Michael Rutter firmly on its side, and can rely on his certainty that none of the findings on parenting is "a matter of opinion or political preference. It is as good a science as physics".

"Wise experts should stay well away, or recognise that the world of politics is an untidy and unclean necessity," she reflected on Saturday.

"If they want influence in the real world of policy making then they must roll up their sleeves and accept a measure of contamination and compromise. The quid pro quo is that politicians desiring these experts' kudos must face unpalatable truths that will clash with political populism."

In September, the British Academy “the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences” set up a new Policy Centre with the intention of publishing topical research overviews and policy briefings. With Sir Michael Rutter as chair, it has since launched a study of Family Patterns and Public Policy.