quotations – Andi Fugard (∧⇒)

PM vs. Reform leader (3 June 2026)

PM: “The grieving family have asked us not to respond in the way that the leader of Reform has responded. They have lost their son in the most appalling circumstances, and they make a simple plea of us as human beings to please not exploit that. We all need to reflect on the words of Henry’s father.

“My response—and the response of others, to be fair—has been focused on the lessons to be learned so that we can deliver justice. The hon. Gentleman’s response has been to appeal for rage. That is his response to a father who has lost his son and asked for that not to happen. Exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division would be wrong in any circumstances, but to do it when the family are expressly saying, “Please don’t,” is unforgivable. It shows exactly who he is.”

(PMQs, Wednesday 3 June 2026)

Invest in your staff

Relevant in the age of over-reliance on AI, particularly LLMs:

“I have always said you have to invest in technology but do not rely on it, but you should invest in your staff and you can always rely on them.”
– Tim O’Toole, Managing Director of London Underground (2003–2009), reflecting on the heroic staff response to the 7/7 attacks amid failed radio links [source]

Value free governments

“[… I]t is accepted that the social scientists’ contribution cannot be value free but, surprisingly, much less attention has been given to the much more obvious fact that governments are not value free either. The fact that they are not means that the problem facing the social scientist in government is not so much that his own value system colours his research and recommendations, but that these values may be out of tune with those of the government he is advising.” (Sharpe, 1976, pp. 75–76)

References

Sharpe, L. J. (1976). Government as Clients for Social Science Research. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 5(1), 70–79.

Useful science (and evaluation?) for policy

“A policy problem is not usually the same as a scientific problem, and may have several scientific problems incorporated within it.”

“Scientists can be advocates, or they can provide the best possible balanced assessment of the evidence but they cannot do both simultaneously. It has to be clear to policymakers which horse they are riding. Papers seen as advocacy are likely to be discounted.”

“Since the policy process tends to be very fast, papers must be timely. An 80% right paper before a policy decision is made it is worth ten 95% right papers afterwards, provided the methodological limitations imposed by doing it fast are made clear.”

“Sensible policymakers prefer a paper they understand, including its flaws, to one they do not, however sophisticated and apparently precise it looks. It is possible to be simple whilst being rigorous.”

“Policymaking is a professional skill; most scientists have no experience of it and it shows. […] Worse, trying to work up to a policy position can unconsciously bias scientists towards trying to get a neat policy narrative from a complex picture, or downplay inconvenient facts.”

“Some scientists seem to assume a two-stage process where the individual research is conducted, and then policies made on the basis of that. The reality should be a three-stage process: that original research is conducted, then research from multiple instances and disciplines is synthesised, and then policies made on the basis of all the available synthesized evidence.”

References

Whitty, C. J. M. (2015). What makes an academic paper useful for health policy? BMC Medicine, 13(1), 301, s12916-015-0544–0548. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0544-8

The kind of researcher needed for policy research and evaluation (Donnison, 1972)

David Donnison’s (1972, p. 532) view on the qualities required for someone to be an effective policy researcher or evaluator:

“The research workers to look for should of course be the most creative and intelligent we can find. But their motivation is equally important and harder to assess. They must have a policy-oriented cast of mind, or be likely to acquire that in time. They must enjoy thinking in a sustained, rigorous and independent way about the problems of government – which means they take seriously the version of a problem perceived by the government of the moment, but do not confine their own perception of the issues to that version alone. They must want to make the world a better place for people already living in it: the needs of future generations should not be wholly neglected, but neither should they be the main concern. And they must enjoy studying how that could be achieved with the resources potentially available for the task – which calls for a capacity to envisage the alternative uses to which such resources might be put. […]”

“Responsible scholars recognise that if they are to present conclusions which might ultimately affect many of their fellow-citizens they must be more, not less, careful about the quality of their evidence and the logic of their argument than they would be if they intended only to communicate with their academic colleagues. […] They should not be tempted to become politicians – a reputable but entirely different role. They should remain firmly rooted in the academic world – whether they work in universities or not – where they can keep in touch with their colleagues and students and draw on their help.”

