Government’s Approach to Everything it Does: Make Deranged Choices and Watch Britain Burn

Imagine if any student wrote an exam paper in the way the government has handled the issue of marking the exams. They’d write “The main cause of the First World War was the Mona Lisa, which was written in 1985 by Catherine the Great.” Then they’d insist this was “fair and accurate” following a “robust process”, until 15 million people screamed it made no sense. Then the student would say it wasn’t his fault because his computer was broken. In the government’s defence, how could anyone have worked out in advance that marking down students from a school because that school hadn’t achieved such high marks before might be a problem? If a pandemic had happened in Beethoven’s year, he’d have been downgraded from a predicted A to a C because Bonn Comprehensive didn’t have any As the previous year. If the Premier League hadn’t been completed this year, Liverpool should have been given fourth place, because, in spite of them being 137 points clear at the top, that’s where they normally finish.

This is so efficient, no students need to bother learning anything, they’re just given the grades that school got before, so the schools can be turned into flats. This should be the rule in every other area as well. So to make the justice system fairer, each town has to send the same number to prison every year. If Luton sent fewer this year than in 2018, the local council takes 40 random people out of Lidl and gives them all six years for armed robbery. But the way they dealt with these exams seems to fit a pattern. Because this government had the same approach for increasing NHS fees for foreign nurses. A decision the prime minister might as well have responded to by saying: “I am sick and tired of foreigners coming over here and saving my life as a sneaky way of earning money off our health system. If they can’t be bothered to pay for the privilege, they don’t deserve to save my life.

Read more: Mark Steel, https://is.gd/X1g56q