The UN’s Contempt for Democracy
By Ben Pile
We are now halfway through the annual global festival of green hypocrisy, science abuse and rent-seeking, known as COP30 in Belem, Brazil. Each year bar one (delayed because of the pandemic), 99.999% of the world has been excluded from the ritual of this United Nations climate conference, while governments, billionaire-funded NGOs and transnational corporations seek deals between themselves to remake the world at our expense. From the early days of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings, hopes for a global one-size-fits-all emissions reduction policy have faded. And the process has produced notable failures. We make take some satisfaction in that, but it would be premature to celebrate either the failure of this COP meeting, or the broader process. And it is the broader conversations around the UN that shed more light on why we should resist global climate politics than the detail of any one conference.
It was historian of the green movement, Rupert Darwall, who explained this to me. Much of the UN’s green agenda is credited to the late Canadian oil man and latterly green technocrat, Maurice Strong, who convened the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in the 1970s. Strong, explains Darwall, “understood the nature of power in modern world and the fear people have of being left out.” Once the agenda of endless meetings had been established, “people have this terrible nervousness of being left out of these very important meetings, not being at the top table.” The world’s Great and Good having been drawn in, continues Darwall, is the greater part of the process establishing itself. At the UNEP meeting convened by Strong in 1972, he was asked: “what is the policy?” “The process is the policy,” replied Strong.
There is a striking parallel between Strong’s reply and the criticism of the shortcomings of criminal justice: “the process is the punishment.” That is to say that bureaucracies do not need a tangible objective to achieve an objective as such. As systems thinking theorist, Stafford Beer observed “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID). And bureaucratic processes are, or can be thought of, as systems. Accordingly, process-as-punishment can be a form of harassment, not justice. And the COP process, as an end-in-itself, need no particular objective to draw power away from national democracies – it merely needs a justification. The hope, therefore, invested in any particular COP meeting, to finally reach a deal to “save the planet”, is always a distraction.
The UNEP later branched into many UN agencies and processes. Most notably, of course, the UNFCCC. In the 1980s, geopolitics was still defined by the Cold War, and environmental politics had yet to come to the fore, but the process was now organised by the concept of “sustainable development”. The grim prognostications of imminent ecological catastrophe that had formed the cradle of the green agenda had failed, but the momentum achieved by the process allowed its continuation nonetheless. The Cold War ended, and the gloomy computer simulations that scientists had developed to understand what might have been the outcome of a different kind of ending, were instead used to predict what might happen if the world carried on heating. The neomalthusianism at the heart of the green agenda in the 1970s gave way to a seemingly more tangible scientific claim, and global warming filled the mushroom cloud-shaped hole in global political agencies’ mission-statements.
Cold War became Global Warming. The principles of “Sustainable Development” that had been drafted in 1987 by former Norweigan Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland in her report for the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) “Our Common Future”, which established the architecture of the process in this post-Cold War world. Most notably, green NGOs were elevated as overseers of governments and businesses, and as the mediator between publics and the process.
And this story contains a message for climate sceptics. We can argue until we are blue in the face about the reality or not of global warming science’s claims. But science has always been secondary – i.e., downstream – of the political process. Conventional scepticism has it the other way around: that the process emerges from the scientific claim, which once debunks, deprives the process of its energy. The problem is that this forgets just how fickle institutional science has been, first in supporting the neomalthusian claims of the early 1970s that leant authority the process, such as overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution build-up. These stories were debunked by history itself. Yet that caused little reflection by scientists about how their institutions had been colonised by politics. As soon as they failed, scare stories at the centre of the process’s narrative were simply swapped for others. Science is, sadly, no more immune to ideology than it is to money.
Other sceptics too, get far too excited about the artefacts of the process, rather than the process itself, giving undue weight to documents that seemingly outline the policy agenda. Countless comments on social media assert confidently that this or that draconian excess of national policy is the direct implementation of Agenda 21, or Agenda 30, for example. But this also misconceives the process. Agenda 21 and 30 – definitions of sustainable development goals – had no legal force. States could pick and chose whether or not to implement these non-binding ambitions to any extent. Meanwhile, the insidious process rolls on.
The third COP meeting in Japan in 1997 seemingly agreed the Kyoto Protocol, in which it was agreed that wealthier countries would begin taking the greater burden of emissions-reduction, in acknowledgement of their historical guilt. These agreements were, or at least were attempted to be, binding, requiring for most countries in that category to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. And this is where the problems with the notion of global climate governance over national sovereignty began to emerge. Despite the agreement of the Clinton administration, the US did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Later, in the 2010s, Canada, Japan and Russia withdrew from the targets.
But the COP process continued to roll on. The solution, arrived at in Paris in 2015 was to allow states to choose their own levels of emissions-reduction, known as “Nationally-Determined Contributions” (NDCs). This is, of course, a fudge, and the criticisms from green NGOs are: i. that the not-quite-binding NDCs aren’t sufficient to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, as they are seemingly intended to; ii. That countries aren’t properly implementing their NDCs; and iii. that countries are no longer submitting their NDCs. More notably, perhaps, the ‘agreement’ is toothless. Donald Trump, for example, withdrew the USA from the Paris Agreement during his first term. Joe Biden put the USA back in almost immediately. And then on re-election, Trump re-withdrew. The point of the ‘agreement’, then, was not to deliver anything towards the reduction of CO2 emissions, but to sustain the process, despite the obvious obstacles to binding agreements, absent any meaningful mechanism of enforcement.
