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.