Herald Opinion: It’s all very simple, but only if you do it right

Last week I engaged a contractor to do some work on an old building. The main entrance was topped by two heavy parallel steel beams that together formed the lintel that kept the building stable. A survey had shown the steel beams to have suffered rust damage from water ingress over time, so the only solution was to replace them.

A job like this has to be carried out with great care. You can’t just remove the existing steel and replace it, the old rubble walls could collapse and bring down the entire structure. The contractor in this case took the correct precautions, opening a series of slots above the existing steel and inserting suitable steel pins that he then propped from the ground on both sides of the wall. With that done, the wall was supported and he could safely replace the support beams across the opening, packing between them and the wall with a suitable mortar. Once that had dried and set he could remove the supports and grout the holes where the pins had been.

That was the right way. The wrong way would have been to remove the old steel beams and take a chance on the stability of the structure. Then if it did collapse, maybe somebody else might come along and clean up the mess. But nobody in their right mind would take that approach.

The President of the USA came into office in January on the back of an election campaign that promised to cut down on waste in Government. This was a popular promise; we all know of examples where we wonder how the people who spend our taxes can manage to spend so much on so little. You don’t have to go to the USA to see examples of reckless squandering of public funds.

Instead of metaphorically propping the wall however, Trump and his people took the view that they would remove large sections of it altogether and take their chances with the law of gravity. The raid on Federal computer systems, where they took control of data relating to most of the citizens and sacked or disenfranchised many of the people who normally safeguard this data, was the equivalent of kicking away the supports of government and walking away. The risks and threats to good governance are unprecedented, and reckless.

We all agree on the need to reform the permanent government and provide better value for money along with a better service, but we need to avoid the risk of wrecking the democratic process on the way. The only certainty arising from his approach to the job is that without safeguards, collapse of the system is one potential outcome.

We need reforms here too, but there is a right way and a wrong way to implement them. Populists suggesting it is all very simple don’t have any of the answers.