Wednesday 24 February 2021

The glaring incompetence of our governments

  I challenge anyone to read “Blunders of our Governments” by Crewe and King and “Scared to Death” by Christopher Booker and Richard North and not come to the conclusion that our politicians and governments are totally incompetent.

I read the first several months ago and it categories the half a dozen ‘Human’ and ‘System’ failures that lead to our politicians, quite simply, floundering as they go about the task of trying to govern us.

The second “Scared to Death” was first published in 2007 but the 2020 revised edition, which I finished last week, has been brought right up to date to include a chapter on the Coronavirus. This is a must read book which I highly recommend.

 “Scared to Death” is 487 pages of detailed explanation and analysis of the many different type of scares that our governments have had to deal with in the last 50 odd years and reads a bit like a crime thriller as it outlines each scare and the government’s reaction and mis-management of each one.

The book covers 22 scares which included Salmonella, BSE, Satanic Child Abuse, Passive Smoking, Asbestos and Global Warming to name but half a dozen of them. In all of them the officials concerned and the media certainly didn't help the situation with they level of hype they introduced to each but the government’s actions, and the millions of pounds spent to ‘deal’ with them, were in the main completely unnecessary.

The role of our politicians is nicely summed up in the final chapter where it states: -

“A real problem politicians have with scares is the one they share with journalists. Much of the business of modern government has become so technical that it is often very difficult for them to get their heads round its complexities. They cannot develop an informed view of their own. Ministers under pressure of a scare are thus very much in the hands of their officials and advisers. If the advisers themselves have fallen under the scare’s spell, it would take a minster of unusual intelligence and strength of character to be able to identify the flaws in their advice and overrule it.”

I’m afraid it is blindingly obvious, looking at the majority of MPs sitting on the Green Benches, that we are not served by politicians of intelligence, strength of character and I’d add leadership abilities to master a brief and challenge their advisors. In fact, I’d say the average MP would struggle to run a welk stall or a bath or organise a piss up in a brewery or any other synonym you care to use. However, many are brilliant at jumping on any passing bandwagon and spewing out meaningless generalised rhetoric which achieves the square root of zero but usually suffices for the particular news cycle at the time. 

Finally, all the while our politicians are making a complete ‘clusterfuck’ of the scare in question or in our general governance, we the public can do absolutely nothing to stop the sheer lunacy of their decision making. This is why any reform of our governance and democracy has to deal with the key issue of who ultimately holds ‘POWER’ and, I'll happily stand corrected, but it is only our six demands that address this vital question by inisting the people have to have their inherent sovereignty recognised and confirmed in a written constitution.

People without power become cannon fodder to the vanity and incompetence of our useless party indoctrinated politicians.

 

3 comments:

  1. I thought that the original "Scared to Death" was excellent, but didn't know about the update, so thank you. Half way through "The Secret Barrister" at the moment - scary stuff, then it will be Peter Oborne's "The Assault on Truth" before "Scared to Death".

    As for "who ultimately holds ‘POWER’", we, the people, have given it up through apathy. However, those in power seem to have failed to learn a lesson of history, repeated over and over, that money printing ALWAYS ends in economic disaster. I don't know when economic collapse will happen, but when it does, it will be sudden. Will people then look around and adapt THA?

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  2. If you have read the original S to D then there may not be much new in the revised version except the chapter on covid.

    Yes I've read both The Secret Barrister books and learnt the key lesson that it is not the judges who are to blame for lenient sentences but our politicians for the laws they pass on sentencing.THA would help the people have their view heard on our sentencing policy.

    I personally won't bother with Oborne's book as I already know our PM, like other politicians, is an inveterate liar from his days as the Telegraph correspondent in Brussels. Reading Dr North's blog Turbulent Times also highlights his lies as and when they occur.

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    1. One point made in the Secret Barrister, is about financial cut upon cut to the justice system so that it is teetering on the verge of collapse.

      The party that calls itself Conservative has also attacked the NHS. First we had the ill thought out Clarke reforms of 1989 and 90, introducing an Internal Market. The next attempt at reform was the Lansley reforms (2012 Health and Social Care Act). This completed a reform programme described by former NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson as so big it could be seen from space. ‘We’ created NHS England, to run the NHS, with new regulators and GP-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) replacing primary care trusts and town halls driving ‘healthy lifestyle programmes’. Did we really think that greater competition in the NHS would improve it? Weighed down with the huge burden of PFI, Covid came along. This winter was going to be bad for the NHS, with its huge shortages of nurses and doctors (thank you Jeremy Hunt) without Covid, but with it, government’s arrogant incompetence has been shown up for what it is.

      I mention this because, at the same time, money seems to be thrown at consultants, family and friends to run this or that, but not at the NHS, the Courts and other public institutions, not at those institution upon which we depend. This government is broken, corrupt and non-reformable, IMO.

      I found Peter Oborne’s book useful because he itemises the history behind the issues that have lead to such a broken, corrupt and non-reformable government. Something radical is needed such as THA, but how to make the elements of it happen in time, is a conundrum.

      (As an aside, Oborne’s book is an easy read, short and he references every allegation. It follows on well from his “The Rise of Political Lying” 2005, which is a horror story of the way that the Blair administration took lying to a whole new level. As he wrote in 2005 “At what point, if we have not reached it already, will we cease to believe a word politicians say?”)

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