The stupidity of elites

 As a child I was encouraged by my parents to trust 'knowledgeable people' - teachers, vicars and the like. Growing up I noticed that many of these people had achieved great things, for they tended to display an alphabet of post-nominal initials; I also noticed, though, that many of them seemed to be lacking in aspects of knowledge that other, more 'ordinary', people seemed to take for granted.

Recently there was an example of a mother who, faced with looking after her disabled son unsupported during lockdown, had a mental breakdown and killed him. In order to protect us (or the NHS) from the effects of Covid, our leaders, on the advice of highly qualified experts (in SAGE), had set up an environment where the most vulnerable could not cope. To me, and many like me, it was obvious that this sort of thing would happen - and that it will continue to happen for years, long after lockdowns, as a result of the measures that have been implemented. Surely, in a civilised society, new rules that come in for any purpose should improve on what was there before - not make them worse.

There may be some in Government, or SAGE, who realised there was a risk that this sort of thing would happen, but it seems unlikely that the true risk was understood by enough members of the group to influence their recommendations. This, I would argue, is because 'experts' spend much of their lives working in their specialist fields; they have therefore never experienced, or mixed with anyone who experienced, the kind of life that mother lived. (This is indeed a common problem that carers like me face; few, even highly qualified people, understand what it's like to care for someone, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year). As a consequence, the group of experts displays what to many seems like unbridled stupidity.

Even more ridiculous is that there are often 'underlings' around the instigator of the idea who should give them guiding advice, but perhaps find themselves unwilling to seemingly criticise a dominant individual. 

We all probably have examples of 'experts' who have apparently ignored plain common sense before doing or recommending something unbelieveably stupid. Here are two of mine. 

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I was 'lucky' enough to attend Christ's Hospital, the boarding school for talented children of families of average incomes, between 1970 and 1976. The headmaster was one David Hay Newsome, M. A., a historian, theologian and former Fellow and Senior Tutor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was, my mother told me, a 'very intelligent man'. 

He didn't always show it; he always seemed out of his depth dealing with teenage boys, especially those from what might be termed the rougher side of the tracks. We were, after all, boys, and teenage boys will try to do things they shouldn't. The school was, in the seventies, often facing financial challenges due to the inflationary economic situation, and, in December 1975, Newsome had a great idea; he passed the hat round all the staff to get a sum of around £850 together so that, at lunchtime on the last Saturday of term, he could give each boy a pound with the guidance to follow the parable of the talents, and come back with ten pounds in one year's time to boost the school's coffers.

I shuddered when I heard him announce his plans, for he clearly didn't understand that this was the last Saturday of term; on such occasions teenage boys would want to celebrate, and the main thing that stopped them doing something stupid was a lack of funds in their pocket money account. In those days a pound bought a quarter of a bottle of spirits, and, it is fair to say, the off-licenses in Horsham did well that Saturday afternoon (even though sales to under 18s were, of course, illegal).

Some of those who ended up drinking alcohol were young - no more than fourteen - and the dorm resounded to the sound of their vomiting for an hour or so that night. Us older boys (I was 16) were less affected because we knew a bit more about drink, and were more occupied with the girls that were visiting from the local high school, but we were of course blamed, and hauled before Newsome the following day for the inevitable bollocking and six strokes of the cane. At no point did he show any awareness that the whole mess could have been avoided if he had arranged for the money to be given out just before boys left at the end of term.

In December 1976 my then-former housemaster had to write to me to ask for the pound and sum I had made on it; it being the end of University term, I was broke. I sent him a cheque for a quid, and I suspect many others did. He was a nice bloke, but perhaps a bit of a wimp; he would have known what would happen, but would never have been able to persuade Newsome of the risks of his idea.

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Viv and I live on a new build development; we bought our house in 2013. Planning permission was granted for it in the early years of the 2000's, when Tony Blair was PM and John Prescott  Secretary of State for the Environment.

Prescott made many foolish statements, one of which was to announce that, if local authorities were going to reject developers' plans for new housing developments, he would encourage them to appeal to the Secretary of State and he would approve them - irrespective of what the local authority wanted.

Developers used this as an excuse to cram in more houses than they should, and, on our development, in order to meet commitments they'd made about green spaces, some roads were laid out with no pavement, just a green verge. The roads also feature cobbled traffic calmers; the net result of these features is that the roads are dangerous for users of wheelchairs or walking frames, to the point of forming barriers (Viv once nearly ended up headbutting the tarmac when I was pushing her in her wheelchair). I asked the council how this had come about, for it clearly breaches the Equality Act (in terms of DDA compliance): the answer was that they didn't like the plans when the developer submitted them, but didn't want to reject them because Prescott would overrule them and it might get the DoE looking at other matters in their area more closely than they would like. 

So, gobby John Prescott has left us with a network of roads on our estate which are unsuitable for use by the less mobile, despite all the Labour Party talk of equality and diversity. There must surely have been a Labour Party worker who could have warned him about getting too cosy with developers, and what would happen: or perhaps new Labour didn't really care about ordinary people.

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In one management course I attended the lecturer did a good test: delegates were asked to rate themselves as communicators. They then read out the most boring bit of the old testament they could find, and tested the delegates on what had been said; few did very well. The point was that the material was, to the delegates, boring to listen to, so their attention  wandered, yet communication is about listening as well as speaking.  Highly qualified specialists and experts may find some everyday matters quite uninteresting, and consequently fail to understand them, leading to poor decisions later on.

Those using the services of 'experts' should pay attention to this point.