The death of common sense - it's time we all fought back

This is not much of an excuse for what follows, but I had a dreadful cold at the time and it is not nice to have a bunged-up nose and ears that feel they are about to explode when you are 35,000ft in the air.


So if a certain flight attendant is reading this, I apologise for my behaviour. But only up to a point. Let me present the facts and you may judge for yourselves.

My seat on the aircraft was next to one of the emergency exits and there are strict rules about not allowing bags to block the exit.

Quite right too. I know the rules and I obey them, but I had a few magazines and newspapers on the floor and when the flight attendant told me to put them away, I gathered them up and put them on the empty seat next to me. Not good enough.

"They must be put away properly," he snapped.

"They are - and anyway it's only a few papers," I snapped back.

"The exit must not be blocked."

"But I'm not blocking it."

Then he started getting very officious, indeed. "I'm beginning to dislike your attitude," he told me.

I resisted the temptation to tell him what I thought of his attitude, grabbed the papers, stuck them under my backside and sat on them. Still not good enough.

"That is not what I asked you to do! Put them away!"

What I really wanted to do at that point was grab the papers, roll them up very tightly and (well, you can guess the rest.)

Instead I remembered that airline captains have absolute power when they are airborne and keep handcuffs on the flight deck. So I did a great deal of snorting indignantly and managed, with some difficulty, to squeeze the papers into the already bulging seat pocket in front of me where, it seemed to me, they were actually more of an obstruction than when I'd been sitting on them.

Technically, I have no doubt the officious attendant was right. But what I wanted was for him to be a bit more civil and, above all, to show a bit of common sense. That, however, is a commodity in short supply these days.

I wrote about common sense in the Mail earlier this year after taking my small son to the local hospital's accident and emergency unit.

It could scarcely have been a more trivial injury - a splinter in his finger - but it was swollen and turning septic and I had made a bit of a mess of trying to get it out myself.

Neither the nurse I saw first nor the doctor who joined her would do it. Not because they couldn't - it would have taken them a few minutes - but because of the rules which say only A&E units with specially trained paediatric staff can deal with children. That meant having to travel miles into Central London to another hospital.

They told me they did not have "after-care" facilities in case of complications. But it's only a splinter, I said, not a life-threatening injury. It made no difference. Rules are rules.

So off we went and eventually - after seeing two receptionists, two nurses, three doctors of varying seniority and one X-ray technician and receiving a large dose of painkiller (unwanted) and a bottle of antibiotic medicine (unused) - the splinter was removed.

The patient, I am happy to say, survived with no complications whatsoever, but what should have taken a minute or two had taken five hours and heaven knows how much it ended up costing the poor old taxpayer.

I ended with a plea for common sense and the result, predictably enough, was a flood of letters from Mail readers.

They make depressing and infuriating reading. One woman - a senior nurse who's been in the NHS for 40 years and obviously knows her way around the system - has a teenage daughter who managed to step on a needle.

Her saga began with the A&E receptionist taking six hours to hand the GP's referral letter to the hospital doctor and ended, many days and much unnecessary pain later, with her checking her daughter into a private hospital and paying for an operation to remove it. At no stage was common sense applied.

The letters reinforced the view that too many public bodies seem to look for ways of doing things that are, frankly, daft.

Why do so many police forces plaster their vehicles and their police stations with signs assuring us that they are "Working for a safer city"? Wouldn't it be just a little odd if they were not?

Why do hospitals produce glossy brochures and posters promising us that they will "treat all patients equally, regardless of ethnicity, age and gender"? Would they actually tell us if they weren't?

Why are dustcarts emblazoned with signs saying that they are dedicated to keeping our streets clean? As opposed to what, precisely?

These may seem trivial complaints, but they have a corrosive effect on the relationship between us and them. We feel we are being treated like idiots, patronised, having our intelligence insulted - not to mention our money wasted.

It would take an ounce of common sense to realise that we are perfectly capable of judging for ourselves whether public servants are doing the jobs for which we pay them.

Those infuriating signs merely succeed in reminding us of what we might actually like to see, for instance - fewer police stations being closed or more frequent rubbish collections. In other words, they have precisely the opposite effect from what was intended.

Growing expertise and the massive proliferation of "experts" can be the enemy of common sense. Every big organisation now has its own so-called specialists to assess every conceivable risk and draw up complicated - and often unworkable - strategies to avoid them.

Instead of allowing common sense to tell us what is truly dangerous and what is acceptable risk, fear takes over.

Every sensible parent would agree that it is wise to guide a child across a dangerous road or to avoid using concrete floors in children's playgrounds.

But they also know that if you wrap a child in cotton wool, never let him climb a tree lest he falls, or go to the shops by himself in case he is abducted by a crazed paedophile, he will be at far greater risk in later life.

The Public Relations industry is one that can seem to defy common sense.

Ask yourself which politician has received the most favourable press coverage over the past year and I'd be amazed if Liberal Democrat Vince Cable does not come out at or near the top of your list.

