Letters | 23 August 2018

Not up to snuff

Sir: The country is indeed crying out for expertise, as James Ball and Andrew Greenway wrote last week (‘The rise of the bluffocracy’, 18 August). But the
main problem is with the civil service, not politicians.

The civil service has traditionally wanted experts to be ‘on tap, not on top’. This attitude has done immense damage to Britain. Since 1970 the scientific civil service has been abolished in a series of reductions and privatisations. The result in 2001 was that there was nobody in government who had any clue about the epidemic of foot and mouth disease.

In the education department there seems to be nobody who understands what a standard deviation is; nobody who appreciates the bottom one-sixth of the ‘Bell Curve’. The result is a vast waste of money within the education budget.

Perhaps The Spectator could set an example by instituting a science column that combines scientific excellence with the magazine’s high standard of writing.
Michael Gorman

Guildford, Surrey

Call their bluff

Sir: James Ball and Andrew Greenway suggest our public institutions need to let the experts in. Unfortunately, the bluffers in charge of those institutions have been deluding themselves for years that they have been employing experts. These ‘experts’ are the über-bluffers of the world, more commonly known as management consultants. They hold many meetings and then produce a report setting out the blindingly obvious, supported by meaningless statistics and pretty graphs, and crammed with buzzwords.

So Messrs Ball and Greenway are correct that what we need are real experts. But those in the top echelons of these institutions also need to be able to admit that they are not always right and to listen to the ideas put forward by their more junior colleagues. Otherwise, nothing will change.