 For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jude England, I'm the head of social sciences here at the British Library. And astonishingly I realised that almost four years ago we embarked on this series of events. We called Myths and Realities and I don't think we've visited when we started, that we'd be going four years and nineteen events later. In fact this one is number twenty and it's our final one so cue for our… Thank you to all of you who supported us, but I'll come on to that again in a minute. The aim of this series has been to look at a whole range of significant and public and social issues. The idea came about really through a collaboration between us, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Economic and Social Research Council. When we started in 2009, those were the days when we had a big nice drinks reception afterwards because we hadn't been cut back in government at that point. Through this series, our aim has been to challenge some of the common assumptions that we make about our everyday lives and highlight the role that social science research can play to help us understand what's happening and why and point the way to how we might change and improve. We really wanted to provide a forum for researchers to talk about their research to a wider audience than they would perhaps normally reach or regularly reach. We wanted to give the public the opportunity to engage with academics and practitioners working in a range of different areas. We've covered a huge range of topics and we've got posters showing some of them over there. We started with migration. We've looked at risk, class, crime of punishment, education and the property-owning democracy, food, diet and families, policy and social issues around welfare, provision, young people and older generations as well as discussing ethnicity and identity, sustainable lifestyles and the impact of social media. Just that list in itself has something about the beauty and the scope of social science, I think. We've had a fantastic range of speakers, though some who will remain nameless were incredibly ambitious about the amount of ground they could cover in 25 minutes or so. But whether they broke my two minutes of slide, and if you do PowerPoint it works if you think about two minutes of slide, we're incredibly grateful to them to distilling their expertise and research mostly in succinct, informative and illuminating packages. But what's for me shone out all the long has been the importance of evidence to understand and enhance their understanding of issues. That's what we set out to do. In tonight's event what we want to do really is conclude by looking at why some people cling on to the social myths that we've discussed in the series, often in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. Why do those politicians who also remain nameless prefer anecdotes over evidence? And why the general public over estimate benefit fraud, migration rates, population trends and so on? Now we're very honoured this evening that our Chair is Dame Janet Finch, who's Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Her main research interest has been around the family-family relationships, but she's been involved in national level policy work on a number of issues. Most recently she chaired a group on open access publishing and has become, I don't know if it's a noun, I don't know what you call it, a noun, because she's now referred to as the Finch Report. But she's also Chair of the Governing Board of this fantastic new cohort study, birth cohort study, which will involve 100,000 babies. Just get your heads around that, 100,000 babies are going to be born in 2014 and will track them through their lives. So in 50 years time hopefully my equivalent will be standing here introducing the latest results on that. For Light Relief, she's Chair of the Social Sciences Panel for Research Excellence Framework National Assessment, and that's looking at the research output of higher education institutions, which I think is a bit of a labour of love actually. But Janet's going to be keeping our two speakers in order and we'll be introducing them, and I'd like to welcome Professor Ziver, Gaber and John Homewood. Two more things from me before we get underway. We're changing our focus next year, we haven't got rid of a theat. We're going to do a new series, which we're debating what to call. We've thought about understanding our society, we've thought about just tonight discovering society. We're still working on this, but we'll have the first one in June, and we're thinking about the sorts of topics. And one of the things we think about, we think we might do is perhaps look at some of the theory around society and why we are the way we are rather than the sort of issues. So let's have a look at some of the underpinning theories. Before then, we're part of the events that will be going on for Science Week in March, and we have an event with that called Beyond Nature vs Nurture. So are we born the way we are and stuck with it or do we change as we go through? And that's on the 11th of March. Just a technical thing, bear with us a bit on the technical issues this evening. There may be some feedback and we are sorting this, but please be patient. And I'm going to hand over to Janet now to get us to underway properly and welcome our speaker. Thank you very much, Jude. And on behalf of everybody who's been involved in these 20 events, I think I'd like to thank you very warmly for the way in which you have supported it and the library is the question. And of course, Corridwin for the Academy of Social Sciences has been great. So this is the denouement of the series on myths and realities. And will we get to the bottom of why people stick on to, hold on to the myths in the teeth of all evidence against