Jul 10
Inquiries…World Cup exit and otherwise
England has fallen out of the World Cup after a direly depressing and infamous penalty shoot-out. The nation shuddered and then mourned the end of hope for this year’s World Cup. Now, to be fair, sports are not the field of this political hack. More interesting to this hack, was the sports commentators suggesting only hours after the shoot-out that England needed an inquiry into what went wrong.
Setting aside the instant reaction of the dedicated sports fan ie: ‘a little late for that don’t you think:’ What does the suggestion of an inquiry suggest about the collective thinking of the English? Whenever anything negative happens there is an immediate call for an inquiry. This is notwithstanding the fact that inquiries consume ever more time, are expensive for the British taxpayer, and seldom result in any change irrespective of recommendations by the inquiring body.
And so once again, there is indeed to be an inquiry on the shoot-out. In addition, FIFA will launch their own inquiry over the event that saw Wayne Rooney, one of England’s best players, sent off after a dubious confrontation with a Portuguese player. So, then there were two!
In neither case are we told what is to be accomplished by these efforts. But then again, the taxpayer is rarely told exactly what the board of inquiry is looking for. It appears from bits that leak out that members of the inquiry often have little idea of what they are trying to find.
Surely it starts with this lack of clarity of purpose leading to no apparent outcome, so the only sure result is a complete lack of faith in these efforts by the general public. After all the effort and money, the results may get 5 minutes of coverage on the BBC and or a segment on BBC’s Newsnight. A bit of print coverage and that is about it. The public pretty much recognizes these efforts as another scheme by politicians and officials to collect more pay and appear to placate the public.
What then happens to the recommendations of the inquiry? They are usually completely ignored by those with power to make changes. It generally takes at least 2 of these mega-expensive talking shops to cause any change whatsoever. Sadly, the most egregious example is the Kings X fire in the 80s: Recommendations of that inquiry board had still not been put into place by the time of the 7/7 bombings. Those particular recommendations covering things like communication underground between safety services, were once again proven to be correct and their implementation a matter of life and death.
We shall witness a similar level of disappointment for England fans to that experienced by the families of those lost in recent tragedies. Now, personally, I do not find any similarity between these two events but it is clear from the bleating of England’s fans that they may do.
Will it take a mealy-mouthed waste of paper to so enrage the English that they finally reject the farcical “inquiry” for future events? Indeed such a result would be a net gain for all of us and the England players could be seen as doing something useful this World Cup. Now, what would be a useful replacement? You can see optimism occasionally takes hold.
