Oxford University won't take funding from tobacco companies. But Shell's OK

If scholars don't take an ethical stance against corporate money, where's the moral check on power?

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 May 2013

Those in the strongest position to challenge climate change are instead lending it their ‘moral prestige'. Illustration by Daniel Pudles

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars), act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political "realism" by upholding universal principles. "Thanks to the scholars," he said, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good." Europe might have been lying in the gutter, but it was looking at the stars.

But those ideals, Benda argued, had been lost. Europe was now lying in the gutter, looking into the gutter. The "immense majority" of intellectuals, artists and clergy had joined "the chorus of hatreds": nationalism, racism, the worship of power and war. In doing so, they justified and magnified political passions. Across Europe, scholars on both the left and the right had become "ready to support in their own countries the most flagrant injustices", to abandon universal principles in favour of national exceptionalism and to proclaim "the supreme morality of violence". He quoted the French anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel, who eulogised "the superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage".

The result of this intellectual support for domination, Benda argued, was that there was now no moral check on the pursuit of self-interest. Rather than forming a bulwark against popular delusions, Europe's thinkers turned them into doctrines. With remarkable foresight, Benda predicted that this would lead inexorably to "the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world". This war would be genocidal in intent, and would not be stopped by any treaties or institutions. In 1927, these were bold claims.

I'm not suggesting an equivalence between those times and these. I'm summarising Benda to highlight a general principle: the need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores. Racism, nationalism and war are only three of the many hazards to which society is exposed if that challenge should fail: if, that is, most scholars side with the soldiers or the sellers.

Today the dominant forces have changed. Now the weak state, not the strong state, is fetishised by those in power, who insist that its functions be devolved to "the market", meaning corporations and the very rich. Economic growth and the forces that drive it, whether they enhance or harm people's lives, are venerated. And too many scholars seem prepared to support the new dispensation.

Two weeks ago I castigated the new chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, for misinforming the public about risk, making unscientific and emotionally manipulative claims and indulging in scaremongering and wild exaggeration in defence of the government's position. Since then I have seen his first speech in his new role and realised that the problem runs deeper than I thought.

Speaking at the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University, Walport maintained that scientific advisers had five main functions, and the first of these was "ensuring that scientific knowledge translates to economic growth". No statement could more clearly reveal what Benda called the "assimilation" of the intellectual. As if to drive the point home, the press release summarising his speech revealed that the centre is sponsored, among others, by BAE Systems, BP and Lloyd's.

Last week, two days before CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, Oxford University opened a new geoscience laboratory named after its sponsor, Shell. Among its roles is helping to find and develop new sources of fossil fuel.

This is one of many such collaborations. Last year, for instance, BP announced that it will spend £60m on research at Manchester University partly to help it drill deeper for oil. In the United States and Canada, universities go further: David Lynch, dean of engineering at the University of Alberta, appears in advertisements by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whose purpose is to justify and normalise tar sands extraction.

As the campaign group People and Planet points out, universities help provide fossil fuel corporations not only with expertise but also with a "social licence to operate". Climate change is one of the great moral issues of our age, but the scholars in the strongest position to challenge the industry responsible are, instead, lending it what Benda calls their "moral prestige". Neoliberal economists, imperialist historians, war-mongering philosophers, pliable chief scientists, compromised energy researchers: all are propelling us into the arms of power.

In 1998, the vice-chancellors of the UK's universities decided that they would no longer take money for cancer research from tobacco firms. Over the past few days I have asked the Shell professor of earth sciences at Oxford, the university itself and the umbrella bodyUniversities UK to explain the ethical difference between taking tobacco money for cancer research and taking fossil fuel money for energy research. None of these great heads, despite my repeated attempts to engage them, were prepared even to attempt an answer.

So perhaps this is where hope lies: unlike Benda's scholars, these people have not yet developed a justifying ideology which permits them to excuse or glorify the compromises they have made with power. Perhaps we have not yet abandoned the redeeming hypocrisy of what Benda called "honouring good".

