Reposting from February: On Bullshit

It’s a post that has lasted reasonably well.

Chris Johns

Please take a listen to our latest podcasts:

On Bullshit

A detective pondering the mystery of who killed the British economy will discover a long list of suspects. It will include loss of empire, decades of underinvestment,  unskilled school leavers, Eton, Oxford’s PPE degree, PPE gear, vast regional economic disparities, low quality management of British companies, a dysfunctional planning system, the pandemic, energy prices, Brexit and Boris Johnson. 

A brilliant dissection of the Britain’s utterly dysfunctional system of governance is to be found here. Ian Dunt lays bare the chronic amateurish short-termism endemic in Westminster. Economists have long lamented the same behavioural features of British board rooms.

As Professor Diane Coyle of Cambridge famously said, unlike most murder mysteries there is no one culprit. All of the long list of suspects are guilty. That enables the scoundrels masquerading as politicians to make ever wilder claims based on their preferred agenda. Rishi Sunak can say, as he often does, that falling living standards are nothing to do with Brexit. Such claims have an air of plausibility, a truthy vibe. They are, of course, pure bullshit.

‘On Bullshit’ is a fabulous book written in 2005 by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. One of the main ideas is that proper liars care about the truth and always try to conceal the fact they are lying. Bullshitters have no interest in what is true or not and care only whether their audience is persuaded. Liars are often motivated by a desire to keep the truth hidden. The bullshitter couldn’t care less about what is true or not, so long as the audience is convinced.

For most us, these kinds of quasi-academic philosophical digressions into semantics should be of little interest. But they do provide a convincing explanation of the current state of British (and US) politics: proper bullshitters don’t care about the truth and are unaware of its existence. They know they are making it up as they go along and make no effort to uncover the truth. Truth doesn’t matter. For the current generation of over-educated posh kids running Britain, the truth, if known, would get in the way. So bullshit it is. Sunak doesn’t know or care about Brexit’s effects on the economy. He neither believes nor disbelieves his repeated assertions about Brexit. The point is to sound Brexity, to have a Brexity vibe. That’s the political zeitgeist. And more fool us for letting them get away with it.

Being truthy allows Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to have a go at those of us who boringly point out the facts of Britain’s stunning economic decline. Naturally, and accurately, he labels what we say as ‘Declinism’. That declinism comes in the form of the vast array of numbers, charts, tables and words that describes the facts of the ‘economic catastrophe’ that has befallen the U.K. 

Again, we are talking semantics here. My declinism is a factual, data driven, description of Britain’s decline. Hunt’s declinism is an accusation, a dig at us for having the wrong vibe, for telling the truth but not being truthy in the style of the bullshitter. That we are telling the truth is irrelevant, utterly beside the point.

This matters in obvious ways. Nothing will be done about Britain’s decline for as long as the bullshitters are in charge. I fear that the disease is contagious and Keir Starmer, possibly Britain’s next Prime Minister, has caught a new variant. I defy anyone to spot material differences between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer.

Starmer wants ‘to make best of Brexit’. He claims, as does Sunak, that his priority is economic growth. Both also claim to have a magic wand that will make growth happen; both refuse to acknowledge Brexit’s negative growth consequences. Neither come anywhere near to recognising the economic damage that Brexit has already caused, let alone seem able to do anything about the future economic harm coming our way.

It’s more than just dry GDP and productivity statistics . Not allowing truth to enter public discourse means that it struggles to enter anywhere. It becomes normalised. But one of the many consequences of this is truly terrifying.

Britain, according to those boring old numbers, has stopped growing. Both in absolute terms for things like real household incomes and relative to all those countries that used to be our economic peers. They are rapidly becoming our economic superiors. Britain, according to those boring old numbers has become as unequal as the United States, far less equal than most EU countries.

These boring facts impinge on daily life in one insidious, poisonous way. In countries that grow the economic pie, like Ireland and the US, domestic political debate is dominated by how that economic growth is shared out. The US’ economic problem is that for years now, economic growth has been grabbed by the 1%. The American dream of ‘making it’, of constant economic improvement for anybody with talent and a work ethic (and not a little luck) is dead. Cue the rise in Trumpism. In Ireland, rapid growth, contrary to much ill-informed commentary, is shared much more equally than in the US.

The important point here is that political debate in growing countries is dominated by how to share that growth. 

In the U.K., there is no growth to share. In a country that has managed to increase inequality. So if you want to get ahead it must be at the expense of your fellow citizens. That’s the relentless logic of a pie that doesn’t grow. 

Enough people in the U.K. have become sufficiently unequal, have seen their real incomes actually fall in absolute as well as relative terms, to revolt. Cue all those public sector strikes. That public sector has endured 15 years of doing more with less and has had enough. The fight over that static (or even shrinking) pie has become toxic.

But still the bullshitters remain in charge. The worst of the breed, Johnson and Truss, are plotting comebacks. Thankfully (a small mercy), that seems less likely by the day. This will get worse before before it gets better.