Not much evidence of common sense, Minister

BRITAIN has always prided itself on its strong sense of humour. Yet our Government has told us that it has appointed a Minister for Common Sense and expects us to keep a straight face. It must be a tough gig. Because there hasn’t been a huge amount of it in evidence lately.

Common sense would suggest that our children would be getting regular check-ups on their teeth and looked after properly before they develop painful problems. In reality, the leading cause of admissions to A&E for children is reported to be tooth pains. In what world does it make sense to increase the pressure on hard-pressed accident and emergency centres instead of protecting children from getting problems in the first place by providing universally available NHS treatment?

Common sense would prevent a government from forcing people to buy their water from a single supplier and then fail to properly regulate and control that company. It would suggest that laws which prevent raw sewage from being poured into our rivers should be enforced instead of routinely ignored. It would stop companies that have paid out huge dividends, whilst loading a service to the public with crippling debts, from then telling their customers that they must accept painful price rises to pay for essential investment all that borrowing should have already paid for.

Common sense would have started building HS2 from the north. It would have directed investment towards fixing horribly neglected regional services like the Cross Pennine route or the squalid Bradford services from the start. Instead of suddenly deciding just before an election to announce distant plans to sort out problems that could already have been resolved if the right priorities had been applied.

Your average woman in the street might reasonably believe that after getting us through a major health pandemic and being applauded by the public our health and care workers would be properly looked after when the crisis eased. Instead of seeing the service decline even further as the Government presides over one clumsy confrontation after another.

Common sense would suggest that what we would have learned from lockdown is the value of communities coming together and working to a common purpose. Instead, faith in our political leaders has been further undermined as squalid point scoring and revelations of shameful behaviour dominate an inquiry that was meant to help us plan better to prevent the next pandemic. The good sense of the vast majority of the public enabled them to recognise that the rules had to be stuck to by everyone in order to reduce extreme risk. Too many in government thought the rules didn’t apply to them.

Most sensible people would expect their local council to be able to deliver basic services like emptying the bins and looking after the elderly without going into debt.

Few ordinary people would choose to tell farmers that they needed to face fresh competition from imports produced with low regard for environmental standards at the same time as they were being rightly asked to farm their own land in more sustainable ways. Even fewer would devise a system of food supply that puts all the profits in the hands of the retailers and wholesalers and leaves the actual producers struggling to make ends meet in the face of low prices.

Common sense would suggest that a woman who managed to crash the economy and put people’s bills up after only 45 days in office should hang her head in shame and spend the rest of her life apologising to people who had to pay higher mortgages and higher rents because of her reckless incompetence. Instead, she is busy giving us all lectures on how much better things would be if we had followed her daft theories for even longer at even greater cost.

Most reasonable people make judgments about whether government policies have worked on the basis of whether the promises have been kept and the nation feels a better and stronger place after the change. Our government seems to expect us to adopt blind faith that Brexit will eventually prove a success regardless of pesky things like a lack of any serious evidence of life improving.

Some of us think that it is a very bad idea to make it harder to do business with our nearest neighbours and there is little prospect of all the good things we were promised materialising. Others tell us we need to have a little more faith as we double down on implementing political theories that were once thought foolishly marginal and extreme.

I leave it to the good judgment of readers to draw their own conclusions on where common sense sits with that one.