them? Well, let's see where we get to by the end of the evening. It is something that I feel personally quite passionate about because my own research has mostly been about families particularly about kinship, about the broader family relationships. And at least 30 years ago, more than that, I started working on it partly because I thought that we needed to unravel some of the myths about how people were no longer, no longer mattered, the wider family relationships were no longer important to people. Despite the fact that my wonderful research demonstrated without any doubt whatsoever that this is not true and that kinship remains really important to most people in this country, strangely enough that myth is still alive and well. And despite the fact that very many other people as well as me have shown that it's very much more complicated than that. So I think it is a genuine puzzle for social scientists as to how these myths persist in the teeth of all evidence against them. And I hope to learn a lot tonight from our two speakers. And I'll move straight away to introduce the first one, who is Professor Iva Gabor. He is an academic who is also extremely well known as a practitioner in the media, as you may say, an independent producer now of programmes for Radio 4 and the World Service, but in the past has had senior editorial positions in the BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky News. He's currently Professor of Media and Politics at the University of Bedfordshire and widely respected for his work on media and politics. And he's going to talk to us tonight about the topic, never let facts get in the way of the good story either. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. As a journalist it's difficult to resist wine. As Janet's described my background, I like to think of myself as a recovering journalist that one never finally loses the journalistic imperative to tell a story, hopefully by letting the facts get in the way, but I have got a bit of a research background. So my talk tonight is going to be a bit of a romp from both a journalistic and a media perspective. I have to start with The Good and Great, Paul Daker. And I chose that picture as all newspapers choose them to reflect an absolutely neutral and unbiased perspective on what I think of them. Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail? I'm going to start and end with the Daily Mail because they do form a theme. There are metropolitan classes and I fear that's you lot. Of course despise our readers with their dreams mostly unfulfilled of a decent educational health service they can trust. Their belief in the family, patriotism, self-reliance and their overriding suspicion of the state and the people who know best. These people mock our readers scepticism over the European Union and the Human Rights Court that seems to care more about the criminal than the victim. They scoff at our readers who, while tolerant, fret that the country's schools and hospitals can't cope with mass immigration. Well I'm proud that the Mail stands up for those readers. And I just thought given the events of the last few weeks it was impossible to do this talk without referencing the Mail. But for those of you who find the Mail difficult to take you'll be pleased to note that they only make an appearance at the end. This is a very complex subject. Janet said she's hoping to learn much. This is a multi-causal explanation. There is no single answer and it takes in a whole lot of discipline, psychology, anthropology, sociology, which John will be talking about. But also political science, media studies, contemporary politics and current UK journalistic practice. By the way when Jude said it's two minutes a slide I thought sometimes. So hold on it might be a bit quick. So I'm going to only focus on the last, the media studies, the contemporary politics and the current journalistic practice. If you ask me to tweet and it's not done as a tweet why miss persist? I would summarise one of the major reasons and I have to say in my experience and experience of colleagues I talk with we do have a unique unfortunate media and political culture in this country perhaps imitated in Australia where you might have noticed the civilised exchanges between the party leaders in the previous election and within parties not dissimilar to some of our own policies. We do have a very adversarial political and media culture and one reason and I'm not going to history but of course our judicial system and our political system is adversarial in nature. There aren't many political systems where the two sides do sit opposite each other. Most are hemispheres and it's more than just furniture. There is an important symbolism there. We have one of the most concentrated media colleges in the world and as you all well know newspapers have very strong political opinions and these political opinions suit many of the myths that Janet alluded to which I will be referencing. This is an unfashionable view but my research which I will be touching on some of my research very briefly but I am a believer that politicians in this country do have a very strong agenda setting power. If I told that to a group of politicians as I have on occasion they just laugh they see themselves as pawns of the media. Well it ain't necessarily so. Politicians have the ability to put items, to put issues on the agenda and to keep them there. I hope you can all think of examples. I'm happy to discuss that in questions. Then we have a very problematic journalistic culture. Journalists have never been under greater pressure. It's a process that I've described elsewhere as news intensification that because of the culture we're now in, the 24 hour social media culture the pressures on journalists are horrendous and they are more so which makes