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‘Secularism’, ‘religion’, and the public disciplining of nonconforming Muslim civic activism

Khadijah Elshayyal

Muslim civic activism has a history of posing challenge and discomfort to the British establishment. Back in 1989, at the height of the Rushdie affair, British Muslims were organising politically on a coordinated and highly visible national platform for the first time. Responding to their sustained protests and representations, the then Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, delivered a speech at Birmingham Central Mosque. He acknowledged the pain that Muslims felt at gratuitous insult to their faith and sensibilities but the predominant emphasis of his speech was to lay down what acceptable and unacceptable forms of political engagement were. In his speech, protests were somewhat begrudgingly conceded to be legitimate, but, he declared, if Muslims really wanted to succeed, their priority was to eschew protest and ‘have a clear understanding of the history and institutions of Britain, of its democratic processes’ (Cited in Weller 2009).

By positioning violence and irrationality as the unacceptable alternative to adherence to the rule of law, Hurd’s overarching message was a call for Muslims to leave their (default) backwardness behind, and to toe the line that had been demarcated for them. Essentially, Hurd’s speech was a statement of ‘this is how we do things here’, an assertion that was echoed emphatically in the mainstream press and policy discourse (see, Thomas 2011). Their message was that public Muslimness is fine, so long as it doesn’t disrupt our (rational) liberal and secular sensibilities.

This is a theme which has endured and sharpened over time. Yet we can note that an irony of the British political class which promotes the impression that it doesn’t ‘do God’, is that actually, it does. We reassure ourselves that ours is not a militant secularism (as in France), and that neither are we overbearing or bombastic about it (as we perceive to be the case in US public life). Yet to think that the secularism of our public and political life is a guarantor of fairness or neutrality, is to ignore the foundational connection that the very notion of secularism has with justifying white supremacy.

Can we understand secularism, or indeed, European notions of ‘religion’, without considering their role in justifying European colonisation as a civilising mission, and how western Christianity was promoted as a superior worldview to the regressive ‘backwardness’ of the east? (Manzoor-Khan 2022)How does this inextricable connection bear out in the ways that civically active Muslims are received and their aspirations and arguments engaged with?

The Trojan Horse Affair (THA) presents us with an instructive and compelling case study affirming the longstanding reality of how the options and possibilities for Muslim civic activism are subject to exceptional preconditions – and that any departure from these constraints carries the threat of punishment in the form debilitating public humiliation and/or sanction.

Let us take for an example a key argument presented by barrister acting for the government in the legal cases against teachers implicated in the affair, namely that they were going “too far in inculcating their own vision of the cultural identity they wish these children to have.” (Trojan Horse Affair podcast, part 6)

This charge is built on an inaccurate and unaddressed assumption that state schools in England and Wales are supposed to be neutral spaces when it comes to religion and culture, and that these teachers were contravening this neutrality by promoting too much (Muslim) religion and culture. The assertion that these were ‘secular’ state schools was repeated throughout the Clarke report, and was most recently reiterated by Nick Timothy, who in the wake of the affair was successively Downing Street’s Chief of Staff and then a columnist at the Telegraph, and asserted that these were ‘secular state schools’.

But there is a glaring disingenuousness in this portrayal. Aside from the obvious complication that no critically honest observer of any curriculum or educational environment would concede its neutrality, we are left again with the question of what this highly prized value of secularism actually looks like. Since we are not like France or the US, there are no hard-and-fast rules about ‘secularism’ in non-denominational state-funded schools, schools like those in Birmingham’s Alum Rock, that were caught up in the THA. There is, however guidance about the nature of mandatory collective worship at such schools. This provision for regular worship stipulates that it should be ‘wholly or mainly Christian in nature’, unless individual schools are granted the ‘determination’ to depart from this arrangement.