A Saudi, a pressure cooker and the FBI…

Ali Khan Mahmudabad
14 May 2013, 09:34 PM IST

 

 

What do you get when you put a Saudi student, the FBI and a ‘bullet coloured’ pressure cooker together? Kabsah! Talal al-Rouqi, an Arab student in Michigan had cooked his favourite rice and meat dish, Kabsah (also know as Mandi) and was walking over to share it with his other Arab friend when a neighbor spotted him strolling in public with a ‘bullet coloured’ pressure cooker. Naturally, worried about the swarthy looking young man’s intentions, especially given the Tsarnaev brother’s use of the pressure cooker as a bomb container, the conscious citizen decided to report the incident to the FBI. Armed agents surrounded the Al-Rouqi’s apartment, asked to enter the premises and then quizzed him on his sojourn of two days earlier. Al-Rouqi explained that he was merely cooking dinner and sharing it with a friend. I am sure if he had not been so nervous, as he admitted to the Saudi newspaper ‘Ukaz, he would have offered to cook a pot so that they could take it, though obviously the public parading of the pressure cooker would risk upsetting passers-by. When leaving al-Rouqi’s apartment the FBI officer present turned to him and said ‘you need to be more careful moving around with such things, Sir.’ Of course, calling him Sir makes it alright. Next they will be telling Arabs to be careful when appearing in public, just in case someone gets upset.

In another incident a Saudi man who was being held for irregularities to do with his passport was also quizzed and detained for bringing two pressure cookers from Saudi Arabia for his nephew. The nephew had complained the ones in America are cheap, break easily and generally don’t do a good job. He helpfully also added that in case he did want to create an improvised device he would not try and import an authentic Saudi pressure cooker rather than use the cheap western ones which are widely available. 

Obviously, the threat from an ‘Ay-Rab’ pressure cooker is much greater than one sold in the U.S. of A. Incidentally, the international transport of pressure cookers is becoming quite a serious issue. An Indian friend in Cambridge wanted to bring a pressure cooker from India to cook daal but was wisely advised against it by his friends. Having read the news of the Saudi student he seems very relieved. In an unexpected twist, the import of pressure cookers to America from abroad by visiting aliens, in the rest of the world also known as tourists, might actually be a very real need because in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, Williams-Sonoma, a home furnishing chain, temporarily pulled pressure cooker stocks from their shops.

Now that carrying everyday items is a sign of being a potential suspect, especially if one has too much melanin (even though the Tsarnaev brothers looked more Caucasian than anything else), I have some advice for brown people and in particular Muslims in America. Please be more careful about using your cycles in public because they have steel ball bearings. If you want to hang a painting on your wall please do not go out and buy nails but rather ask someone else to buy them for you. In general avoid hardware stores because Muslims only ever go there to shop for improvised explosive devices. Your trip to fix the barbecue might result in the whole area being shut down. Never ever carry a bag or rucksack in public unless it is made of completely transparent material. Please carry pocket watches or a sun-dial as the digital watches most people wear could be construed to be timers. Most importantly, only use plastic boxes to carry food to friend’s houses. And before I forget, a quick disclaimer: I typed all this on a samurai-sword coloured computer. I know, I know! I will get a white one soon.

While pressure cookers are causing such angst, in America it is still be possible for people to go out and buy pistols, guns, sniper rifles and even automatic weapons over the counter. The day the war on pressure cookers was being conducted in Michigan, an average of 8 children and 75 adults would have died because of gun related crimes. Zero American citizens died that day because of terrorism. We are told about the war on terror everyday but then where is the war on guns? The war on poverty? The war on diseases? The war on road accidents? The war on obeisity? The war on smoking? The answer probably lies in the fact that all these problems need care, investment and money to be spent on them but do not provide a way of making money.