The main solutions seemingly being developed in the apparent chaos of post-Paris climate politics are twofold and attempt remove responsibility for climate policy from still nominally democratic national governments. I will not dwell on these here, because I made these observations often.
First, it is increasingly local governments that are shouldering the responsibility for advancing Net Zero. Hence, the C40 Cities meeting, with green tycoon Michael Bloomberg as its president and London Mayor Sadiq Khan as its chair, held its global meeting of mayors in Belem, ahead of the COP30 meeting. As Charlotte Gill has revealed, the billionaire has picked up the expenses. Though that might seem to mitigate concerns about the use of public money, it also raises the question of the quid-pro-quo. And that question I have answered previously: the attack on private transport being waged by local authorities is a proxy battle of the climate wars, whatever the motivations of its billionaire backers, and undermines democracy.
Second, and also significantly on Bloomberg’s coin, national governments’ climate policy agendas have been oriented towards enabling ESG. The point here is not that governments would enforce anything that would risk climate policies being subject to democratic pushback (though that is still likely to happen, but for other reasons), only that companies are required to report and publish their exposure to ‘climate risks’. The hope for ESG was this would then allow companies, as part of their own ESG compliance policies, to enforce ESG compliance, such as emissions-reduction, on their suppliers and customers. In other words, financial power would be turned into a form of environmental governance, whether or not governments implemented policies. But, as I have pointed out in articles here, that agenda, though not yet completely dead, is failing.
The process rolls on, however. And what form it takes, post-Belem, or from some other destination thereafter, remains to be seen. But what is certain is that it is the process, much more than any policy as such, or any story that legitimises it, that will be saved.
If this is still confusing, the point is to remember the POSIWID. The process will suffer its ups and downs, its advances and setbacks. But over time, it will accumulate power. And this is why detail of UN processes often masks the nature of the politics around the UN – its greedy acquisition by corrupt billionaires and their pet NGOs.
The UN may well have been substantively formed in the aftermath of World War II, and intended to mitigate the risk of such horrors being repeated and, and to cool the potential of the Cold War and its skirmishes. Along the way, it absorbed more unimpeachable Good Things, such as disaster recovery, disease elimination, and poverty reduction. But the road to hell, and all that…
A very different philosophy and concomitant logic emerges out of the desire to do good in the world, that is seemingly beyond the competences of national governments to achieve, whether democratic or not. And it is a perspective that, since the UN’s foundations, has sought to undermine that sovereignty, it having been identified as the problem at the centre of many problems. According to this logic, if the nation state didn’t exist as the ultimate form of government, then nation states capacities to execute wars would be so much diminished. Similarly, if national governments were not so committed to improving the material conditions of their populations – or, perhaps, less corrupt, depending on one’s perspective – they may be less inclined to make decisions that would put competitive economic growth before environmental sustainability.
The process takes on this logic, which now has a power of its own, to undermine the basis on which national governments are founded. It’s not just about climate change. Consider this Guardian story, for example, which emerged ahead of COP30. According to Mary Lawlor, who is “UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders”, though governments such as the UK “pay lip service to climate goals”, they persecute climate activists, who are “criminalised”. “Attacks against climate defenders,” claims Lawlor, “and we now see outright repression against people who are organizing for climate action.”
The criticism is clearly aimed at the prosecution of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil campaigners, whose style of direct action saw them blocking roads and stopping trains, smashing windows, spraying paint over buildings, vandalising petrol pumps, obstructing businesses, and throwing soup over priceless artworks. According to many from the green camp, these actions are simply ‘peaceful protest’ and merely ‘civil disobedience’, and therefore legitimately a protected form of democratic engagement. (As if the green movement cared to subject its own designs for society to democratic contest.) And so what many consider to be expressions of narcissistic criminality becomes, on the logic of NGOs merely the expression of ‘human rights’.
In this way, the competences of the state to legislate and execute the law is undermined and made subject to the higher court. Though radical protest movements’ actions are manifestly criminal, and their designs for society wholly at odds with the broader population, that subversion clearly finds a sympathetic response in the state’s judicial system.
The nation state does not need to formally surrender its sovereignty in order for its quasi-independent public institutions to be colonised by the process. It only needs to create a culture that is shared beyond the process to subvert those institutions, against the interests of the broader public, who, it seems likely to me, are of one mind about the necessity of the state using the criminal law against ideological movements seeking to sabotage critical civil infrastructure, such as roads and energy. The process is the engine of ideology, and its means of propagation, and overemphasis on the policies that emerge from it may distract us from what the UN aims to be.
Police Admit Unlawful Arrest of Parents who Complained about School
Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested over messages they had sent on WhatsApp criticising their daughter’s school. Hertfordshire constabulary have now admitted unlawful arrest and agreed as £20,000 payout. The Times has the story.
A police force has admitted unlawful arrest after sending six uniformed officers to detain two parents who had complained about their school on WhatsApp.
