Return to Reason - Chapters 10, 11, 12, Bibliography

 

Chapter Ten

Some one Had Blundered

In this chapter I give details from four different fields to justify the contention made in the introduction that the philosophical errors listed there have been at the root of disasters of many kinds.

The reorganisation of the National Health Service was typical of what I have called solutioneering, a far-reaching change undertaken with only vague and untestable objectives, such as the general improvement of the efficiency of the service, and without any built-in assessment of whether those objectives were being attained. Before reorganisation there was a genuine problem created by the lack of suitable accommodation for disabled people who, while no longer in need of the facilities of a hospital, were not able to manage in an ordinary home. The Regional Hospital Boards had no power and no money to build the hostels needed. The local authorities had both, but gave the hostels a very low priority. The result was that costly hospital beds were clogged by people who had no need of their expensive facilities. It would clearly have been ridiculously easy to devise an ad hoc solution to this problem. It could have been made a duty for local authorities to provide hostels; Regional Hospital Boards could have been given the money and the duty to use it for this purpose; or special authorities could have been set up with the one function of filling this gap.

Yet the need to solve this problem was the only concrete example that Sir George Godber, then the Chief Medical Officer to the Department of Health and Social Security, gave in an hour long lecture to NHS staffs in Portsmouth to justify the enormous upheaval that his Department were advising the government to embark on. The clean sweep that was carried out made it impossible to predict the consequences except that the administration of the new service would be enormously more costly than the old. The estimate was that initially administration would cost an additional £56,000,000 annually - a classic example of Heller's quip about estimating, or rather underestimating! (see page 3).

The irony is that the new Regional Health Authorities have found themselves in the same position as the old local authority health departments. They have the power and the money to build hostels, but they have what they see as far more pressing calls on their necessarily limited funds. In other words the whole huge upheaval has failed to solve the one concrete problem that its architects realised as needing to be solved, while the problem itself is more severe now than it was then. It is a fact that, through lack of suitable accommodation outside, men are being sent to prison.

It is by no means only governments and nationalised undertakings that behave irrationally. In 1972 I was intrigued by reading an advertisment for the then new Jaguar XJ12 car, which confirmed what I had previously read in motoring correspondents' gossip that this car priced at about £3,500 could immediately be resold on the open market for about £5,000. The advertisement took pride in this fact and mentioned that customers were being asked to sign an undertaking that they would not resell.

I was so puzzled as to what could be the reason for this apparent eagerness to subsidise their customers to the tune of some £1,500 a time that I wrote to the Managing Director, who was good enough to reply. I pointed out that if the firm were to charge £5,000 and make a profit of £1,500 on each car while the going was good, this profit could be ploughed back into the business in order to increase production and make them more able to compete, for example, with Mercedes. We carried on quite an exchange of letters. The gist of his answers was that the high market price was the consequence of the large demand for a car in very short supply. When, as they hoped it soon would, supply increased, the market price must fall. If, therefore, they charged £5,000 now, they might well soon find that they would have to reduce the price in order to maintain demand. 'There is no doubt that in these circumstances we should be accused of blackmail.' I replied that I thought their potential critics were under the same delusion as themselves, that the price charged must be related to current costs of production. If they were to reduce their price in the future, they would, on the contrary, be praised for their efficiency in cutting their costs. Indeed they would be able to make the announcement of a reduction of price, proudly, in these terms - of 'being able' to reduce it.

The letter repeatedly talked of looking forward to what they called a 'free market situation'. In fact they seemed almost to be planning for, if not looking forward to, the day when their cars would be a drag on the market. It seemed, as I said to them, as though they had never heard of the law of supply and demand or imagined that it had been superseded. By all means give the customer the feeling that he was getting a good buy, by pricing the car a few hundred pounds initially below the market price; but £1,500 below seemed beyond all sense.

It seemed that they were so flattered at being told that their product was exceptionally good value for the money, that they lost sight of what should have been their problem, namely how to do the best for their employees, shareholders, and the country as a whole, without disregarding the interests of their customers. Had they been manufacturing a vehicle for invalids one could have defended their attitude; but, as I told them, their potential customers would seem to be among the last to deserve charity.

The same situation pertains now in regard to Land Rovers and Range Rovers which are under-priced in relation to the market. The consequence is the encouragement of quasi-criminal organisations which divert vehicles to those who are prepared to pay up to £2,000 above the market price but are not prepared to wait. The evil of the system is not only that profits that should go to the manufacturers (publicly-owned) go to the racketeers but that the firm's employees see these people pocketing far more money than they themselves can ever hope to earn by productive work. The high charges that we all have to pay for electricity - charges which have led to great hardship for many who depend on electricity for winter warmth - are higher than they would be if we were not carrying in this country an excess of generating capacity.

The amount of generating output capacity required is governed by the simultaneous maximum demand, S.M.D. In order to allow a margin of safety for breakdowns etc., the aim is to have output capacity 20 per cent in excess of the S.M.D. However, in 1976 there was an excess capacity of 55 per cent (i.e. 35 per cent above the target) and this is likely to increase for a number of years as the S.M.D. is rising more slowly than the output. As it takes from five to ten years from ordering a new station to bringing it on line, this degree of over-estimation might seem excusable; and it has in fact been blamed on the unexpectedly low rate of economic growth, on the oil crisis, and on the advent of natural gas. However the Open University's Energy Research Group have convincingly shown that these excuses will not do and that the errors date from the early 1960s before any of these factors was operative. The mistakes were in fact examples of trendism, of assuming that an observed trend is a kind of law and that it will go on indefinitely. In this case there was clear evidence that it was not doing so.

The S.M.D. for electricity grew between 1923 and 1950 roughly exponentially, that is to say (cf page 98) the growth could be expressed as a constant percentage (about 5 per cent) of the previous year's demand. But the figures show that since 1960 demand has grown only linearly, and since 1970 even less rapidly than that. Yet the forecasters continued to estimate an exponential growth. The Energy Research Group say:

"It would be unreasonable to expect a forecaster in 1954 to anticipate a change from exponential to linear growth in 1960... it would require a very sharp forecaster to have spotted the turnover by 1960 (when forecasts for 1966-68 were being made). However, by 1964 the trend is obvious, and it requires a very blinkered forecaster to persist in using an exponential projection from 1964 to 1974 when the trend is clearly not exponential ... The only reasonable conclusion is that the industry planners did not want to see a trend away from exponential growth - so they didn't."

Their conclusion is borne out by this quotation from electricity forecast documents:

"From 1954/55 to 1962/63 total sales expanded at the rate of 11.6 per cent per annum, but during the subsequent period 1972/73 the annual growth rate fell to 6.3 per cent and between 1972/73 and 1974/75 the average growth rate was only 2.1 per cent. (Electricity Council 1975)."

These are the words of somebody who insisted on seeing a straight line as something that perversely kept on deviating from a curve.

