Politicos treat the public like cogs in a machine

The Government’s hideously complex tier system is the product of a political class which has entirely lost touch with ordinary people. It takes little account of the way people actually live and work, and presumes citizens are cogs in a machine they can control. Consider for a moment how those in Whitehall pushing for a second lockdown have taken to describing it as being a “circuit breaker”. In electronics a circuit breaker is an automatic device that cuts off the flow of electricity. In applying that type of terminology to Covid, officials betray a profoundly mechanistic mind-set. If only they push the right buttons, society will comply.

Push the button marked “tier 3”, they seem to imagine, and millions of us will change our behaviour, altering the rate of infection of the virus. Really? Does anyone imagine, for example, that a young dating couple will observe what the Government has decreed about overnight stays? If you live in a tier 2 zone the rules say, overnight stays are only allowed “subject to social contact rules”. Good luck enforcing the twometre rule on the sofas of every courting couple.

By having lots of rules for every situation, we risk ending up with low levels of compliance where it really matters. Perhaps if, like Sweden, we did not issue edicts governing the petty, people might actually comply where it counts. Right now, this isn’t happening. According to research from King’s College London, a mere 11 percent of people notified that they have been in contact with someone tested positive, are selfisolating. Fewer than one in five who develop symptoms are doing so.

How did we come to be governed by officials who imagine our country can be run this way? For years, commentators have lamented the way in which politics has become increasingly dominated by a class of professional politicians, with little real world experience. After gaining a degree in the humanities or social science, political wannabes will often do a short stint as a special adviser, or swot up for the Civil Service Fast Stream exams.

Then off they go, advancing their careers in Westminster and Whitehall by helping make public policy decisions on behalf of a public they simply do not understand.

If the policymaking classes don’t grasp this, nor do they appear to understand science. “Science,” wrote one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists, Richard Feynman, “is the belief in the Ignorance of the Experts.” Yet too few politicians in Britain have science backgrounds, so they defer to the expert advice they receive uncritically. The tier approach sits on a simple metric of how many positive tests there are per hundred thousand of the local population. Yet it does not seem to have occurred to ministers that the increase in positive results might reflect an increase in the number of tests, rather than just an increase in infection.

Prone to overestimate their grasp of the situation and ability to engineer good outcomes, our policymaking class overlook the reality – understood in Sweden – that it is often better to aim for the least worst outcomes instead.