People unwilling to dig deeper

One of the most important and informative parts of this paper are the letters of Mr Bob Britnell. I and my friends, who are largely well and widely read, often with significant academic qualifications, find one after another political decisions made by the British population a complete mystery.

Examples include 37% of the electorate voting for Brexit despite the clearly disastrous outcomes it would mean for our nation that are becoming more obvious every day, and the failure of many to get vaccinated or wear masks despite the advice of experts.

But reading Mr Britnell’s letters makes everything clear. If factbased reports are produced by scientists, he won’t have read them whether they’re by economists, diplomats, biologists or climate scientists. Rather he has the notion that experts - people who spend their whole life studying a particular subject - have no more right to publish their work than he does to write letters utterly devoid of any factual basis.

His letter published in the January 20 issue [Is crisis of our own making?’] is a classic . He asks “what if we are wrong in our assumptions that the ill effects are man-made?”

Well, firstly, these are not assumptions but deductions made from a large number of detailed observations, agreed by well over 95% of climate scientists. But the answer to his actual question is that all of climate science is wrong and the hard work of the scientists misplaced. By extension, this would also be true of all science since all scientists work in the same way.

The reason that Britain is in such a bad way is that there is now a massive divide between those who have been more extensively educated and those who have not. There did not used to be that divide. People did not need to spend a lot of time in a classroom to respect the work of those who did, as those who can’t install plumbing, for instance, respected those who did. The internet of course has not improved the access to knowledge as expected, with misinformation spread on social media, but the source of the problem is not restricted to that. Four of the main printed outlets contribute also – for instance, publishing massive amount of misinformation about the value or otherwise of immigrants. The ill effect we now see is British people are wholly unwilling to engage in the jobs they used to do. What we have is that so many people, like Mr Britnell, are unwilling to dig into the widely available information before writing on a particular issue, and prefer to continue to base their thoughts on prejudice and ignorance. It’s all so sad. Richard Cooper

Crouch Lane, Selling