What matters: leadership, data analysis, culture

Three factors that can play an important role in a team's success

Ed Smith

May 15, 2013

 

	Rajasthan Royals are an example of a cricket team that underspends and overachieves © BCCI  Enlarge
Related Links Ed Smith : It's not about selection or tactics, silly

A writer yearns to have intelligent readers who engage with his ideas. Then you realise that they are examining your logic with an uncomfortably forensic eye.

Two weeks ago I argued that all students of sport need to understand randomness. That the familiar talking points of selection and tactics are lazily thrown around to explain events they often do not influence. That understanding the "causes" of why things happen in sport is very difficult.

Enter Kieran McMaster, a statistician and ESPNcricinfo reader. He asks how I can explain the evolution of the Spain football team and the All Blacks rugby squad, teams that not only win but also drive forward the evolution of their sport. Surely that is evidence of tactical supremacy? Moreover, his question gained added weight thanks to a random external event: the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson. How can I square my scepticism about the short-term influence of tactics and selection with the consistent and relentless success of Sir Alex, who manipulated the levers of management so shrewdly?

Here goes.

I certainly do believe in leadership. It is obviously true that some captains and coaches make a sustained difference. Warren Gatland has transformed the Welsh rugby team from romantic underachievers to pragmatic winners. Jose Mourinho wins something wherever he goes. The pattern of success is too consistent to be explained by randomness. One out of one might be dumb luck. But it is much more likely to be skill than luck if a coach has a long sequence of different winning teams.

It is equally true that there aren't many coaches and captains in this elite category, certainly fewer than there are teams that need managers. Great coaches are incredibly rare. So clubs that continually chop and change managers, searching for the right "chemistry" (usually a euphemism) are usually taking an ill-judged risk. It is a statistical fact that changing the manager, on average, makes no difference at all to the performance of the team. It is, however, always expensive and usually distracting. Most teams would be better advised to invest in youth coaching and infrastructure rather than another round of sackings at the top.

Consider the following logic. If every club sacked its coach on the basis that they were searching for Sir Alex Ferguson, at the end of the process there would still only be one club with Sir Alex Ferguson, and dozens of disappointed teams, because there can only ever be one manager who is the best in the world. Sometimes it's better to work with what you've got rather than chase fantasies.

Secondly, I acknowledge that teams can gain a competitive advantage through smarter, clearer use of data and statistics. We all know about Moneyball and the Oakland A's. Cricket has a more current example: the Rajasthan Royals. They underspend and overachieve. And, like the A's, they use data to study how games are really won, instead of just recycling clichés. According to Raghu Iyer, the Royals' CEO, their strategy is not to buy famous players but to "out-think the opposition" at the player auction.

Thirdly, I believe in the power of culture. The recurrent success of some national sides cannot be explained by random cycles of dominance. Some sporting cultures achieve success because they get more things right, from grass roots to World Cup final. The All Blacks play a wonderful brand of total rugby. They rely on skills developed throughout New Zealand's rugby culture. In Dunedin this March, during rain delays in the cricket Test match between England and New Zealand, I watched Otago practise on the adjacent rugby ground. Everyone can pass, everyone has awareness, there are no donkeys and no under-skilled thugs.

	The serious analyst of sport runs into difficulties when he argues that "an Australian would never have dropped that catch because they're tougher over there", or "India lost the match because they should have picked X"

Something similar can be said about Spanish football. Only once have I succumbed to a satirical rant on Twitter. It was during the European Cup final of 2012. In the lead- up to the match, we had to endure ill-informed punditry about how Spain's refusal to pick "an outright striker" was a negative move, how they played a cautious game based on control of the ball rather than dynamic sweeping moves, how rival teams ought to do this and ought to do that, as though opponents hadn't already tried everything and simply lost. Basically there was a widespread reluctance to admit that Spain had developed a systemic solution to playing a better, more modern brand of football. This struck me as both insane and ungracious.