Unsurprisingly, considering the overwhelmingly Muslim local populations that they serve, the schools implicated in the THA had sought and received such a determination. Park View had a ‘determination’ in place since 1997 and Islamic assemblies had long been an established element, receiving high praise in inspection reports of 2007 and 2012 (see Holmwood and O’Toole, 2018),  Deemed by recent Ofsted inspections to be highly successful, Park View and other schools’ converted to academy status that afforded them a greater degree of autonomy in curriculum and governance. School leaderships understood that their approach of validating and celebrating their pupils’ faith and culture was a legally uncontroversial way of building a safe, nurturing and motivational environment. On this understanding, activists such as Tahir Alam (then chair of governors at Park View) and others describe the decades of community service they had given to their local schools as driven by the hope and determination to lift their children out of a systemically predetermined track towards academic failure – one that they themselves had experienced and felt fortunate to have escaped against all odds.

Yet regardless of this background and context, inspectors and investigators operating under the unforgiving conditions of a hysterical witch-hunt were predisposed to understand the environment within the schools as being subjected to what the Clarke Report called, ‘undue religious influence’ and a ‘sustained and coordinated (ideological) agenda’.

Who could say which was the correct assessment? Who is to say what constitutes religious influence? Is it the provision of communal prayer facilities, accommodations made for fasting in Ramadan? Is it the content of assemblies, sensitivity or awareness shown to cultural or religious norms in class delivery or content? Is it the provision of Arabic and Urdu in the modern foreign languages curriculum? Who is to say what the parameters of ‘due’ and ‘undue’ in any of these areas would be? The answer to these questions is what tests the apparently widespread understanding among press and policy voices of secularism as neutrality.

Further, this question carries even sharper relevance in the Trojan Horse Affair if we consider revelation about the active role played by Humanists UK (HUK) in supporting ‘whistleblowers’ with their testimonies and grievances. HUK by its own account, is emphatically committed to secularism, adopting the same uncritical stance – that separation of religion and state is a guarantor of neutrality – that I mention above. It therefore had a vested interest in the portrayal of ‘Muslim influence’ in schools as harmful and negative. HUK’s commitment to the myth of secularism as some kind of great leveler amidst our messy diversity is oblivious to the structurally embedded exclusion and marginalisation that Muslims and other minoritised groups face. Thus, removing ‘religion’ from the public sphere, leaves us with a public sphere that has historically developed around presumptions of white and Christian normativity, and by extension, their superiority Goldberg 2006)– in short, one which has not intentionally interrogated its colonial past and present. Even the act of defining what constitutes ‘religion’ (and what should therefore be extricated from our public sphere in the process of secularisation) is one which is reserved to the very same state structures and authorities which have historically marginalised and excluded both in empire and in metropole.

We see this lack of self-awareness unfold spectacularly in the account given by Sue Packer, one of the whistleblowers supported by HUK. Built on a self-styled mission to save Muslim women from their oppressive menfolk, Packer herself trips and stumbles as she is confronted with the shoddiness of her own creative licence – admitting that she had not once consulted or even engaged with the Muslim women she was supposedly advocating for:

“I think it’s just because the women aren’t very good at speaking out.

I shouldn’t say the women, sorry.

A lot of women perhaps aren’t confident to speak out in that community, especially female Muslims.

I think there’s just sort of fear about speaking out.” Trojan Horse Affair podcast, part 5

Let’s zoom back out a little and consider David Cameron’s 2015 speech at Ninestiles Academy, also in Birmingham, which set out the imminent implementation of the Prevent Duty and to which a direct line can be drawn from the THA. Cameron’s discourse reiterated the framework and parameters for legitimacy and acceptability of Muslimness in the public space – a framework that had been set out time and again by preceding governments. Dissent and grievance were characterised as ideologically driven extremism – ‘the root cause of the threat we face’, and compliance with the policy direction of the security state tied to notions of loyalty and belonging.

The deployment of a duty to promote fundamental British values in schools as a yardstick with which to measure loyalty to the state (and therefore acceptability in the public space) was consistent with a longstanding state tactic of disciplining nonconforming civic actors who dare to imagine that they can engage and contribute to civic life in ways other than those which have been delineated for them by the political elites. Presented as well meaning, Cameron’s statements in 2015, like Hurd’s in 1989, were laced with patronising undertones and coloured by the power differential between an old Etonian government minister and a socioeconomically marginalised working-class Muslim community.

