Know-all ‘expert’ who told us all to drive diesels
Then nonchalantly admitted he’d dropped a blooper when it turned out they were lethal
IN HIS superb new book, Quentin Letts skewers the pretensions of the liberal elite as no one else can. In today’s concluding extract, the Mail’s acerbic political sketchwriter and cultural critic has the Foreign Aid fiasco in his sights — not to mention pious poseurs in Davos and craven BBC bosses who daren’t ruffle the feathers of gender politics bores.
MOST of us are so touchingly obedient that we tend to yield to experts. We accept the word of people like Sir David King, the Government’s one- time Chief Scientific Adviser, an egghead with a Downing Street pass on the lanyard he wore round his neck like a stethoscope.
King was a white South African who had opposed apartheid. He had been photographed shaking hands with U.S. Vice President Al Gore. These things made him a Good Person, stamped as such by the approved news channels.
From 2000 to 2007 he was ‘CSA’ (scientists, like the military, relish acronyms), an era in which officialdom, steered by such deskbangers as Alastair Campbell, came to acquire a heaviness of moral insistence.
It was a time when Tony Blair and his cronies kept justifying policies on the grounds that ‘it’s the right thing to do’. They were right and anyone who opposed them was wicked.
King was gripped by climate change. After a hot spell in 2003 — in which some 2,000 people may have died as a result of the steamy weather — he declared that heatwaves were going to be a worse threat to the world than terrorism. The Spectator magazine was unhelpful enough to note that many more British people died as a result of cold weather.
But his gloomstering was greatly appreciated by the politicians. He gave expert approval to their desire to promote eco issues.
He also said we should buy diesel rather than petrol cars. Millions of British motorists were soon doing just that, encouraged by taxation policies that made diesel-powered vehicles a more attractive option.
We were told this would be good for the environment, though, as the driver of an ageing dieselfuelled Renault Laguna at the time, I remember being surprised. Whenever I put my foot down to accelerate, a cloud of black smoke would pour out of the exhaust pipe and I could see cyclists coughing in the noxious cloud of filth.
Diesels, to my mind, seemed pretty grubby. But not being ‘an expert’, what did I know?
King was bound to know his stuff. At 34 he had become one of Britain’s youngest university professors and his specialist subject was car-engine exhausts. And you don’t become the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser without having a sceptical disposition and the ability to resist pressure from politicians until the evidence has been fully tested. Do you?
BUTit turned out that, far from being good for the environment, diesel cars were, in the words of a former science minister, ‘literally killing people’.
Eventually King coughed out his own admission that he had made a mistake. He claimed he had been misled by carmakers. ‘It turns out we were wrong,’ he said.
Turns out! What masterly nonchalance. A Transport for London report found that as many as 9,500 people a year had been dying in our capital city because of air pollution. You could almost say scientific ineptitude — or arrogance — had caused more deaths than terrorism.
What really drove bungler King and the Blair government to push us towards diesels? Was it raw ( and as we now see, wrong) scientific data?
Or was it high-handedness, an insistence that they knew best, and that even if they cottoned on to weaknesses in the research, they should keep mum on the basis of pas devant les enfants?
Another hoity-toity mandarin in the ‘we know best’ league was Mark Lowcock, until recently Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development ( DfID), the government outfit that spends £13.3 billion a year of our money — not his — on helping foreigners.
Last year he was pictured in Civil Service World in a trendy white shirt, no tie, arms crossed as he glowered at the camera.
The interview with him dwelt on his visionary qualities and his ‘strategy’. It described the battles he had fought to overcome public scepticism and establish foreign aid as a political inevitability.
His proud boast was that international aid was ‘the most amazing success story in human history’. (What, bigger than the spread of Christianity? The Industrial Revolution? The discovery of penicillin?)
He looked to the horizon and expressed the hope that there might come a time, in some distant day, when there would be no more waifs in the world and DfID’s work would be done.
The interview ended with him expressing quiet satisfaction that he will one day be able to dandle his grandchildren on his knee and tell them he did something worthwhile with his life, saving billions of people and helping to ‘eradicate’ poverty.
Certainly foreign aid was good to him. He was on some £165,000 a year as permanent secretary, plus pension entitlements and other perks. Furthermore, his wife worked for the department as a senior economic adviser. No poverty for the Lowcocks!
But this was a handful of sand compared with the £13.3 billion Sir Mark got to spend on our behalf. This represents about £256 million a week, or £36 million a day. Every day of the year. Every year for the past decade or so.
And that money is coming from the British taxpayer.
With the foreign aid budget protected by law thanks to David Cameron’s coalition government, DfID has at times resembled the firemen on the Flying Scotsman, shovelling banknotes into the boiler at double speed, frantic to get the loot spent on time in case the government did not meet its annual spending requirement.
Meanwhile, the British government’s debt interest payments run at £39 billion a year. A more moral course might be to clear our enormous debts first.
What do foreign aid enthusiasts want from the spending? To reduce human suffering, presumably. Or do they seek a buzz of altruism, even if the money belongs to other people? A sense of power over the recipients?
Here, wretches of the world, come and peck crumbs from our hands like December songbirds: is that what drives them?
The DfID website focuses on ‘hand-washing campaigns, vaccination drives and gender equality advocacy’. Hand-washing is certainly a practical response to
hygiene problems but there is something of the primary- school mistress here, checking pupils’ hands before lunch.
What must adults in drought zones think when these Westerners lecture them like this? Is the Bangladeshi grandmother or the Iraqi refugee-camp matriarch expected to lower her eyes with grovelling gratitude to the DfID sahibs? Or is she not more likely to think, quietly: ‘How the bloody hell dare these condescending white bastards tell me when to wash my hands? Do they think I was born yesterday?’