In the 14th minute, Cesc Fabregas, an attacking midfielder who was playing instead of the lamentably absent "outright striker", scored a typically classy goal. The goal revealed the interaction of control, technique, movement, intelligence and team work - a microcosm of Spanish footballing philosophy. Spain went on to win 4-0, and this columnist could not resist a series of sarcastic tweets about "boring Spain", "stupid selection", "wrong-headed tactics" and so on.

But I'm not certain, returning to our original question, that the influence of national sporting culture should be filed under the heading "tactics". It is more a case of philosophy culminating in elite expression. Put differently: if Spain had been instructed by their manager to play a violent, low-skill form of football in that final, I doubt they could have done so. So deeply ingrained is their approach that it has become second nature, not really a "tactic" at all.

I thrill to all three of these methods of gaining an edge in sport: through leadership, via analysis, and through culture.

However, and here is the crucial point, not everything that happens on the sports pitch can be explained in terms of leadership and strategy, or even culture (though the influence of culture is so subtle that it's impossible to measure).

This is especially true over the short term. The serious analyst of sport runs into difficulties when he argues that "an Australian would never have dropped that catch because they're tougher over there", or "India lost the match because they should have picked X", or "imagine how good we'd be if we changed the captain". Above all, my scepticism about causes kicks in when a match is lost and a media inquest begins into everything that immediately preceded the defeat, as though the former inevitably led to the latter.

In sport, as in life, I believe in the capacity of innovation, strategy and intelligence to make a difference over the long term. But that faith can coexist with the right to challenge the retrofitting of today's causes to suit yesterday's events.

You can be a short-term sceptic and still a long-term optimist.

Waist to height ratio 'more accurate than BMI'

Your waist should be no more than half the length of your height, according to experts who claim that having too large a trouser size can dramatically shorten your lifespan.

Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions Photo: Alamy

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

12:01AM BST 14 May 2013

391 Comments

Measuring the ratio of someone's waist to their height is a better way of predicting their life expectancy than body mass index (BMI), the method widely used by doctors when judging overall health and risk of disease, researchers said.

BMI is calculated as a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres, but a study found that the simpler measurement of waistline against height produced a more accurate prediction of lifespan.

People with the highest waist-to-height ratio, whose waistlines measured 80 per cent of their height, lived 17 years fewer than average.

Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions like stroke, heart disease and diabetes and add years to life, researchers said.

For a 6ft man, this would mean having a waistline smaller than 36in, while a 5ft 4in woman should have a waist size no larger than 32in.

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Children in particular could be screened as early as five using the waist-to-height ratio to identify those at greatest risk of obesity and serious health conditions later in life, it was claimed.

Researchers from Oxford Brookes University examined data on patients whose BMI and waist to height ratio were measured in the 1980s.

Twenty years later, death rates among the group were much more closely linked to participants' earlier waist-to-height ratio than their BMI, suggesting it is a more useful tool for identifying health risks at an early stage.

By comparing the life expectancies of various groups of people at different waist-to-height ratios, they were able to calculate how many years of life were lost as people's waistlines increased.

For example, a man aged 30 with a waist-to-height ratio of 0.8, representing the largest one in 500 men, stood to lose 16.7 years of life due to their size.

A 50-year-old woman with the same ratio, accounting for about one in 150 women of the same age, would lose 8.2 years of life on average.

Dr Margaret Ashwell, whose previous research has suggested that the waist-to-height ratio could be a better tool than BMI for predicting a range of diseases, presented her findings at the European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool.

Measuring someone's waist is important because it accounts for levels of central fat which accumulates around the organs and is particularly closely linked to conditons like stroke and heart disease.

She said: "If you are measuring waist-to-height ratio you are getting a much earlier prection that something is going wrong, and then you can do something about it.

"The beauty is that you can do it in centimetres or inches, it doesn't matter. We have got increasing evidence that this works very well with children as well, because whilst they grow up their waist is growing but also their height."

Petrol price 'rigged for a decade'

Motorists may have paid thousands of pounds too much for their petrol over the last decade, after two of Britain’s biggest companies were raided on suspicion of manipulating oil prices.

