Confusion reigns as UK scientists face government 'gagging' clause

We faced it all the time back when I worked for the Bureau of Stats (Aus, not UK, but the systems are related). In fact, i'll give you one of my old work place dilemmas.

The government notionally paid us money to produce indicators of housing affordability across time. At first I thought this would be kind of cool to work on. As both a technical specialist and someone with experience working with both income and housing data, I remember being young, naive, and thinking "Well its about time!".

What I didn't realise was that when they said "work on this", what they really meant was that some nut, somewhere, no doubt a useless executive or someone with government/political connections (it was never entirely clear or transparent to me how this thing I was supposed to be calculating had come about) had already chosen the metric and the methodology. I was no longer an expert, I was a political cog.

Although we were the specialists and the technical experts, and were notionally employed by the government to provide good, suitable, and accurate information so that policy could be influenced with good and appropriate data, my job was now to go in and produce shit.

Now, should I be saying something or doing something about this?

And before you think this is a one off, we got it all the time: Labor force stats, incomes, house prices, gdp, pollution, production figures, etc, etc, etc. Its a professional hazard.

We faced dilemmas both on what we measure, how we measure, what is collected and what is not, and how it is interpreted. Contrary to what people think, numbers aren't just numbers. As both the experts and the people at the coal-face, we're almost always among the best qualified people to comment on the production and interpretation of our numbers, and let me say that the abuse of our numbers and that information is rife.

The safest career and life move, I would observe, is just self censorship. Sit down. Shut up. Produce what we tell you. Don't rock the boat. Don't comment on anything political. And since there's no definition of what's "political", the safest response is to just not comment on anything. Do what the hierarchy says and follow orders.

It is not historically inaccurate to say that working on that project led me to try to transfer out of that section/project, and I did, despite the quality of my colleagues. And it is not inaccurate to say that such had a part to play in me leaving the org, not the biggest part, but it was an issue.

To me, being professionally a-political is not abandoning the ability to influence or comment on policy, but the ability to make policy conform to truth and our best attempts at validity and objectivity, or at the very least to be able to make the people making such decisions knowledgeable that what they're doing is going against your advice and best evidence. But such conflicts with plausible deniability, political blame games, and often risks exposing some of the very explicit political connections and corruption that determines how policy is actually made.

For a variety of reasons, I feel that objective and apolitical culture has been lost in public service here in general, science or otherwise. Its a different country, but if you've had experience in these things, you'll know that the culture/topics/fads/zeitgeists of the UK/Canada/US and Aus are all closely interconnected.