There may be many reasons for Dr Cable's favourable coverage (it helped he was only a temporary leader and thus never the main target) but the public warmed to him because he appeared to be that relative rarity: an unspun politician. We don't like to feel we're being manipulated. That's common sense.

In medicine, specialisms have brought untold benefits. Millions of people are leading healthy lives today who would have been dead or suffering terribly had it not been for clever doctors who have specialised in ever more narrow fields.

And yet, in those same hospitals where medical miracles are performed every day, it was felt necessary to remind nurses to wash their hands. The virtues of the old-fashioned matron may sometimes be exaggerated, but intrinsic to her role was the application of common sense.

The experts told British Airways that Terminal Five could operate smoothly from day one. Common sense could have told them otherwise. No new airport has ever pulled off such an impossible achievement.

The experts said the old rules about lending far more money to house-buyers than they could afford to repay were outdated because there was now a new economic "paradigm" - not that anyone ever seemed to know exactly what that meant. Common sense could have told the banks otherwise.

They'd have done better listening to Charles Dickens's comic creation Mr Micawber, who said: "Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19 19s 6d, result happiness. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20 6d, result misery." He had no expertise, but plenty of common sense.

The experts tell us - often in studies that contradict each other - that just about everything we eat and drink is going to take us to an early grave, from coffee and tea to sausages and eggs.

And heaven help us if we knock back more than the occasional very small glass of dry sherry. Common sense tells us that if we have a varied diet and don't go binge-drinking every weekend, we'll probably be just fine.

The experts said we could ignore the experience of our ancestors who avoided building houses on flood plains. Common sense could have saved many people the heartbreak of ruined homes.

Last month many Today listeners were appalled by an interview I did with the father of a deaf child who wanted to have another child by IVF. He insisted that he and his partner should be able to choose an embryo with the same disability - except that he refused to acknowledge that deafness is a disability.

I once chaired a debate for the charity Scope and was attacked by several members of the audience for having described a child as "dreadfully disabled".

She must spend her life strapped into a wheelchair, incontinent, unable to speak and she will never develop beyond a mental age of two. Yet I was fiercely attacked for daring to impose my standards on another human being by describing her as "dreadfully disabled".

Couldn't I accept that she was "differently" abled? No I could not. Common sense told me otherwise.

It is true, as most scientists will attest, that common sense can often be the enemy of progress. To our ancestors it was nonsense to suggest that the earth was round. If it were, we'd fall off the bottom.

The genius of great scientists throughout the ages has been to take a proposition that seemed entirely sensible, stand it on its head and prove that it was rubbish. Isaac Newton - perhaps the greatest scientist of all time - demolished one "sensible" theory after another.

Einstein described common sense as nothing more than "the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen".

But there is a profound difference between applying common sense to science and applying it to the way we lead our lives - especially to the way we are governed.

In 1776, Tom Paine wrote a pamphlet that would help change the course of history. It argued the case for American independence and it was called "Common Sense".

Paine regarded government as a "necessary evil". It should be representative and subject to frequent elections and it should be simple.

It should allow us to get on with our lives and be totally accountable to us. I imagine him nodding in agreement if he had been sitting in the audience when Onora O'Neill gave a magnificent series of Reith Lectures on Radio 4 a few years ago.

Baroness O'Neill, who was the principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, attacked the "detailed control" practised by modern governments: "An unending stream of new legislation and regulation, memoranda and instructions, guidance and advice" that has flooded into the public sector over the past 20 years.

Common sense tells us that teachers want to teach, nurses to care, police officers to protect the public. It also tells us that if we pay their wages we expect them to be accountable to us. But, as O'Neill pointed out, the "accountability revolution" often gets in the way.

Police have to deal with so much red tape that fewer cases can be prepared and fewer criminals brought to court.

Doctors have to do so much record-keeping it reduces the time they can spend with patients. Even children, as she says, are not exempt because exams are more frequent and the time for learning shrinks.

Accountability demands that we should have a right to complain when things go wrong, but once again common sense is needed.

Instead complaint procedures are so burdensome that avoiding complaints, including silly ones, becomes a goal in its own right.

As O'Neill puts it: "We are heading towards defensive medicine, defensive teaching and defensive policing."

You know common sense has deserted us if an ambulance with a sick patient on board has to sit outside the hospital because if the patient is taken through the doors and cannot be admitted the hospital's targets will be affected. You know it when police officers beg to be allowed to do their job rather than fill endless forms.

When I started researching this essay I was asked to define common sense. The best I could come up with is that you know it when you see it.

But then I started reading The Wisdom Of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which makes the point that the many are smarter than the few.

One individual - however much an expert he may be - may well get it wrong. But the aggregate wisdom of a large enough group of diverse individuals will almost certainly get it right.

In short, if enough of us think it makes sense, it probably does. And that includes you

By JOHN HUMPHRYS

Daily Mail