Woke flights of fancy won't get passengers home

IN HIS poignant farewell interview with this paper last weekend, Frederick Forsyth reflected on the governance of modern Britain. 

- 

"We've become a country that is effectively ruled by its bureaucrats, not by its elected tribunes," he said. It was a characteristically trenchant observation and a true one.

Our political class has rarely been weaker or the machinery of the state stronger. Ministers bustle about self-importantly, filling the airwaves with eager rhetoric about their plans and policies, yet officialdom carries on regardless.

That helps explain why there is such disillusion with the current political process. Action is promised on knife crime, hospital waiting lists, and the shortage of affordable housing, but nothing seems to change.

The small boats crossing the Channel cannot be stopped. The deportations of illegal migrants cannot be started.

An air of impotence hangs over the Tory Government. Ministers are in office, not in power.

This huge democratic deficit is bad enough, but what makes the ascendancy of unelected, unaccountable administrators even more disturbing is that they are failing in their basic tasks. Pragmatic efficiency used to be a key attribute of our nation, enabling Britain to run the largest empire the world has ever seen without a heavy apparatus of oppression.

In late 19th century India, for instance, this land of more than 250 million people was ruled by only 200,000 officials and soldiers. In the same vein, when the threat of the Luftwaffe in 1940 compelled the British authorities to evacuate children from the cities, this colossal exercise was undertaken without a single child going missing.

Yet today, that sense of purpose and dynamism has given way to a creeping incompetence, as epitomised by the chaos in the air traffic control system this week, which left tens of thousands of British holidaymakers stranded abroad and could cost the airline industry north of £100million.