CAMBRIDGE LETTER
Looking back on a fiasco
BY BILL KIRKMAN
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The Conservative Party in the U.K. is now acknowledging some of its past mistakes and is waking up to the realisation that people are important.
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IN a fascinating BBC radio programme this week, a group of people who had been involved in the privatisation of the railways just over 10 years ago came together to talk about it. The privatisation is now widely recognised to have been a disastrous mess. It produced a large number of competing train service providers and separate ownership of the track. The quality of service went down, and the prices went up. The standard of track maintenance went down and a major railway accident in 2000 led to Railtrack, the company responsible, being placed in administration — in effect, abolished.
The wrong way of doing it
In the radio conversation there was general agreement that, whatever might be thought about the principle of privatising the railways, the way it had been done, the model that had been chosen, was bad. One thing that came across was that people with expertise in running railways had been largely ignored. A merchant banker, for example, was brought in to run the franchising, and he had no experience at all of how railways operated.
None of this would have surprised any listener with a reasonably well informed, but not expert, interest in railway transport. The privatisation was carried out during the final years of John Major's Conservative Government, when it was manifestly floundering. At the time, there was widespread criticism of the scheme. Ordinary railway users saw, and said, that it would be unworkable. They were ignored, not just because of the incompetence of those in charge, but because of the doctrinaire commitment of the government to the principle that private sector management is inevitably more competent than public sector management.
As part of its current orgy of moving away from its past, the Conservative Party under David Cameron has recognised its errors of this kind. This week the party has embarked on a policy of working with, and valuing, public service employees. In education, according to the report of a party policy group, the party wants to work with professional teachers rather than ignoring them. "The political culture has often required the Conservatives to belittle the efforts of people whose objectives we share, and to defend the indefensible consequences of policies for which the previous Conservative government was responsible". Recognising that valuing people produces better results than berating them is not rocket science.
The attitudes, whose stupidity is now being recognised, are not, of course, unique to one political party, or to one type of organisation. They can be found in a huge variety of aspects of ordinary daily life. One, relatively trivial, example this week came from the writer of a letter to The Guardian this week. He had been told by an assistant at Boots at a Heathrow terminal that he could take their egg mayonnaise and cress sandwich through security but their cheese, tomato and pesto pasta was on the banned list. "Can anyone" he asked "give a logical, scientific explanation for this nonsense?" It is a good question.
There are obviously many reasons why mistakes, and stupid decisions, are made. Stupidity, pure and simple, is one of them, and that is something that should not be forgotten. If something seems to be manifestly silly, that may well be because it is.
Experts can make mistakes too
Then there is what I would call the "expert" fallacy. People labelled as experts are probably nearly always exactly that, but it is worth looking below the surface, and examining what exactly is the nature of their expertise. There was a widely publicised serious miscarriage of justice in the U.K. a year or so ago, attributable to flawed statistical evidence given by a distinguished medical specialist. It was a good reminder that claims to expertise should not simply be taken at their face value.
The doctrinaire delusion is probably the most likely cause of bad decisions with far-reaching effects, because it is the one to which politicians are innately prone. It is quite salutary to turn doctrinaire assertions on their head. If you counter "Business men are the obvious people to run universities" with "Professors of history are the best people to run large retail businesses" you will at least recognise that there is a subject for discussion.
Often the problem seems to be that decisions focus on procedure rather than purpose. If those determined to privatise the railways had started by asking: "What are the railways for, and what systems need to be in place to ensure that they achieve it?" the mad rush to ignore the experts might have been halted.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, UK. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
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