Donnison, D. (1972). Research for policy. Minerva, 10(4), 519–536.

P.S. I’m not convinced by the comment on future generations – perinatal programmes and net zero policies are example areas where evaluators should and do consider impacts on future generations.

“It is not unheard of for permanent secretaries, in a sense, to try and work in a way which allows there to be a decision”

Edward Morello: Well, we should put on record that you have served under four different Prime Ministers. At any point during your tenure as perm sec, were you asked by a No. 10 organisation to withhold information from the Foreign Secretary? How usual is that request?

Sir Philip Barton: I am worried that everyone is going to think that the centre of Government spends its whole time sort of conniving behind the backs of everyone else in Government. That is not the reality. The reality is people trying to get on with delivering the business of the Government the vast majority of the time. My best answer to that question is that it is unusual. However, in the end, it is particularly around things where you might have a policy disagreement or difference of view between the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State.

It is not unheard of for permanent secretaries, in a sense, to try and work in a way which allows there to be a decision, and a consensus view in the Government to then move ahead and take it forward. In that sort of situation, it is not unheard of for a permanent secretary to be privy to something that they are asked not to pass on to their Secretary of State. I would describe it as not unheard of, but I do not want to give the impression that this is standard operating procedure.

Q344 Chair (Emily Thornberry): But this is absolutely extraordinary. The permanent secretary at the Foreign Office can be told, “Don’t tell your boss about this” when they are the Foreign Secretary? Has that ever happened to you before this?

Sir Philip Barton: Yes, it has.

Q345 Chair: Really?

Sir Philip Barton: Yes.

Chair: Well, you learn something new every day.

(Oral evidence: Work of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, HC 385, Tuesday 28 April 2026)

Whose values of merit or worth…?

Some helpful thoughts from Linda Mabry (2010) on value clashes in evaluative judgements – perhaps what we could call the fundamental problem of evaluative judgement, the value-based sibling of the fundamental problem of causal inference:

“Those who promote attention to the values of stakeholders beyond those of program managers or funders […] often refer optimistically to the importance of building consensus. But the diversity of stakeholder interests may be irreconcilable, and evaluation’s capacity to clarify differences may cement dissensus. Moreover, for federally funded programs, […] every taxpayer, every citizen, every resident is a remote stakeholder, introducing a diversity of social values that could overwhelm an evaluation.” (p. 84)

“[…] should decision-makers favor the evaluator’s values over those of program personnel and other stakeholders? For a critical social theory evaluator, this issue demands introspection, a willingness to interrogate one’s own conception of appropriate use of the evaluation. Theoretically at least, it is as possible for evaluators to misunderstand appropriate use as it is for clients to do so. While the client can count on lived experience of the program to guide ideas about appropriate use, he or she is invested in the personal values reflected in the program; while an external evaluator can count on fresh eyes and systematically collected data, he or she is invested in the personal values reflected in the evaluation. There being no disinterested view, notions of appropriate use always involve someone’s subjective values.” (pp. 90-91)

“[…] the evaluator cannot simply presume it appropriate for his or her conclusions or values to overrule those of decision-makers and other stakeholders. Errors of two types are possible. On one hand, clients might be well advised to exercise healthy skepticism in considering the work of a short-term outsider, one whose findings might point them toward unproductive territories. On the other hand, stakeholders pinched by evaluation results have been known to engage in blatant self-protection […].” (p. 91)

Mabry, L. (2010). Critical social theory evaluation: Slaying the dragon. New Directions for Evaluation, 127, 83–98.