In the intervening years between 1989 through to the THA in 2014, these conditions for acceptable civic engagement have haunted Muslims time and again. Whether it is thrust upon them via the familiar periodic niqab ‘debate’, moral panics about gender segregation or ‘child hijab’, as innocuously as it might be framed, the demand to separate religion and state is impossible because it requires a sanitisation of one’s Muslimness as a precondition.

Civic engagement and activism are fine if they embody an unquestioning reverence to state institutions and the policy directions that inform them. Activism which isn’t alive to these parameters, or chooses to test them, is deemed a threat, and something to be ostracised. In the context of the THA, we can rephrase this: community engagement in the leadership and management of local schools was encouraged and applauded by the Conservatives’ academies programme, but when such engagement was found to have a Muslim ‘flavour’, it was considered a subversive threat. So we can see that the prejudice and unease around Muslim civic activism which primed the establishment to unquestioningly believe the hoax from which the THA mushroomed, was not exceptional. Rather it is a par for the course feature that Muslims active in the civic space routinely come face to face with.

A notable feature of this unease is how liberal politicians and commentators agonise over the question of what to do about Muslims who wear their faith on their sleeve. Muslim civic activism, in all its diversity, cannot help but resist the neat (if inaccurate) categorisation of the public sphere as neutral and the expectation that faith is left at the door. It might do so actively – by deliberately contesting received norms or the dominant direction of travel in politics and public life. Campaigns against the incursion of securitisation in the public and private lives of Muslims (and society more generally) offer many such examples.

Or it may resist this categorisation inadvertently and in spite of its best efforts. Again, we have countless examples of British Muslim public figures who may themselves make little of their Muslimness, or may downplay its relevance, even as they themselves support policies that demonise and target Muslim individuals, institutions and communities. Nonetheless, their mere presence in the civic space as identifiable with Muslimness otherises them, arouses suspicion and invites prejudice and discrimination.

This is a dilemma which continues to plague Britain and will persist, as long as these colonially rooted notions of ‘secular’ and ‘religion’ frame our discourse and policy. Ultimately, as understated and sensitive as we may believe our secularism to be, it remains a secularism that does not really know what to do with Muslim civic actors.

What can be done about a faith community that doesn’t play by the rules? A community whose religious belief and practice cannot be compartmentalised in ways that reassure and make us comfortable, and whose faith will not be depoliticised, in defiance of our best efforts? The ubiquity of such questions – expressed overtly or otherwise – means that Muslim civic actors are problematised before they even open their mouths – are they moderate or extreme? Are they native or foreign? Are they loyal or disloyal?

The persistence of such anxieties around Muslim civic activism, of a ‘Muslim problem’, if you will, means that any indicators of Muslim organising or networking can be met with a presumption of ulterior motives. The report authored by Peter Clarke on the THA includes a spider diagram, which depicts Tahir Alam as a hyper-connected mastermind. His various extensive connections to professional and community bodies are insinuated to be conspiratorial and sinister and are used to argue that he has had ample opportunity not only to influence at the policy level, but also to bring about change at the local through delivering training and membership of governing bodies.

As the podcast presenters mention – similar diagrams could be drawn around the associations and interests of serving government ministers and ideological think tanks, lobby groups and media outlets – the difference being that the former are disenfranchised, their citizenship conditional, a case needs to be made for their voices to be heard… and when they are, demands are made that their voices be shorn of anything which makes them distinctive, that they moderate the tone and content of their voices so as to be palatable to the sensitivities of an anxious establishment. As for the latter, they form part of a minority who wield disproportionate power – power which is inherited and bequeathed through centuries-old institutions and the wink, nudge and handshake of the old boys’ club.