European investigators said the alleged price-rigging could have had a 'huge impact' on the cost of oil Photo: ALAMY

By Rowena Mason and Emily Gosden

9:57PM BST 14 May 2013

425 Comments

MPs and energy experts tonight raised fears motorists have been “taken for a very expensive ride”, after officials searched the offices of BP and Shell for evidence of price-rigging.

The companies are suspected of distorting the oil price since 2002, meaning drivers have potentially been ripped off for more than 10 years.

Over that time, petrol prices have risen dramatically by more than 80 per cent to around 135p per litre.

European investigators, who raided the London offices of BP and Shell, said the alleged price-rigging could have had a “huge impact” on the cost of oil, including the price of fuel for consumers.

The investigation into market-fixing already has echoes of the Libor scandal, which saw the banks falsely report key interest rates used to calculate mortgages. It cost several British banks hundreds of millions of pounds in fines.

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Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow who has long campaigned for an investigation into the oil market, said high prices have been “crushing families across Britain”.

He called for UK authorities to launch an urgent inquiry and for oil companies to “come clean and show some responsibility for what is happening to the international price”.

The raids were part of an investigation across the continent by the European Commission’s competition authorities. Offices owned by Platts, a price-reporting agency, and Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, were also raided.

European officials said several companies may have colluded in manipulating the price of both oil and green “biofuels”.

This could have happened if the oil companies provided false information to Platts, the main reporting agency that collects and reports prices to the wider market.

“Any such behaviour, if established, may amount to violations of European antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices and abuses of a dominant market position,” the European Commission said.

“Even small distortions of assessed prices may have a huge impact on the prices of crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels purchases and sales, potentially harming final consumers.”

It said the raids were a “preliminary step to investigate suspected anticompetitive practices” and “does not mean that the companies are guilty of anti-competitive behaviour nor does it prejudge the outcome of the investigation itself”.

The inquiry comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed growing concerns about the reliability of oil prices last year.

A study for G20 finance ministers, including George Osborne, said traders from banks oil companies and hedge funds have an “incentive” to distort the market and are likely to try to report wrong prices.

Scott O’Malia, a top official at the US Commodities Futures Commission, has also previously drawn attention to the “striking similarity” between the potential for manipulating oil and Libor. The price reporting agencies strongly deny any similarities between their methods and the way Libor was calculated.

The information published by Platts and other reporting agencies is used widely by companies as a guide for pricing their oil-related products, including petrol.

Brian Madderson, chairman of the Petrol Retailers’ Association, tonight said any manipulation of the benchmark oil price over a decade could have cost motorists “thousands of pounds each”.

He said the PRA has repeatedly warned the regulators that the oil price appears to have been manipulated.

An 8p rise in the price of petrol last winter cannot be explained by basic supply and demand, unusual geopolitical events or other factors, he said.

Like Libor – the interest rate measure that banks were found to have rigged – the market is unregulated and relies on the honesty of the firms to submit accurate data about all their trades.

Lord Oakeshott, a senior Liberal Democrat and former Treasury spokesman, urged the UK authorities to take a closer look at the oil market.

“Rigging oil prices would be as serious as rigging Libor,” he said. “The price of energy ripples right through our economy and really matters to every business and families.

“All credit to the European Commission for taking action if they have evidence of collusion-but why have we had to wait for Brussels to find out if British oil giants are ripping off British consumers?

"I will be putting down parliamentary questions asking who has UK regulatory responsibility for ensuring fair and open competition in the oil market and what action they have taken in the past 5 years to investigate and enforce it.”

The oil companies tonight confirmed their offices have been raided.

A spokesman for BP said the company is “cooperating fully with the investigation and unable to comment further at this time.”

A Shell spokesman also confirmed its companies are “currently assisting the European Commission in an enquiry into trading activities”.

“We are fully cooperating with the investigation. For legal reasons we cannot make any further comment at this stage”.

