Inquiryitis

I read yesterday about PM May ordering an inquiry into a disaster, involving contaminated blood and lots of deaths, maybe forty years ago.

Without knowing anything about the right and wrongs of this particular case, I do fret about the continuing march of inquiryitis into the fabric of our society, a march previously noticed at references 1 and 2. I offer a few more thoughts.

Maybe we should operate a statute of limitations, maybe on a sliding scale according to the scale of the disaster, and not have inquiries into very old disasters. One reason being that it is very hard to get at the truth so long after the event. Another being that there are unlikely to be lessons which can be drawn from a very old event which are going to be helpful now. The world is likely to have moved on.

Maybe what we are seeing is a reversion to the law of the jungle or to the laws of the ancients. When something goes wrong you have to sacrifice something expensive or important to placate the gods. Sometimes it was enough to sacrifice a good quality goat, sometimes nothing less than a king would do. But exacting a blood penalty somehow calmed everybody down and they could then get on with their lives.

The trouble is that if you do too much of this sort of thing, it is going to be very hard to get public servants and very hard to get the ones you have got to do anything. They don't get paid enough to run the risk of being a sacrificial goat twenty years down the line.

Furthermore, it will greatly increase the temptation to cover things up. If the penalty for making a serious mistake is the chopping block, you are going to do your best to cover your tracks. This afternoon I feel sure that this is part of why the police find it so hard to admit that they have made a mistake, even when it is obvious to pretty much everyone else that they have. But I think that in their case it is still counter-productive: sensible people understand that mistakes get made, particularly when under stress.

From where I associate to Colonel Bantry in 'The Body in the Library'. Someone he did not like at all had done something stupid, something which make his life a bit awkward for a while - but when the Colonel learned that the perpetrator had been drunk at the time, he just waved the whole business aside with a broad smile. A matter of no importance any more.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/where-angels-fear-to-tread.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/inquiryitis.html.