And there were those who were not blinkered. In his diaries, Richard Crossman describes the agonies that ministers went through in meeting after meeting during the financial crisis of 1968 in deciding what cuts to make in public spending in order to placate the International Monetary Fund. He mentions a report by the Brookings Institute which recommended big cuts in what they believed was the gross over-investment programme of the Central Electricity Generating Board. Crossman commented: 'Even a fractional slow-down of these programmes could ... avoid any cuts in the social services.' But it was not to be. The axe fell, as it did in the repeat performance in the middle 1970s and again in 1979, mainly on social expenditure.

A number of plausible explanations were advanced for the failure of the electricity industry to predict demand; but 'By and large', say the Energy Research Group, 'these explanations start from the presumption that the forecast was actually correct and that the world behaved perversely.' The capital costs of power stations account for about 25 per cent of current electricity generating costs. If these are about 35 per cent too high through over-investment, it means that our charges are about 8 per cent too high. By 1980 the corresponding figures are likely to be 38 per cent and 9 per cent. If it had not been for the very large recent disproportionate rise in fuel costs the forecasters' errors would have been even more apparent. In that event the capital costs would have formed a much larger proportion of the whole and, therefore, a miscalculation of them would have had a greater effect on the consumer charges.

Unfortunately the effects of the miscalculation are not confined to the price the consumer has to pay. The over-capacity threatens the electrical engineering industry. For the obvious remedy to the situation is to order no more power stations until the S.M.D. approaches the output capacity and this may not occur for many years as the gap is probably widening. To do this would be to kill an industry which will be needed again sometime in the future. Already the government has been forced, in order to save the industry, to order a power station which is not in fact needed. So far-reaching are the effects of a naive belief in trends.

In the early months of 1979, in spite of the excessive surplus of generating capacity, we were brought to the brink of a large-scale electricity shut-down for rather absurd reasons. A period of unusually cold weather resulted in both the National Coal Board's stockpiles and the C.E.G.B.'s own coal stocks being frozen (literally) so that they could not be moved to the power stations. There were days when there was a margin of only 2 per cent - 45,000 megawatts of available capacity facing 44,000 MW of demand. A C.E.G.B. statement (reported in the Guardian - 1 February 1979) took the opportunity to hit back at those who had criticised them. The narrow escape from disaster, they insisted, showed that the country `cannot run on smaller generating margins'.

In replying to this statement, Professor J. W. Jeffery was provoked to derision. 'Obviously we must build more power stations', he said in a letter to the Guardian, 'but supposing their coal stocks get frozen up also?' If just some of the heat that went to warm the rivers and the sea were used instead to keep the coal heaps warm, he pointed out, we should have had 32 per- cent excess capacity in the coldest spell for many years. 'They plan for 20 per cent overcapacity, achieve 32 per cent (50 per cent if you count the 'mothballed' stations) and then, with enough waste heat available to warm a large proportion of the nation's houses ... get to the edge of breakdown because their coal stocks are frozen solid.'

Had the mental attitude of the C.E.G.B. been one of facing problems rather than solutioneering, it is inconceivable that they would have come up with the answer they did. Faced with the problem of preventing their huge surplus of plant from being immobilized by frost, they could hardly have proposed to solve it by looking towards a still larger surplus.

As a final example of irrationality in high places, I cite what was, in terms of money and of Britain's earning ability as well as our reputation as a technological nation, the most expensive of all blunders. This was the series of misjudgements which led to the probably irretrievable decline of our aerospace industry. It was comprehensible, I think, only in terms of the philosophical errors that this book is concerned with. No band of conspiratorial saboteurs could have hoped to have destroyed so much.

In the many discussions that took place after the end of the second world war regarding Britain's economic future, it was frequently stated, and I think generally agreed, that this country should, so far as a choice was possible, put its eggs into the aircraft as opposed to the car industry, because of our comparatively poor raw material resources and our comparatively high resources of human skill and ingenuity.

By 1951 it appeared that we were well on our way to capturing a good share of the world market for aircraft. The Comet I ... was well on the way to entering service as the world's first pure jet commercial transport, while the Viscount was in production at Weybridge as the first turboprop commercial airliner. At Filton, Bristol were assembling the prototype Britannia long-range turboprop aircraft. A series of, at the time unexplained, crashes grounded the Comet I; but this need not have been the end of Britain's hopes.

Derek Wood in his book, quoted above, Project Cancelled, describes in detail the events leading to the cancellation of a whole series of promising aeronautical projects on which a total of £1,000 million at 1974 prices had been spent. He does not suggest that all should have been allowed to go on; but he does suggest that a substantial number had, at the time of their cancellation, good commercial prospects, far better in fact, than Concorde ever had. I shall touch on just two of these - the Vickers VC7 airliner and the Fairey FD2 supersonic fighter project.

In 1949, in accordance with a suggestion from the Air Ministry, the Fairey company embarked on a design for a transonic research aircraft. They decided to design it so that, if successful, it could be developed into a fighter. The plane, the Fairey Delta, turned out to be much faster than anybody outside the design team ever expected. It caused amazement when, in March 1956, it broke the (American held) airspeed record of 822 mph by more than 300 mph, setting a new record of 1132 mph.

Fairey at once set their sights on a development of this aircraft, called FD2, to meet the Air Ministry's specification, OR329/F.155T, which called for a two-seater fighter capable of climbing to 60,000 feet and achieving Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) in six minutes. Owing to regulations about supersonic flying over Britain, Fairey came to an agreement with the French firm Dassault to use. their airfield in France for development flying. The FD2 made 47 such flights in October and November 1956. on 1st April 1957, Fairey were tipped off by the Ministry of Supply, Wood says, that their FD2 was favourite for the F.155T contract. Three days later Mr Duncan Sandys announced in the Commons that development of all high performance piloted aircraft was to cease and that we were to rely henceforth on rocket-propelled missiles.

Dassault were developing a similar design to the Fairey Delta. The silhouettes of the two machines were almost identical. The fact of Fairey's speed record probably influenced the French government to give the development contract to Dassault; and the success of the FD2's proving flights from the French airfield undoubtedly confirmed Dassault's confidence in their own design, which went into production as the Mirage. Twelve hundred machines of this type were subsequently sold all over the world. The FD2 never flew again. Dassault is said to have told a British aviation chief later that `if it were not for the clumsy way you tackle things in Britain, you could have made the Mirage yourselves'.

