Collapse

The theme of my thought for today is competence, or lack of it; a topic which never stops giving and deserves of an entire library of study. As barely evolved tool-using apes, it’s a minor miracle that the majority of us can hold down a useful job at all. As a general rule humans are barely adequate most of the time, often lacking knowledge, skills and insight and rarely exceptional. If you can’t think of anybody in your little tribe who is lazy, lacking in drive and generally incompetent then maybe it’s you.

There is much hand-wringing and blame-flinging going on over the Carillion collapse. It’s der gubmint wot dun it, cry The Labours; not us, replies the government; and certainly not us, plead the company directors. It turns out – and there will be much more to come – that the audits on which decisions relied were not searching enough, that contracts were inevitably awarded to the lowest bidders without due diligence and that warnings were not heeded. In summary humans are to blame, lots of them.

Is it ‘the system’? After all, if rigorous supervision isn’t in place where’s the incentive to do more than simply turn up and collect your salary? I can hear you protesting that this doesn’t apply to you, that you go above and beyond and that you are worth every penny. But so goes the plea of the crashed driver, the disgraced surgeon, the jailed accountant. I say again, the default human condition is general incompetence. We come into the world knowing nothing, with basic instincts to feed and avoid pain, the ability to learn and a certain acquisitive bent... and it all goes downhill from there.

Nature gives us those gifts, perhaps enhanced in some, but it is nurture which teaches us how to use them. We are taught and in the process we are moulded; religion, circumstance, politics, tragedy, triumph and formal education all add to the mix and make us what we are. How sad then, that most of us are, frankly, rubbish. We struggle and strive and imagine we are doing all we can and then, when we don’t get the reward we believe is ours by rights, we mostly stop trying to be the best and settle for mediocrity (though convince ourselves otherwise).

We see others apparently rewarded for failure, we see leaders followed by blind acolytes and we form a set of beliefs from which it is almost impossible to escape. Each side blames the other and is unable to see their own complicity in the complex realities of human life. A couple of nights ago, I heard a segment on LBC whereby the caller’s litany of Tory failings was refuted by the presenter using generally easily verifiable arguments. Every accusation was met with an easy answer and in every case that charge was dropped without comment and another wheeled into battle. It didn’t matter what the truth was, she was not going to be dislodged from her firm position that the Tories were responsible for every evil in the land.

But the most astonishing holy tenet was that Jeremy Corbyn would somehow right all the wrongs, nationalise – and thus cure – all essential industries and spread bring joy and peace and fairness all around. Presumably on the seventh day he’d take a nap. It seems that people are not only incompetent in themselves, but incompetent in grasping reality. And desperate in their need for others to be competent where they are not. Carillion is not the fault of any individual; its collapse was through the collective feeble endeavours of too many people not being quite capable enough. To err is human? Too right.

Wired!

In my day job I try and play a positive role in maintaining the competence of workers in a pretty straightforward field. Electrical installation work isn’t exactly rocket-surgery[sic] and since the first days of the Wiring Regulations (1882 - 130 years) testing has been a necessary component of the job, yet most practicing sparkies have only a rudimentary grasp of the principles.

Last night I was assessing a supposedly experienced tester. Once the test rig had been safely isolated I left him for ten minutes to get on with it and returned to find nuts and bolts, springs and things, popping and fizzing round the exam room while he wrestled with deadly killer croc-clips and test leads.  It was like a kitten with a ball of wool… and a stick of Semtex. Given that an absolute minimum of dismantling should have been involved, this was like Armageddon; Electricalypse.

Once the fires broke out, I decided to terminate the assessment, enough is enough. His blackened eyebrows still sparked and sizzled slightly and a wisp of smoke rose from his new Afro hairstyle... “How did I do?” he asked, hopefully.

Cut the red wire... NO! The blue!

When you hire an electrician you’d like to think they know what they’re doing, wouldn’t you? Most of them have an impressive sounding list of qualifications but the simplicity of Ohm’s Law is lost as they struggle with the deep and complex relationship between Volts and Amps and Ohms. Yet, it’s easy enough to remember:

Villa = Is x Rubbish

The truth about electricity

If few of these trained professionals can really tell their amp from their elbow, how can they be expected to tell a talented politician from a mere chancer? Or distinguish between a plan for economic doom versus commercial boom? These are the people who choose, once in a blue moon, who gets to make the important decisions as to just exactly how much more money we're going to piss down the European drain. Or to what extent we will continue to emasculate our armed forces. Or how much more of the third world's population we plan to crowd into our precious little island home.

One-man-one-vote democracy doesn't seem such a good idea now, does it?

That A level.

I suppose you have to be, or know somebody, from The Black Country to understand this joke. It goes like this and it has to be told in the local accent. Ready?

"Ah kid's got wun of them A-levels. In carpentry."

"Aa-ah?"

"Aaa. 'Ee put some shelves up and 'ee ses, "That a' level"."

Ba-da-and furthermore-bing! Plenty more where that came from. (I guess you had to be there... or more precisely, here. For clarification, watch Doreen's Story.)

'A' used to stand for 'Advanced'. That is, an advanced qualification capable of being attained by only the better scholars. Now, however, the 'A' clearly stands for 'Average'... if a large proportion of pupils passes them that's what they are, by definition. (One sort of average at any rate - this would need no explaining to a proper 'A' level maths scholar, but probably 'means' nothing to today's A-plus-double-plus-good clones.)

Beneath the A-level stood a solid tier of achievement known as the 'O' (ordinary) level. And beneath that, for those not destined for the groves of academe, the Certificate of Secondary Education, or CSE... the qualification for the thick kids. Not an issue, by the way; more a badge of honour for those who were going to hit things with big hammers, pull stuff out of the ground, or have babies for Britain.

Well, I was there when they ripped it all up. When the progressive  educationalists (I lump the 'ists' together so you can see the full force of my disdain: psychologist, sociologist, therapist, criminologist, apologist… rapist) ripped the still-beating heart out of Britain's proven, highly esteemed fit-for-purpose, education system. So pernicious were the changes that a future colleague of mine was sent back by his father from London to Guyana in order to undergo a 'proper British education' in a former colony that had yet to ‘benefit’ from ‘progress’.

Because ‘progress’ invariably seem to mean ‘regress’. Progress in transport means that the average speed of traffic in London today is a fraction of what it was a hundred years ago. Progress means that you no longer have to rely on a human being to miscalculate your electricity bill – we have machines now that can fuck it up so much quicker. Progress – in the absence of any accelerated human cranial evolution – means that we replace achievement with the illusion of achievement.

So, Michael Gove’s desire to put the ‘A’ back into A-levels has to be applauded, if not actually completely believed. His heart is undeniably in the right place, but he will be thwarted by the liberal intelligentsia who, despite their lofty, egalitarian posturing have wrought nothing but harm to our entire society.

Oh yes, liberal fuckwits, I’m gunning for you. You, with nothing to lose, have experimented with several generations of Britons and now see the mess you’ve left us in? Bereft of decent public education, available to all, it is you who have left the nation in the hands of the kind of career politicians we have today, scions of the very privileged classes – on both sides of the house – that you sought to crush.

 If Michael Gove truly wants to achieve political immortality he should put all his efforts into the very illiberal and definitely non-intellectually-taxing enterprise of fucking the lot of you right up the arse.