Once upon a time there was much talk about the need for Joined Up Government. One department’s policies should not contradict another’s. But the real problem of governance is the absence of Joined Up Political Philosophy. It is this Disconnect that makes Joining the Policy Dots impossible.

One example is the illegal Iraq War and its flagrant breaches of Geneva Convention protocols in its slaughter of non-combatants. If we were talking about smoking killing two and a half percent of the population over four years we might expect urgent action to put the Tobacco Companies out of business. We might also expect the media to hound the directors onto their front pages and off to the Courtroom for prosecution, convictions and sentencing.

There is also the appalling Intelligence Advice. Where is the New-Broom needed to sweep clean every corner of Britain’s Stupidity Services in the Middle East? What...if anything...has happened to the restructuring of Intelligence Outsourcing Strategies relied upon in the region over the past 60-years?

But the immediate remedy is hardly Rocket Science. It worked for the Americans in Vietnam. It can work for Britain in Iraq. Declare Victory and Go Home! Whether home is England, Germany or Afghanistan is unimportant.

Violent Death is the Number One Public Health Priority in Iraq. And the Botched Invasion and Flawed Military & Diplomatic Strategies are the principal cause. For God’s sake run away from Mesopotamia now! Israel must make the best of it.

Another example is the Foot and Mouth Disaster five years ago. Politicians suppress and distort the truth. They are Economical with the Actualité. This is not always a Bad Thing…and their intentions are not always bad. Lesser of Two Evils Paradox are no strangers to the Jesuit Seminaries who have doctrines to deal with them. But when scientists become strangers to the truth we are in trouble.

Not one Government Senior Adviser has yet admitted publicly that the mass slaughter of farm animals in the 2001 was unnecessary and based on False Statistics, Faulty Computer Modelling and the Flagrant Abuse of generally accepted norms employed for centuries in the use of Scientific Methods for analysis, evaluation and deduction from experimental observation. In a word - Bad Science.

The mistakes that were made have been laid bare in a devastating paper compiled by Paul Kitching and published by the World Organisation for Animal Health. Of the ten million animals slaughtered a third were perfectly healthy. Out of ten thousand farms where sheep were killed only 1 300 were infected with the disease. The Foot & Mouth Disease Virus was not spread through airborne infection. The epidemic reached its peak before culling began. The Three-Kilometre Killing Zones were not justified. And the estimates of infected premises was always pure guesswork.

The language used in the Kitching Report has a controlled anger about it. He talks of a culling policy driven by unvalidated predictive models and of ‘public disgust with the magnitude of the slaughter’. His conclusions have much broader application. He writes that the UK experience provides a salutary warning of how computer models and the statistics used to predict the course of an epidemic can be abused in the interests of scientific opportunism.

Those models used by the British Government were badly flawed because they relied on computers rather than advice from vets and virologists who understood the nature of the disease. ‘No model will produce the right output when fed the wrong input,’ says the report. The Government was late reacting to the outbreak and fatally moved decision-making away from FMD Experts to the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (Cobra). The result was ‘carnage by computer’ as one farmer put it. And a slaughter that was ‘grossly excessive’. And we trust these jokers with Our Climate?

There are vital lessons in the report about how to control future outbreaks to avoid the horrendous cost and slaughter of 2001. There are also broader lessons about managing scientific claims and computer forecasts when these are producing Mayhem & Idiocy. Unfortunately no heads have rolled and there is no sign of any lessons being learnt.