Hertfordshire constabulary originally defended its arrest of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine but has now agreed a £20,000 payout. The force admitted that the legal criteria for arrest were ‘not made out’ and formally accepted liability for wrongful arrest and detention.
It stood by its decision to investigate, citing the volume of correspondence sent by Allen and Levine to their daughter’s primary school.
The case led to a national debate about police overreach after the Times revealed that Allen and Levine had been detained in January in front of their young daughter before being fingerprinted, searched and left in a police cell for eight hours.
They were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, police concluded that there should be no further action.
Six officers, who arrived in a police van and two marked vehicles, arrested the couple after Cowley Hill Primary School, which their daughter attended, complained of a high volume of emails and disparaging comments on WhatsApp.
In April, Andy Prophet, chief constable of Hertfordshire, defended the arrests.
He said that the inspector who had approved them did not believe Allen and Levine would consent to a voluntary interview and also needed to preserve electronic devices.
However, the force’s lawyers admitted this month that the criteria for arrest, under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, were not made out “therefore rendering the arrest unlawful”. The force agreed a payout of £10,000 each to Allen, 50, and Levine, 47, noting that the sum was “significantly above that required by the case law and reflects the constabulary’s desire to bring matters to a conclusion”.
Needless to say, the couple were defended by the Free Speech Union.
Worth reading in full.
How I Found Myself in the Middle of ‘Anti-Fascist’ Violence at UC Berkeley
By Andrew Doyle
I was warned there would be trouble. Students and staff at the University of California at Berkeley have earned a reputation for intolerance. After I told some friends that I had agreed to speak on campus at a Turning Point USA event, at least three of them predicted that violence would ensue. One even suggested that I should withdraw. Naturally, I failed to heed the prophecies, even though we all know that the Cassandridae are never wrong.
Last Monday’s event had been initially planned as the final stop on Charlie Kirk’s tour, so tensions were understandably high and security had been ramped up accordingly. I was to appear on stage with the comedian Rob Schneider and the philosopher Peter Boghossian (whose excellent Substack is here). We made our way to Zellerbach Hall together in an SUV, where we were dropped off in an underground car park and found ourselves suddenly flanked by men with guns. We had arrived hours early to avoid the swarms. They came later.
With only an hour to go, waiting backstage, we were shown footage of the fracas unfolding outside. While ticket holders were attempting to enter the venue, protesters had descended on them to threaten them into leaving. One member of staff showed me a clip of what he said was tear gas being deployed (it turned out to be smoke bombs). Other images were quickly going viral: a car being deliberately backfired to simulate gunfire and deter audience members, a line of people calling on audience members and police to kill themselves and chanting “fuck your dead homie” (a macabre reference to Charlie Kirk). One group was attempting to break through a barrier, and the ringleader was wearing a “fags against fascism” patch. I’m a ‘fag against fascism’ too, I thought. Where’s the solidarity?
All in all, it was a surreal experience. At one point, two heavily armed campus police officers burst into our green room, apparently looking for other potential points of entry that might be breached by the zombie-like hordes outside. When we finally reached the stage and took questions from the audience, I found myself scanning the hall with a sense of bewilderment. Armed police were lining the stage and were positioned all around the perimeter, like that final concert scene in The Blues Brothers. And all of this because a conservative group had offered to share their ideas on campus and hear them challenged. What the hell was going on?
The political tribalism of our times appears to have emboldened the extremists on all sides. Untethered to reality, they spend their time squabbling with ghosts, secure in the belief that they are brave warriors in a righteous cause. It may be simply a failure of imagination, an inability to consider that there might be other ways of looking at the world. Some of us are more solipsistic than others, and it is all too easy to grasp at catch-alls like ‘fascist’ to explain those views that we find intuitively inexplicable.
These protests seemed to represent an inversion of reality, with groups determined to suppress free speech in the name of ‘anti-fascism’, and those who consider themselves to be ‘compassionate’ and ‘progressive’ celebrating murder and urging others to commit suicide. A man wearing a t-shirt bearing the word “Freedom” was beaten bloody and racially abused (“you’re bleeding, white boy”), presumably in the name of liberty and anti-racism. As a final touch, the man arrested for his assault was named ‘Jihad’.
One would have expected those at a university campus to have the necessary historical literacy to understand what ‘fascism’ entails, rather than seeking to embody its core aspects. To the extent that there can be any rationale behind such collective mania, it would seem to run along the following lines: ‘Although the members of Turning Point are not open about their fascism, they are nonetheless Nazis in embryonic form. If not eliminated now, they will flourish into the stormtroopers of the future.’ It should be noted that this is precisely the same fallacious reasoning given by Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for his decision to assassinate his friend; not that he is a tyrant, but that he ‘may’ become one.
While only a minority of the protesters participated in the actual violence, the majority were happy to cheer it on. They were perfectly entitled to behave obnoxiously, of course – protests are ineffective unless they are irritating somebody – but there is no excuse for a mob of students forcing others to bend to their will. Many members of the college had bought tickets to the event, but were prevented from attending because others had decided against it. The university must bear some responsibility for this state of affairs.