The first of the four jet `V' Bombers, the Vickers Valiant, flew in 1951. The Ministry of Supply suggested to Vickers that they should develop a transport version for the R.A.F. Work on it, the V1000, began in October 1952 to a Ministry of Supply specification. The design was such that it could be easily modified to a civil airliner, to be called the VC7. In 1955 the R.A.F. began to have cold feet. Under Treasury pressure they moved towards cancellation, saying there was no longer requirement for an all jet transport. on the civil side B.O.A.C. (British Overseas Airways Corporation), the only potential British customers, had as long ago as 1949 ordered the Britannia. This turboprop airliner was potentially more economical than a pure jet but much slower. Before this was even in service B.O.A.C. ordered 60 of its rather faster successor type (which, in fact, never materialised) still on the drawing board. While B.O.A.C. dithered about the VC7, the President of Trans Canada Airlines flew to Britain specially to implore the Minister of Supply (Mr Reginald Maudling), to go on with the VC7 because he wanted it for his airline. This action seemed to prompt Sir Miles Thomas, the head of B.O.A.C., to say that he would not buy it. The upshot was an announcement by Mr Maudling on the 11th November 1955 that both the military V1000 and the civil VC7 were cancelled, the latter because `BOAC have no requirement for it, as the aircraft they already have on order will fully meet their needs until well into the 1960s'. Nearly £4,000,000 of public money had been spent on the V1000. only one year later, on the 24th October 1956, the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation announced that the government had approved the purchase by B.O.A.C. of fifteen American Boeing 707s at a cost of £44,000,000. The VC7 could have been in nonstop Atlantic service by 1959. The Boeing 707s, which started in service in August 1959, had at that time to make one stop en route. Mr Maudling afterwards said, perhaps with some truth, that there was nothing that he could have done. Neither the R.A.F. nor the B.O.A.C. were prepared to place an order. Certainly B.O.A.C. had a lot to answer for. Nationalisation does not seem to ensure that decisions are taken in the national interest.

There is a strong possibility that behind these muddles there lurked the mistaken quest for certainty. Ministers, airline bosses, and air marshals were discouraged by such things as the disasters to the first Comets and the inability of prototypes of other designs to meet the requirements at once. For example, at the time of its cancellation, the Rolls Royce engines for the VC7 could not take the plane nonstop across the Atlantic, but `stretched' versions of the engines were being developed (and B.O.A.C. knew about this); and these more powerful engines were, in fact, fitted to the Boeings which B.O. A. C. subsequently purchased. There lurked in the heads of the people who took these decisions the idea that, if things were not right straight off, there was something radically wrong with the design. Better then wait until the Americans had got something proven to offer and then buy that. They failed to appreciate the trial and error nature of aircraft design, as of everything else.

Wood tends to blame the technical ignorance of ministers and civil servants for these disasters. I think one must blame their failure to realise that a good decision, a reasonable plan, can only emerge from a situation of criticism. It may be objected that in the case of a fighter aircraft secrecy is essential. Certainly it would have been difficult to arrange a fully public discussion. But Professor R. V. Jones has described how, even at the height of the war, he was allowed by Churchill to argue his case, that rockets were being developed at Peenemunde, against the establishment view. Even if a discussion cannot be fully public it is much better to allow discussion among those who are privy to the secret than no discussion at all. The fact that someone in the Ministry of Supply was able to tell the Fairey company to expect the go-ahead on the FD2 when three days later the Minister announced a cancellation of all such projects, shows that the decision was taken in extreme secrecy, excluding officials who knew about the existence of the project.

In the case of the VC7 and of the other airliner plans that were cancelled, discussion and criticism could have been fully public. What was lacking was the institution whereby these cancellation decisions could only be taken in the framework of a fully argued discussion. What was wanted was something like the institution of listed building consent, whereby no sudden decision can be taken to pull down a listed building but procedures exist whereby the case for not pulling it down can be forcefully argued.

Popper's dictum, that we must so organise things that even incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage, is the point. It is no good arguing that we must have better ministers or better civil servants. Here were two ministers whose other actions have shown that they were well above the average level of competence. The same could be said of Mr Roy Jenkins and Mr Wilson who, later on, cancelled Britain's TSR2 in favour of the American F.111, which was in an early stage of development and which later got bogged down as badly if not worse than the TSR2, in technical difficulties and escalating costs, so that the British order for that, too, was eventually cancelled. It was the lack of proper institutional safeguards for criticism that enabled these very competent ministers to deal deathblows to the whole industry and thereby wound the whole economy.

In a final example, not of a blunder committed but of one towards which we may be heading, I want to emphasise that criticism of large national projects needs to be wide-ranging. The current nuclear energy controversy, as publicly argued at present, turns mostly on the questions of environmental hazards and costs. But a recent study has shown how employment prospects are also affected. Dr D. Elliott of the Open University has compared likely employment in the energy-producing industries by the year 2000 in the event of a nuclear 'strategy' with that under a 'fairly moderate non-nuclear programme'. The latter would combine conservation technologies - that is straightforward energy-conserving measures as well as C.H.P. (page 103), and heat pumps - with a wide range of renewable energy technologies: solar, wind, wave, and tidal power, biosynthesis and geothermal energy. Elliott draws on official documents for his estimates of what is feasible, what the cost would be, and the likely employment. His conclusion is that the nuclear programme would create about 660,000 person-years of employment up to AD 2000 and would cost about £35,000 million. The non-nuclear programme would make available about the same amount of energy at a cost of about £21,200 million and create about 1,520,000 person-years of work in the same period. It seems likely that we lack the proper institution for the taking of this vital decision so that the various experts can criticise each others' views in public.

Chapter Eleven

Democracy in Action

"Institutions are like fortresses. They must be well designed and properly manned."

Popper: P.H., 66

Our political life is still to a large extent on the wrong track to which Plato switched it more than two thousand years ago. Questions like proportional representation, how party leaders should be appointed or elected, and how parliamentary candidates should be selected - all these are questions of who should rule, while the question is largely neglected as to how should these representatives once chosen, by whatever means, be controlled, and how shall the will of the governed be brought to bear on them, and through them on the permanent agents of government.

That this is the important question is illustrated by Leslie Chapman in his fascinating exposure of the civil service, Your Disobedient Servant. In the Southern Region of the Ministry of Public Works and Buildings (later the Property Service Agency, PSA), which he controlled, he had achieved (with the agreement of the unions and all concerned) economies of the order of thirty per cent in annual expenditure without reduction of service, simply by eliminating waste. Had the people known what he was doing there can be little doubt that it would have been their will that he should succeed in his attempt to persuade the other regions of the Department to follow suit. For the economies amounted to such things as that store-houses which were empty or contained only barbed wire should no longer be heated. one technician was awarded £1,000 for a money-saving suggestion. It was `Nothing very sophisticated. Nothing very revolutionary. The -gas cookers in the mess kitchens are in future to be turned off when not in use!' It would save £40,000 a year.

The responsible Labour Minister did know and did order that Chapman's methods should be adopted elsewhere; but his orders were not carried out. Then came the general election of 1970. The people chose a new government and so a new minister. He too quickly became an enthusiastic champion of Chapman's methods; he too ordered that the example should be followed in the rest of the country; and he too was disobeyed. Now we are engaged in another great round of public expenditure cuts, threatening our schools, hospitals, theatres, and much else that we value; but no doubt the barbed wire in the government store-houses will still be kept warm in the winter.

The power of the people to oust the government is, as Popper so rightly says, the most important power and certainly not to be disparaged. But can we not devise something a little less drastic? I want to point to two existing institutions as a model of how, without radical upheaval, or revolution, we might achieve a kind of plastic control of government at all levels by the governed, by this I mean a control that differs from absolute control as a red traffic light differs from a solid road block. But before I give what seem to me to be the right examples I want to touch on two other current suggestions by way of comparison.

