¹⁰When wisdom finds its way into your heart, and knowledge is pleasant to your inner being, ¹¹discretion will preserve you, discernment will keep you, ¹²to deliver you from the way of the evil man who speaks perverse things, ¹³who leaves the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness.

Proverbs 2: 10-13 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

⁵Put all your trust in the Lord and do not rely on your own understanding……²¹My son, safeguard sound judgement and discretion; do not let them out of your sight

Proverbs 3: 5 and 21 – The Revised English Bible

²²Good sense is a fountain of life to its possessors, but a fool is punished by his own folly

Proverbs 16:22 – The Revised English Bible

⁵If, though, any of you should lack wisdom, let him ask from God who gives generously to all, and not begrudgingly, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, not at all doubting

James 1:5 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

⁹And this is my prayer, that your love may grow ever richer in knowledge and insight of every kind, ¹⁰enabling you to learn by experience what things really matter.

Philippians 1: 9-10 – The Revised English Bible

^19.…the Son of Man came, eating and drinking, and they say, “Look at him, a glutton and a drinker, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Yet God’s wisdom is proved right by its results.

Matthew 11:19 – The Revised English Bible

What is this image? Answer below

For my overseas readers, we have a new health minister here in the UK, Ashley Dalton who, it was reported soon after her appointment, had said that it’s OK to ‘identify as a llama.’ In response, an MP in parliament asked whether, if such a person was sick, he should call for: ‘a doctor, a vet or a straightjacket.’

So this is just a bit of harmless political banter? One side says something amusing, to see what the reaction is? The problem with this is that she was deadly serious, albeit it must be acknowledged that the words date from 2016. She was then 44.

What on earth has this story got to do with theological reflection? Well, I’m sure you’ll agree that our God is not just a God of mercy and justice, but also a God of wisdom. Wisdom is one of the great themes of the Bible. God doesn’t want us to celebrate ignorance and stupidity!

But firstly, I need to ask how, as a country, we came deliberately, in cold blood, to choose to throw away all common sense. This is, of course, a complex question, but it’s worth exploring, because it points so very clearly to how our country came to be in such a parlous state. Those following this site often make two comments to me:

• Nothing works any more
• Our world seems to have gone completely mad

One of the possible answers to both questions relates to the extent to which we no longer live in the real, practical world. We’ve discarded that world of designing and making things, a world in which, almost uniquely among my friends, I made my living for the vast majority of my career. In this, I followed my grandfather and great-grandfather; you could say that manufacturing flows in my veins. Many learned articles have been written about how the manufacturing percentage of our GNP has declined from 30% in 1973 to 17.5% in 2023. People are inclined to think that this change took place when our manufacturing was ‘offshored’ to China. But the problem is much older than that. Research shows that between 1973 and 1992, the total increase in manufactured output in the UK was only 1.3%. Between those same years, manufactured output rose 68.9% in Japan, 68.6% in Italy, 55.2% in the United States, 32.1% in West Germany and 16.5% in France. In his book ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ Mattias Desmet states that between 1840 and 2010, jobs in administration, management and services increased from 20% to 80%. From Napoleon’s ‘Nation of Shopkeepers,’ in 170 years we’ve become a ‘Nation of Administrators and Clerks.’

Does this matter? Yes, it matters very much, and explains a great deal of the decline in our nation over my lifetime. Only yesterday on TV, I saw someone saying that the outcome for children born to married parents was far better than for those born to unmarried parents. The person asked to comment on this said: ‘This is wrong, Research shows that 42% of all marriages end in divorce.’ The person answering seemed completely oblivious to the fact that her answer was totally irrelevant to the claim. This kind of muddled thinking has now become completely commonplace and normal.

When you’re engaged in designing things, making things or repairing things, you can’t survive unless you’re skilled in problem solving. Most technicians carry those skills around unconsciously. How else would a car mechanic, in the days before computer ‘diagnostics,’ faced with a car that wouldn’t start, be able to narrow things down to discover that the fuel pump had failed? Think about it; such people follow a hierarchy of problem-solving automatically, having been trained to think this way. Now, you plug in a diagnostic computer and it tells you what to think; except often it’s completely wrong.

We now have a tendency to identify what we want the solution to our problem to be, and then ignore all evidence when publicising it. It’s like a disease that runs through all those who govern us. For example, Ashley Dalton studied politics and has only ever worked in local and national government. She has no visible connection with the ‘real world.’ In my youth, politicians almost always had a career outside parliament; such experience is now a rarity; Starmer’s front bench has only two people out of a total of 26 with a University STEM qualification (one in Bioscience, the other in Chemistry; the former converted to become a lawyer and the second went straight into politics, so neither has real-world experience). From what I can see, there is no business experience in the current Cabinet and there was only one person with such experience in the last Conservative Cabinet.

It’s hard not to reach the conclusion that the lack of practical skills and experience amongst those who govern us has heavily influenced the totally deluded decision-making of such people. Just look at this list of examples of the kind of insanity with which we’re having to live:

• Claiming that a man can become a woman (or a llama), just by saying so.
• Permit a ‘work from home’ culture and expect productivity to remain the same.
• Encourage a switch to 100% electricity use in vehicles and home heating and at the same time expect windmills and solar panels on their own to meet the demand.
• Blame a terrible murder of children on the online company which sold the knife.
• Think that computers, that are programmed by people, are capable of solving the huge problems that people themselves cannot (Artificial Intelligence).
• Grant legal exemption to those companies supplying an experimental ‘gene therapy’ and then cajole and threaten the population into queuing up to take it.
• Import gas over huge distances in diesel-powered ships, instead of exploiting your own natural gas.
• Position weather stations right next to a runway where military jets are taking off and then claim that the climate is getting hotter.
• Give huge subsidies to a power station for burning wood that has had to be shipped across the Atlantic on a diesel-powered ship and at the same time threaten to ban wood burning stoves for the population.
• Increase both taxes and government expenditure and expect the economy to grow, despite generations of experience that the opposite happens.
• Provide endless benefits to illegal immigrants and yet expect them to stop coming.
• The final question – what is the illustration at the head of this article representing? Answer after the prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank you for giving us reason and for encouraging us to use wisdom in our decision-making. Amen

Answers:

The entire square represents the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere,

Yellow is Nitrogen, 78.08%

Blue is Oxygen, 20.94%

Red is Argon, 0.93%

Green (Circled) is CO2, 0.04%. Of that, 0.0384% is natural

White is CO2 resulting from human activities, 0.0016% (you’ll have to look very carefully to see this, it’s so tiny)

The green square at the top right is the total CO2 contained in the Earth’s atmosphere, which is 0.04% of the total. 0.0384% is natural CO2, and 0.0016% is that produced by human activities (white square). All of Europe contributes 16% of that little white quadrant, or 0.000256% of the total.

Questions:

1. How much of the 0.000256% is represented by the UK on its own? 0.0000397%
2. If the cost of ‘Net Zero’ will be well over £3,000,000,000,000 (£3 trillion) as some experts believe, and you are the government, how much effort do you put into reducing the UK’s 0.0000397% share of the problem? Answers on a postcard, please.
3. So why is this government, and the previous one, fixated with this situation?