Too much zeal

Many of us are beginning to weary of the pushier sort of ‘expert’. Gone is the sense of proportion, the admission of scientific doubt, the ability to weigh risks against benefits. Taking seriously a year’s worth of their health warnings would give anyone an eating disorder.

It hardly builds confidence when so much of the advice directly contradicts whatever was confidently pronounced beneficial only months previously. The natural reaction is to take it all with a pinch of salt (if that is still allowed) and assume that the hasty appearance of a government minister on the one o’ clock news to endorse the latest findings is an early indication that they will transpire to be nonsense.

For 20 years we were solemnly and repeatedly lectured that 21 alcoholic units a week for men and 14 units for women were the upper limits of what is safe to drink. A couple of months ago we discovered that these figures were, in the belated admission of their author, ‘plucked out of thin air’. But did anyone think to query the evidence at the time? No, we were taken in by the government-endorsed expert. The only wonder is that he has not been knighted.

Sadly, such frequent infelicities are minor matters compared to the jaw-dropping outrages and abuses of authority revealed by the dogged research of Christopher Booker and Richard North. Scared to Death is a masterful and salutary account of the most costly misjudgments of the last 25 years. Written with painful clarity, here is an important study of the process by which sloppy science becomes a difficult to shift orthodoxy. In the process, Booker and North have produced a shocking but not remotely hysterical indictment of how government error is re-enforced — rather than held to account — by the media and special interest groups.