“The method in the madness of modern civilisation” – Is this what is wrong?
This article was originally published by LabourList on 29th April 2012. In his autobiography, The Time of My Life , Denis Healey described his experience of trying to count the number of people getting on and off trains across six platforms at Swindon station during the Second World War: “I made up the number getting off and on again, made an informed guess of the number getting on, and asked the ticket collector for the number getting off. After a few weeks I discovered he was making up his figures as well. This gave me a life-long scepticism about the reliability of statistics, which served me well when I became Chancellor of the Exchequer.” As Healey illustrates here, what is served to us as truth is often as subject to human limitations and frailties as anything else. Truth is often wrong. In politics, the currency of rights and wrongs tends to be statistical (albeit with an underlying playground culture of mutual blame attached). Most problems are the ot...