In politics, there are times when it might be better to leave aside terms such as ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, and focus instead on the threat assessments being put forward by different advocates, and consider what they really convey. It will be seen that they tend to fall into one of two categories: either they are broadly based on systematic evidence gathering and expert examination (realist assessments), or they are constructed from highly selective cases, distorted reports, or even complete fabrication (contrived assessments). We can illustrate the contrast, for example, with five pairs of threat assessment.
Environment-related threats
Realist assessment: there are various kinds of pollution and emission that are damaging to people’s health and world’s weather system, and these need to be tackled if problems are not to get even worse.
Contrived assessment: anyone trying to reduce pollution and what scientists regard as harmful emissions poses a serious threat to our quality of life, our freedom to drive, our access to energy, and must be stopped.
Immigration-related threats
Realist assessment: there are people we want to be able to come to our country (having family ties with us, needed as workers and innovators) and there are people we want to keep out (criminals, terrorists, exploiters); and we must have an effective system to achieve those goals.
Contrived assessment: immigrants and refugees are all dangerous people (except the very rich ones) who will harm us and ruin our way of life, and we must use all means at our disposal to get rid of them.
Military-related threats
Realist assessment: there are countries which try to undermine our security and stability, and we must build up our defence and reliable alliances around the world to protect our interests.
Contrived assessment: our wellbeing is far more seriously threatened by some foreign enemy than poor health and the spread of disease, rise in poverty, mental distress form economic insecurity, etc., and we must cut funding for everything else in order to keep spending more on arms.
Crime-related threats
Realist assessment: we need to strengthen our police force to enhance their detection and deterrent capability, and ensure there are sufficient resources to detain dangerous criminals and rehabilitate others.
Contrived assessment: anyone convicted of any crime should be punished severely with long prison sentences, and people concerned with prison conditions and rehabilitation are themselves a threat to public safety.
Welfare-related threats
Realist assessment: it is dangerous to neglect the plight of people who cannot get jobs with sufficient pay, and it is important to provide an adequate safety net that reaches all those in need while anyone trying to scam the system needs to be identified and penalised.
Contrived assessment: benefit claimants are lazy, liars, cheats, and should have their support reduced or cut completely; help for the poor creates a dangerous dependency culture, unlike help for the rich which is in line with meritocracy.
There are many other contrasting threat assessments – e.g., highlighting discriminatory and abusive behaviour as threats v. treating action to curtail such behaviour as threats; highlighting tax avoidance as a threat to public finance v. treating action to tackle non-tax-payment as a threat to private wealth; highlighting the harm from irresponsible business practices v. treating regulatory limits on such practices as harmful.
Realist assessments put forward responses to identified threats which are guided by reviews of what would make a positive difference, and take into account the variables in individual cases. Contrived assessments, by contrast, call for responses that ignore objective findings, and only serve the interests of those propounding them to further their financial and political power.
Rather than starting any argument with “You on the Right/the Left are fixated on this or that”, let’s turn our collective attention on the real threats we face, work out what would evidentially most likely improve our situation, and cast aside misleading claims that will only make things worse.