simple black and white solutions much easier than complexity. That's really what we're talking about. We're talking about simplicity against complexity. Then we have audience expectations, the notions of hegemony, certain ideas not only of current that get a hold in our society and some of them are very, very difficult to dislodge particularly when the ability to dislodge them choose not to. I'm going to do a quick trot across some of the myths about scroungers. I was just looking for some just to give you a flay. Oh, I beg your pardon. I've jumped. There are current myths a lot surrounding youth and hoodies and so forth. Problems, feral families, scroungers which I'll talk about briefly. Drugs. My first journalistic job was working for now a long defunct magazine called Drugs and Society in the 1970s and there were a lot of myths around there about drug taking which persist. There's some very interesting work a long time ago done by a sociologist called Jock Young which exemplified that. Immigration, I don't mean to tell you. Islam, Islamophobia, all of the stuff surrounding that. There are a lot of myths. 60s has long been a myth if you can remember it you weren't there but the 70s recently there's a headline which I didn't use when Ed Miliband the Daily Mail said Ed Miliband's bringing back the 70s. Well there were aspects of the 70s that were problematic in the extreme but the notion an entire 10 years were misery is one of the myths. And sorry social workers and child protection which is an issue I've been researching. There are a lot of myths surrounding that. Myths go, fading faster making comeback. There were many myths surrounding AIDS, HIV fantastic educational work in that area has dispelled many if not all of the myths. There were many myths around homosexuality every time a child was attacked it was a gay pedo or whatever. Trade unions, that's a fading myth although I'm sure the Conservatives will be doing their best to resurrect it. Do you remember all the dangerous dogs and the dangerous dogs that came out of it? So myths aren't stabilised they're not all encompassing all the time although some of them persist they do sometimes move on. I was going to look at some myths about scroungers. The majority of welfare spending goes to those who aren't or can't be bothered to work out of work benefits account for less than a quarter of welfare spending and just over half of spending on non pensioner benefits. They live in families in which there are three generations who've never worked. How often have we heard that? In fact a family in which three generations have never worked has yet to be unearthed by either social researchers or the media despite their best efforts and only an estimated 0.3% of families have two generations who've never worked. Wrong button again. They spend all their money on drink and drugs fewer than 4% of benefit claimants report any form of addiction. They're all on the fiddle. Less than 0.9% of the welfare budget is lost to fraud. If everyone claimed and was paid correctly the welfare system would cost around £18 billion more. So it's even bigger myth than I'm suggesting. Thank you very much for that. Life on benefits is a doddle. Over the last 30 years benefits have halved in value compared with average incomes and I hope finally Britain is the benefits capital of Europe. I'm grateful for this morning's guardian for pointing out to me that EU nationals are net contributors to the UK welfare system. They pay more in tax and social security contributions than they receive in benefits. Although as my wife pointed out that's something to do with demographics make up but nonetheless it is a fact. So however it's not all in one direction. The Guardian for example shopped some of us when it had this table on cost of tax evasion. We assume that tax evasion is a mega problem here compared with elsewhere and in fact we don't do too badly in this table by tax justice network and the World Bank which puts us below Russia, Brazil, Italy, Spain, France and Germany in terms of loss to the Exchequer by tax evasion. So I just wanted to point out although clearly there is a bit of a political agenda going on here it doesn't all happen one way. Some theories of news. I'm now going to theories of news. This is a very classic definition of news and I think behind this I'm told probably not but everybody attributes it to Lord Northcliff who owned the Daily Mirror. News is what somebody somewhere does not want you to print all the rest is advertising but there's a fundamental truth in that, that news media don't exist fundamentally to give you the news. Even the newspapers are there essentially to make a profit and they generate news to do that. Even the BBC needs to generate audiences to justify the license fee so attractive audiences comes before telling the news and the notion that there's such a thing as the news is very problematic but I won't go into that here. Three basic texts I want to draw your attention to Walter Lippmann who was an American journalist in 1922 he wrote this book he went on to write some very strange things but his comment on the news news and the truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. How many times do I hear journalists say all we do is we get the facts we get the truth and life's a bit more complicated than that. Lippmann had this lovely analogy of the press is no substitute for institutions it is like the beam of a search light that moves restlessly about bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone and that notion that journalists are selecting shining a light on the things that they're looking for is a very persuasive notion so that's Walter Lippmann 1922 just moving forward very rapidly and this is something that I'm familiar with the most important work in this field and the work