A move in a totally wrong direction is the current tendency to set up non-elected bodies over the heads of elected ones. For example a `working group' chaired by Mr Gordon Oakes, at that time Minister of State at the Department of Education and Science, proposed the establishment of a national body to oversee generally the development of maintained higher education including the allocation of funds for current expenditure. The body would, in the usual way of these things, have `representatives' from county councils etc.; but it would in effect, as Tyrrell Burgess (1978) pointed out, control the local education authorities and usurp the Secretary of State's authority, while itself being answerable to nobody and quite out of reach of attack by any member of the public who may not like what it decides. Representatives from local authorities all over the country who meet occasionally in such a body are absolutely powerless against the permanent staff, largely because they do not know each other and have no opportunity to organise themselves in unison. What sort of people are they who devise solutions of this sort, solutions, as Burgess put it, in search of a problem, when the crying need is for a strengthening of the almost non-existent control of the electorate over the L. E.A.s and of Parliament over the D.E.S.?

To many people government by referendum seems to be the ultimate in democracy. Let the people decide every major issue. That must be to their advantage. Mrs Thatcher, before she became Prime Minister, toyed with this idea; but it is a bad one for two main reasons. The first is that the questions of government are usually not of the yes-no kind. Capital punishment is a subject, above all others perhaps, which many people think should be decided by referendum. Mr Albert Pierrepoint, the former official executioner, made my point well when he said: `The trouble with the (death) sentence has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.' The best solution to a problem is so often of the kind that I have called lying at right-angles to the yes-no axis. Secondly rational decisions can only be taken in the light of the fullest information. It is simply not possible for the whole electorate to be fully informed on any issue. They must delegate their decision-making to representatives who make it their business to be fully informed; but these representatives do need to be controlled, or tamed, as Popper put it.

Local government

In putting forward my positive suggestions I first draw attention to the important differences between the organisation and functioning of local and central government. I shall use as example the district council of which I am myself a member. The council consists of forty-eight elected members who, like M.P.s, are representatives, not delegates. The work of the council is done by a policy committee and seven `programme' committees, each with its own field of responsibility, e. g. finance, housing, etc. Each programme committee consists of fourteen elected members. Nine, including the chairman and vice-chairman, are members of the majority party. Four are from the minority party and there is one independent, these being the proportions of the parties in the council as a whole. At each meeting of, for example, the housing committee, there are also present round the table a number of the council's permanent professional staff - the officers. The Director of Housing is there and also a senior officer from each of the following departments: Treasurer's, Planning, Architect's, Estates (dealing with property values, sale of property etc.) Engineer's (roads, parking, sewers etc.) and Secretariat (law, precedent, administration etc.). In the Planning Committee, the Chief Planning Officer would be there in person, while the Director of Housing would normally send one of his staff.

Different authorities have different arrangements in respect of the policy committee. In our case it is chaired by the Leader of the Council, i.e. the leader of the majority party; and it consists of the chairmen of all the programme committees together with four representatives of the opposition. In other councils the opposition are not represented on it. It then functions more like the cabinet, and consists of the Leader, Deputy Leader and the chairmen and perhaps vice-chairmen of all the committees also. (There are important advantages from the point of view taken here, of the control of the rulers by the ruled, in the `anti-cabinet' system we have. The majority party can always get their way; but they are saved from a number of futile confrontations by being acquainted early on with the opposition's point of view; and sometimes they are not too, proud to accept it as better than their own.) The programme committees have certain powers delegated to them by the Council. Their decisions on these matters take effect at once. In others, ratification is required by the Council, which functions more like the House of Commons. There, the officers do not take part.

As in central government, the elected members, the amateurs, ultimately decide (with important reservations which I shall mention later) on each issue that comes before them. only they can vote. Arguments both party political and otherwise can be given a full airing. But the advantages compared to the way that central government operates are these:

1. Each elected member acquires a kind of expertise in the fields of the two or three committees on which he serves.

2. Members of all parties, those in opposition as well as those in power, hear at first hand the advice of the professional officers and read their reports. They have opportunities both in committee and outside to question and cross-examine the officers on their advice (or any other relevant matter) as searchingly as they like.

3. There is continuity. If, as a result of an election, the opposition oust the party in power, the proportions on the committees change; but the new chairman of the housing committee, for example, will normally have been an opposition member of the old committee. He will know the ropes. He will be familiar with the powers of the committee and its obligation under the law. He will know the pros and cons of the controversial matters likely to come before the committee; and he will know the worth or otherwise of the officers who will advise him. Also he will have had a chance while in opposition to work out how the philosophy of his party can be best applied in the circumstances prevailing.

4. New chairmen are not hampered by anything remotely comparable with the absurd restriction placed on new ministers in that they are denied access to their predecessors' papers and plans. The effect of this (and probably the purpose) is that each minister begins from scratch, unaided by any progress made by this predecessor, in his efforts to gain control over his civil servants; and he tends to get moved on before he has begun to achieve it. He is denied the means of learning from previous mistakes. `The rule is applied', Chapman points out, even when, as in his case, `the different (Conservative) administration were following identical policies and giving identical instructions.' He, as a civil servant, was not permitted to tell the new Conservative minister that his Labour predecessor had given identical instructions - for the following up of his (Chapman's) successful elimination of waste - and that the instructions had not been carried out.

5 The elected members have real power over the permanent officials, largely because in the committees where the decisions are taken they outnumber them. The new chairman, supported as he is by a majority of the committee, should be able without much difficulty to carry out the changes of policy which he has decided upon. The corresponding impotence, sometimes, of ministers is well documented. I have already mentioned Mr Callaghan's inability to get an obvious reform adopted by his own .department, when he was Home Secretary, until a chief official had been moved on. Mrs Barbara Castle described, while out of office, the difficulties of an inexperienced minister, unsupported as she must be by her political colleagues and surrounded by obsequious civil servants, who say `Yes, Minister' but are none the less determined to carry on as before. She alone, single-handed, had to try to impose her will and make them switch courses, although she herself must have carried the handicap (which she did not mention in her article) of not really knowing whether what she was trying to persuade them to do was practicable. It is well known how, in the first world war, Lloyd George, even when Prime Minister, was unable to get rid of Haig. Very much with this experience in mind, Churchill, at the very beginning of his administration in 1940, made a small change which `subject to the support of the War Cabinet and the House of Commons' made him undisputed master in his own house. `The key change on my taking over', he recorded, `was the supervision and direction of the Chiefs of Staffs Committee by a Minister of Defence with undefined powers. As the Minister of Defence was the Prime Minister, he had all the rights inherent in that office, including very wide powers of selection and removal of all professional and political personages.' The machinery as well as the men are important. In this connection of the control of officials I remind the reader of the example on page 117 of the civil servants touring the country preaching a doctrine which was contrary to the policy of the government of the day, something that local officers could never get away with.