If the protesters genuinely objected to the idea of conservatives (and some liberals) participating in a public discussion, they could simply not buy a ticket. The problem of their squeamishness at others exercising their free speech would be thereby resolved. Or they could buy a ticket and join the queue to challenge the speakers on stage. They chose instead to impose their wishes on others. The event was completely sold out, and yet the hundreds of empty seats were evidence of the triumph of authoritarianism.
And what of the media reaction? While the Telegraph described the “violent clashes” that ensued, Politico opted to gaslight its readers by describing the mania as “largely peaceful”, a conclusion that no serious journalist could have reached after examining the footage. It’s reminiscent of CNN’s report from Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020, with the chyron describing protests as “mostly peaceful” while Omar Jimenez appeared against a backdrop of burning cars and buildings. The BBC similarly described a protest in London in June 2020 as “largely peaceful” even though its own headline acknowledged the injuries sustained by 27 police officers. These are truly the days of ‘alternative facts’.
All of which is a reminder that truth has been the ultimate casualty of the culture war. Narrative has become more important than reality, and the search for a purpose has led many to conjure enemies into existence in order to fight them. If any further evidence were needed, consider the piece I wrote about the event for the Washington Post. In it, I made the case that these protesters appeared to be mistaking mainstream conservative viewpoints for ‘fascism’, had no understanding of the definition of the term and were evidently impervious to reason. There are over 1,800 comments beneath that article, virtually all of which are repeating the same definitional errors, complaining that Charlie Kirk was a ‘fascist’ and blaming the victims at UC Berkeley for provoking the assaults. They have proven the point of my article far more effectively than I ever could. (You can read the article and the comments here.)
Andrew Doyle is a writer, comedian and broadcaster. His latest book is The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution. This article was first published on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
Take Back Migrants or Face Visa Ban, Says Home Secretary
By Will Jones
Countries that refuse to take back illegal migrants from Britain will face visa bans, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is to announce as part of a crackdown on immigration. But Labour MPs are getting uncomfortable. The Telegraph has more.
States that will not accept the deportation of failed asylum seekers or foreign criminals are to face a “sliding scale” of penalties, from the removal of fast-track visa services to bans on entry documents for everyone from tourists to senior politicians.
On Monday, the Home Secretary will announce plans to block people from travelling to the UK from Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo unless there is a rapid improvement in the number of returned migrants they accept.
Other countries will also be at risk of a future crackdown. Those with the worst records for accepting refused asylum seekers also include Somalia, Bangladesh, Iran and Egypt, according to analysis of Home Office data by the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
The visa bans, which mirror measures introduced by Donald Trump, the US President, against some African and East Asian nations during his first term, are among a string of measures to ramp up the removal of illegal migrants and foreign criminal offenders.
Reforms to be announced by Ms Mahmood will include legislation to prevent immigration judges from putting migrants’ rights to a family life under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) ahead of protecting the public and controlling the UK’s borders.
Ms Mahmood will commit the UK to working with other European countries on reforms to the ECHR in an attempt to prevent it from blocking deportations.
In addition, illegal migrants will be restricted by law to only one appeal against their removal, rather than “endless” appeals where they cite different reasons at different times to remain in Britain.
The appeals will be decided by a Danish-style independent board of adjudicators with powers to identify and weed out unfounded cases.
The Tories initially called the reforms “just a gimmick”, saying: “It won’t work. The only way we can properly tackle it is to leave the ECHR.” However, party leader Kemi Badenoch later backed the proposals, calling them “steps in the right direction” on migration policy and saying she wanted to encourage the Government “in that right direction”. She offered the Conservative Party’s support in the Commons amid unease on the Labour backbenches.
Of course, Mahmood may point out that Denmark, which many of the reforms are modelled on, is an ECHR member, suggesting much of it may be possible within the convention. But then, Denmark doesn’t have Britain’s decidedly pro-immigration judiciary, many of whom seem to revel in gold-plating any and all protections for immigrants at the expense of the native and settled population.
According to the Telegraph, new policies to be confirmed by the Home Secretary in the House of Commons today include:
- Countries that refuse to take back illegal migrants from Britain will face visa bans.
- Refugees who enter the UK illegally will be forced to wait 20 years before they can apply for permanent settlement.
- Refugee status will become temporary, with reviews every 30 months to determine whether their home country is safe for them to be returned.
- Asylum seekers with assets such as jewellery, cars and e-bikes will be required to contribute towards their taxpayer-funded bed, board and financial support.
- Immigration judges will be prevented from putting migrants’ rights to a family life under the ECHR ahead of protecting the public and controlling the UK’s borders, under new legislation.
- Illegal migrants will be restricted to only one appeal against their removal.
- The legal obligation to support asylum seekers who would otherwise be ‘destitute’ – inherited from EU law – will be scrapped. Instead people will only be funded if they are vulnerable, contribute and obey the law.
In the Spectator, Ross Clark says Mahmood’s sanction for uncooperative countries – suspending visas – is unlikely to have much effect, and she should instead hit them where it really hurts: in the aid budget.
A backlash against Mahmood’s reforms is growing among Labour MPs, with Tony Vaughan, the MP for Folkestone, Hythe and Romney Marsh, calling the reforms a “wrong turning” and John McDonnell, Corbyn’s old shadow chancellor, backing him, claiming he speaks for many in the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Whether this will turn out to be just a few immigration fanatics on the fringes sounding off or will swell into an internal opposition that could kill Mahmood’s programme remains to be seen. The Mail reports that at least one Minister is on ‘resignation watch’ and quotes from MPs describing the proposals as “disgusting” and “performative cruelty”.