Evaluation as a social science

“We have argued that good evaluation is good social science. For us, this embraces the gallant aims of precision in articulation of theory, rigor in empirical testing, confederation in lines of inquiry, and cumulation in the body of findings. The ‘realist movement,’ of which we are a part, is often considered the brash upstart of the evaluation schools. In fact, it depends on these rather venerable ideas. The future, for us, thus lies in keeping faith with some of the grand old principles of social science and in not forgetting the hard-won lessons of the old studies.” (Pawson & Tilley, 2001, p. 324)

“All scientific investigation utilises explanations relating mechanisms and contexts to empirical patterns.” (Pawson, 2024, p. 42)

“Despite the habitual use of the appellation ‘social science’, many of my colleagues would reject any claim to follow science, dismiss any interest in causality, deny any need for objectivity, and scorn the possibility of generalisation. They are beyond hope. I don’t seek to convert them. But in following their chosen paths these various tribes – constructivists, post-modernists, emancipators, critics, essayists, relativists, and so on – have found time to say why causality, objectivity, and generality are false idols. So, in defending the science in social science, their criticisms also need to be overturned.” (Pawson, 2024, p. xviii)

“What I’ve come up with here might well be entitled The Old Rules of Sociological Method. I have attempted to extract and justify some realist principles for conducting social research on the back of a generous portfolio of existing examples. Those illustrations reach across many research domains and a broad portfolio of practical methods. But they remain a pinprick; I could have called upon a thousand others. Accordingly, there is another way of perceiving my efforts. The book is no more and no less than an attempt to codify and formalise existing practices. I have tried to capture a tradition.” (Pawson, 2024, 251)

References

Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (2001). Realistic Evaluation Bloodlines. American Journal of Evaluation, 22(3), 317–324.

Pawson, R. (2024). How to Think Like a realist: A methodology for social science. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

The Westminster Model and why it’s useful even though it’s wrong

This paper by Paul Cairney (2025) is fun.

The Westminster Model (WM) of policymaking:

“… political parties present manifestos to compete for public votes in general elections, the winner forms a government, and government ministers oversee the delivery of their manifesto by civil servants and public bodies.” (p. 297)

What’s wrong with the British Political Tradition (BPT), the UK flavour of the model:

“… politicians do not live up to the BPT; party manifestos combine some specific and many vague promises; parties don’t always gain a majority; not all MPs are easy to keep in line with government policy; ministers could not understand all of the choices made in their name; EU entry and exit was a bruising experience; and, the UK’s ability to reform devolved or subnational government is constrained in practice. In other words, the first aim of a ‘governance thesis’ is to use the WM as an ideal-type to compare with more accurate stories of the real world.” (p. 298)

Cairney then argues that “these differences between aspiration and reality provide the launching point for a more realistic story” – and goes on to have a go, e.g., noting the impact of the finite time and capacity of ministers, expanding on the range of individuals and informal and formal groups that influence policymaking

The approach reminds me of how classical logic and probability are used in the psychology of reasoning: they offer frameworks for understanding how people ought to reason, and then researchers adjust that framework to match how non‑mathematicians actually do reason, constrained by finite working memory, drawing on broader interpretations of terms like “if” than are used in logic, etc.

References

Cairney, P. (2025). Governance and the Westminster model: What exactly is the dominant story of UK policymaking? British Politics, 20(3), 295–315.

“Yes, it did”

As innumerable hacks read their tea leaves to forecast what happens next, and debate who is responsible for whose downfall, this shows what an effective Opposition moment looks like – and why the Opposition sometimes, very occasionally, strengthens democracy (House of Commons, Wednesday 4 February 2026):

Mrs Badenoch: On 10 September, when we knew this, I asked the Prime Minister about it at the Dispatch Box, and he gave Mandelson his full confidence—not once but twice. He only sacked him after pressure from us. I am asking the Prime Minister something very specific, not about the generalities of the full extent. Can the Prime Minister tell us: did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?

Prime Minister: Yes, it did. As a result, various questions were put to him. […]

Mrs Badenoch: What the Prime Minister has just said is shocking. How can he stand up there saying that he knew, but that he just asked Peter Mandelson if the security vetting was true or false? This was a man who had been sacked from Cabinet twice already for unethical behaviour. That is absolutely shocking.

How likely or unlikely do you think it is that Keir Starmer will still be prime minister at the end of 2026? (YouGov, 5 January 2026, 4,667 GB adults, verys and fairlys summed):

	All	Con	Lab	Lib Dem	Reform
Likely	29	19	45	39	15
Unlikely	55	70	39	44	76
Likely – unlikely	-26	-51	6	-5	-61
Don’t know	17	10	15	16	8