Central and local government compared

Thus the position of the new Housing Chairman contrasts very favourably with the position of the corresponding new Housing Minister in a new government. It is clear from his diaries that in his case Richard Crossman knew nothing about the practical problems faced by his department when he took office in 1964, because he had been ‘shadowing' education, and knew nothing about the way the department functioned or the qualities of its staff. Furthermore he was lumbered, as most new ministers are, with election promises made in ignorance of the facts which gradually confronted him in office. His overall ignorance coupled with his need to appear to be pursuing election ‘targets' with all vigour prevented him from interfering, as he might otherwise have done, with the accelerating conversion of the major cities into wastelands or oblongs of reinforced concrete, the at-a-stroke, gimmicky, industrialised building solution to ‘the housing problem', resorted to by his predecessors, with such appalling aesthetic and social consequences, not to mention expense, for almost every large town in the country.

It is important to emphasise that the inherent continuity of local government, even where there is a change of political control, does not exclude a change of policy. What it does is to make it more likely that such a change will be rational and practicable, and within the bounds of available finance etc. Nottingham's transport policy is a good example of this. The change of control brought about by the municipal election of 1971 resulted in the discontinuation of a multi-million pound urban motorway scheme and its very successful replacement by a system of bus priorities and car control. (Successful, at least until a further change of political control began to undermine its basis.)

Perhaps the most important advantage of the organisation of District Councils is that all members - those in opposition as well as those in the ruling party - are entitled to know what is going on and to see all letters and reports in which they may be interested. This does not prevent individuals from engaging in corrupt practices; but it does effectively prevent the whole council from pursuing a corrupt, illegal, or hypocritical policy. Nothing like the Rhodesian oil sanctions charade could be undertaken by a district council, because the opposition would expose it. .Clearly that twelve-year farce would have been prevented had, say, the shadow cabinet been provided with the same information as ministers. Criticism is the key; but it must be informed criticism. Plenty of people criticised many aspects of the sanctions case; but they were all denied the necessary information which would have made their criticism effective.

Why then does not local government work better than it does? I suggest that there are three main reasons. The first is that there is still no proper link of control and information between the electors and the elected councillors. The electors can throw out their councillor at an election but they cannot control him. Councillors can still get away with supporting schemes that are unrealistic, unpopular, and irrelevant to real needs. Especially is this so in the many local councils where one political party has an almost permanent large majority. The second reason is that it is very difficult for the amateur councillors to get alternative professional advice, alternative that is to that of their officers, who like all professionals, are sometimes wrong but unlike other professionals tend not to disagree enough among themselves. They tend to adopt something of a `party line'.

These two reasons are linked-by the great importance of face-saving. Perhaps it is not surprising that the attitude which Popper persuaded Eccles to adopt in regard to his biological theory which looked like becoming untenable (page 21) has not yet become the norm in local (or central) government. If we have proposed a plan, then it must be right; and no second thoughts, new facts, or new attitudes can be admitted without loss of face. And face is the one thing above all others that must be preserved. If only we could be committed to solving problems rather than to particular solutions!

The third reason is the interference by a central government administration which is ignorant of local conditions and tends to oscillate between one policy and priority and another. In the late 1970s governments of both parties have improved in this respect; but here is the experience concerning housing finance of my own council, not so long ago, in eight months of 1975 to 1976. First of all Whitehall assured us that there would continue to be priority for housing and especially for the improvement of old property. We submit our estimate for the amount we intend to spend in the year ahead on improving old property newly acquired or yet to be acquired by the Council: £950,000. Some months later when we have already spent or allocated £300,000 of this sum, we are told that our allocation has been cut to £350,000; and the reason given for the cut is that available funds must be diverted from less essential matters to where the money can do most good. Among such areas are listed the improvement of old property newly acquired - precisely where our £950,000 was going to be spent. After protest, and pointing out the contradiction, we are given an immediate £70,000 with a hint of possibly more to come. After more argument this is raised to give a final figure of £610,000.

No organisation, however potentially efficient, can function under this kind of harassment. Central government abetted by the media, has always cast local government in a light of ridicule. Local councillors are invariably portrayed as self-seeking, self-important, incompetent figures of fun. Although twenty years before, Grossman had had several years experience as a local councillor, when, in 1964 he was appointed Minister of Housing and Local Government, he took so little interest in the second part of his job that in his first diary entry he describes himself just as Minister of Housing. (And his literary executors carried on this disregard for local government by leaving it out of the title of the first volume.) M.P.s have patronised the councils in their constituencies, often without any attempt to find out how they work; and civil servants have usually regarded as a lesser breed of men their counterpart officers in local government. But the latter have, from the point of view of the public, a great advantage. They are comparatively permanent.

Professor David Henderson, in his analysis of the reasons for bad civil service advice, blamed the anonymity of that advice and the continual shifting of civil servants from one department to another. It is always the department's advice. The individual civil servant responsible has most likely moved on elsewhere by the time the consequences are apparent. `Not only may it not matter much for your career whether or not you were right, but few will ever know.' `The Unimportance of Being Right' was the title of Henderson's talks. Whether or not a civil servant is often right is not a factor, Henderson found, in the speed of his promotion. Interestingly enough, in this connection, R. V. Jones said (in his Most Secret War), apropos of his having offended certain senior officers by his outspoken criticism of them, `Nevertheless I survived because war is different from peace; in the latter fallacies can be covered up more or less indefinitely and criticism suppressed, but with the swift action of war the truth comes fairly quickly to light.' And then he quoted Churchill's aphorism: `In war you don't have to be polite, you just have to be right.'

I am not implying that local government is satisfactory, only that the bones of the system are potentially more capable than those of central government of adaptation to one where government by the people for the people can be carried on. Although, as I have said, councillors are fairly well able to control the officers in the sense of ensuring that they carry out decisions taken at meetings, there is a whole range of matters which never get raised in public. The agenda of committees and councils is to a large extent fixed by the officers; and they tend to bring matters on which they want decisions which are often not the matters on which the councillors would like the searchlight turned. There is also the technique described by Robert Heller (page 3) and its converse - that is, the under-estimating of the costs of schemes the officers favour and the over-estimating of those they do not. Where decisions are required by elected members the situation has too often been manipulated in advance so as to reduce the number of options or to reverse the logical order of things. Left to ourselves, we would never have' found ourselves having to make the choice which we are asked to make.

As an example, I cite again the Cumberland Road fiasco in Portsmouth. The Housing Committee were required to decide what to do about the houses blighted by the road scheme before the details of that scheme had been fully worked out, before planning permission for it had been applied for, and long before the obligatory public inquiry could be held. So those councillors who are against the road had to choose between demolition of the houses now, to make way for a road that might never be built, or spending money on them now with the prospect that they might have to come down in a year or two for the road.

Councillors, and I imagine ministers, are constantly put like this into the position of the proverbial Irishman who, when asked the way to Dublin, replied that if he were going to Dublin he would not start from here.