The Trojan Horse affair will be remembered in our history not only as a moment that exposed how embedded colonial attitudes in our political and press establishments remained, but also one which was used to justify further the idea of Muslim exceptionalism. It was a public inquisition of an alleged Muslim fifth column within our schools and public spaces that needed to be subdued, contained, and made a cautionary example of.

References:

Goldberg, David Theo (2006) ‘Racial Europeanization’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29:2, 331-364, DOI: 10.1080/01419870500465611

Holmwood, John and O’Toole, Therese (2018) Countering Extremism in British Schools? The truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair, Policy Press.

Manzoor-Khan, Suhaiymah (2022) Tangled in Terror: uprooting Islamophobia, Pluto.

Thomas, Elaine, R. ‘Rereading the Rushdie Affair: The Contested Terms of Being British,. Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France: A Comparative Framework, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, pp. 214-244.

Weller, Paul (2009) A Mirror For Our Times: ‘The Rushdie Affair’ and the Future of Multiculturalism, Continuum.

Goldberg, David Theo (2006) ‘Racial Europeanization’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29:2, 331-364, DOI: 10.1080/01419870500465611

Khadijah Elshayyal holds research fellowships at Edinburgh and SOAS. A specialist on Muslims in Britain, she is General Secretary of the Muslims in Britain Research Network and author of Muslim Identity Politics: Islam, activism and equality in Britain (IB Tauris, 2019). She tweets @drkelshayyal.

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TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Elshayyal, Khadijah 2022. ‘‘Secularism’, ‘religion’, and the public disciplining of nonconforming Muslim civic activism’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (2):

Is COVID-19 Ushering in a ‘Golden Age’ of Scientific Expertise in Policymaking?

Kat Smith

One of the many consequences of COVID-19 has been a renewed emphasis on the role of scientific experts in policymaking. For those of us committed to improving the use of evidence in policymaking, it is tempting to hope that we may be achieving a substantive step forward with efforts to ensure policy decisions are, if not evidence-based, then at least evidence-informed. When it comes to the visibility of scientific expertise, it certainly feels like we are in a very different era to the UK of 2016, when Conservative minister Michael Gove famously responded to an interview question by saying that he thought people in Britain had ‘had enough of experts’.

… we need to do much more to promote a democratically grounded approach to evidence use, in ways that make better use of a wider range of expertise

Yet pandemic-provoked government commitments to ‘follow the science’ are no guarantee that we are entering a golden era of evidence-informed policymaking. Indeed, the approach that policymakers in the UK have taken to scientific evidence, and scientific experts, during the pandemic may not even be desirable. Here, I outline four reasons to be hopeful, and four reasons be cautious, for those seeking to improve the use of evidence and expertise in policy. I close by reflecting on some of the opportunities there are to learn from the unique experiences of this pandemic, arguing that we need to do much more to promote a democratically grounded approach to evidence use, in ways that make better use of a wider range of expertise.