Platts, the price-reporting agency, said the European Commission has “undertaken a review at its premises in London” and confirmed it is “cooperating fully”.

FTSE 100's use of tax havens – get the full list

Research has found that the UK's biggest public companies have more than 8,000 subsidiaries or joint ventures in tax havens – but which businesses have the most?

• Get the data
• More data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

Tortola, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, which in turn is the global capital of offshore finance – how many UK companies have subsidiaries there? Photograph: Neil Rabinowitz/ Neil Rabinowitz/CORBIS

Which major UK corporations keep subsidiaries in tax havens? The short answer, according to updated research by development charity ActionAid, appears to be almost all of them.

The research found 98 of the 100 companies in the FTSE 100 – the hundred biggest publicly listed UK corporations – had subsidiaries, associates, or joint ventures in countries defined by the charity as tax havens.

These included well-known offshore tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, as well as larger "onshore" countries which have been criticised for low taxes, lax regulatory regimes, or stringent corporate secrecy rules. The charity has provided a full rationale for its list of havens here.

The figures were collated through a months-long process began in September 2012 (and using the FTSE 100's composition at that date), using official corporate documentation.

In their extensive annual reports, many companies list a small number of "principal" subsidiaries – but buried in further filings, or in documents submitted to US authorities, lie dozens or hundreds more, scattered across the world. However, even once the existence of the offshore subsidiaries is known, no further information can be obtained, due to strict secrecy rules in most offshore jurisdictions.

Of course, a company's presence in a given jurisdiction doesn't itself demonstrate tax avoidance in any country, and there is no suggestion any of the listed companies have any offshore structures not permitted under UK law – and many of the FTSE 100 companies are keen to note they are major UK taxpayers.

However, given the renewed focus on offshore secrecy, and pressure on tax havens for greater transparency and accountability, an insight into the extent of the jurisdictions' usage is telling.

The top ten companies by offshore usage are listed below (note WPP's list is based on a 2011 SEC filing, and as in more recent submissions the company has taken advantage of an exemption allowing it to list only a small number of "principal" subsidiaries)

The research also shows which sectors make the most use of tax havens. Four out of five overseas companies operated by real estate companies are located in tax havens, compared with about one in three travel and leisure businesses.

We've included a summary table showing the total number of subsidiaries each FTSE 100 company has in tax havens, and how many of those are in countries with ties to the UK (Crown dependencies like Jersey and Guernsey, or British overseas territories like the BVI) – and the full country-by-country data is in the linked spreadsheet at the foot of this post.

Do you spot anything of interest in this data – or have you got thoughts on visualising it? Let us know what you make in the comments, or via Twitter @GuardianData

Data summary

FTSE 100 subsidiaries in tax havens

Company	In British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies	Total
FTSE 100 composition as of 1 September 2012. Ashmore Group Plc has now left (replaced with Melrose Group Plc), data taken from available Companies House filings at that date. Information has been drawn from the latest available annual return submitted by each group head company to the UK company registry, Companies House or other available public records. Source: ActionAid

Lies, damned lies and Iain Duncan Smith

The way the work and pensions secretary manipulates statistics is a shaming indictment of his department's failings

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013

The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, was reprimanded by the UK's statistics watchdog over his claims about the benefits cap. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA

When you see rottenness in a system you must ask: does it come from one bad apple or does the whole barrel stink?

The rank smell emanating from the coalition is impossible to miss. At first sniff, it appears to come from the blazered figure of Iain Duncan Smith. It has taken me some time to identify its source, because appearances deceive. From his clipped hair to his polished shoes, Duncan Smith seems to be a man who has retained the values of the officer corps of the Scots Guards he once served. Conservative commentators emphasise his honour and decency. They speak in reverential tones of his Easterhouse epiphany: the moment in 2002 when he saw the poverty on a Glasgow estate, brushed a manly tear from his eye and vowed to end the "dependency culture" that kept the poor jobless.