Elected members are swamped by more reports than they can possibly read. This has the effect of keeping them quiet for fear of being accused of `not having done their homework' should they raise some matter on which they are imperfectly informed. However, when occasion demands that the mountains of paper be carefully examined it is not at all unusual to find them faulty. Crossman remarked: `Once a so-called fact gets into the system it's almost impossible to prove that it's wrong or out of date and should be dropped.' In Portsmouth we have one of these `so-called facts'. It is a statistic that appeared in a housing survey of 1966 that 57 per cent of the total housing stock was then pre-1914. The same figure appeared as the present position in a report to the Council in 1977 although, after a decade of redevelopment a 1976 survey had shown the proportion then to be 43 per cent. Was the overlooking of the 1976 survey from the October 1977 report gross carelessness, or was it a subtle means of influencing, even of frightening, councillors in favour of more demolition? And all the time we are being subtly brain-washed into the assumption that if the proportion of old houses is high, that is a disadvatage. A lot could be said for the view that we are lucky to have such a lot of Victorian and Edwardian houses.'

Residents' Committees

The second institution which I want to propose, as a model for what could be, is something quite new and still evolving. The miseries and failures associated with the total clearance policies of the 1950s and the 1960s led to policies of conservation and refurbishing. Under the Housing Act of 1969, General Improvement Areas (G.I.A.s) have been declared in most old towns. They are areas of (usually) Victorian houses which, fifteen years ago, would have been scheduled without question for demolition. Each G.I.A. normally contains between 500 and 800 houses. It is a predominantly residential area free of plans for major redevelopment - motorways, shopping centres etc. There are two quite separate prongs to the carrying out of the improvement work. The first is the improvement and modernisation of the houses themselves. It is the second prong that concerns me here.

Money is available from central government for what are called environmental improvements for the area. These are such things as planting of trees and shrubs, renewing pavements, provision of playgrounds, community centres etc., removal of `non-conforming users' which may be factories which cause a nuisance in the area, road closures and other measures to prevent the use of residential roads as `dodge runs' for through traffic.

Each G.I.A. has a committeee, composed of from one to three volunteers from each street. The committee, having canvassed their own streets and in consultation with the elected ward councillors and appropriate council officers, decide on a plan for these environmental improvements. once a year there is a meeting to which all the residents of the area are invited. They may then give their blessing to what their committee has proposed or air their criticisms of it. It is worth noting that at these meetings, the ward councillors of whatever party, are confronted by the public of all parties or none. This is something which does not happen regularly to M.P.s.

In Portsmouth we have evolved rapidly from having the officers putting up a plan to the Residents' Commitee - and meeting there a deal of hostility - to a cooperative system whereby the officers merely indicate what could be done and the residents of the area, through this committee of street representatives, really do control what is done. This immediately eliminates the main cause of the adoption of silly plans, namely face-saving. Under this sytem there are no faces to be saved. No matter what the officers think should be done, it is not done if it does not please the residents' committee, and on at least one occasion a plan agreed by such a committee has had to be changed when a full meeting of residents refused to endorse it.

That particular plan was a road scheme which had been set about perfectly rationally. Everybody knew what the problem was. It was to divert, as far as possible, on to main roads the traffic dodging through the area, without making it too difficult for residents to use their own cars. From the start it was realised that there was no perfect solution, and that any plan would have snags and might well increase traffic in some of the streets which at the time had little. Repeated meetings over three years of the G.I.A. committees, and occasional meetings of the City Council's Transportation Committee, and of all the residents concerned, resulted in an experimental plan being tried out and then a modification of that plan in an attempt to iron out snags, partly foreseen and partly not. It has been a satisfactory demonstration of Popperian principle in practice, contrasting starkly with the solutioneering of the larger and infinitely more expensive road schemes I have described elsewhere. It has been successful in eliminating the `dodge-runners', though less successful in fairly distributing the internal traffic that has to go somewhere. It is not perfect but it has greatly relieved the suffering of those who were previously tormented by traffic. Without any new construction - merely by making some streets one-way and blocking others - we have made the best of what we have.

We have also achieved an atmosphere in which opinions can be changed in the light of knowledge. Because of the high camber of the old streets and the comparatively low damp courses in the houses bordering them, it has been necessary in some cases, when relaying the pavements, to tilt them towards the houses. Residents' representatives have gone into the meetings vowing that they would not have these new-fangled pavements in their street. But the City Engineer's representative came prepared with large clear diagrams illustrating his problem and the alternative solutions. Animosity and opposition evaporated. It was agreed that he should proceed as he thought best.

We have achieved with these committees a degree of the plastic control I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Public participation in planning has until recently been little more than a bad joke. A Guardian cartoon summed it up by `And now for something entirely different - two years of debate preceded by the decision'. But in our G.I.A.s a tradition has now been established whereby, although the Council retain the power to override the residents' wishes, they will not do so lightly. They need to have compelling reasons (e.g. that what the residents' want is against the law) which will have to be justified to the residents. The necessity for justification in public is the best way there is for ensuring that at least things will not be done for silly or utterly spurious reasons, as so often they have been in the recent past.

These two examples, showing that at local level there are institutions for the control of government by the governed, contrast with the state of affairs at national level.

Tentative suggestions

My own tentative suggestion is that what are needed to tame the rulers at all levels are layers of overlapping loops of information and control, modelled on what is already in being. Central government would be gradually reshaped in the direction of the present organisation of the district councils (county councils are even less under control than is central government); and the idea of the G.I.A. residents' committees would be extended. The aim is to achieve informed criticism at all levels enabling information to go both ways - from the governed to the government and vice versa, so that each has some measure of control over the other. We then have to establish these important social traditions, where control is only plastic and not rigid, that the will of the ruled will not be lightly overruled.

Probably also we need new institutions to cope with certain technical problems whose complexity prevents their adequate scrutiny by the ordinary committee of lay M.P.s, civil servants, or ministers.

One of the greatest unchecked controls seems to be that exercised by the Treasury over other government departments and over the economy as a whole. At present there are at least three, to some extent contradictory, theories as to the proper direction for the British economy. The Treasury view, in line with the I.M.F. is broadly that everything depends on holding down public expenditure. The keynote of the `Cambridge policy' however is expansion of the economy combined with a fixing of the level of manufactured imports. A third view, is that of Dr Jeremy Bray M.P. who, using the same model of the economy as the Treasury, comes to very different conclusions. His suggested combination of devaluation, substantial tax changes, and increases of public expenditure would, he estimates, greatly increase employment and result in a large favourable balance of payments by 1983/4.

The matter is as important as any that ever comes before Parliament yet it is too technical for it. We need a special institution, a kind of economic forum, where the protagonists can criticise each other in front of an informed audience. The steering of the right economic course is of such importance that it must be justified in public so that it can be seen that science rather than orthodoxy or face-saving has prevailed. It needs to be demonstrated to the lay public that due weight has been given to facts, such as unemployment, and not too much to intangible artefacts like monthly trade figures and relative percentage changes in gross national product (G.N.P.). The danger of such semi-myths is illustrated by the publication just before the general election of 1970 of a £31 million trade deficit for May of that year. It was widely believed at 'the time that this tipped the scales against Labour; and the feeling that this was an unfair influence was reinforced by the revision of the figures at the end of that year to show a May deficit of only £12 million. The treacherous nature of the myth is emphasised by the twist in the tail: the latest revision of the figures shows a deficit of £36 million for that May! (New Society, 3 August 1978, p. 245).

