What if we were to follow social science as we ‘follow the science’? A thread.

In criminology, we know that when governments start casting around for folkdevils, it is to deflect from their own inabilities to keep bigger problems in check, typically economic crises, but now a pandemic.

These folkdevils take an all too predictable form. Foreigners, ethnic minorities and young people are blamed for not abiding by ‘our rules, and our values’ and cast as the worst offenders and a threat to the nation.

The discrimination this engenders entrenches inequalities and grievances that outlive a generation. Media attention switches to small subsections of those so scapegoated who appear to comply with their labelling, further fuelling the demonization of the wider group.

But other far-reaching problems are also caused by this kind of populist politics.

One is that the law-abiding majority comes to see the causes of ‘the problem’ as someone else: the folkdevil. This section of the public might not reflect, for example, on how their ways of life have a bearing on ‘the problem’.

This might be how low taxation rates entrench the poverty that causes certain crimes...

Likewise, during the pandemic, the demand for cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap holidays - consumer demand for industries that create working conditions that have contributed to the spread of covid – has not been something the public have been encouraged to reflect upon.

Second, politicians in need of solutions open the doors to government contracts with private corporate providers who promise instant solutions.

We have seen this in criminal justice with firms like G4S and Serco offering solutions to crime in the form of private security, probation and imprisonment.

While incompetence in delivering such privatised services becomes the news story and contractors are given a steer to improve with new targets set by government, they proceed without a financial interest in reducing or resolving the original problem/crisis.

The shareholders who own private prisons need demand for cells to remain high, and to improve profits by widening their portfolios - to say immigration detention – to keep returns on shares buoyant. Hence, service users have to keep coming back to keep the service profitable.

And so with test, track and trace, we must ask whether there is sustained financial interest among private providers in eradicating covid quickly, because if they do their contracts will be superfluous and there will be poor return on their investment in new infrastructure.

Of course, the people who tend to ask these questions are the sociologists and criminologists and human rights lawyers, whose non-technical skills are currently being derided by a prime minister, who has casts them as 'leftist do-gooders' and hence unpatriotic.

But actually, now is probably the time for social scientists to start explaining why leaders really need the teachings of social science if they are to improve compliance with public health directives...

for they probably reveal the limits of exclusively following natural science which has been unhelpfully popularised as offering a single authoritative perspective – ‘the science’ - that politicians can pick and choose when to hide behind.

What can we learn from social science about how better to get peope to reflect upon the need to attend to lessons from natural sciences, when these lessons are being politicized daily but are otherwise hugely important?