In the Middle Ages, when books were scarce, being \u201ceducated\u201d meant having a prodigious memory. Knowing all 150 psalms by heart was table stakes: \u201cpuerilia\u201d, as the 12th-century Saxon theologian Hugh of St Victor put it. It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Half a millennium on from Gutenberg, it is taken for granted that if something is written down, it\u2019s remembered \u2014 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\u2019t happen? This question has loomed large with recent revelations that the Cabinet Office\u2019s \u201cpropriety and ethics\u201d team broke into a safe in 2022<\/a>, to retrieve a report detailing a historic investigation of allegations made against Dame Antonia Romero, and then destroyed the dossier.<\/p>\n 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> 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.<\/p>\n Was this a career-saving act of deliberate forgetting? If so, it worked: Romero was appointed Cabinet Secretary last week<\/a> 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<\/a> last week against Romero\u2019s appointment; perhaps it\u2019s a coincidence that a fishy incident of record-deletion should also bubble to the media surface at the same moment. Or perhaps not.<\/p>\n In any case, the impression is of all-out Whitehall war, as competing civil service factions vie for the chance to Yes, Minister Starmer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> an inquiry, Labour seems to be trying to kick it into the long grass<\/a>. Perhaps Starmer hopes the public will forget about all the child rape and torture, and stop asking.<\/p>\n A similar instinct seemed to guide the recent Ministry of Justice order for Courtsdesk, a digital court reporting resource, to delete its archives<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n This prompted widespread outcry, with journalists warning that losing the archive would amount to covering up<\/a> further grooming gang trials and drastically reducing the transparency of Britain\u2019s criminal justice system. Then, hours before it was due to shut down, Justice Secretary David Lammy U-turned on the decision<\/a>.<\/p>\n Was Labour trying to make criminal justice records less accessible? It\u2019s certainly the case that court reporting supplies a stream of judgments radically out of kilter with the moral instincts of the general public, especially where \u201chuman rights\u201d are concerned. Were I an official in the Ministry of Justice, I dare say I\u2019d be delighted to see a large, searchable, years-long open-access database of such criminal cases wiped, in favor of a system that required reporters to make individual (and no doubt usefully onerous) applications to individual courts for specific cases.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n For amnesiocracy is hardly unique to Labour. In their noble recent pledge to cut student loan interest rates<\/a>, 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\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n When it comes to the habitual weaponized 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it comes to the habitual weaponized forgetfulness of our permanent bureaucracy, Cameron probably bears at least a share of the blame.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s decision to delete Britain\u2019s institutional governance memory \u2014 one held in the aggregate memory of training personnel and veterans rather than written down \u2014 that began our long national slide toward the current sense of no one knowing how anything works? This isn\u2019t quite the same kind of forgetfulness as the kind that elides \u201cdue diligence\u201d, destroys files, or forgets to cut contact with convicted sex traffickers, but on a practical level it probably affects the public\u2019s lives more from day to day.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>) even use AI to compose their speeches. There\u2019s also evidence<\/a> 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 \u201cthe Google Generation has no need for rote learning<\/a>\u201d since before David Cameron was elected.<\/p>\n Hugh of St Victor, meanwhile, would have insisted that without a store of memorized 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\u2019 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 \u2014 by a foreign government with no particular incentive to make Labour\u2019s life any easier \u2014 to cut through this strategy of weaponizing the public\u2019s own forgetfulness.<\/p>\n Along with phones, could the comparative paucity of science and technology graduates<\/a> in the Civil Service also be having an effect? The Telegraph reports<\/a> 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<\/a> at Civil Service recruiting practices that favor socially adept groupthinkers, and filter out anyone more interested in being right than being liked<\/a> \u2014 a personality type that describes many STEM graduates.<\/p>\n Intermittent efforts do seem to be made to inject a little more reality-orientation into the civil service. Dominic Cummings\u2019 famous call for \u201csuper-talented weirdos and misfits<\/a>\u201d to refresh civil service thinking was, just as famously, defeated<\/a> by the woman he called \u201cPrincess Nut Nut<\/a>\u201d \u2013 a woman who, despite obviously her ninja office politics chops, could not really be described as a STEM whiz. And though Cummings didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n But what if this simply ends up transmitting the existing government culture to a new generation, amnesias and taboos and all? What if they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. It\u2019s 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 programs 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<\/a> and family homes<\/a>, sinkhole repair lorries fall into sinkholes<\/a>, and Britain\u2019s high streets are taken over by ethnic mafias<\/a>.<\/p>\n