Similarly the Gross National Product (popularly equated with national standard of living) not only ignores, necessarily, the `black' economy which has been estimated to run into thousands of millions of pounds (and perhaps explains the fact that we do not appear to be as poor in comparison with, say, the French as the experts tell us we are) but does include such things as production of cigarettes and operations for lung cancer. So that a successful anti-smoking campaign would reduce the G.N.P. in two ways.

In the Conservative party power to decide a policy is kept firmly in the hands of the leader and is not devolved, for the very real fear that the `backwoodsmen', would take over. In the Labour Party power is vested in the annual party conference and, in theory, policy is there decided by the party activists who are not in fact the same as the `grass roots' in whose name everything is supposed to be done. As is well known, when the party is in power, the conference is in fact unable to control the government., Genuine devolution in either of the two main parties would undoubtedly result in the adoption of `extremist' policies which would in no way reflect the wishes of the people as a whole. What I have in mind avoids this difficulty. The series of loops that I suggest between people and both local and central government would be on specific practical issues. The planning of the G.I.A.s is one. The running of the local authority schools might be another. The extremist difficulty would be overcome in three ways. 1) As in the G.I.A.s, the statutory authority would not in any way give up its power to override: 2) people of all political persuasions would be entitled to attend, so that extremist elements would to some extent cancel out; and 3) the practical nature of the agenda would attract, more than do meetings of political parties, those who are interested in practical solutions to problems; and such people tend not to be extremists.

Divisions must be recognised, not smothered. There are bound to be differences of outlook and interest between, for example shopfloor workers and managers and directors. What is required is that there shall be communication between them and some measure of plastic control of each over the other. It is no more good putting shopfloor workers on the board than it would be to put ratepayers in the cabinet.

I do not at all mean to imply that disagreements occur only between the rulers and the ruled and do not arise between different groups or individuals among the governed. But my experience is that if public meetings of the kind I advocate are held, either regularly as an institution or even on an ad hoc basis for a particular problem, then there is a good chance of one of these consequences: 1) Agreement is reached when (a) protagonists of the scheme see how damaging their proposals are to other people, or (b) when objectors realise the reverse - namely how vital the proposals are to the proposers and how comparatively trivial are what they had imagined to be the insuperable snags. 2) Disagreement among the people concerned is so obvious and irreconcilable that, by mutual consent, it is left to the Council to decide.

As an example of (2): a public meeting was held in Portsmouth to air the question of whether to convert a shopping street completely to pedestrian use or whether to leave it as it is at present with buses but no other traffic. The Council's officers and the bus men explained the pros and cons and were questioned by the public. It was obvious that those present were more or less evenly divided between the two possible courses of action. In these circumstances the people were content, I think, for the Council to decide. What had been a heated dispute was disarmed when it was generally recognised that there were good arguments on both sides.

Politicians and newspapers tend to exaggerate the divisions among the people or at any rate to assume that they lie along political party lines, rich or poor, employers and employed, `capitalists' and workers, etc. In real life partisanship is often much more complicated. Nevertheless division along lines is not to be despised. The benefits it confers become obvious when it is lacking. No party took up the cause against either comprehensive redevelopment, urban motorways, or high-rise prefabricated flats. All these disastrous decisions went through on the nod. The great advantage of opposition is that it forces the airing of the issues with the result that the decision, even if not reversed, is greatly modified in the light of criticism. Popper refers to a generally “overoptimistic expectation concerning the outcome of a discussion; the expectation that every fruitful discussion should lead to a decisive and deserved intellectual victory of the truth, represented by one party, overfalsity, represented by the other. When it is found that this is not what a discussion usually achieves, disappointment turns an overoptimistic expectation into a general pessimism concerning the value of discussions. ('The myth of the framework')”

In conclusion, it obviously detracts from the benefits of having elected representative government if the elected representatives find themselves unable to govern. I have quoted Crossman and Chapman on the subject, and there is plenty of other evidence to the effect that this does happen, that ministers are frequently unable to control their officials. I have described the mechanism of local (district) government in order to demonstrate that it is possible to devise institutions that give the elected rulers effective power, while they themselves are to some extent controlled. `Institutions are like fortresses', wrote Popper. 'They must be well designed and properly manned.' We have tended to concentrate on the manning to the exclusion of the designing. The particular suggestions made in this chapter are advanced in the spirit of the 'bold conjecture' which is then open to attempts to refute it.

To sum up then, my suggestion is that we need at all levels to improve our institutions, and where necessary invent new ones, designed to make possible two-way exchange of information and control - between the public and their elected representatives, between councillors and MPs and their permanent officials, and between the various branches of commerce and industry: manual and office workers, management and providers of capital, and the public for whose benefit the enterprises exist. This must be done, not as a sop to tiresome agitators, but in the realisation that at no level is there a monopoly of knowledge. Each level has its own special kind of knowledge which is necessary to the 'wise wielding of power'.

Chapter Twelve

The Power of Wrong Ideas

Certain powerful wrong ideas dominate the mistakes and muddles I have touched upon in this book and at the bottom of them lie the fallacy of induction and ignorance of Popper's solution of the resulting problem. Induction is the cardinal wrong idea. The associated errors are of two kinds. The first assume the validity of induction notwithstanding Hume's conclusion to the contrary, and the second kind, while implicitly accepting the irrationality of induction, go on to assume that there is no rationality, that `human nature' is basically irrational.

The first category comprise the planning errors and the aberrations of certain scientists. They demonstrate a false authoritarianism that is derived from induction because it appears to be possible for authority and experts to know what is right, to arrive in private at the truth or the best solution. The second is at the root of the acceptance of such things as contradictions and the attraction of psychoanalytic or pseudo-psychoanalytic notions which do not need to be justified by reason.

In the early eighteenth century, David Hume had shown that generalisation from a limited number of observations or facts could not be justified by reason; it was not logical to assume that what had not been observed would be the same as what had been. In other words (to use Popper's example), no number of sightings of white swans could make it certain that all swans are white. Yet this process of generalisation seemed to be the basis of rational behaviour and especially of science. We observe that the sun rises every morning, so we assume that it will rise tomorrow and the next day. Hence Hume's conclusion seemed to mean that science and human behaviour in general were not and could not be rational.

The difficulty has arisen out of the mistaken quest for positive confirmations. Induction seemed to be a means of ascertaining the truth. When this turned out not to be valid, it became apparent that there was no direct logical path to certainty. The mistaken quest for certainty led to scepticism and a belief in irrationality.

Popper's solution to the problem is simple. It is based on accepting uncertainty. Rationality consists in making the best choice between approximations to the truth, in making judgements precisely analogous to those made by judge and jury, whose verdicts also are uncertain yet rational. We act rationally, not on generalisations from incomplete experience, but on the best-tested theory, the theory that has best stood up to attempts to refute it. It is true that we act on the theory that the sun will rise tomorrow, but this is not because we generalise from our countless past experiences, but because the theory that it will do so is the one for which we have the best reasons. This interpretation is borne out by the fact that if we were to fly in winter to somewhere north of the Arctic circle, we should expect the sun not to rise, because the best theory predicts that it will not, although we as individuals may have no previous experience of perpetual night.