As with welfare reform, the question is whether Labour MPs will stomach what the Government has determined is necessary to deal with the problem and win back wavering voters, or whether they will rebel en masse against the ‘Right-wing’ policies and force the Government into further humiliating U-turns. There are only so many humiliations a government can take, of course, before a change of Prime Minister becomes necessary to restore party confidence – and both MPs and Ministers surely know this. Perhaps this will concentrate the minds of MPs and lead most to back the Government, despite possible misgivings. The risk for Starmer, though, is that disgruntled MPs with an eye on the party’s dire polling will see it as a chance to bring him down and put a ‘proper Left-winger’ in his place. Whichever way they jump, one thing is clear: with the Budget also approaching later in the month, it’s crunch time for the Prime Minister.
Are Economically Literate Americans More Right-Wing?
By Noah Carl
Who’s more economically literate: the Left or the Right? On the one hand, Right-wing parties tend to put more emphasis on economic growth in their rhetoric and policy platforms. They claim to prioritise ‘growing the size of the pie’ rather than simply redistributing income. And they often accuse their opponents of being ‘socialists’ or even ‘communists’.
On the other hand, most academic economists actually vote for centrist or Left-wing parties. (Though you have to remember that practically all academic disciplines lean Left, and economics is one of the least Left-leaning.)
In a recent paper, Jared Barton and Cortney Rodet sought to address the question more systematically. They gave a representative sample of Americans a test of economic literacy, and then looked at whether Democrats or Republicans scored higher. They also examined whether respondents’ economic literacy scores were correlated with their views on specific policies.
The authors’ test of economic literacy was based on the Test of Economic Literacy, a high-school assessment developed by the Council for Economic Education. The full test has dozens of questions, but they selected 15 due to the constraints of an online survey. All the questions are multiple choice.
For example, Barton and Rodet’s test included the question, “From an economic point of view, which approach to controlling pollution is most efficient?” The correct answer is, “Reduce pollution as long as the additional benefits are greater than the additional costs.” The incorrect answers are: “Abolish the use of toxic chemicals in all production”, “Use economic resources to eliminate all pollution” and “Adopt laws and regulations that prohibit economic activities that cause pollution problems”.
So what did they find? Average scores for different groups are shown in the table below. (Recall that the test has 15 items, so a score of 8 means getting more than half the questions right.)
Men scored higher than women, the old scored higher than the young, the wealthy scored higher than the poor, whites scored higher than non-whites, and those with more education scored higher than those with less. What about Democrats and Republicans? Looking at the last three rows in the table, we can see that Republicans scored about a point higher than Democrats.
When the authors ran a multivariate model of economic literacy, thereby estimating the independent effect of each characteristic, the difference between Republicans and Democrats remained statistically significant — though it was reduced to about 0.6 points.
Despite this finding, Barton and Rodet found that respondents’ economic literacy scores had generally weak associations with their views on specific policies. For example, those with higher scores were no more likely to oppose government jobs programmes or to favour less regulation of business.
In fact, across 30 specific policies, there were only four that showed significant associations with economic literacy. Respondents with higher scores were more likely to oppose government efforts to control prices and reduce income differences. And they were more likely to say government should spend less on the military and the arts. Yet even these associations were weak.
Note that all the associations with specific policies were estimated in a multivariate model that controlled for the demographic characteristics shown above. The unconditional associations may have been slightly stronger — though these are not reported in the paper.
Overall then, Republicans do seem to be more economically literate than Democrats, even when controlling for race. However, there is no strong tendency for economically literate Americans to favour libertarian or laissez-faire policies. Boosting economic literacy would not substantially help the Right.
Science Career Bias Against Women Debunked After Study is Repeated
By Will Jones
A landmark study that claimed men enjoy an unfair advantage in scientific careers has been debunked after a nearly identical rerun of the experiment finds that the opposite is true: it’s women who have the unfair advantage. The Times has the story.
The results are all the more striking because a leading scientific journal had refused to repeat the original experiment, raising concerns that some researchers are reluctant to scrutinise results that align with their views.
The original study, published in 2012, has been cited 4,600 times — an enormous figure in a field where most papers attract fewer than 20 citations. It involved science professors being sent a fictional CV for a lab manager job.
In half of CVs, the applicant was named “John”, while for the other half the applicant was named “Jennifer”. Everything else, from the candidate’s academic grades to work experience, was identical.
The professors who saw the male name rated him as more competent, more hireable and more deserving of mentoring and a higher salary. The finding is often mentioned in debates about the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) careers.
The new paper repeated the test on a far larger scale. Whereas the original had asked about 130 academics at six universities, the authors of the new paper — led by Nathan Honeycutt and Lee Jussim of Rutgers University in New Jersey — contacted nearly 1,300 professors from more than 50 American research institutions, using the same application materials and the same measures of perceived competence, hireability, likeability and salary recommendations.
