I have no time for Dominic Cummings, he’s an idiot without the self awareness to realise his own faults and limitations He’s opinionated, strong willed, combative, abrasive and confrontational but he certainly isn’t clever and he's very far from the genius he thinks he is. I am surprised that Gove and Johnson ever thought he was indispensable but they did. Gove probably still does.
Recently, he has taken to Twitter where he seems to be undergoing some sort of mental breakdown. He is constantly defending himself and what he did during the Brexit campaign and later in government, perhaps realising it is all going disastrously wrong. To describe him as prickly would be a serious understatement. Methinks he doth protest too much.
His latest attack is on the journalist Jenni Russel. She wrote an article for The New York Times arguing that the EU, far from being a set of restraints has in fact been propping us up. This is my own lived experience in European industry over the last fifty years. This is his tweet:
Good example of how elite Remain are like Japanese soldiers still fighting 1950... And using weapons that blow themselves up... If these idiot-elites continue to dominate environmental debates they'll turn everybody into SUV driving coalminers stat https://t.co/cpQBBCY0Bb
— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) August 11, 2021
Cummings says she (and remainers in general, who are always 'elite') are like Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle in the 1950s (the last one actually came out in The Philippines in 1974) but we are more like fifth columnists under Franco, a hidden army waiting to rise up when the time is right.
We are not fighting the last war, but an ongoing battle where one side has gained temporary supremacy, as the Japanese did in the far east and the Pacific. This doesn't make Brexit right any more than Pearl Harbour made the Japanese right.
Russel was bang on the nail if only Cummings knew it. If he had spent time in industry and especially European industry, he might have learned something about the real issues facing us. He thinks we are going to 'lose' the environmental debate and presumably advocates telling lies and spewing out misinformation in order to 'win' it. Truth and honesty is never mentioned.
But to address his thinking and to see where he is going wrong you have to look at an earlier post which was archetypal Cummings, full of jargon and abbreviations that are almost impossible to understand.
New blog: some elite firms recruit for IQ & execution, some elite firms recruit for status, the parties (& civil service often at top levels) recruit for chimp politics/courtiers/fixers/being articulate (hence repeated disasters) https://t.co/dJ9a34Y9qq pic.twitter.com/FGC11rx864
— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) August 12, 2021
If this is how he conducted himself in government it’s little wonder he made a lot of enemies and very little progress. I image in meetings nobody knew what he was talking about. You can see what he might be driving at, that somehow Britain’s problems are about recruitment, but it's hard sometimes to see through the thicket (what is chimp politics for example?) of verbal shorthand.
If I read him correctly, he seems to believe there is a cohort of people walking among us who are uniquely qualified to manage things either in industry or the civil service, but are somehow systematically being overlooked. Recruiters have for years been obstinately selecting men and women who can’t do the job and rejecting better candidates who are useless and incompetent.
I am not arguing this doesn’t happen, because it does. However, if Cummings thinks this is THE problem - and I think from plenty of other past comments this is what he thinks - he is not even barking up the right tree. There is not a mysterious group living and working among us but unrecognised like some alien beings wearing latex masks. These is us - the British - and nobody else.
Nationally, we are definitely short of skilled, qualified people, that is a fact which makes his campaign to pull us out of the EU where we had ready access to all the expertise we need all the more difficult to understand.
What he should be asking is WHY we have such a shortage and why we struggle to match the wealth and productivity of other countries or grow the giant corporations that increasingly dominate our lives. The problem is one of national attitude, as I may have mentioned before.
You can give a person the skills needed by training, You can give people knowledge and experience but what you can't change quickly is attitude.
By attitude I mean our work ethic, our approach to problem solving, our dedication to improving ourselves and the companies that employ us. To be world beating you must begin by recognising others are better, that you are NOT world beating but that you are prepared to learn and to put in all the time, effort and resources for as long as it takes to become world beating.
Our problem is that we usually begin by thinking we are world beating when we aren't and politicians are the worst offenders. Nothing that Cummings says shows he has even started to understand that.
He is part of the very idiot elite that he despises.
