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Madame Bovary Revisited

Lord Copper

I don’t know how many of the readers of this article will have read Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth century novel Madame Bovary. Because of my particular educational choices, I have read it several times, and written more than one essay on it. But it doesn’t really matter if you’ve read it or not; the overall plot and Emma’s circle of self-destruction is not what I want to focus on here. There is, though, one small(ish) incident - I think in about chapter eleven - which I think we can use to sum up our present UK government.

Emma’s husband, Charles, is a small-town doctor in rural Normandy. He is dull, boring and not very intelligent; the standard fare of his medical practice is childbirth, childhood illnesses, colds and flu and a bit of end of life care. At the cutting edge of medical knowledge and technology he most definitely is not. But one day, in a medical publication, he comes across a report of a new operation, which, the proponent claims, can cure club foot. Now, I’m not medically trained, or indeed a scientist of any sort, but I do kind of feel that I would have worked out that this operation was very unlikely to succeed - the technique was to sever the achilles tendon; difficult to see how that could improve things…. Nevertheless, for Charles, it’s written in a respected magazine, by a surgeon (who, incidentally, has never tested his great new idea), so it must be a good thing. And, miraculously, in their small town, there is a stable lad, called Hippolyte, at the hotel who has all his life suffered from a club foot.

So, egged on by Emma and the local pharmacist (they all see the prospect of fame and fortune if the first operation of this new technique is carried out in their village), Charles persuades the unfortunate lad that he can cure his disability. He carries out the operation, and then encloses the foot and ankle in a heavy box, which he has had manufactured by the blacksmith. All they have to do is wait, and soon Hippolyte will be running around like a child.

Mmmm….it doesn’t quite work out. After a few days, the lad is crying out in excruciating pain. They remove the box from around the foot, and discover a stinking, gangrenous infection. A real surgeon from the bigger town is called in, and there is no choice for him but to amputate the leg, before the gangrene spreads further and kills the lad, who is left as an exhibition of Charles’ desire to go beyond the bounds of his knowledge.

What has any of this to do with the government? Well, Charles is a doctor, but what he tries to do is a step too far - he is going beyond his limited fund of knowledge and attempting to do something for which he is frankly unqualified: with disastrous consequences for the person he claims to be trying to help.

Most of our government ministers have a degree of some sort; they are by and large educated people. But unfortunately, like Charles Bovary, they are so convinced of their own talent that they are rushing headlong into areas where they do not have the knowledge to operate. Take Ed Miliband: he has a PPE degree. A perfectly respectable degree - I know lots of people who have it, who have been successful in all sorts of things. It does not, however, make one an energy supply guru. I have written enough about this particular subject (you can find the columns here going back years), so I won’t repeat all that again. Just one point - this country needs fossil fuels; currently, our major oil and gas supplier is Norway. That oil and gas comes out of the North Sea, rather close to the UK’s own oil and gas fields. Those are the ones Ed won’t let us develop any further - apparently, when British fields are exploited, it’s disastrous for the global environment; when the Norwegians do it, seemingly it’s fine. Does that make any logical sense?????

And then there is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Also PPE; but that E - which does indeed stand for Economics - does not in any way provide a guide to how to support a national economy. Some experience in a capitalist, market environment would be of far more relevance.

The Education Secretary - even when respected educationalists point out the error of her ways, and the unnecessary damage she will do to children, she still insists she will pursue her ideologically driven class warfare.

Just one other example - the Foreign Secretary, who also has a reasonable academic background, but seems to have extremely limited knowledge of history, diplomacy or indeed geography, which would seem to me to be the basic essentials of the job. A British history book and an atlas could be useful Christmas gifts for him…

I could go on, but I think I have made my point, or at least part of it. By now, you may well be saying, OK, Lord Copper, but your degree is in Modern and Medieval Languages - how does that fit you to comment critically? But that is the rest of the point - I am simply commenting, I’m not claiming to be fit for the job. The sad truth is that we are governed by a bunch of people who are not up to the job, and they know it too, to judge from the way they look like rabbits caught in the headlamps when they are interviewed.

Charles Bovary faded back into obscurity after his calamitous attempts to go beyond his area of competence; let us hope that example is followed….



  

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alipmann
21 de jan.

A stimulating analogy Lord C. Governments spin utopias and the present one is the idea that we can convert to green sources of energy without climate cost. Norway is an example of 'climate hyprocrisy'. A country which boasts of its quantity of electric vehicles but is subsidised by its trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund acquired via the sale of oil. Ed Milliband's utopian zeal would be much tempered were he to examine the carbon footprint of his green solutions - the amounts of precious fresh water consumed in the production of lithium, the quantity of coal fired energy consumed in China to produce silicon wafers for solar panels from sand/quartz. It would appear many achilles tendons and legs are yet…

Curtir
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