Four reasons to be hopeful

The high policy profile of scientific evidence: The value of scientific research has rarely been more obvious to policymakers than it has in the past 18 months. Research has played a crucial role in helping UK policymakers respond to COVID-19, helping them to understand: how the virus spreads; the health, economic and social consequences of the virus and of policy response; and how it can be treated, tracked and potentially prevented. The value of scientific advice for pandemic policymaking was almost immediately apparent. Just a few weeks into the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson described policy responses to COVID-19 as ‘guided by the science’. A few months later, an Institute of Government report reflected that Ministers were consistently keen to emphasise that they were ‘following the science’. These claims have persisted, despite mixed assessments of the extent to which the UK government has drawn on science and expertise, and public trust in science appears to remain relatively high in the UK, despite high infection and mortality rates. All this suggests we have strong foundations on which to build a better long-term relationship between evidence and policy.The high public profile of (some) experts: The crucial role of scientific research during the pandemic has contributed to the emergence of some high profile scientific experts who are skilled at translating the constantly evolving evidence-base for policy, media and public audiences. From those holding high profile government roles, such as Chief Medical Officers and Chief Scientific Advisers, to the senior academic experts who have taken on advisory roles, such as Linda Bauld, John Edmunds, Neil Ferguson, Susan Michie, David Spiegelhalter and Devi Sridhar, to those who have opted to provide more arms-length advice via Independent SAGE, the media and Twitter, such as Anthony Costello, Trish Greenhalgh and Christina Pagel. Being able to explain the societal and policy implications of emerging data and evidence for audiences who do not all have postgraduate scientific or statistical training is a distinct skill from being able to use this training to gather and interpret data. The current pandemic has provided a platform for individuals who have the relatively rare ability to do both and, in so doing, seems likely to be raising the societal profile and accessibility of scientific evidence and expertise. If we want to maintain this interest, and counter misinformation, then this genre of scientific capability is likely to be essential.A renewed spotlight on social and economic inequalities: The unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of the virus itself and the various policy responses, have brought a renewed media and public interest in social and economic inequalities. As well as shouldering a higher burden of death and illness, many of those in positions of financial precarity have been pushed to the brink and beyond. Meanwhile, a wealthy elite has accumulated shockingly high increases in wealth by betting on the recovery of particular firms, while a broader set of households with high levels of disposable incomes have managed to increase their savings during the lockdowns, having had fewer options for spending their disposable income.There is growing evidence that the British population are unhappy with these inequalities. The simultaneous emergence of a UK arm of the Black Lives Matters movement with evidence that black and minority ethnic groups have experienced higher rates of COVID-19 infection and relatively worse health outcomes has, at the same time, shone a spotlight on Britain’s ethnic inequalities. All of this presents an opportunity for evidence and expertise concerning inequalities to gain public and policy traction.The potential to discuss previously ‘off the table’ policies: During the course of research exploring the impact of evidence about health inequalities on UK policy over the past 15 years, I consistently found that macro-level, structural policy responses (e.g. using policy levers to achieve more egalitarian distribution of wealth) were deemed so unpalatable (to policymakers and publics) that even researchers and policy actors who favoured them often saw little point in advocating their uptake. Consequently, even though many of the researchers and policymakers I spoke to were persuaded that there were structural causes to Britain’s health inequalities, they often put forward proposals that helped sustain ‘a ‘cargo cult’ of health behaviourism’. The dominance of this behavioural, individualised way of responding to health inequalities did not always appear to be grounded in empirical assessments of public views. However, the roots of this way of thinking can be traced back to the policy paradigm firmly embedded by the Thatcher-led governments of 1979-1990, in which the role of government policy in tackling many social and economic issues was limited to issuing guidance and pushing individuals to achieve behavioural changes. In the New Labour era (1997-2010), the state’s role shifted into setting targets and mechanisms for performance assessment but, still, the idea that governments might need to take more substantive policy action to tackle and prevent social problems remained unpopular. Since 2010, the creation of the ‘nudge’ unit within the UK government (under the Cameron-led Coalition government) further cemented the policy influence of behavioural science.

… the policy responses to COVID-19 could create spaces in which we can have evidence-informed conversations about policy interventions that were, until recently, ‘off the table’

In the face of a global pandemic, however, we have witnessed the structural power that still resides with policymakers working at the national level. All of the national level governments in the UK have introduced measures to tackle the pandemic that were previously deemed unimaginable. This opens up the potential to ask questions about why similar interventions are routinely ruled out in ‘normal’ times, given that inequalities are responsible for even greater – more sustained – levels of death and illness. In the UK (and other countries such as New Zealand and Finland), the Wellbeing Economy Alliance are framing the pandemic as ‘an opportunity to transform economies and societies in radically positive directions’, noting the lack of popular support for a ‘return to the way things were’. In the face of growing inequalities and a climate emergency, the policy responses to COVID-19 could create spaces in which we can have evidence-informed conversations about policy interventions that were, until recently, ‘off the table’.

