The Disastrous Rowing Ethos

The 800th anniversary of Cambridge University this weekend is a good opportunity to return to the damaging obsession with the rowing analogy instilled by our senior universities and spreading across all levels of British society. Interestingly Matthew Parris comments on the effect of this problem in his column in The Times this morning, linked here. I blogged on this topic earlier this month, read here, with a very pretty picture of an idyllic rowing scene on the River Cam. The reality of the ingrained fear to stand out from the establishment consensus or state one's individual views when one can see a disastrously wrong course being steered is the penalty NOW being paid by Britain for decades of this false philosophy. As Matthew Parris so accurately puts it: What troubles me is the suspicion that discretion in public is accompanied by discretion in private, discretion to the point of gutlessness.

For courage rarely surfaces until retirement. Just how brave is our British habit of staying tight-lipped about unfolding policy calamities while still part of the policymaking team - and then, after a decent pause and a garnish of ermine, swinging about in the Upper Chamber with a “my Lords” here and a “my noble and learned friend” there, to pronounce on all the mistakes you apparently saw coming for years? How proud should a man or woman be of that?

There will always be disingenuous hindsight; but all too often the retired luminary is being honest when he says that he knew at the time a doomed policy was doomed......

It sometimes seems that we all trudge down a long road we suspect is leading nowhere, nursing our private doubts and keeping our mouths tight shut.

This is exactly the problem. I feel sure we have all been guilty at one time or another of falling into the trap spelled out in the paragraph immediately above. If we are to come through the present economic collapse where a fresh start is so urgently needed we must all speak out against the disastrously mistaken route of enormous borrowing now being undertaken by Brown and Darling!