The perversity of politicians

Wednesday September 21, 2011

Government acts not on rational evidence, but on prejudice. The result is that it often achieves the opposite of what it intends, says Simon Hills

In this year’s A-level results bonanza – yes the pass rate hit a record high yet again – one student achieved four straight-A*s in maths, further maths, biology and chemistry. However much easier A-levels may or may not be, it’s pretty impressive.

As good as it’s possible to be, in fact.

But still not good enough for Oxford, University College London, Nottingham or King’s College London.

“It’s weird,” said the student, Prina Shah, “because I got higher than the standard offers.”

Weird indeed, but a clue might lie in these six words: City of London School for Girls. Prina’s school. The latest craze in government circles is a university admissions programme that discriminates positively towards children from poorer backgrounds. There’s not much of an argument used to justify this, but the basic premise is that because poor children at not very good schools don’t have the opportunities that Prina had, for them to achieve, say, Bs, means they are actually brighter that those who got straight As at posh schools.

This, of course, is utter nonsense. For a start, it renders A-levels (the gold standard in exams, politicians tell us) pretty much useless; secondly, among certain ethnic groups, principally Chinese and Indian, academic achievement bears no correlation with wealth; thirdly, it’s just not logical. Would you rather be flown by a pilot from Toxteth with a sixty per cent pass-rate in pilot exams or one from Alderley Edge with ninety?

But politicians are running the country – indeed the world – not on any kind of rational, empirical evidence, but a stack of prejudices they’ve filled their heads with. And the result is that nothing they do works in the real word; indeed they often achieve the opposite of what they intend. This week it transpired that even after years of social engineering the percentage of privately educated children has actually increased in some universities. And you have to go back to the early Sixties before there were more state-school educated Oxbridge students than there are now.

Energy policies are based on wind turbines that are uglier than the Elephant and Castle and massively inefficient. They don’t work when there’s no wind, they don’t work when there’s too much, and there needs to be a back-up power station that exists solely to provide power in either case. Therefore you need to double the number of electricity pylons and cables. Which is being about as green as a pillar box.

Similarly politicians cruise around in Toyota Priuses, a car, you might notice, that no real person buys. Why, because it’s massively inefficient and ludicrously expensive. Because this is a car with TWO ENGINES. One of them uses a nickel metal hydride battery and the nickel has to be mined. And transported. And the battery at some point has to be disposed of. Compared to a little diesel Ford Fiesta it is about as green as the Arsenal Strip.

Meet any government initiative and shake hands with failure. When the government wanted in 2000 to cut teenage pregnancy rates it decided to offer teenagers – without their parents’ consent or even knowledge – free contraception and a sex education that would make a prostitute blush.

Result? Britain’s teenage pregnancy rates are still the highest in Europe. The number of teenage abortions meanwhile has continued to rise in England and Wales. Clearly this sex education programme was not a glittering success. The government’s solution? To start teaching it to five-year-olds.

Despite receiving billions of pounds extra the National Health Service is incapable of keeping its hospitals clean, schools churn out feral, illiterate teenagers, and more billions still are spent on transport policies that have turned the nation’s roads into car parks and public transport that is as reliable as Arthur Daley.

Wind power. Doesn’t work. Smoking bans. Made no difference to the number of smokers whatsoever. Affordable housing, a complete nonsense. Merthyr Tydfil and Dagenham are awash with boarded up houses that can’t be given away. What politicians mean, with their penchant for social engineering, is that there should be affordable housing in nice places like Mayfair.

Increase tax for the rich, tax take is reduced. We’ll no doubt be hit very soon by that very important cry for us to retain British summertime on the basis that it ‘saves lives’ – although when this means sending our children to school in darkness and gives workers two journeys under a night sky offers a clue as to how that might pan out. As for obesity, despite the army of social workers and five-a-day co-ordinators, as a nation we resemble a Beryl Cook painting.

You would have thought, then, that our political leaders would look at themselves and cast a critical eye over their achievements and even life in the real world. But that is as likely as Ann Widdecombe joining Girls Aloud. No, if things are going wrong then a) it is our fault and b) billions more pounds of public money must be spent on hiring more professionals to put us right.

If our politicians say that comprehensive schools are nirvana, then they are. If the NHS is the embodiment of healthcare heaven, then it is. Their policies and propaganda efforts to support them are the same in every aspect to Stalin’s five-year plans for agriculture; they ignore the hard realities of life and instead are drawn up in thrall to political ideology. Tory, Labour or Lib Dem – especially the Lib Dems – have all become politically correct radicals with their feet planted firmly in the air.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State