{"id":2600,"date":"2012-12-10T20:57:47","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T20:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=2600"},"modified":"2012-12-10T20:57:47","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T20:57:47","slug":"the-arrogance-of-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=2600","title":{"rendered":"The Arrogance Of Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the last week, we have seen two example of the arrogance of leadership; on both occasions <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Cameron\">David Cameron<\/a> has unilaterally decided that the considered opinion of a group of experts is wrong and his snap judgement is right. Of course he is not the only example of this sort of thinking &#8211; most Prime Ministers of the past have committed the same sort of error of judgement.<\/p>\n<p>The two decisions in question were the response to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.levesoninquiry.org.uk\/about\/the-report\/\">Leveson report<\/a>, and today&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-20667139\">report on the future of recreational drug legislation<\/a>. In both cases, people have gone to a considerable effort to consider what to do about certain issues. And of course have spent a lot of\u00a0<em>my<\/em> money on doing so.<\/p>\n<p>I do not resent my money being spent on such things; what I do resent is that some puffed up politician is wasting my money by not spending an appropriate amount of time considering the report(s).<\/p>\n<p>A snap decision is necessary in some circumstances, but not in these circumstances! There should be nothing wrong with a political leader saying that they would like to spend some time considering the report &#8211; rather than respond with gut instinct to the report&#8217;s headlines.<\/p>\n<p>Ripping up a report within hours of it being released is contemptuous of the work that has gone into it, and wasteful of taxpayers&#8217; money.<\/p>\n<p>It may well be that ignoring the report&#8217;s recommendations is the right thing to do, but to do so too quickly is\u00a0<em>definitely<\/em> the wrong thing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last week, we have seen two example of the arrogance of leadership; on both occasions David Cameron has unilaterally decided that the considered opinion of a group of experts is wrong and his snap judgement is right. Of course he is not the only example of this sort of thinking &#8211; most Prime <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=2600' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[614,1043],"class_list":["post-2600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-david-cameron","tag-leveson","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-FW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2601,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600\/revisions\/2601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}