The amnesiocracy governing Britain There’s a reason our leaders are getting stupider

In the Middle Ages, when books were scarce, being “educated” meant having a prodigious memory. Knowing all 150 psalms by heart was table stakes: “puerilia”, as the 12th-century Saxon theologian Hugh of St Victor put it. It wasn’t until the printing press made the written word comparatively abundant that we came to think of knowledge as primarily stored in written form, rather than in human memories.

Half a millennium on from Gutenberg, it is taken for granted that if something is written down, it’s remembered — which means (paradoxically) we can forget about it. So what happens when written records are lost? If no one else can quite remember, does that mean the event didn’t happen? This question has loomed large with recent revelations that the Cabinet Office’s “propriety and ethics” team broke into a safe in 2022, to retrieve a report detailing an historic investigation of allegations made against Dame Antonia Romero, and then destroyed the dossier.

Romero had been accused of bullying by Foreign Office staff while working as consul-general in New York in 2017. The investigation was later dropped, prompting some to claim a cover-up. The report was stored in said safe until 2022 when Darren Tierney, then head of the government standards watchdog, retrieved and destroyed the documents.

Was this a career-saving act of deliberate forgetting? If so, it worked: Romero was appointed Cabinet Secretary last week by Keir Starmer. Tierney, for his part, insists he only obtained the report to help in redacting a memoir by the former diplomat Lord McDonald of Salford. The same Lord McDonald, in fact, who briefed last week against Romero’s appointment; perhaps it’s a coincidence that a fishy incident of record-deletion should also bubble to the media surface at the same moment. Or perhaps not.

In any case, the impression is of all-out Whitehall war, as competing civil service factions vie for the chance to Yes, Minister Starmer’s ailing government. But beyond the byzantine intrigues of career bureaucrats, the casual destruction of an important report speaks to a deeper sense that Britain is now governed by a universal policy of strategic forgetfulness: an amnesiocracy.

There is surely a strategic amnesia in the ongoing, obdurate official inability to remember or grapple with the cumulative enormity of the rape gang scandals. Despite the horror this ongoing national catastrophe engenders, successive reports seem to generate outrage at intervals, only to be officially forgotten again, every time, without anything significant ever changing. Most recently, having reluctantly promised an inquiry, Labour seems to be trying to kick it into the long grass. Perhaps Starmer hopes the public will forget about all the child rape and torture, and stop asking.

A similar instinct seemed to guide the recent Ministry of Justice order for Courtsdesk, a digital court reporting resource, to delete its archives. After alleging that Courtsdesk had breached its agreement by sharing sensitive data with a third-party AI company, courts minister Sarah Sackman ordered the platform to delete its archive.

This prompted widespread outcry, with journalists warning that losing the archive would amount to covering up further grooming gang trials and drastically reducing the transparency of Britain’s criminal justice system. Then, hours before it was due to shut down, Justice Secretary David Lammy U-turned on the decision.

Was Labour trying to make criminal justice records less accessible? It’s certainly the case that court reporting supplies a stream of judgements radically out of kilter with the moral instincts of the general public, especially where “human rights” are concerned. Were I an official in the Ministry of Justice, I dare say I’d be delighted to see a large, searchable, years-long open-access database of such criminal cases wiped, in favour of a system that required reporters to make individual (and no doubt usefully onerous) applications to individual courts for specific cases.

How deliberate you assume this habitual drift toward amnesia to be probably depends on how much trust you still have that the British government has your particular interests at heart. But even if we refuse to attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, this still invites the question: why is our ruling caste getting stupider? Or, at least, more forgetful?

For amnesiocracy is hardly unique to Labour. In their noble recent pledge to cut student loan interest rates, for example, the Conservative Party seems unable to recall having designed the system in the first place. The same goldfish-like mentality appears to afflict the Tories elsewhere, while fulminating in Parliament about immigration, even as they appear to have forgotten just how much of this dyspeptic debate is a direct consequence of (really very recent) Tory policy decisions. Yes, they have to put on a show at PMQs; but the performance of not remembering previous policy decisions is so convincing it does look like they simply don’t remember.

When it comes to the habitual weaponised forgetfulness of our permanent bureaucracy, Cameron probably bears at least a share of the blame. For he presided over a primordial act of amnesiocracy: closing Britain’s civil service college, in 2012, to save money. This school served, from 1970 to 2012, as the repository and transmission mechanism for institutional memory within Britain’s permanent bureaucracy. When it was closed, few of its teaching functions were replaced. We can reasonably assume that, 14 years on, many of the older civil servants who trained prior to its closure have retired or left. Counting just the Fast Stream, we can estimate around 12,000-15,000 more have joined the service since Sunningdale closed; many of these have surely been promoted to positions of authority by now, all without any longer-term institutional memory.

