The accident to XV230 was avoidable.

My report identifies manifold shortcomings in the UK airworthiness and in-service support regime, and reveals matters which are as surprising as they are disturbing.

The Nimrod Safety Case took a total of nearly four years to produce (April 2001 to March 2005) and cost in excess of £400,000… [It] was a lamentable job from start to finish. It was riddled with errors. It missed the key dangers. Its production is a story of incompetence, complacency and cynicism.

The Nimrod Safety Case process was fatally undermined by a general malaise: a widespread assumption by those involved that the Nimrod was ’safe anyway’ (because it had successfully flown for 30 years).

Haddon-Cave looked at the organisational causes of other major accidents, notably the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, and found strong similarities. Both had long incubation periods. Strong signals of problems had been identified and recorded, but analysed away. Diane Vaughan in her study of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster coined the phrase ‘normalisation of deviance’ to categorise this phenomenon: for Challenger it was a fault in the O-rings in the solid booster rockets; for Columbia it was foam insulation coming loose. These were judged – wrongly – to be acceptable risks.

The normalisation of deviance is not peculiar to aviation or space travel. The categorisation of escalator fires on the London Underground as ’smoulderings’ before the King’s Cross fire is another example.

I chaired a public inquiry into the 2005 South Wales E.coli O157 outbreak (157 cases, mostly in schoolchildren, with one death). There was a normalisation of deviance. In 1994 the abattoir that supplied contaminated meat to the butcher responsible for the outbreak had an unannounced independent inspection. Its hygiene scored 11 out of 100, the worst ever recorded in Britain (scores less than 66 were deemed to be unacceptably low). A recommendation went up the line that it should be closed. But it was not. Months and years went past. There was no significant improvement. Deficiencies were recorded, but not rectified. The same independent inspector visited in April 2005. He concluded that the problems he found looked remarkably similar to those in 1994. The outbreak occurred in September. Like the MOD, the Meat Hygiene Service had failed.

Food hygiene is assessed using a system known as HACCP: hazard analysis and critical control points. Haddon-Cave’s description of what he found with Nimrod – a lamentable job, riddled with errors, missing the key dangers – applies to the butcher’s perfectly. His HACCP said things that were untrue (for example that the butcher had a ‘number of quality awards for excellent service and hygiene standards’), it made claims that were physically impossible to achieve (about the speed of cooling of meat), and it did not consider the processing of bought-in products (errors in their handling caused the outbreak). The environmental health officers who inspected the butcher failed to spot these deficiencies, just like the wing commander (since promoted to air commodore) who signed off the Nimrod safety case, having ‘failed to check carefully and query what he was signing’.

Last week I went to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 90th birthday party at the Collège de France. It seemed an unremarkable occasion at first. Though the courtyard of the Collège de France is fittingly grand for the republic’s premiere scholarly institution, the rooms inside are meanly proportioned and shabby. The three dozen or so academics in attendance looked dreary and moth-eaten the way academics do. There was a sprinkling of journalists, but no cameras or microphones. Fortified by a couple of glasses of indifferent burgundy, I obtained an introduction to Lévi-Strauss, who rose with difficulty from his chair and shook my hand tremulously. The conversation went poorly, owing both to my shaky French and to my lack of conviction that the nonagenarian I was talking to could actually be Claude Lévi-Strauss.

A few minutes later, he was asked to give a little speech. He spoke extemporaneously, without notes, in a slow, stately voice.

‘Montaigne,’ he began, ‘said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be 59, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today’ – which, he added, was one of the ‘most curious surprises of my existence’. He said he felt like a ‘shattered hologram’ that had lost its unity but still retained an image of the whole self.

This was not the speech we were expecting. It was intimate, it was about death.

Lévi-Strauss went on to talk about the ‘dialogue’ between the eroded self he had become – le moi réel – and the ideal self that coexisted with it: le moi métonymique. The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former: ‘You must continue.’ But the former replies: ‘That’s your business – only you can see things whole.’ He then thanked those assembled for helping him silence this weird dialogue and allowing his two selves to ‘coincide’ again for a moment. ‘Although,’ he added, ‘I am well aware that le moi réel will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution.’

It was pretty affecting stuff, and I must admit that I had to avert my eyes and do a little manly fist-clenching and shoulder-squaring before I was ready to go out into the drizzly Parisian night for a nice comforting plate of choucroute.

I am, on the other hand, constantly interested in how I can know whether what I read and hear is reliable. I couldn’t for example put my hand on my heart and say that my belief that climate change is irreversible is based on anything very much more substantial than a tendency to trust in the green and the left, and the fact that I know from history and experience that human beings are inclined to do what they want to do until they use up the ability to do it. I’m certainly not equipped to verify the scientific arguments for or against climate change. I can’t do the maths. In much the same way, I ‘believe’ in Darwinian evolutionary theory, which, although I’ve read a good deal on the subject, I’m only minimally able to verify for myself. Ditto the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. I read the reports and assume the science is right, but the truth is I don’t really know.

