Why is the Met Office making light of human misery with silly names for storms?

Columnist Did you know with a Digital subscription to Yorkshire Post, you can get access to all of our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. They did that this week in an annual workplace ritual, and I hope you won't think I've had a sense of humour bypass if I tell you that I found it pointless and patronising. Actually, more than that, it was Pythonesque. There is no real difference between John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks and today's real-life Ministry for Giving Silly Names to the Weather. Does it really help us to know that the 18th storm of the winter calendar is to be called Shaun because there's a sheep of that name in Wallace and Gromit? Or that the one after it will be named Theo after a pet cat? The official justification is that it will help us tell one storm from another, as if dates alone don't already do that. 'Storm Shaun blew my shed down' is no more useful on the insurance form than 'The storm on November 12 blew my shed down'. More importantly, storms are instruments of destruction. They kill people. By cutifying them like a cut-price Walt Disney, the Met Office is making light of human misery. Yet that is the default position of government communicators: treating us like five-year-olds. The Silly Walks sketch was funny in 1970 because the audience recognised the truth at its heart: government time-wasting was a cultural touchstone, and it has remained so ever since. It grows more absurd with each misbegotten attempt to inveigle daft ideas into the national conversation. The principle is that if you bang a drum loud and long enough, people will be deafened into not noticing it's off-key. As a result, it becomes possible for policies too ridiculous even for an episode of The Thick of It to gain traction. It's a phenomenon that can be traced back to the abortive Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme of the late 1940s, in which bowler-hatted clerks in Whitehall tried to counter a shortage of cooking oil by diverting Army tanks to clear three million acres of East African bushland for peanut growing. It was considered such a topping wheeze that inconveniences like persistent droughts and the fact that tanks are not ploughs were glossed over. The resulting fiasco cost over £1bn in today's money and produced barely enough peanuts for a night at Wetherspoons. Since then, good money has been thrown after bad on one project after another, because no-one has wanted the ignominy of admitting they're wrong. U-turns are for politicians, not their officials. Some of the blunders have been laughable; others tragic. The insistence by successive highways authorities that the dangerous removal of hard shoulders from motorways is a triumph of smart technology falls into the latter category. Dozens of deaths have proved that an electronic sign can never safely replace an entire physical lane. But in Pythonesque policymaking the NHS is unsurpassed. Its perverse logic that a backlog of patients is somehow beneficial because it proves there is no 'wasted capacity' has created a service that now prioritises spreadsheets over bed sheets. It does an even worse job in looking after its staff, spending fortunes on superficial 'mindfulness' apps and 'resilience webinars' while ignoring the clinical burnout of workers caused by impossible caseloads and an institutional blame culture. Superficiality, in fact, extends right across Britain's infrastructure. But of all the schemes under active consideration, the one that flies most aggressively in the face of common sense is concentrated in a village in the North Yorkshire countryside. Linton-on-Ouse is home to just 750 souls but the Home Office wants to increase its number nearly threefold by putting 1,200 asylum seekers on land that used to be an RAF base. The likely cost of this is said to be £400m, about 10 times the price of hotels. Local politicians of all colours think it's a terrible idea, given the isolation, lack of amenities and traumatising military environment – not to mention the safety risks inherent in population overwhelm on this scale. The Home Office itself got cold feet last time the idea was mooted. Yet officials are now doubling down on it, with ministers promising the site will be run by a 'specialist asylum provider' – which is another way of saying they're going to throw money at a problem which didn't exist until they created it. The idea is as nuts as those tanks in Tanganyika. The only difference is that the officials who conceived it no longer wear bowler hats – but only because they're working from home. And walking around the house in a bowler would be silly, wouldn't it?