The fact of the invalidity of induction and the nature of the solution of the problem together destroy the case for authoritarianism, elitism, and revelation, and make the case for democracy and science.

If induction were a valid means of arriving at the truth, then civil servants, governments, and authorities of all kinds, and experts in general, could be left to arrive at the truth, the best theory, the best policy, the best solution to a problem. But the fact that the best theory or plan is the one that stands up best to criticism, to genuine attempts to refute it, means that experts alone in private (just like judges in private) cannot be relied upon to arrive at the best answer. They may do so; but we shall not know that it is the best until it has withstood severe criticism in public. None of us can be expected to criticise with sufficient severity his own scheme. We see the merits of our own ideas better than others do, but we see their snags much less well. The necessary criticism must therefore come from an outside jury - from other scientists perhaps in the case of science, but from the general public in the case of public affairs, because new laws and plans will affect individuals in ways which they alone know, and which cannot be foreseen (for instance the well-planned law courts that caused more cases to be brought to court) (page 35).

This leads to the idea that a theory cannot be proved although it can, in principle, be disproved. Hence nobody can be sure of the success of a plan or the truth of a theory, while the existence of insurmountable snags or contradictions may often make certain its failure or fallaciousness. It emphasises also that criticism is important and not just `constructive' criticism. Destructive criticism - pointing out the snags, why something will not work - is far more constructive in the long run than suggesting minor amendments to a fundamentally unsound scheme. on the other hand it is only a short step from the acceptance of induction to a belief that theories can be validated by finding enough facts that support them - the process that I have nicknamed white-swanning. I have concentrated on two psychological theories which have been accepted on that sort of basis and which have had a profound effect in undermining the tradition of Western culture. An equally potent and equally invalid complex of theories, Marxism, has been exhaustively criticised by Popper himself in the second volume of The Open Society. His main accusation against Marx is that he `misled scores of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific way of approaching social problems. Marx is responsible', he says, `for the devastating influence of the historicist method of thought within the ranks of those who wish to advance the cause of the open society' (O.S., ii, 82). This accusation is considered but not, in my view, fully understood or satisfactorily answered in Maurice Cornforth's attempted refutation of Popper. All three theories owe their damaging effect to their explaining of everything in terms of material or unconscious processes, thereby discounting consciousness and therefore reason, that `medium of universal understanding'. The process could be compared  with that of explaining the course of a boat in terms only of the tide and currents while neglecting the efforts of the rowers and helmsman. In Popperian terms it is looking only at World 1 and ignoring World 2. The undercutting of consciousness also leaves out of account the effect of what are usually called cultural influences and what Popper has more accurately defined in his concept of World 3. An appropriate analogy here would be the explaining of the behaviour of motor traffic without taking into account the fact that there is a rule of the road to keep to the left (in the U.K.).

The general indifference to the importance of criticism and the almost universal condemnation of destructive criticism has tragic personal effects. Many of the best young people - the most energetic, enthusiastic, altruistic - are attracted and seduced by meretricious theory-systems such as psychoanalysis and Marxism and more recently by the new cults: Scientology, the Moonies etc. Too often their education has failed to impress on them that, as with the accused in court, the other side must be heard - audi alteram partem, the cardinal principle of natural justice, a principle that applies to any kind of decision-making. one must know what is to be said against an apparently attractive creed or case.

Inherent in Popper's solution to the induction problem is a lowering of sights from the unattainable ideals of certainty and perfection to a realistic striving for advance and improvement in knowledge and conditions of life. This can give just as much scope for energy, enthusiasm, and altruism. We must aim to reduce unhappiness rather than try to make people happy, to prevent and cure disease rather than strive for perfect health, reduce poverty and injustice rather than try to create heaven on earth. For we can identify and agree on the bad things; we cannot be sure of and certainly cannot agree on the ideal state of society.

I have concerned myself largely with practical plans about physical things like power stations and roads; but thoughtful people are much exercised by, for instance, the alleged decline of Britain; and by this is meant not just our undoubted failure to increase our Gross National Product in line with that of our neighbours, or our loss of empire, but a decline of the `whole of society'; and they proceed to find remedies. It is here also, I think, that Popper's attitude is applicable. one must first define the problem. Is it just the G.N.P. or is it also that the trains are dirty or that people are increasingly taking to drink? Next, having defined the problem or problems, we must ask if it is likely that the suggested solution will work or at least help. If this process is carried out, part at least of the problem is likely to disappear. When somebody is suffering from, say, tonsillitis, often he will feel that his whole body is deranged, everything is wrong. Yet the killing of the bacteria infecting those two small organs will quickly restore to health the whole being. So with some of the problems of society. Some may turn out to be genuine but the favoured broad solution irrelevant. A direct remedy is likely to be needed, for example, for keeping trains clean, such as paying the cleaners better and supervising them

I must add the reason why I suspect that those who attempt this mental exercise will find that the problem largely vanishes or fragments. It is because of the immense diversity of our society, which contains members of the Salvation Army as well as those whose lives revolve around some sort of gambling. It contains the unemployable who spend their `social security' on ginger wine and it contains the man who without any state aid broke two world athletic records in a week. It contains those who care obsessively about their personal appearance, those whose curlers are in place in readiness for some still more important (but unspecified) occasion, even when the queen comes to their street, and those who don't care at all. There are those who compete in the ballroom dancing championships, those who spend every weekend alone on a river bank under a green umbrella fishing, as well as those with ordinary nine-to-five office jobs who watch `telly' in the evening. The idea of such a society moving as a whole in any direction other than in terms of total material wealth or power over other peoples seems to be without much meaning.

Finally a couple of disclaimers: in case it may seem that the tendency of this book is anti-technological, anti-progressive, I must emphatically state that this is not the case. The attitude adopted here is substantially that of Winston Churchill's famous remark about scientists,  that they must always be on tap, never on top. We must use science and technology in order to better the lot of man, but we must never allow technological progress to be an ideal in itself, overruling what is desirable for man's welfare. We (society, that is, as opposed to individuals) must never do things simply because they are technically possible. In particular we must be wary of computer technology - of the kind of practice exemplified on page 101 - where because factors could not be computed they were taken as being irrelevant or of less importance than those that could be. I would add that I think it most desirable that those who are on top, the political and social leaders, should not be illiterate in regard to science and mathematics as so many are today.

It might also be charged that in the last chapter I am advocating a mad proliferation of committees to replace individual decision. This again I am utterly opposed to. There is nothing worse than the artistic choice of a committee. Creation springs from individuals. Committees are necessary as checks on individuals, charged with acting on behalf of the public, to ensure that what they do really is in the public interest. Many committees could be disbanded because they are attempting to do what the individual would do better. In summary: this book has been concerned with the consequences of the neglect in public affairs of practical philosophy, and with the way in which wrong ideas, especially unquestioned yet mistaken assumptions and attempted solutions to unformulated problems, can lead and have often led to practical mistakes of many kinds, resulting on the one hand in great economic loss and waste and individual misery and on the other in an atmosphere of distrust of all political and intellectual motives, disillusion with democracy, suspicion of the very idea of truth.

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