that's probably shone the most light was written by the late Stanley Cohen in 1972 in a very important book called Folk Devils and Moral Panics. I fear there's a long quote coming in here but this is just summer I can almost just read this and stop. He wrote societies appear to be subject every now and then to periods of moral panic. A condition episode person or group of person emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media the moral barricades are manned by editors bishops, politicians and other right thinking people, socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions, ways of coping are evolved or more often resorted to the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes less visible. He was writing about the mods and rockers panic of the 70s but it can be applied to virtually every other moral panic we've had since. He identified three key elements exaggeration and distortion a prediction of recurrence that this isn't just a one off we have a problem and then there's symbolization of a wider issue usually moral decadence breakdown of society the final text I'm briefly going to refer to who built on again I'm familiar with so many of you who built on Cohen's work is policing the crisis which was written by Stuart Hall and others a few years later and he came up with this very important notion of primary definers and I suppose moral panics and primary definers are for me the key explanation of myths primary definers are the notion that certain elements in society are given greater credibility than others just to give you an example a simple example for my days as a reporter you go along to a demonstration you say to the organisers how many people do you estimate here and they say 200,000 you go to the police and you say how many do you estimate here and they say 7, 8 and news editors would take the police version of numbers as authoritative they might then add organisers claimed police never claimed police say there were 20,000 present and organisers claimed there were 100,000 and it's a preferred it's a very interesting notion primary definers that the media privilege certain definers it's breaking down now I'm just talking to you as the Metropolitan Police the explanation of plebgate collapses and they as a primary definer are now very very challenged to put it at its mildest but the notion of primary definer still holds very strong and it does give the establishment to use a very problematic word an advantage so that enough of the theory although it's not gone away this is evenings down a couple of weeks ago the gangs of London this was absolute sensationalist tripe they ran but we have to examine the motor in our own eye this was based on quote research it was today we expose shocking new findings that show just how bad normal life has become for vulnerable young Londoners the result of a study of a high risk of young people in south London of Wales we know it's not all Londoners this is south London and it's a wonderful place I cast no aspersions on it and they said nearly half had seen a stabbing or shooting in the last year and these were block capitals as I'm portraying them one in four had witnessed a killing one in five themselves had been stabbed or shot those are truly shocking shocking figures and a cursory reading suggests this is what Londoners normal life has become for young Londoners this research is based on a study of 105 children drawn from 18,000 being helped by the charity Kids Company undertaken by researchers at the University of College London now I'm sure this research at UCL is very good quality qualitative research based on a particularly troubled group because kids company works with troubled group and there's no based on my knowledge of quantitative methods there's no way a sample of 105 can be representative it can be a large quantitative sample but it certainly ain't quantitative but you would know that that was the bottom of the piece but that really reinforces a lot of myths and we have to exact at the most in our own eyes as social scientists my own work interest in this area I was involved in the Monroe Review for Child Protection which looked at Child Protection and I was advising Professor Monroe on the role the media plays in baby pee Victoria Columbia and so forth these sort of issues and it is a great the notion of the demonised social worker is a great fit for a lot of the myths in our society the whole of the story why did these stories attract such attention they just fit everything they fit the scroungers and feral famines discourse social workers demonisation which is an ongoing theme which I'm happy to discuss further there is a hangover from the loony left of the notion that that some local authorities have been too indulgent with people people whose life styles most people disapprove children are newsworthy there's no question the murder of children I'm not for one moment suggesting that the deaths of children looked after children should not be a story but children are particularly newsworthy much more newsworthy for example in the deaths of old people and we know there's a lot of elder abuse as well but you know they don't make nice pictures I mean we could talk about Madeleine McCann and why that's such a big story whoops and then it's a classic moral panic in fact it has all the elements moving on but for example in this whole what can I call it epidemic of deaths of child abuse it's a classic never let the facts get in the way of a good story because in the middle of all this 2010 the British Journal of Social Work reported child abuse related death rates have never been lower since records began England and Wales have made significantly greater progress in reducing violent child deaths than the majority of other major developed countries and this message this was