WOrkER
With the greatest respect, I'm troubled by your exhortation in an otherwise well reasoned post to:
Please remember that we have not only read everything ever written on this accident, we have actually studied it all.
There is enormous danger for a free society where those who are elected to office are, because of the very fact that that they have been elected, distrusted. Increasingly, it is unelected officials, bureaucrats and advisers, such as yourself I suspect, rather than Ministers, who decide policy. These ‘experts’ may offer useful advice. But politics and government is about more than expertise; it is about wider judgments of the national interest and recognition that decisions in one policy area can have profound consequences in other areas. In a democracy, the people’s representatives must take the decisions after weighing all the opposing views and arguments. Otherwise, we live in a dictatorship of ‘those who know best’ - those such as you, perchance?