In the Guardian, George Monbiot berates Clive James speaking on Radio 4 about scepticism for saying: ‘the number of scientists who voice scepticism [about climate change] has lately been increasing’. Monbiot comments: ‘He presented no evidence to support this statement and, as far as I can tell, none exists.’

Monbiot also presents no evidence to support his refutation. As far as he can tell, he says, James is wrong. He needs only to ‘look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies – climate scientists on one side, right-wing bloggers on the other’. Scientists = quality and correct, sceptics = right-wing, bloggers and wrong. Really? Just the two armies, big brains v. knuckleheads?

But it seems the real problem with Clive James is that he’s old. Climate change denying in America is on the up, Monbiot tells us, and the majority of climate change deniers are in their sixties and older, accroding to a report from the Pew Research Centre. Monbiot agrees: it ‘chimes with’ his experience. It’s pretty obvious, he says, that the old folk refuse to believe the truth of climate change because we have no investment in the future, we were brought up in a period of technological optimism, and we feel plain entitled to fly around the world like there’s no tomorrow – well, like there will be tomorrow.

But it’s even worse than just having an atrophied view of the world. Monbiot has discovered a ‘fascinating corner of human psychology’: people can’t face thinking about death. A cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, in 1973 theorised that:

When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and increasing their striving for self-esteem.

A biologist, Janis L. Dickinson, suggested that ’some people might respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists.’

And so Monbiot brings us back to Clive James and the rest of us ancients:

is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the last two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

Yes, quite fanciful. So many question marks, and even George Monbiot has failed to find any evidence for his proposition. I can’t say I’ve ever felt more suspicious of my rather automatic readings and acceptance about climate change than after reading Monbiot’s wobbly article. From one comment by one elderly commentator, we arrive, via some ‘proposals’, at a spurious generational argument and are asked to consider how to deal with this problem.  Well, you are – I’m well past the age of reason. But bear in mind that at 46 (even accepting his assumption that I’m closer to death than he is – live every day as if it were your last, I say) George Monbiot has only got another fifteen years or so before he’ll about-turning and racing in the other direction, screaming: ‘There is no death, I am immortal.’ Just like I do.

A Structuralist Lament

They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did.
They see Saussure as one more dead white male
Trapped between the ego and the id.

The Elementary Structures all are hid,
No Lévi-Strauss is heard to tell the tale:
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did.

Semiotics had its day but flipped its lid,
Got lost inside the advertising whale,
Or trapped between the ego and the id.

Alas, poor Barthes, who cares for Ess and Zed?
When every morpheme’s up for sale
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did.

And as for ‘Theory’ writ large, heaven forbid,
There’s nothing left but cakes and ale
Trapped between the ego and the id.

Myth and symbol slide and skid,
It’s lost for good, the fine old trail.
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did,
Trapped as we were between the ego and the id.

Postmen over there are losing their jobs. Fixed contracts are being replaced by ‘flexible’ contracts, full-time postmen by ‘freelance’ postmen. People who have been doing the same round for 31 years are being got rid of and made to reapply for their jobs, but on a freelance basis.

The Dutch minister responsible for the change was being interviewed. ‘As consumers,’ he said, ‘and especially from business to consumer, there is more flexibility. Competition has made mail companies modernise, and that’s where consumers profit from.’

You have to pay attention to the words here.

Liberalised: That means open to competition, regardless of the quality of service. Cleaning services in hospitals were ‘liberalised’ and that gave us MRSA. Catering facilities in schools were ‘liberalised’ and that gave us turkey twizzler dinners. Rail maintenance and engineering got ‘liberalised’ and that gave us the Paddington rail crash.

Flexible: Flexible always means more work for the same pay; or in the case of TNT, more work for less pay.

Freelance postmen: Is this like being a freelance writer? Can I pick up the post any time I choose? Can I only post those letters I’m interested in? Of course not. What it actually means is ‘casual’, meaning you have no fixed contract, and anyone who’s willing to work for less can undercut you at any point.

But it was the Dutch minister’s words that were the most interesting. He used the word ‘consumer’ three times, but he did a clever thing. He shifted the meaning of the word from the beginning of the interview to the end. At the opening of his statement he meant it in the generalised sense, meaning everyone, you and me. Then he added that word business – ‘from business to consumer’ – and by the third use of the word it is clear that he is referring to something else entirely: to business consumers. Corporate consumers. Consumers who will make profits.

So now you know who is driving these changes to our mail service. It isn’t being done for the benefit of the ordinary customer, but by the corporations for profit.