researched by Pritchard and Williams the following year in the independent I picked up a thing archives of diseases in childhood showed equally if not more dramatic death they're measuring different things and I don't want to get too but deaths from child abuse in 1974 was 152 in 2018 it was 51 so children under one down from 36 to 8 so while there's this huge moral panic epidemic of problems of child abuse actually the figures are moving in the opposite direction and very briefly my other case study I also looked at the phenomena in a book called culture wars about the loony left and the way it was used to stereotype and categorise and stories you some of you older members will be familiar with Barmy Bernie the late Bernie Grant and the sort of stories we looked at is you know PC coffee black bin liners bad no man holds in Hackney bar bar green sheep is a fascinating one and a very brief diversion when we researched why the Daily Merit Express whoever reported we tracked down the people and there was I have to tell you a nursery in Hackney where they were teaching the children to say bar bar green sheep and when we or our researchers interviewed them they said why are you doing this if you had an instruction from the council they said no but we've been reading the newspaper reports and we know that's the sort of thing they'd want us to do so it was a very interesting application and it was a bit like some other research I did looking at the media reporting of the introduction of congestion charging those of you who in London at the time will remember there was a really hysterical reporting of how Armageddon will come when we have the congestion charging the evening standard started the story un-sourced we sourced it to a source in city hall and I have an eminent friend of mine here who was working in city hall and actually commissioned the research come to think of it they sourced it to a source in city hall and then for that subsequent 250 reports they didn't source it to this anonymous source they sourced it as as exclusively revealed in the evening standard so they became their own source it was a rather clever trick anyway I can't remember what comes next the times are changing going back to these myths some of the myths of Luley leftism or canards have now become very mainstream and that's just an example of the dynamism of myths how they do metamorphise feminism which was one of the key issues anti-racism, gay rights rights for disabilities environmentalism, negotiating with the IRA even public finance initiative they're even selling off our town halls was one of the headlines we looked at well they beat capital to it but not by much these myths so to speak have become mainstream let me now just take you behind the scenes briefly I picked up this advert in the Guardian for Sky News was looking for a social affairs and education when this sort of sums up the problem they want speed of coverage exclusive news stories sharp analysis tight deadlines but original and imaginative and complicated issues and they don't all fit together particularly when you're being asked to do a 1 minute 15 package explaining the complexities of a social phenomena and it is a real problem there are other problems news intensification I've referred to where news information is coming both coming at journalists at ever increasing rates through social media and 24 hour news but they're also having to output it at the same sort of rate there are fewer staff doing it there's a much more competitive media environment career aspirations mean that journalists don't say no I won't write that, that's a myth if you want to get on you keep quiet and you do what you're told this is a very well known phenomena that sociologists of the media have been observing for a long time it's very obvious and then there's a newsroom culture it remains a macho newsroom culture where you don't go into complexity and explanation unless you're working on the Guardian as they say but in the mainstream media and the popular press and on the TV channels there tends to be a newsroom culture the cliché is if it bleeds it leads it's slightly clichéed but it explains quite a lot there's another cliché which is too good to check we've all been there now I'm just going to moving towards two minutes well I want to pay my video there's this notion of objectivity there's this notion there is the news there is the facts we tell it truth this is what is taught to every first year journalistic student the inverted pyramid you start on the most important the who, what, where, when, why and how the most important info goes first it only takes 20 seconds of reflection to realise that deciding what's the most important person what's the most important fact it's a very subjective judgement it involves all sorts of value judgments so the notion that there is objectivity out there is many journalists are now realising it's not although they do try and say well it's a gold standard some still say it's a gold standard some say it's a worthy aspiration and people like me say it's either a chimera or a chimera a chimera, that's what I say it's a chimera there's some rather, a couple of interesting American academics, journalist academics who wrote objectivity is not a fundamental principle of journalism merely a voice or device to persuade the audience of one's accuracy or fairness and that's the key issue journalists and particularly the Daily Mail have the ability to convince people that they're giving them the facts straight that notion that there are the facts straight and that's what makes it so persuasive so I'm just going to show you finally this is a thing called response source which I only came across in the process of researching it but it's a PR service and if you are a PR you log on to that you pay some money and then