The aim was to see whether the result of the original paper held when the experiment was repeated. It did not. The female applicant was seen as marginally more capable and appealing to work with and the more hireable of the pair. She was also seen as worth a bigger salary — $35,550 versus $34,150 for the man. The differences were small, but consistent. The widely cited bias against women failed to reappear; it now tilted the other way.
Honeycutt said attitudes may have shifted since the first study, but that the failure to replicate could also reflect the small sample size of the original experiment.
According to the authors of the new study, the resistance they encountered when they suggested repeating the experiment may be as telling as the result. Honeycutt said that he and his co-authors were taken aback when they proposed a rerun to Nature Human Behaviour, a leading journal.
When Honeycutt and his colleagues submitted a registered replication report (RRR) — a formal proposal to repeat the study — it was rejected by a panel of peer reviewers acting for the journal.
Worth reading in full.
The Doomed Attempt to Create Academic Journals That Nobody Pays For
Reports of the death of the academic publishing industry have been greatly exaggerated for many years. Potential assassins over the decades include photocopying, the internet, email, CD-ROMs, Google Scholar, university repositories, Wikipedia, SciHub, open access (OA), Plan S, preprints, AI large language models, academic fraud and the increasing number of retractions. Now it is ‘diamond OA‘.
The predicted obituary always reads the same: ‘This time the system cannot survive.’ Yet publishers adapt, pivot, monetise, rebrand, restructure, partner or simply wait for the panic to blow over.
Diamond OA is a publishing model whereby authors do not pay to publish, and academics do not pay to read. Frankly, it is the least sustainable model of academic publishing, unless those involved in editing such journals have a sugar daddy behind them, either a large professional society or, in some cases, a university.
A good example of a professional body which supports a diamond OA journal is the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, which publishes The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. This is supported financially by the college which, in turn, is supported by fellows’ subscriptions. Examples of universities supporting diamond OA journals are few and far between. Being unsustainable, such ventures do not last long. I have been consulted by several universities about establishing their own academic journals and my advice, universally, is not to do it (as I explained with a colleague in Journal of Advanced Nursing).
Another Year, Another Apocalypse for Academic Publishing
Enter the latest harbinger of doom, Professor Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck University. Professor Edwards appears to be the unofficial leader of a sustained campaign against the academic publishing industry. Specifically, she targets the ‘Big Five’ – which includes Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Sage – for their “obscene profits”.
Professor Edwards is the founder of the Open Library of Humanities and is a leading figure in the forthcoming Open Journals Collective to be launched in 2026. These are entirely worthy ventures but will hardly be a match for the Big Five. Professor Edwards can be followed on Bluesky.
It is true that the Big Five make profits, but whether they are obscene or not is unclear. There are definitions of ‘profit’ and ‘obscene’ but not one of ‘obscene profit’. In 2024 Elsevier made a profit of £1.17 billion, Springer £389.7 million, Wiley £39.8 million, Taylor & Francis £255.7 million and Sage £323 million. The reader can judge the level of obscenity.
But, before passing judgement, consider the number of people gainfully employed in the academic publishing industry and that academic publishing is not the sole means by which these companies earn money. These publishers also maintain niche low-profit journals due to their importance to particular fields. Academic publishing is one of the UK’s most successful exports.
Professor Edwards’s recent missive titled ‘Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing’ and subtitled ‘Buckling of commercial models alongside maturing of community-led efforts promises major shifts’ draws on the dire financial straits of many UK universities and, thus, their libraries, which she predicts will lead to many pulling out of the bundle deals they have with the Big Five. The publishers have tried to accommodate the dwindling budgets of UK universities by offering between 5 and 15% reductions in the £112 million spent annually on subscriptions. This has been rejected, “decisively” claims Professor Edwards.
Cash-strapped universities are, indeed, looking for new deals and alternative models, and the possibility of working with emerging “mission-driven scholarly societies and non-profit publishers”. But that is not enough to satisfy Professor Edwards who is pushing for diamond OA. So, let’s consider what could possibly go wrong.
What could go wrong?
As alluded to above, the problem with diamond OA is unsustainability. This is probably best illustrated by explaining what the academic publishing industry, including the Big Five, offers authors, editors and universities. Academic publishing companies provide online ‘one-stop shop’ platforms for the submission, review and editing of academic manuscripts.
These platforms are continually adopting new features that allow editors to check the level of similarity to published articles, to check if the article has previously been submitted (and rejected by) the journal, how well the manuscript fits the scope of the journal, the selection of peer reviewers for manuscripts and, with the development of bespoke AI platforms, assistance with the review process, automated personalised responses to authors and reviewers and detecting the use of generative AI in writing manuscripts.
The sheer volume of manuscripts received by journals these days is orders of magnitude bigger than that received in the days when editors would receive a large bundle of manuscripts by courier on a Friday night, to be reviewed over the weekend and returned to the publisher with decisions about whether to send out for review, to publish or to reject.
Those selected for review would then be sent out manually to reviewers with a pre-paid reply envelope for return to the publisher and the cycle was repeated weekly. Such a system simply could not cope with the present volume of manuscripts. A fleet of vans would be required to ferry manuscripts up and down the motorways of the UK and editors would need the assistance of a fork-lift truck to move manuscripts around their offices.
