The human presumption

All species live life “in the moment” – in basic terms, each morning they awake, seek out food and sustenance, “do their thing” and eventually go back to sleep again, all against the background of what the specific conditions are on any given day.

It is one of the crosses to bear of the human race that it has the capacity to think, analyse and plan ahead.

One of the downsides of this is a tendency to assume that “the present state of civilisation” is not only a “given” but in fact a moving starting point from which Man – with all his varied skills, dreams, graft and ingenuity – will inexorably and constantly make the world a better place.

An offshoot of this phenomenon is that “people get used to what they get used to” and feel hard done by whenever their “status quo” (whatever it is) comes under threat and/or is turned upside down – most spectacularly perhaps by things like the current pandemic.

Let me give an example or two as illustrations.

My father was by profession a chartered accountant/auditor and enjoyed a long and successful career in that capacity.

However – reduced to the point of near absurdity, as I was wont to do in order to prompt an occasional debate – all he and his colleagues were doing was (by examining the financial books) carry out an annual check upon the financial records and performance of a business and then certifying that its accounts “showed a true and fair view” of its activity over the past year.

Or possibly not – it was/is always open to any auditor to “qualify” its report in any respect (e.g. to state that the organisation’s stock-counting system is inadequate) which the world at large would consider a “black mark” notched against it.

However. My point is that the prime reason that auditors and audits exist at all is that annual audits of specified type of organisation are a legal requirement.

I once put it to my parent that – if ever that legal requirement was ever dropped or repealed – he and his kind would have been out of a job.

In response he listed financial probity, integrity, the importance of the wider world being able to trust annual company accounts – plus all the other the plusses that the accountancy trade embodied as a service.

Nevertheless, (for the sake of my argument) I maintained that none of them outweighed the fact that all an auditor does is double-check the work of other accountants inside an organisation who “keep the financial score” on a daily basis.

In themselves they created no wealth – they just charged very handsomely indeed thank you for a specialist service that added very little of value to the organisation they were checking.

I haven’t just got it in for accountants as such, you understand – there are plenty of others.

Let’s take lawyers.

I confidently predict that one day it will become technically possible for some country somewhere (if not all) – through developing sophisticated AI (“Artificial Intelligence”) computers to devise a court system where lawyers draft witness statements etc. … but then a computerised courts system would spew out the judgements automatically – without any need for the expensive buildings and hardware, the hundreds of thousands (millions of?) of administrative staff, court ushers, judges, lawyers and prison officers that the current UK legal system involves.

Lawyers could make all the arguments they wanted about the Rule of Law, the rights of ordinary citizens to take an issue to court if necessary, and so on – but ultimately (as with accountants/auditors) – the UK legal system is wrapped in human self-interest at every level and is deliberately overgrown with traditions, rules, regulations and conventions that perpetuate “the system”.

I just ask whether – if we were charged in February 2021 with coming up with a national legal system and given a blank sheet of paper from which to start – would we come up with “that which we’ve current got” again?

I very much doubt it.

Which brings me to the BBC and its new Director-General Tim Davie who was appointed last September.

He recently put his head above the parapet to claim that if – as some BBC-sceptics are suggesting, the BBC’s licence fee of £157 per annum should be dropped and the BBC should instead become a subscription service – its service would be worth more than £400 per annum at current market rates.

In making this statement Mr Davie, who has been in and around the BBC for fifteen years before ascending to his current post, has displayed the classic symptoms of a “status quo-er”.

He begins, inevitably, from the delusion that the BBC (with all its “warts”) is a perfect organisation in every respect – not the “50 years out of date bureaucracy” that is really is, i.e. woefully bloated with time-servers, go-fers and mediocrities with high-falutin’ titles and salaries, eternally trying to be “all things to all men (and women)”, devoid of dynamic thinking and in desperate need of a radical re-think.

I’ve always held the view that the BBC should be restricted to producing the BBC World Service (for the benefit of humans everywhere), and then UK news and current affairs programming, worthy documentaries, some relatively cheap entertainment shows and such sundry other items as might be agreed as part of a review of what we actually need from a national broadcaster.

It certainly doesn’t need to make drama series or bid for sports contracts costing tens (even hundreds) of millions of pounds: all of that stuff – including its high risk/high regard vagaries) – can/should be left to the commercial sector.

I’d certainly consider taking out a blanket subscription (depending upon the price) for a base level BBC service, or alternatively happily “pay per view” for specific BBC programmes as and when I chose to watch/listen to them.