hundreds of journalists get a note from you asking we're looking for somebody a woman who's tried to give birth a lot of times and has given up and has now gone into homeopathy or whatever and I picked up this really nice one and it's true this is in-depth reporting this is how investigative journalists work that's unfair further to my last request this some journalist said I also now urgently need an expert who will say tattoos can give you cancer we can plug any relevant organisation give copy approval which journalists pretend to desperately resist and pay a fee please get back to me as soon as possible if you can help I'm prepared to be a tattoo expert if the fee is big enough but you can see the problem so in this romp I've concluded with this headline British press best in the world and as somebody might have said I don't believe it but before I'm now ending but I don't want to leave without trying to resurrect the reputation of the Daily Mail because I think I've been a bit unfair on the mail and that ilk and I'm going to end with a contribution that I would love to have claimed to have written but didn't and the from... oh it works oh it almost worked can you hear that? bring back capital punishment for paedophiles photos feature on school girls, skirt stars binge Britain, single mums, pensioners hoody scum, over sexed and under aged foreign stories, half a page criminals, get marks, suspensives, vouchers when released on bail it's absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail ban this gay smart I'm not racist but car crime, knife crime hangler cheating, lifetime stars take drugs, team boys wear hoods, sport stars have sex, bear shit inwards Brussels politicians want to stop us drinking English ale it's absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail climate gate petrol prices pot holes, credit crisis gypsies Russell brown time, we all took a stand modern art, where to start trashed a lot of it, a bathroom statuette a puppy, 50 quipers in hiding stole, and goes behind their veil it's absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail polls paid to give blood immigration like a flood soft touch, British arms cancer from your mobiles cancer from your laptop, cancer from your root crop cancer from your shoes, from your dog from your pen top, immigrants arriving on an unprecedented scale it's got to be the case if it's written in the Daily Mail they never mincer words in the good old Daily Mail it's absolutely true because I gather all my views from the Daily Mail Thanks Dan I'm going to wash my hair I would if I were you Thank you very much indeed I don't know whether our next speaker is also going to have a comedy spot but I have seen him being very entertaining on a number of other occasions I'm delighted to introduce Professor John Homewood from the University of Nottingham current president of the British Sociological Association and a well known commentator on the ways in which sociology in particular scientific knowledge social scientific knowledge more generally can be of public relevance in order to put that into practice he I think has become a practitioner in a slightly different sense recently as one of the joint managing editors of the new online magazine of social research called Discover Society which I suspect he's going to talk about but which the first issue was really good I thought that's my personal opinion John your turn Okay I'm not going to talk about it Is it okay if I I'm not going to talk about it and I'm not going to be entertaining and so I'm really annoyed with Iva and I suspect I'm going to go a bit off message because I'm uneasy about these discussions about myths and realities and expertise and I'll begin with a reference that I've made to Walter Lippman Walter Lippman is also the author of a book called The Phantom Public and the book The Phantom Public is about how the figure of the public occurs within democratic theory but has no real substance in relation to the complexity of modern society and that what we really need is a replacement of politics by experts and the social sciences in a sense represent themselves as that form of expertise and I think it's very dangerous if we think about myths and realities in the context of expertise replacing publics and I think it's also an issue if we think and criticise the idea of privileged definers and then claim for ourselves the role of privileged definer so what I want to do is actually think about the idea of expertise in the context of issues of democracy it's the last in a series so I thought well reflect upon the series itself in the light of what it says about the public role of the social sciences also want to say something about an event I was at recently and that's the launch of a new social science division at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in September it was a seminar about social science in parliament improving the evidence based for policy and so what does that mean and how might we relate to it and it's clear that I think what's intended is that evidence based policy would be policy based upon an adequate understanding of society rather than on myths and one of the things that's clear from the title of this particular seminar is that evidence based policy would be about understanding society and to understand society it might be necessary to challenge myths embodied in normal everyday understanding so what does it mean to kind of challenge myths and the first thing I'll say is that the social sciences sociology in particular didn't always think that the role of the social sciences was to challenge myths so I'm not at all critical I'm not sort of hostile to the things that are being represented about scroungers about welfare benefits and so on but we used to think that myth had a positive role but now