Might this have anything to do with the complaint, now audible across both Labour and Tory figures, that ministers routinely pull levers and find that nothing happens? Was it Cameron’s decision to delete Britain’s institutional governance memory — one held in the aggregate memory of training personnel and veterans rather than written down — that began our long national slide toward the current sense of no one knowing how anything works? This isn’t quite the same kind of forgetfulness as the kind that elides “due diligence”, destroys files, or forgets to cut contact with convicted sex traffickers, but on a practical level it probably affects the public’s lives more from day to day.

Nothing is ever monocausal. Is it the phones? Hugh of St Victor would have been unimpressed with MPs who need the prompt of their iPhones to speak in Parliament, or who (allegedly) even use AI to compose their speeches. There’s also evidence that internet overuse affects memory, perhaps making all our governing class dimmer and more hyperfocused on the moment. Some even suggest this is a positive benefit: Big Thinkers have been asserting that “the Google Generation has no need for rote learning” since before David Cameron was elected.

Hugh of St Victor, meanwhile, would have insisted that without a store of memorised material to think with, everyone is more stupid. And regardless of whether you set much store by medieval monks, no one can deny that smartphones’ ubiquity has accelerated the news cycle to such a pace that a bureaucrat eager to bury inconvenient facts often only needs to wait for the next online panic. It takes a curveball event, such as the Epstein file release — by a foreign government with no particular incentive to make Labour’s life any easier — to cut through this strategy of weaponising the public’s own forgetfulness.

Along with phones, could the comparative paucity of science and technology graduates in the Civil Service also be having an effect? The Telegraph reports that only 23% of top civil service officials have STEM degrees; once you exclude scientific advisers, this drops to a handful. And perhaps this paucity is also itself an effect. Reports point the finger at Civil Service recruiting practices that favour socially adept groupthinkers, and filter out anyone more interested in being right than being liked — a personality type that describes many STEM graduates.

Intermittent efforts do seem to be made to inject a little more reality-orientation into the civil service. Dominic Cummings’ famous call for “super-talented weirdos and misfits” to refresh civil service thinking was, just as famously, defeated by the woman he called “Princess Nut Nut” – a woman who, despite obviously her ninja office politics chops, could not really be described as a STEM whizz. And though Cummings didn’t get his weirdos, after Covid, targets were put in place to increase STEM graduate recruitment in the Fast Stream. Recently, too, Labour have announced plans to establish a replacement civil service college, to replace the lost Sunningdale.

But what if this simply ends up transmitting the existing government culture to a new generation, amnesias and taboos and all? What if they’re still filtering out anyone detail-oriented but disagreeable? If so, nothing will change. For the amnesiocratic tic ultimately points toward something far more fundamental than training schemes or recruitment quizzes: a basic metaphysical outlook that treats reality as something conjured into being by fiat, through the written word.

Depressingly familiar among progressive arts graduates, and woefully incompatible with planning and executing anything substantial in the world of atoms, this is the mindset that asserts humans are whatever sex they say they are. It’s perhaps also the mindset that treats destroying a report as equivalent to un-happening the events in the report. The same one that writes lengthy programmes for change no one has the slightest idea how to implement, and will have forgotten about next week, while private equity buys up GP surgeries and family homes, sinkhole repair lorries fall into sinkholes, and Britain’s high streets are taken over by ethnic mafias.

This conflation of speaking with doing is bad enough when we’re talking HR policy. It’s worse when the task is to complete (say) a high-speed rail link on time and to budget. It’s worse again when it tacitly opts, even in the face of the documented, organised, gang-based, racially aggravated rape and torture of children, to go on ignoring the problem, perhaps in the hope that by doing so it will magically go away.

So it may be that the root cause of amnesiocracy, is simply that we’re governed by ideologically conformist arts graduates who shut out truth-seeking nerds from power, think words are the same as action, and wouldn’t recognise a workable construction schedule if it bit them on what Hugh of St Victor might have called their “nates”. Throw in a loss of institutional memory and a dose of common or garden nates-covering and hey presto. But this is the hopeful reading, as such a situation is not insuperable: in theory, we could course-correct by re-orienting government recruitment back toward the reality-based community.

Let us hope this is the case. For the alternative is far worse: that the rot goes all the way up. That no one is coming to save us, and we are governed at all levels by at best intellectual lightweights, or otherwise outright frauds, who know exactly what’s what but simply respond to awkward facts by deleting them from the record, and hoping the public forgets they ever asked.

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