Ironically, it was a passing remark by Helen MacNamara in her evidence to the Covid inquiry that left me shaking my head in disbelief (sadly her observations re the toxic misogynistic culture that prevailed in Downing Street were all too predictable). The former deputy cabinet secretary believed that, having graduated in History, she and several of her associates were not properly qualified to understand briefings given by the Government’s principal scientific advisers. Ms MacNamara studied History at Cambridge, where one can be fairly confident she was trained to gather, assimilate, analyse and interpret evidence. Yes, specialist scientific information can be hard or even impossible to understand, but presumably the Chief Scientific Adviser and his colleagues were briefing and advising, not drilling down into deeply technical data re the pathogen and its impact. Was it the statistics that phased the high flying bureaucrats and the special advisers?
Sixty years ago, CP Snow was lamenting the ‘Two Cultures’, and since then commentators like Correlli Barnett and of course Dominic Cummings have insisted that ‘generalist’ civil servants are the bane of the British state, unqualified to advise minister on key policy pronouncements. David Edgerton isn’t alone in pointing out that politicians and senior civil servants with humanities degrees have in the past proved perfectly capable of making properly informed decisions, displaying due respect for those scientists, physicians and engineers operating within the state apparatus. In Edgerton’s ‘Warfare State’ pioneers of operational research like Solly Zuckerman and Patrick Blackett transcended artificial barriers between the arts and the sciences, while ministers such as Denis Healey and Michael Heseltine (Greats and PPE respectively at Oxford) were unphased by the challenge of deeply technical policy issues; until recent years successive cabinet secretaries displayed a similar intellectual agility and adaptability.
And yet, when I look back to my own experience with bright undergraduates I can’t help but wonder if Helen MacNamara identified a collective shunning of science and technology among those who have followed a narrow educational path from the age of 16. Too often when I tested my students’ knowledge of basic science (try studying the Attlee Government’s decision to build the Bomb without any comprehension of nuclear fission), I was shocked by how little they knew. Yet all of them boasted three separate science GCSEs: credentialism, the curse of British education, had encouraged the assumption that once Chemistry, Biology and Physics were ticked off the list then there was no further need to engage with matters scientific (an obvious equivalent on the other side of this obsolete binary line is languages). What this illustrates is that, notwithstanding full undergraduate programmes in the history of science, medicine and technology, and combined honours degrees partnering history with say computer science, there remains a paucity of science-oriented courses/modules for undergraduate historians to choose – they exist, and there are far more than even a decade ago, but still not enough.
A key question is always whether an eighteen year-old equivalent of Helen MacNamara has the desire to expand her knowledge in cognate areas that aren’t safe and predictable. The only way to ensure this is to reshape and open up the post-16 curriculum, counter an instinctive wariness of science as being ‘too difficult’, and above all, foster the presumption that learning never ceases. Were we to do this then the next time fast track civil servants and political advisers inside Number Ten and the Cabinet Office confront a crisis as critical as Covid they won’t be afraid to ask the scientists difficult questions and to offer ministers genuinely informed analyses and recommendations. For three years History graduates have been encouraged to recognise and embrace complexity: they possess the necessary transferable skills to pose suitably incisive questions, however challenging the topic. It’s a shame the deputy cabinet secretary and her colleagues were under so much pressure that they forgot this elementary lesson, and in consequence felt intellectually intimidated when engaging with expert opinion.