this idea of myth is that normal understandings are insufficient and serve the reproduction of social relations which in some way we regard as problematic and that in serving their reproduction they do so through in some way failing to explain them but myths as I suggested didn't always have negative connotations from some perspective myths were positive they used to be argued for example to serve the function of maintaining social identity and cohesion people sociologists would sometimes refer to common values as being a cement of society now I think what's interesting about the idea of common values is that it's fallen into disuse within the social sciences that there might be something inclusive which defines membership insofar as they're invoked and the government I think has recently invoked common values and they're now suggested that there are some whose understandings lie outside common values and it's a basis of scapegoating some groups who don't believe what we believe despite being members of our political community and I suggest that that might well be one myth that is current that we could dispel but if so it's an interesting myth because it's a myth promoted by government and I suggest that one of the problems with contemporary democracy is that our government lack an inclusive public interest that is that they don't regard the public from the point of view of an inclusive political community and so one of the issues then is how do we provide evidence based policy for a government which lacks an inclusive idea of the body politic and I'd say well one of the dilemmas we're in so the presumed need to challenge myths suggests that they're dysfunctional that they serve to reproduce something problematic but then the issue is dysfunctional for whom or from whose perspective and whose task is it to dispel myths and how do we relate social sciences to that task and I'm going to say and to the idea of democracy so the reference to realities implies that where there are myths there's a possibility of warranted knowledge grounded in reality that's myths and realities and that this knowledge is secured by various kinds of practices that establish its claims to be authoritative and available as a form of expertise and this suggests another kind of distinction between knowledge and belief but it also suggests possessors of knowledge and those who are merely representing beliefs so we have knowledge and they have beliefs so I think it's part of what is going on in that distinction so well that's kind of a difficult distinction to make and it's also only a distinction that can be made in the context of what really underlies it and that's an idea of disputed knowledge claims so in calling somebody else's claims belief as opposed to knowledge we are both in a sense implicitly implying a difference a cognitive difference between the nature of our claims and then pushing aside the idea that their beliefs might themselves contain a form of knowledge which we would have to engage with as knowledge so we've already in a sense separated ourselves from the process of understanding all I would suggest we risk that kind of separation and perhaps that kind of distinction between knowledge and belief is relatively unproblematic in many areas of life and the myth we tell in the social sciences or the story we tell to get this going is the story of medical expertise so we have a strong interest in the idea of medical expertise that the person who would be treating us is an expert and indeed we sanction all kinds of regulations to ensure that kind of expertise and we tell us that story because it's a favourable story for setting up that our expertise might be like it and that's a story about trust in the institutions by which expertise is reproduced and one of the problems is how we maintain that trust but I think it's dangerous to base the idea of social scientific expertise on a medical model and because most social scientific expertise is not like medical knowledge where we might think that the interest of the physician and patient tend towards an alignment but I don't really think that medical knowledge is like that either and one of the reasons why it's a bad thing to use the argument about medical knowledge to justify is to say there's a common sense way in which expertise the alignment of the expert and the person on behalf on whose behalf the expert speaks is because although you don't want to be operated on by an unqualified doctor that deliberately obscures the controversies that arise within medical expertise especially in the context of perceived professional interest or in the mobilisation of knowledge claims as a form of disruption to facilitate institutional change and I think at the moment we're living in a particular form of the mobilisation of knowledge to disrupt and to facilitate institutional change for example the representation of variations above and below an average number of hospital deaths as an indication of unnecessary deaths that's a piece of social scientific knowledge that is mobilised it's mobilised to have disruptive consequences and of course anybody can recognise that some hospitals have to be below average and there is no way of representing being below average as involving unnecessary deaths otherwise it would remind that there was an MP back when MPs were interested in raising workers wages who said he would not rest until every worker in Britain had above average wages and it's almost as if we won't rest until every hospital is on above average but that's a mobilisation of expertise in a context of disruption and I think it's a situation where there is a public interest in actually questioning the nature of the expertise and the values that it is putting forward it's worth I think just at this moment suggesting that that form of mobilisation