Four reasons to be cautious

The narrowness of scientific expertise gaining public and policy traction: Much of the expertise, and many of the experts, gaining public and policy traction over the past 18 months have emanated from biomedical and statistical disciplines and from scientific advisers inside the policy process. Although social scientists are better represented on some of advisory groups than others, the continuing supremacy of behavioural thinking is unmistakeable (e.g. a key advisory group is the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, dominated by psychologists and behavioural experts). Advisors bringing more societal and structural perspectives (including, perhaps surprisingly, public health experts) are, while not completely absent, vastly outnumbered on these advisory groups. Appearances also suggest many of these experts share a relatively narrow cultural and demographic background. Put bluntly, although substantive in number, Britain’s current scientific superstars appear to be predominantly well-off, white scientists from high-income Anglophone settings who have trained in disciplines that promote broadly positivist or behavioural epistemologies.Beyond this, the more influential advisers appear to be those who understand, and are willing to follow, ‘the rules of the game’ (i.e. those working as policy insiders who are willing to limit criticism, at least in public). As Cairney reflects, in the UK context, ‘guided by ‘the science’ means ‘our scientists,’ and usually a small group of government scientific advisors.’ This relatively narrow set of experts almost inevitably results in a relatively narrow set of scientific advice, which has been a key criticism of the UK’s approach. Missing from this (or, at least, much less well featured) are social science voices that bring societal and structural perspectives to understanding the pandemic and policy responses. This is an importance gap given, as Pickersgill and Smith argue: ‘Many of the questions that policymakers […] are dealing with in relation to COVID-19 have significant social, economic, and ethical dimensions’.The problems caused by drawing on a narrow set of expertise are significant. Ensuring front-line workers had access to PPE – an area in which the UK did not perform well – immediately required advisors who understood procurement, supply chain management and logistics, and voices who recognised that ‘front-line’ workers were not only doctors and nurses working in hospitals but also care home staff, retailers, cleaners, porters, social workers, food processing staff, teachers, midwives, delivery drivers and so on. To avoid substantial increases in social and education inequalities and worsening mental health among children and young people – an other area with a concerning prognosis – policy decisions around school closures needed to be informed by a broad array of expertise (e.g. social workers, child psychologists, childhood behavioural experts, ethicists, teachers, sociologists of education, families and intersectional inequalities) as well as by those trying to model and understand the impact of school closures on viral transmission and hospital admissions.To be well-positioned to overcome the unequal impacts of COVID-19, including the wealth of misinformation about COVID-19 and available vaccines – yet another area in which the UK is struggling – scientific experts in the UK needed to represent (or at least to be drawing on) a much more diverse demographic spectrum. Instead, we saw 10 Black academics calling for a review of the UKRI’s systems and processes ‘after it emerged that none of the principal investigators on Covid-19 grants awarded for research into death rates among people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds were Black’ and claims that working class voices were being routinely side-lined.A lack of democratic engagement: While scientific advice can help decision-makers working to tackle major societal problems, such as pandemics and climate change, to identify potentially effective policy proposals, they also need to attain sufficient democratic legitimacy for proposals to be viable. Here, the UK’s current approach seems especially wanting; although there have been multiple efforts, for more than two decades, to promote the use of evidence in policymaking (on the assumption evidence-based policies are more effective), and multiple initiatives to promote stakeholder/public engagement (on the assumption engagement enhances democratic legitimacy), surprisingly little work considers how evidence, publics and policies interact.The importance of this gap was evident from the early stages of the UK’s pandemic policy response when early modelling of COVID-19 reportedly excluded policy responses that were later pursued because they were not initially deemed publicly acceptable. The need to understand (and listen to) public beliefs, experiences and preferences, and to consider how these are shaped by (and have the potential to shape) research and policy should come as no surprise since this kind of intelligence has been previously identified as important in efforts to tackle infectious disease outbreaks. As Rubin and colleagues note, ‘The public’s compliance is essential for response efficacy, as well as enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the pandemic response’.Yet, reflecting the narrowness of the scientific expertise on show in the UK, policymakers have often seemed surprisingly unwilling to consider what they might learn from publics or from other contexts. Without this kind of insight, policymakers inevitably struggle to understand or respond to the public pushbacks against COVID-19 prevention efforts. Moreover, and especially in the context of the narrow social backgrounds of the UK’s ruling elites, without democratic engagement in discussions around evidence and policy, the unequal impacts of the pandemic are unlikely to be mitigated and inequalities will continue to worsen.Confusion surrounding the boundary between science and politics: Although claims to be ‘guidance by the science’ may sound reassuring, such accounts of policymaking risk muddying the distinction between the decision-making responsibilities of elected governments and the scientific advice of independent experts. As Max Weber famously reflected in Science as a Vocation, the role of science is not to tell us (or our political leaders) what we (or they) should do, or how we should live, but rather to make more meaningful choices possible. Yet, faced with pressure to make unpopular decisions, obscuring this distinction may be strategically and symbolically useful to decision-makers but potentially damaging to the credibility of science. For if policies ‘based on science’ are unpopular, or if they turn out to be ineffective or to have unintended consequences (here, Rubin et al remind us that experts are notoriously bad at forecasting), the public pushback may focus on scientists rather than decision-makers, eroding the authority of science.This explains both why some of the most high profile scientific advisors have sought to emphasise the distinction between providing scientific advice and making policy decisions. Longer-term efforts to strengthen and improve the use of evidence in policy depend on the ability of scientists and other academic experts to maintain public credibility and authority, even where this expertise has informed potentially unpopular or unsuccessful policy decisions. This, in turn, requires efforts to ensure that academic work is sufficiently independent of government policy not to cast scientists as decision-makers or to result in academics self-censoring and telling policymakers what they think they want to hear. Yet, as the UK’s research funding landscape increasingly prioritises research that is responsive to policy needs, we are witnessing an ever-smaller gap between the expertise of those working at universities and those based at think tanks and private consultancies.The ‘emergency’ framing of the pandemic policy response: While pandemic policymaking has certainly enabled policies (such as the furlough scheme) that were previously unimaginable in contemporary Britain, these efforts have consistently been framed as one-off policy responses to an unprecedented emergency. If unchallenged, this framing may quickly shut down opportunities to seriously consider the kinds of transformative policy proposals that evidence on tackling inequalities and climate change suggests are required.