Rolls-Royce expectations, Morris Minor realities
I speak from experience; I worked for many years as an editorial board member of a diamond OA journal, the WikiJournal of Medicine. This was a delight and a privilege and, while no hard copy was exchanged at any point in the working processes of the journal, there was no platform for checking similarity or processing manuscripts.
It was very hard work and required considerable knowledge of the working of Wikipedia type platforms, not easy to master, and each step was done separately and manually. Everything was complex and it proved hard to carry out the work as an editorial board member, hard to encourage reviewers to look at manuscripts and, ultimately, very hard to attract authors. The journal still exists but, sadly, has not published an article since 2024.
Diamond OA advocates like Professor Edwards need to realise that this is what they are facing. Moreover, they are expecting authors and reviewers, accustomed to Rolls-Royce publishing platforms, to join them in their Morris 1000 vision of the future of academic publishing.
I declare what may be considered a conflict of interest here, which is that I have worked as an editor-in-chief for two of the Big Five and currently work for one of them. I spent nearly 30 years with Wiley editing two of their journals and launching one open access journal. I have worked with Elsevier as an editor-in-chief of one journal for five years.
Paywalls, Paranoia and Persistent Myths
But lest the diamond OA advocates think I am an uncritical mouthpiece for any of the Big Five then they are wrong. In terms of editing, I think the amounts of money editors-in-chief and associate editors get paid is paltry compared with the amount of time they put in and the amounts of money some journals earn. The profits of the Big Five and beyond are earned on the back of a considerable amount of free labour; reviewers are not paid.
I fought with Wiley to have the reviewers of open access manuscripts paid as the cost could be accommodated within the APCs they charge. ‘Not the model’ was the reply. The outcome, against a background of millions of submissions to academic journals annually, is that the peer review system is on its knees. Always the rate-limiting step in the publishing process, it is now a genuine cause for concern.
I have been vocal. My exhortations to Wiley not to become involved with the publisher Hindawi failed. I predicted problems and I was proven right. Having acquired Hindawi for £227 million in 2021, the partnership was over by 2023 following thousands of retracted articles and the complete loss of some formerly reputable Wiley journals which were briefly managed by Hindawi.
I am aware of the profits my current publisher makes and have covered the issue in my review of Paywall: the Business of Scholarship, an online film which ‘exposed’ Elsevier’s paywalls and the damage this was allegedly doing. But I also indicated the inaccuracies, exaggerations and half-truths used by the filmmakers to support their case.
I believe that there are many problems associated with the academic publishing industry and have long been an advocate of reform. But diamond OA will join the long procession of photocopiers, CD-ROMs, email lists, repositories, Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, Plan S and a hundred other phenomena that failed to bring the academic publishing industry to its knees.
The industry will adapt – as it always has – while its harshest critics continue to insist, year after year, that this time collapse is finally inevitable. Perhaps, one day, they will be right. But if the past 50 years are any guide, I would advise the pallbearers not to book the hearse just yet.
Dr Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
News Round-Up
- “Mahmoud turns air blue as she blasts liberal critics of asylum reform” – The Telegraph reports on Shabna Mahmouds potty-mouthed defence of her newly announced migration policies.
- “Families to be paid to leave UK under Mahmood’s asylum crackdown” – Under the new plans, migrant families whose asylum claims have been rejected will be deported if they refuse cash incentives to leave the UK, the Telegraph reports.
- “Labour backlash growing over asylum crackdown” – Mahmood’s party colleagues describe her planned overhaul of the migrant system as “cruel” and “divisive”, says the Telegraph.
- “Labour’s migrant crackdown descends into farce” – Ministers are backtracking on plans to seize migrants jewellery on their arrival into the UK, according to the Mail.
- “The fatal flaw in Shabana Mahmood’s migration plan” – Writing in the Spectator, Ross Clark points out a large hole at the centre of the new migration policy.
- “Denmark’s migration maverick: I created a blueprint for Europe” – The Telegraph meets Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the former prime minister behind Denmark’s tough immigration laws.
- “Liberal Europe is turning its back on the ECHR” – There was uproar when Denmark first passed its migration laws. But, says the Telegraph, they are fast becoming the norm in Europe.
- “Nearly half of Labour voters want Keir Starmer to step down” – A Times poll has found that the Prime Minister’s popularity has reached a new low.
- “The Islamisation of Germany reveals an uncomfortable truth” – “Mass migration is leading to the loss of Europe,” writes James Jeffrey in the Telegraph. “We cannot ignore this any longer.”
- “NHS faces ‘doom loop’ without AI, says Euan Blair” – Euan Blair, the son of the former PM who runs the tech group Multiverse, has warned that the NHS risks falling into a “productivity doom loop” unless its workers start using AI, the Telegraph says.
- “Rapist may get compensation as ‘electronic tag made him depressed’”– Mustafa Taskiran, 48, a rapist who has avoided being deported for more than a decade could receive compensation because an electronic tag made him feel “depressed”, according to the Mail.
- “Tulip Siddiq’s aunt sentenced to death in Bangladesh” – Sheikh Hasina, the former Prime Minister of Bangladesh, has been sentenced to death for ordering a crackdown on student protests which left 1,400 people dead, the Telegraph reports.
