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Read the full article on rationalist.org.uk

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But over the last decade or so, almost entirely unnoticed by the media establishment, religious broadcasting has undergone a transformation. Thanks to the expansion of satellite and cable television, media-savvy religious groups need no longer rely on the God slot to see their beliefs reflected on the small screen – they just do it themselves. Today there are 17 dedicated Christian channels accessible via cable, satellite and digital services, around half of which are based or have studios here in the UK.

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Elphicke had two recent cases in mind. In September there was Save the Children’s report into child poverty in Britain. Its headline finding – that one in eight of the UK’s poorest children go without at least one hot meal a day – was quickly picked up by Labour, who blamed the shocking statistic on the government’s “chaotic decisions”. When the right-leaning media twigged that Save the Children’s chief executive was a former Labour adviser, Conservative MPs lined up to denounce its “political agenda” .

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This week Andreas Whittam Smith announced that he had found the answer. In the pages of the Independent – the newspaper he founded - he launched a “bold plan for a new political movement to restore British democracy”. Whittam Smith wants to assemble hundreds of “like-minded citizens” who will stand for Parliament on the promise that they will serve for one term only. Once elected they would form a government and “put right as many things as possible”.

The plan, as Whittam Smith admits, “takes us into the realm of the near impossible”, but for now let’s assume it’s realistic. Who would these people be? The most important qualification, says Whittam Smith, is that they must “have done something with their lives” by “pursuing demanding careers” with “significant management responsibilities”. He suggests those who have run businesses, charities or schools – those with experience in creating new services, financial planning and managing employees.

Leaving aside the flagrant elitism of this – and I’ll admit it irks me that an Old Berkhamstedian and member of the all-male Garrick Club presumes to judge what “doing something with your life” means – it seems odd that Whittam Smith decries the installation of technocratic government in Greece and Italy, while proposing exactly that for the UK. He seems to believe that politics is no more than simply running things. I happen to think politics has suffered from too much managerialism – Whittam Smith seems to think there hasn’t been enough.

So what about the policies? We’re told there would be a year long process of “participative policy-making” where policy groups, with the help of some “expert advice,” will decide on “a series of measures that the electorate would find attractive”. There is of course a practical problem with this approach. Let’s take immigration, one of the areas Whittam Smith says his candidates will need to have have an “easy-to-understand” policy on. Does he really think an issue so emotive and polarising, a debate so saturated with half-truths and factoids, can be “boiled down”(his words) to one simple policy that will appeal to the whole electorate? “Ideological differences are small these days,” he says – but this is a Westminster conceit, not real life.

There’s a more fundamental problem for me, however; this is doing politics backwards. The political process should be about believing in something, then persuading people – through the cut and thrust of debate and campaigning – why you’re right and others are wrong. It should involve passion and anger. And it should be divisive; every significant democratic reform ever achieved initially met with massive opposition. Whittam Smith seems to want to politely ask the people – or his people, anyway – what they would like first, and then do it. That doesn’t seem too different to the kind of focus group politics we’ve seen for the last 15 years.

It appears Whittam Smith wants to avoid the fundamental questions of institutional change – the need to overhaul, even demolish and replace, our feudal system – that would genuinely change the way we do politics today.

(It’s interesting that, on economics at least, Whittam Smith seems to have prejudged this participative process himself. He says the coalition are pursuing an “economic policy that allows no hope for the future”. So, presumably, if you broadly support the government’s programme of cuts, you won’t be welcome.)

Then there are serious questions of transparency about the campaign itself. Below the manifesto there’s a list of names – the 30-strong campaign team. Who are they? How were they recruited? Then there’s the question of money. How will this campaign be funded in the future? Who’s funding it now? Who will be accountable for how it spends its money?

Finally, there is a basic question of competence. “Creative use of digital media could equal if not exceed the power of the political parties to raise funds and organise elections,” says Whittam Smith, but Democracy 2015 doesn’t yet have a working website. And as far as I can tell, no attempt has been made to work with groups already campaigning for democratic reform: Unlock Democracy, Republic and Electoral Reform Society, for example. Why shut these organisations (along with their campaigning experience and valuable supporter bases) out of the process?