Duncan Smith's belief that the welfare state holds down the very people it is meant to serve is pleasing to Conservative ears. To maintain his supporters' illusions, he has to lie. Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service. The work and pensions secretary had claimed that his department's cap on benefits was turning scroungers into strivers – even before it had come into force. "Already we have seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs." How sweet those words must have sounded to Conservative ears. The government was forcing the feckless to stop sponging off hard-working taxpayers. (Taxpayers are always "hard working" in British politics, in case you haven't noticed. We never try to get by doing the bare minimum.)

The figures did not show that, the statistics authority said. More to the point, they could not possibly have shown that. Duncan Smith's claims were "unsupported" by the very statistics his department had collected.

If this were a one-off, I would say Duncan Smith "misspoke" or "lacked judgment" or, in plain English, that he was an idiot. If every politician who spun statistics were damned, after all, parliament would be empty. I would use stronger language; indeed, Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the statistics authority, is thinking about sending his inspectors into the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) because Duncan Smith is a habitual manipulator.

As journalists know, Duncan Smith's modus operandi is well established. His "people" – all of them scroungers, not strivers, who sponge off the taxpayer from their Whitehall offices – brief reporters with unpublished figures. The Tory press uses them, and, as theFinancial Times explained, when his spin doctors meet an honest journalist, who asks hard questions, they end the call and never ring back. By the time the true figures appear on theDWP website , and informed commentators can see the falsity, the spin, the old saying applies: "A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

Before the benefit cap, it was the work programme, which is meant to provide training for the unemployed. The statistics authority criticised the "coherence" of Duncan Smith's statistics and, once again, the manner in which his department presented them to the public. Far from being a success, the programme found work for a mere 8.6% of the desperate people who went on it. Meanwhile, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and a former chief economist at the Cabinet Office, has convincingly demonstrated that the Tory claim that "more than a third of people who were on incapacity benefit dropped their claims rather than complete a medical assessment" is false and demonstrably false.

Numbers are stronger than words. When the powerful lie with statistics, they do so in the cynical knowledge that the public is more likely to believe them. But the manipulation does not just tell us how sly operators view the credulous masses, but how they see themselves.

The UK Statistics Authority has a fine phrase that guides its mathematicians: "Numbers should be a light, not a crutch". Duncan Smith does not wish to shine light on his policies, for he fears what he may see. He uses his twisted figures as a crutch instead, to help his dogmas hobble along. Francis Wheen once said that the one fact everyone believes they know about a public figure is always wrong. Whatever they think about his policies, the public assumes that Duncan Smith is a gentleman. He is anything but.

Portes thinks there is no wider decay in British government beyond Duncan Smith's department. I am not so sure. The British right is riding off with the loons. Like the Republicans with the Tea Party, the supposedly mainstream Conservatives have decided to woo Ukip rather than fight it. To show that they are "listening", they must pursue policies that make little sense and invent the evidence to support them.

Welfare is already at the centre of the deceit. Duncan Smith's duff data always suggests that the unemployed are on the dole because they are workshy, not because there are no jobs for them to find. If he were to admit for a moment that the distinction between strivers and scroungers was meaningless and all of us could be in a job one day and out of it the next, the rightwing argument on welfare would collapse and then where would the Tories appeal to angry, old white men be?

It is not just Duncan Smith. The health secretary says he will stop foreign "health tourists" costing the NHS hundreds of millions. He has no reputable evidence to support that figure. David Cameron says he wants tax breaks for married couples, when there is no evidence whatsoever that they encourage lovers to marry.

The policies may not work, the ills they seek to combat and the benefits they hope to reap may be illusory. But fear holds Conservatives in its grip and the general election is drawing closer. When pressed, they say that they want to "flag up" their support of marriage, "signal" their dislike of scroungers or "send a message" to illegal immigrants.

Our language has been so corrupted by the euphemisms of advertising and public relations that we no longer realise that what they mean is that they intend to lie.