How not to do it

'Often, thinking good thoughts takes precedence over sound logic, or in Jane Austen terms, sensibility gets the decision over sense'

Recently there was an impassioned headline in our local paper, over a letter from a reader, which said: "OXFORD GOT IT WRONG – DON'T LET IT HAPPEN TO BATH!"

Now, what do you suppose this terrible fate was that overtook Oxford? Letting an ancient university grow up there? Letting Robert Maxwell take over the football team? Letting Zuleika Dobson be set there? Giving shelter to Jeffrey Archer?

None of these things. Keeping cars out of the middle of Bath is the surprising answer.

The writer of the letter, Martin Tracy, who runs an admired framing shop in Bath's Walcot Street, quoted at length from a Sunday Times piece written by Rowan Atkinson, who said that he had always been against cars en masse, until he had seen what happened to Oxford after the local council decided to ban cars from the city centre. It had become a silent, dead place, he said, full of bollards and tour buses driving at snail's pace, and shops with nobody in them because nobody could get to them any more. It went against all current orthodox thinking, said Atkinson (and Tracy), but it seemed that letting cars into a place was capable of bringing life to a place, and that instituting park 'n' ride schemes was a good way of sending people to places where there weren't park 'n' ride schemes.

Now, Bath has been subject all this year to a test scheme to see if excluding cars and replacing them with bollards and taxis and buses will work, the main result of which has been to depress trade and create a more or less permanent traffic jam going round the town. Very soon the moment will come when they have to make a long-term decision, but what the locals fear is that thinking good thoughts will take precedence over practical, sound logic, or in Jane Austen terms, that sensibility will get the decision over sense.

It happens all the time.

Recently a professor in America proved that current fishery policies were all wrong, simply because they were based on wishful thinking. We have been trying to conserve fish stocks by catching only big fish and sparing the small ones to grow up and do the breeding. The US experiment, which actually tried both methods, proved that if you spare the big fish, you are sparing the very fish that do all the breeding, and that what we were doing was having the opposite effect of what was intended.

Again, there is a growing feeling that sex education is not exactly educating people towards more enlightened sex. We give our children more and more sex education, and they have more and more unwanted pregnancies. The Government concludes that what we need is more sex education, not less, and it fails to notice that what leads to all this early-baby business is not a failure of sex education, but a failure at home and in society. Just to give people more sex education is a bit like telling people not to take drugs without finding out why people do take drugs, and is having the opposite effect of what is intended.

(A startling example of this was an experiment conducted some years ago in Wisconsin, at a time when new regulations were driving out old-style wooden work surfaces, and introducing new synthetic work surfaces. The idea was to ensure a germ-free, sterile work surface. The experiment involved leaving bacteria on both kinds of surface to see what happened. Time and time again, the germs diminished on the wood surface, but not on the bright, shiny, supposedly germ-free synthetic ones. The new regulations were, to coin a phrase, having the opposite effect of what was intended.)

History is littered with examples of good intentions having the opposite effect of what was intended. People were told not to sail west, or they would fall off the edge of the Earth. They were told by the Pope that the Sun went round the Earth. They were told that Communism would bring equality. They were told (jumping forward a bit) that it would be a wonderful idea to build a Dome in Greenwich. They were told year after year that Tim would win at Wimbledon, though one gets the impression that this forecast has had the opposite effect of what was intended. They were told that the solution to the car problem was to build more roads, though one gets the impression... (see end of previous sentence).

I see we are running out of space, so I will leave the last word to a man who had seen it all. The man I mean is HL Mencken, and what he said was: "To every problem the solution will be found sooner or later, and that solution will always be wrong."