Get off your knees

Is it all national treasure Maureen Lipman’s fault? As the eternally optimistic Beattie in the BT adverts (Beattie/BT, geddit?) she consoled her grandson’s dismal exam performance with the eminently quotable “You get an ology, you’re a scientist”. The ology in question? Sociology. And the rest, they say, is history, or as we now call it, revisionism, as the documented events of yesteryear are pressed into service to tell us all how to be ashamed of our whiteness and industry.

I went up to university in the mid-70s where I discovered something I hadn’t expected. My own degree was a cobbled-together ‘combined honours’ affair, something I later learned was a product of the push to get more people into higher education regardless of merit, but at least my studies (Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering) got me into gainful employment. My discovery was that a disappointingly large number of students were reading the dark arts of ‘social science’.

'Science' such as Sociology, Behavioural Studies, Women’s Studies and the whole plethora of vanity subjects which were engaged in dissecting and dismantling the social order that had evolved over centuries. Many of these subjects awarded their degrees for attendance, there being little in the way of any formal assessment, and thus the acolytes attained graduate status for what was more akin to a three-year holiday than a rigorous examination of the human condition. Of course, while the engineers and scientists were kept busy with coursework and studying for exams, who was busy in student politics?

Just as the Iron Law of Bureaucracy dictates that the pen pushers will drain the productivity from any enterprise, it is those who make the least contribution to the societal health of the nation who will get to decide society's policies. My time at university was long before the days of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) degree, which casts professional politicians from the clay of callow youth, but this is just another facet of the same phenomenon, conferring power, often far too much power, without responsibility.

Today there isn’t a large company which hasn’t got some over-arching HR department focused not on the company’s performance and reputation, but on how it gains gold stars for its hiring policy. No local authority, it seems, suffers from a lack of well-remunerated sociological meddlers, even while it is crying out for funding for frontline staff. And of course, Parliament itself is stuffed with those who have spent their entire careers spouting platitudes promising peace and love and milk and honey, yet offering no practical solutions whatsoever.

Whatever the solution to the now alarmingly in-your-face social disorder – John McDonnell’s Marxist wet dream – it absolutely does not lie with the chattering classes engaging in yet more chattering. The time for talk is not as they suggest, now; that bird flew the nest long ago. The usual, perpetual protesters are hitching their bandwagon firmly to the race train and discovering no effective repulse to their aggression. What else will they do but continue to press their advantage? The options as I see it are appeasement and further decline, or resistance and martial law. Which side will you be on in the coming civil war?