I fully understand you on that. As a society, we SHOULD, be better than that. At the same time we are forced to operate at the level of the lowest common denominator. The reason truthfulness and honor matter to us, is that we know where it goes when it fails. When our opponents both abandon those, and have too much sway to be ignored, we must operate on their level.

We shouldn’t take too much enjoyment from it, but it needs to be done. The British veneer of civility has always been that, a veneer. It’s a mutual agreement to keep things from getting nasty. The hard right has very much broken that agreement already. They need to be reminded why the agreement has held for so long.

No department, government or commercial likes giving up resources, once it has them. This can cause them to become quite inefficient.

In commercial companies, this is corrected for by financial pressures (imperfectly). In government systems there is no obvious mechanism. Instead it’s a lot more ad-hoc. This allows for things like “starving the beast” to break government functions. Conversely it allows for a lot of public money being funneled into private hands.

A better option is to have systems in place to control spending. Critically, those systems need to have people who understand what is being done. They simultaneously allow for reduction in spending when appropriate (or at least stop run away), but stop the chainsaw to the knees approach (e.g. DOGE under musk).

A good example would be something like the UKs NHS NICE (National institute for Clinical Excellence). They keep drug prices under control in the NHS. They are powerful enough to give pause to the drugs companies, they stop the government from going “chainsaw massacre” directly and they keep the NHS efficient in their area. They are also small enough to not bloat themselves as easily.

They act as a 2 way shield. They stop governments sticking their oar in too directly. They also keep the service efficient and updated.

Basically we need localised intelligence to filter what rolls down from higher government, while keeping those below accountable.

In this case, it seems like they over trimmed the science. Some stand down from full height is reasonable, but no mothballed facilities were kept to rapidly spool back up in an emergency.

Any government run system needs something to trim the bloat down. Otherwise there is nothing to stop it becoming dangerous. Capitalism relies on profit motives to do this. It works, to an extent.

The problem comes with how to trim. E.g. this programme. Once the barrier was established, it could be trimmed. The fact it worked for 25 years after is proof of this. This (in theory) would free up resources for more critical tasks. The catch is that it needed to hard protect the barrier itself. It also needed the capability to rapidly scale back up. It seems that that was trimmed too, leading to the current crisis.

A dam is a good analogy. It takes a lot of resources to build one. But far less to run and maintain it. You also need the option for emergency maintenance, but that can be shared with other dams or construction projects, when not needed.

The first trim got rid of the construction budget. DOGE got rid of the maintenance budget. Now the dam needs rebuilding, not just maintaining.

90kph is very slow for a flight speed, but stupidly fast for a decent speed. That is about half the speed of a skydiver free falling. That, added on to the airspeed, would be a very bad situation for any plane.