David Mitchell (of Peep Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look and the “PC” character from the UK Get a Mac ads) is arguing against the REF: Nothing good ever got invented by accident, apart from some silly fun stuff like the slinky, post-it notes, penicillin, warfarin and X-rays.
Reading it brought back to mind that oaf Charles Clarke’s statement that medieval history and other purely academic research was a bit dodgy… there is no reason for the state to pay for them
. That’s Charles Clarke with the maths and economics degree from King’s College, Cambridge. Universities are fine for training government ministers, remember, but not for you and me. And research departments are fine so long as they produce something that can be packaged up and sold, but not if they waste time discovering interesting stuff about nature or humanity.
Margate, Kent, England
