Controversial opinions.
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When I wrote that “British people's data should serve the British people's interests” I didn’t imagine it would cause any fuss at all. I was very wrong. I can’t link to where I wrote it because it got taken down under the weight of the complaints. We replaced it with something that meant less and felt better.
Britain.
I am not enough of an individualist to think that one person’s data should serve only their individual interest in all cases. Nor am I enough of a socialist or a capitalist to think that British data should serve the British state’s interests or British corporate interests, beyond what our democracy decides it should.
It’s that democratic link that means that I think that the British people’s data should serve British people’s interests rather than American or Russian or Chinese or Brazilian interests, or Palantir, Google, or Microsoft’s interests. Americans, Russians, Chinese, and Brazilian cannot, unless they hold dual citizenship, vote in our elections. Microsoft, Google, and Palantir certainly can’t. So it is mostly British people who vote in our elections who decide what we let our government do with the data that it holds and regulates on our behalf.
Enough people felt differently enough to accuse me of far right dog-whistling. I still don’t charitably understand why. I suspect it’s because to a worryingly high, though thankfully still small, proportion of people in Britain using the word British is “problematic”.
Cars.
My crime was the word British. Tim Leunig’s crime was even worse. He mentioned cars. Positively. In a newspaper.
His opinion piece in The FT titled “Let’s fall in love with cars again” was published on Thursday. By the weekend the howls of anger were echoing across the comments section and on social media, especially those channels most preferred by those who disliked my references to Britain.
Perhaps he picked the title, or perhaps he didn’t. Either way, it’s a good title to get readers interested in a balanced, well-reasoned, and carefully caveated piece on transport and growth in an economically stagnant Britain. I liked the piece, and not just because by inserting support for a tram in Leeds he bought my support. I disagreed with parts of it, just as I disagreed with parts of his recent appearance on the FT’s podcast. But I was able to remain civil in my mild disagreements. Many others had much deeper disagreements, and they certainly were not able to remain civil.
“Silly”, “ridiculous”, “nonsense”, “deluded”, “pernicious”, “idiotic”, “hogwash” were some of the words in the top-rated comments on the FT. There was almost no positive feedback.
Longer responses ranged from verbose versions of the insults above such as “this guy is living in cloud cuckoo land” to disgraceful accusations of having been bought by the motor industry or being intellectually retarded.
Worst of all, in some places on social media, there were calls for him to be relieved of his position as Chief Economist at Nesta. Noting that the fantastic innovation of electric cars, if charged at night, especially during windy periods when surplus green electricity is produced, are often greener than electric trains which consume electricity on demand was simply too great a thought crime for an economist at an innovation organisation. I saw no-one check if the assertions in the piece were true or not before condemning them. The crime was to publish them even if they were.
Tim has a long history of clarity in his writing. It makes him easy to disagree with. While others cloak their thoughts in niceties and fashionable inclusive phrases, his views are refreshingly accessible. I have in the past defended some of his even more disliked work, on the economic future of North English cities, because while I disagreed with much of it I could, thanks to actually having read it, see that the sensational condemnations of its content were not based on what he’d written. I am happy to do so again here.
But my bigger worry is in how quick and how vicious the pushback to his short piece was, and especially the link to the UK’s national endowment for science technology and the arts, now the innovation charity Nesta.
Nesta.
I was critical of Nesta before it was cool.
Its endowment was created from the government’s taxation of gambling, money that due to the geography of gambling in the UK had been raised disproportionately outside of South East England. And yet Nesta has always been an achingly London-focused organisation, both in the location of its staff and, partly as a result, the biases of its interests and approaches.
Tim is no antidote to that bias — Nesta’s riverside headquarters at Victoria Embankment are less than a mile from most of the employers on his CV such as the London School of Economics and the UK government at Whitehall — but he is less constrained by a desire to comply than most. In this case he was representing a set of views on transport much more common in the vast majority of Britain outside of London without good public transport. I remain of the opinion that if Nesta wanted to access and cultivate truly innovative opinions it would escape from our capital city public policy world’s tendency for groupthink altogether and use its freedom to set up somewhere like Manchester.
But seeing the vicious reactions to Tim’s quite cautious piece on transport reminded me how difficult such a move would be, how strong the networks that reward cultural conformity and punish digression are, and just how poor much of our national debate on issues as mundane as transport is as a result.