- “Trump concedes defeat on Epstein files as he orders GOP to vote” – Trump had previously called all attempts to release the files part of a Democrat hoax, the Mail says. But he is now urging the GOP to vote for their release.
- “Epstein, Nothingburger” – Eugyppius regrets that he must once again write a piece on the Epstein files.
- “Sadiq Khan’s £1 million bus lane removed after three months” – A petition calling for the removal of a buss lane in Finchley has been signed by more than 1,700 residents, reports the Telegraph, and it’s now been removed.
- “BBC chairman vows to fight Trump in $5 billion legal battle” – BBC Chairman Samir Shah has told staff that there is “no basis for a defamation case”, according to the Telegraph.
- “Did the BBC kill Diana? This book suggests so” – The Telegraph reviews a new book, Dianarama, the Betrayal of Princess Diana in which author Andy Webb investigates a previous Panorama scandal.
- “Yes, the BBC should apologise – for its Covid fearmongering” – “ The BBC’s doctoring of a Trump speech on a Panorama programme is bad enough,” says Liz Hodgkinson in the Conservative Woman, “but it pales into insignificance when you consider its coverage of Covid over the past five years.”
- “Cancel culture comes to Non-League football” – Russell David takes aim at the feminisation and excessive caution that is disrupting non-league football.
- “Inside Your Party’s disturbing Manchester rally” – Israeli Florit Shoihet gives the Spectator an account of her meeting with Your Part, which proudly describes itself as the “only anti-Zionist party in the entire country”.
- “Graham Linehan in trans row with Father Ted star” – Graham Linehan has fallen out with a former Father Ted star over his views on transgender issues, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘Poison pill’ risks burdening Telegraph with UAE debt” – The Telegraph reports that it risks being saddled with a multi-million pound shortfall after RedBird Capital Partners pulled out of its bid to buy the paper.
- “The SARS-CoV-2 transmission riddle – Part 16” – In Trust the Evidence, Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan tell of an algorithm designed to identify the source of an epidemic outbreak to within a few dozen metres.
- “A novel analysis of the Pfizer trial: Vaccine effectiveness was nowhere near 95%” – Eyal Shahar explains for the Brownstone Institute why he never trusted the Pfizer trial. “That 95% effectiveness against a respiratory virus was too good to be true,” he writes.
- “Debunked! European and Oceanian Covid vaccine studies torn to shreds” – Raphael Lataster of Okay Then News announces the arrival of the third and final part of his meta-critique of influential studies purporting to show that the COVID-19 vaccine are successful.
- “Monkeypox immunity lasts two years, vaccines last two minutes” – Roger Watson in the Conservative Woman welcomes some good news about immunity to Monkeypox and some bad news for monkeypox vaccines.
- “Hard-working families are being destroyed to pay for the benefits class” – “We are stuck in a compassion trap,” says Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph, “where the productive are forced to provide for the rest of society.”
- “Cancel crowd were actually green with envy” – “Modern battle cries that felled the writer Kate Clanchy and others were hiding a more ancient motive for vindictiveness,” says James Marriott in the Times. Namely, envy.
- “Tesco renames Christmas tree as ‘evergreen tree’” – Tesco is under fire for rebranding Christmas trees as “evergreen trees”, the Telegraph reports.
- “The Doge philosophy is working – cutting council waste is just the start” – Richard Tice explains in the Telegraph that after cutting unnecessary local authority spending, Reform’s next target will be the over-diagnosis of neurodiversity in children.
- “Laffer loathing: my love/hate relationship with a napkin” – “Government sceptics must robustly reject socialist goals,” says Isabel Paterson. “We need to frame the debate so we assess the benefits of public spending against the full range of harms caused by high tax rates.”
- “How Maga is being ripped apart by a young far-right influencer” – The Mail profiles Nick Fuentes, the far-right pundit who has plunged the Republicans into a ‘civil war’.
- “Has QAnon been vindicated?” – “The online movement has, obliquely, been the best guide to events over the past decade,” says Travis Aaroe in Spectator World.
- “Thanks to climate change fearmongers, even the air is scary to young people” – “It’s only a matter of time until snowflakes start skipping work because ‘difficult climate emotions’ are impacting their mental health,” says Celia Walden in the Telegraph.
- “Ocean rises, Science sinks” – Willis Eschenbach takes aim at the idea that a tiny rise in sea levels might be responsible for frigid winters in East Asia, for Watts Up With That?
- “Bill Gates memo confirms the climate change agenda is all about power” – Bill Gates’s recent assertion that global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise” was not the result of his rethinking climate science but his reacting to a new political reality, says W. J. Lee on Amac.
- “El País lies when claiming that climate change ‘threatens the future of food’, it doesn’t” – Spanish-speaking news organization El País claims climate change is threatening food production. “This is false,” says Linnea Lueken in Climate Realism.
- “Climate crisis isn’t a con but it’s time for some realism” – Amber Rudd calls for some Net Zero realism in the Times.
- “If professionals are not allowed to take part in political debate… then democracy suffers” – Watch Patrick Lee on Free Speech Nation, the man who was expelled from the IFoA for his ‘Islamophobic’ social media posts but who has won the first leg of his case in the Employment Tribunal.
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