2021-03-16
The Global Warming narrative has monopolised government thinking for many years - the Global Warming Policy Forum adds its voice to those who (maybe prompted by the Covid situation?) would like the government to take advice from a wider team of scientists than the officially appointed team.
The idea of the red team is that if the official scientific advisers are badged as the blue team, then we need some to form a red team to put the counter-arguments and counter-suggestions that would otherwise not be considered.
This would have the benefit of disabling the one-sided sort of discussion (that appears to drive government policy currently) to the extent that the one-sided discussion could be better challenged before becoming government policy.
Whilst this might be an improvement on the current situation, one has to ask who would be responsible for selecting the red team members, among the many other practical aspects of this suggestion.
Surely the underlying problem is that, for whatever reason, ministers are not prepared to challenge, let alone face down, their scientific advisers? If they are not prepared to do that, then we are already living in a technocracy and no amount of juggling with different teams of advisers will resolve the underlying problem.
Maybe ministerial training in "how to challenge the advice" might be money well spent . . . provided that we had first addressed the other elephant in the room: the crony capitalism that some suspect may have been behind many aspects of government (Covid) expenditure all along.
