I rather like the new bunch of ministers, Ann Milton the health minister has made it OK to use the word fat in political company and the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt reached for his pistol and killed off the UK Film Council, which everyone has heard of, and there was a big media fuss about. At the same time he killed off the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which I have never heard of and which there was no media fuss about (note to librarians – “louder”). These young scamps remind us that coming up with ideas and then deciding which of them are worth following up, is what we do. I mean, it is part of what makes us human beings, not that it makes us all government ministers. We generate ideas and put them into practice all the time. Of course, people get attached to their own ideas and ways of thinking. Attachment to an idea can blind us to its real properties. Like a proud parent, we will always be ready to defend our idea, won’t hear a word against it and always play up its good points. Now suppose we take a more critical approach. Let’s use the recent free milk debacle as an example. We have this terrific idea about free milk being an anachronism and so we propose to cut it and spend the sixty million quid elsewhere. We could pose questions like will this have a positive effect on growing children, will the press think it is a good idea, will the parents, grandparents and relatives of 5 year olds think it is a good idea, will the farming lobby support it, etc? In answering these questions we are testing the proposition that this is a good idea and if it is likely to be implementable. Some of the answers we identify for the idea not working may be profoundly irrational, such as, in the free milk case, “the press, opposition, families, farmers and five year olds will ridicule us for it beyond our ability to tough it out and no matter what we say, we will always be perceived to be in the wrong on this one”. But, tough, this is political policy making. A policy that cannot be implemented is a bad policy no matter whether it looks like it will work or not. All is not lost though. Testing the policy idea in this way may actually open us up to new ideas that have the potential to be more effective and are implementable. Of course, we ought then to subject the new ideas to the same inquisition, until someone with clout decides that the refined idea will work and is politically implementable. Just asking if the press will go for it, is clearly not a good basis for policy making. What I have just described above and summarise below is a way of sifting through the ideas that we and other people are always coming up with and getting better at potting the winners. This approach was first suggested by Karl Popper (BBC “In Our Times podcast from 2007 here ) who called it "falsification", after the concept of trying to prove an idea false. Although he was looking at the philosophy of science and not how blinding obvious it is that the Daily Mirror will throw all its journalistic talents at working out a slogan as catchy as “Maggie Thatch – Milk Snatcher”.In summary, the sequence for testing an idea to address a social problem is:Come up with policy ideaGenerate questions that test the idea’s effectiveness and implement abilityAddress the questionsDecide, on the basis of addressing the questions, if the idea is worth implementing, new ideas have been generated (that we ought to test) or that we stick with the status quo
