Pat Kane: Neil Oliver goes on about a ‘Nudge Unit’ – but does he have a point?

Yes, you’ve guessed, it’s Neil Oliver Time on GB News. Mad as hell, won’t take it anymore, etc. And he’s now on the hunt for the “mental manipulators” and “nudgers” that operate in national governments. Those who believe that We, The People are “too stupid” to notice politicians’ control-obsessed shenanigans.

I don’t often visit the Ikea-furnished sepulchre that is GB News (though I could paper my desk with their invitations for me to join them there). But is there anything stranger on the media of these islands than Oliver’s six-minute orations?

He looks like he’s entered the studio by a rope from above, landing with guerrilla precision onto Alan Partridge’s couch. When there, fit a sicht: a riot of competing follicular flows, black and gray like those roiling clouds (or alternately, like the Bee Gees meets a badger’s arse).

READ MORE: 'Disgraceful' Neil Oliver pledges not to follow another Covid lockdown

His gauzy neckerchief roguishly brushes his street-level denim jacket. And his I-Shall-Tell-You-This speaking style could get him a gig in a Outer Isles presbytery (deputy pastor).

In a very similar manner to those selfie-taking narcissists who stormed the Capitol building at the beginning of this year, Oliver is a kind of cosplay rebel. He’s not quite that barechested, underemployed actor with the bullhorned hat. But he’s in the zone – sonorously urging resistance to vaccination, or wokeness, or any other component of the establishment.

Like a leisurewear Braveheart, a Celtique sofa-warrior, Oliver urges his committed viewers (or maybe viewer) to “resist these laws, in the name of ... MORALITY”. And then, at last, a merciful fade to black.

It’s weird enough that mainstream media operators are banking their success on material that, 20 years ago, would be a satirical item in a Chris Morris show. But what might be slightly weirder is that, on the topic of this week’s presentation at least, the mousse-laden marauder might have about a third of a point.

Yes, there is a “Nudge Unit” (or more formally, a Behavioural Insights Unit) attached to the current government (though they began under the 2010 Coalition government and took their firepower out of the New Labour creation Nesta). And yes, their aim – as Wikipedia neatly describes it – is this: “To use social engineering, as well as techniques in psychology and marketing ... to influence public thinking and decision-making, in order to improve compliance with government policy, and thereby decrease costs related to inaction”.

And yes, they’ve manifestly been applying these arts throughout Covid, though to what degree of success is arguable. Oliver, bolstered by the arguments of ex-nude photographer Laura Dodsworth and her book A State Of Fear: How The UK Government Weaponised Fear During The Covid-19 Pandemic, is at his most expectorant about this: “Behavioural Insights Team. Nudge Unit. If your partner was using mind games and other psychological tricks to make you do what he or she wanted, always with the undisguised threat of unhappy consequences should you fail to comply or submit to those wants, you’d be right in thinking you were in an abusive relationship with that person.”

Dodsworth and Oliver pick up on statements like these from Sage committees this March, that people “still do not feel sufficiently threatened … the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased”. Or from epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, that “wearing masks helps us be cautious: it reminds people we’re not completely out of the woods yet”. Isn’t this more about social control than health, they howl?

Let’s look at the actual practise of nudging. Nudge theory’s basic premise is, yes, that we are not as in charge of ourselves as we think. We are subverted in our clear thoughts and intentions by a range of cognitive biases or “predictable irrationalities” as Harvard’s Dan Ariely puts it.

These biases come from the fact that most human evolution took place under calmer, more self-determined, hunter-gatherer conditions. When this equipment meets our frazzling modern lives, it means we easily succumb to addiction and depression. But it also means that we can be subtly “nudged” by policy makers and companies, who tap into these limitations.

We must attend closely to metaphor and language, say our freedom warriors. Ministers game our aversion to loss by talking about “cancelling Xmas” – then uncancelling it, boosting our dopamine. Or they frame questions about vaccination this way: should parents have the right of consent over their children or not (which assumes they should have a vaccination in the first place). And Johnson’s galumphing good spirits aims to appeal to our “optimism bias” – that is, our tendency to always overestimate our prospects for success.

And on and on: a huge list of these gameable mental habits are now available. Facing this menu, Oliver and Dodsworth think our freedom and civil liberty is on the line. We need to reclaim our minds from fiendishly manipulative elites.

Hmm. I’ve been a foe of nudge theory for a long time. Its inventors, the economists Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, used to quip that their model of humanity wasn’t homo economicus, but Homer (as in Simpson) Economicus. Governments and managers should start to deeply assume the laziness and impulsiveness of populations, and not presume that we were purely rational “utility maximisers” (as the jargon of classical economics put it).

MY answer has always been: what about Lisa Simpson as a model – that dedicated, self-educating and self-aware, naturally ethical, joyfully performative girl? And crucially, what happens when Lisa (and for that matter Homer) realise that they’re being nudged? We may be hunter-gatherers staggering around in a bewildering present, but we can still hear gossip and information around our digital campfires…

So the more we talk about nudge, the less nudgeable we are. In other respects, too, Oliver is behind the curve. For even the Nudgers themselves realise that “architecting choices”, or being “liberal paternalists” – that is, steering us dreamily to their desired ends – may not work for these times of acute crisis.

This week, a spunky researcher at the New Economics Foundation sent me the Behavioural Insights Unit paper that was swiftly taken down from the UK Government website on October 19, the day Johnson’s government launched his net-zero plan.

It’s a fascinating read, but there is a very explicit line in the document: “We do not have time to nudge our way to net zero”.

The Nudgers go on to admit that “soft persuasion” won’t change enough “downstream” individual and consumer behaviour. It’s

not enough to get us “down the slide” that most emissions graphs display, charting our carbon reductions between now and the mid-2030s.

With refreshing candour (which probably caused the article to be taken out of the public realm) the Nudgers say that policy has to go “upstream”. Meaning, to where the problems originate.

They go on to suggest some rather familiar acts of government. For example, taxes – to be imposed on frequent flyers, on beef, on carbon content in products (similar to the “sugar tax” on soft drinks, which reduced it by 50% in products).

READ MORE: Presenter Neil Oliver thinks our freedom and civil liberties are on the line

Or hey, let’s try regulation – by which they mean stronger regimes for car companies and for transport procurement, laws that “unshroud” companies dodgy environmental practices, forcing a shift to electric.

Oh dear! Put all that in the bin. Perhaps Mr Oliver might like to dwell on the fact that we can all have the soft-theory, semi-paranoid conversations about mind manipulation that we want, across many screens, indeed entire channels.

But when the state is urged to fulfil its social-democratic purpose – which is to defend the collective good in the face of disruption and danger – the material is literally suppressed by Tory ministers from the public realm.

Conspiracy? Just ideology, I think, dear Lord Waveheart. Sorry to douse your flaming jets.