What might a more democratically-engaged approach to supporting evidence and expertise in policymaking look like?

It would be unreasonable to assume that the higher profile of scientific expertise during the COVID-19 pandemic will last beyond the immediate pandemic crisis. Indeed, the narrow profile of scientific expertise at play, the fallibility of scientific evidence and the limited democratic engagement all mean that sustaining this approach is unlikely to be desirable. Yet, this experience does offer opportunities to learn and to reflect on the kinds of evidence and expertise policymaking might benefit from. Pre-pandemic research on evidence use was often constrained by a focus on particular areas of policy, or specific contexts, stymying efforts to understand, and learn from, different ‘cultures of evidence’.

Both the devolved nature of policymaking in the UK and the global character of the pandemic offer opportunities for insightful comparative analysis. Given the complexity and seriousness of the challenges currently facing humans, we need to examine how different governments approached and drew on the complex array of potentially relevant evidence and expertise and how these decisions shaped policy outcomes. The inevitable uncertainty and fallibility of scientific evidence means we also need to explore how different governments sought to frame the role of science and expertise in policymaking and to understand how this, in turn, shapes public trust in science. Finally, if we can use the experience of pandemic policymaking to identify means of enhancing democratic engagement in conversations about evidence-informed policy options to address major societal challenges (recognising that publics are multiple and unequal), we will be contributing to addressing a much longer-standing impasse between ‘science’ and ‘politics’.

Kat Smith is Professor of Public Health Policy in the School of Social Work & Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde. Her main research interests are the dynamics of policy change and the relationships between evidence, expertise, policy and practice, particularly for issues relating to public health and inequalities. She held the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2014.

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TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Smith, Kat 2021. ‘Is COVID-19 Ushering in a ‘Golden Age’ of Scientific Expertise in Policymaking?’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (3):