of knowledge is on behalf of particular kinds of neoliberal claims about markets well Walter Lippmann was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society otherwise known as the or Philip Moroski calls it the thought collective of the neoliberal thought collective so expertise has relation to particular kinds of elite formations and in the social sciences we ought to remember that so what I'd say is that most social scientific claims actually bear upon areas of public policy which affect all citizens but do so differentially they pair upon the values and opinions of citizens and most people think they have a right to those opinions or at least to have a right to having them expressed and debated and that it's a function of democracy to do so so I would say well we risk expertise getting in the way of one of the functions of democracy which is the ability to express opinions, debates and so on of course the Daily Mail notwithstanding so let me return to the post launch event Janet was there and she will pick me up if I misrepresent it of course I'm telling anecdotes about it but what was striking in the arguments there for the public relevance of the social sciences and evidence based policy there was not a single mention of democracy in the mother of parliament not a single person in the room mentioned democracy except as a joke so MPs who were at the event and were keen on evidence based policy heard the division bell and said they had to leave to exercise their democratic function the irony of going to attend a whip at the same time as committing yourself to evidence based policy was lost upon them voting despite the evidence presumably or notwithstanding any evidence but there was mention of other MPs accepting myth and anecdotes in a prejudicial way as opposed to the correct mobilisation of expert opinion but why might any MP do that presumably because of the pressure of the public their constituents who have these opinions and so I'd say well actually there is a dangerous technocratic arguments going on here in the idea of expertise and this was reflected in some of the ways in which evidence based policy might operate so one thing that was said was wouldn't it be good if social science determined what works people have heard what works initiative but the assumption there that there would be agreed aims or that the task of setting the aims could be left to a political process that did not make the means part of the issue and as one speaker put it let's take the politics out of policy and there is the politics is being taken out of policy very dramatically at the moment it's being taken out of policy by the marketisation processes because anything that is subjected to the market no longer becomes part of a matter of public debate and public policy but not only that what is happening at the moment is the marketisation of the holding of government to account so the NHS above and below average operated by Dr Foster is a commercial exercise so we have the commercialisation of holding to account which actually takes the market outside something that is to being held to account and what social sciences seek to do is represent themselves as the embodiment of expertise that can in the sense of the governments so if I just return to one of the ideas I had first I said well in any situation where inclined to divide knowledge and opinion I put to you we are dealing with a disputed knowledge claim if we accept a common fallibility of knowledge claims that is social scientific claims as well as public claims then potentially the answer to that issue of a disputed knowledge claims is communication and dialogue widening not narrowing the range of interlocutors and the great John Dewey who challenged Lippman that was Lippman's response that was Dewey's response not experts but publics and that means expertise in the service of publics rather than governments so let me give an example it's often demonstrated that those with no direct experience of ethnic diversity overestimate both its extent and any supposed problems with which it's associated compared with those who live at Midstead the solution to myth here would seem to be not simply affecting policy but to expand interaction and communication but isn't the problem with evidence based policy and the division of myth and reality that encourages experts to narrow their own interactions and communication not so much putting truth to power but talking about truth with power seems to be a lot of evidence based policies at that and isn't this what delegitimates expertise that it sees democracy as a problem not part of the solution isn't that the small and I admit it's a tiny tiny truth within Paul Dayker's claim that we don't trust the public enough so I'll end on one striking feature of our time because if we were to talk about expertise and how knowledge is produced if we were to talk about facilitating public debate then universities themselves are one of the key sites for the production of knowledge and the facilitation of democratic debate what is their public role if not that so isn't it ironic that there's a massive programme of the marketisation of higher education without experts and universities asking for its evidence base instead most academics are following the money John thank you very much for some very provocative ideas so we've got some really rich concepts now which we've been sort of explored during the two speakers presentations as knowledge expertise democracy trust myth and reality I guess is the one that's the really difficult one to grasp myths and reality is the name of the whole series reality is probably the one that's most difficult to talk about and particularly what we mean by reality as social scientists and the contribution of social science to reality and understanding it