I’ll watch Democracy 2015 with interest, but for now it seems like a grandstanding gimmick rather than the birth of a serious movement. A symptom, perhaps, of what’s wrong with politics today, but certainly not a solution.

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Mark Lynas, author of The God Species and a longstanding critic of environmentalist orthodoxy, is similarly scathing. “There’s a sense that a substantial proportion of conventional eco-philosophy is not based on rational empirical evidence,” he says. “They claim to be comfortable with science on climate change, but show the reverse inclination when it comes to issues like GM and nuclear power.”

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First some background. NLP is best described as a set of communication “tools and techniques” that first emerged in the 1970s with a book called The Structure of Magic I by the movement’s founders Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Its fundamental concept is the primary representation system (PRS), the “internal map” which supposedly determines our actions and emotions.

The theory is that there are five basic modes of interpreting and relating to the world: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. If you’re a visual person you tend to think in images and use visual metaphors, whereas those with an auditory PRS talk to themselves and learn by listening.

Besides these behavioural clues, we can supposedly tell which PRS a person has by observing their eye movement – a visual person looks up to the left, an auditory person sideways, and so on.

Once you’ve deduced another person’s PRS, the theory goes, you can “tune in” to them by adjusting your own language and behaviour to reflect theirs. The result is that the other person will be more easily influenced or manipulated.

NLP’s roots are in psychotherapy and counselling but, having met with scepticism from healthcare professionals, it moved into the self-help and management training sectors, where it expanded rapidly. It’s not hard to see why – NLP’s claims must be enormously attractive to managers seeking to control recalcitrant staff, or salespeople trying to close a deal.

It’s a nice idea, but it simply doesn’t stand up. The PRS theory was discredited as far back as the 1980s (Michael Heap’s work is invaluable here) and the industry hasn’t managed to provide any compelling evidence since. Put simply, NLP has nothing to do with neurology or linguistics – at best it’s psychobabble, at worst a “shameful, fraudulent cult”. (See Martin Parkinson’s excellent Skeptic article from 2003 for a more detailed explanation – and debunking – of NLP.)

But it seems our local authority HR managers haven’t caught up. At least 55 local authorities have put employees on NLP courses in the last three years. Among the worst offenders are Suffolk County Council, which has trained 59 staff in NLP since 2009, Stockport Council (88), Coventry City Council (114) and Lancashire County Council (180).

A mitigating factor (perhaps) is that most of these councils have in-house NLP “master practitioners” who lead the training for their colleagues, so it’s more a case of wasted time and energy rather than money – although there’s a moral question of whether publicly-funded authorities should be actively promoting non-evidence based techniques.

Of those councils that did pay external trainers, there’s a wide variation in the cost of training. Coventry County Council managed to train 114 of its staff for just £10 per head, whereas City of Stoke-on-Trent paid more than £1,500 each for nine employees to be trained in NLP. Worcestershire City Council spent over £33,000 training 30 people as part of its “coaching referral programme”, while Melton Borough Council paid a staggering £2,400 to train one person. (Download the full results.)

These aren’t huge amounts of money, but in these straightened times can we really afford to fritter away ever-shrinking training budgets on pseudoscience? Why not just throw a party for council staff? It would do more for staff morale and industrial relations than tuning in to a kinaesthetic PRS ever will.

For Haworth, it was a beautiful young woman with a clipboard. Originally from Lancashire, Haworth was living in Canada when the glamorous recruiter approached him on a Toronto street. After helping with a survey, he signed up for a four-day self-improvement course on the promise that it would help him stop smoking. In those four days Haworth claims he was hypnotised 16 times. “Initially we just followed the instructions of the person running the workshop and sat there with our eyes closed listening to her talking,” he says, “but by the time the end of the course came along she would say, ‘Let’s meditate’ and get us into a deep trance.”

Read the full article on the New Humanist website