A fare
thing Theodore Dalrymple explains why Britain should be ruled by retired taxi-drivers Every experienced journalist knows that there are two sources of information about obscure and distant countries: the taxi-drivers who take him from the airport to the country's one luxury hotel, and the journalists who are already sitting at the bar of that hotel. Of the two sources, the taxi-drivers are incomparably the more reliable, intelligent and well informed.
Taxi-drivers have a profound knowledge of human nature: besides the opportunity inherent in their job for meeting every class and condition of human being, a keen interest in human nature is a matter of survival for them, and necessity is the mother of all close observation, The universal political conservatism of taxi-drivers is thus not the consequence of petit-bourgeois social prejudice, as haughty radicals like to pretend, but of intelligence reflecting upon experience. It is, indeed, a mere prejudice that taxi-drivers are prejudiced.
My impression that taxi-drivers are the cream of humanity has been strengthened by my acquaintance with them in my own city. Not only are they cheerful, polite, obliging, honest, hardworking and knowledgeable, but they are also extremely well organised. By the exercise of their own intelligence, they have adopted the latest technology to improve their service, increase their efficiency, and raise their income. They are a beacon of light in Britain's sea of gloom.
Members of the association into which they have formed themselves are enthusiastic not only about the technology they have adopted, but — something unheard of in the British public service — also about their management too. They accede to the association by buying one share, and one share only, and thereby contract themselves, under pain of a fine, to attend the annual general meeting at which the three officers — a chairman, a secretary and a treasurer — are elected. These three are paid slightly, but only slightly, more than a driver can expect to earn in a year; and if any of them fails to perform, he is soon voted down.
The drivers are careful to provide neither incentive nor opportunity for administrative hypertrophy, the disease of the age. This is because they would pay for any such hypertrophy directly from their pocket, as a kind of tax; and it is the universal experience of mankind that no man pays tax willingly, just as it is the universal experience of mankind that no man is reluctant to impose a tax on others. It is for this reason that attendance at the annual general meeting is deemed to be so important.
The technology that they have adopted by free vote (after some initial resistance by the older drivers) is a system of satellite guidance. When a customer calls for a taxi, his location is entered into a computer, and the satellite system automatically allocates the nearest free taxi to the customer. This not only maximises efficiency, saving the customer time and the taxi-driver fuel, but it also improves human relations among the taxidrivers themselves. The reason for this rather surprising effect of technology was explained to me recently by a Sikh driver, who spoke of the system much as a young lover might speak of his beloved.
Under the old dispensation, when drivers were allocated jobs via a radio, there were grounds for permanent mistrust and even paranoia among the drivers. They suspected, for example, that the staff who manned the radios had their favourites, to whom they gave the juicy jobs (of course, this did not have to be true for paranoia to exist). Moreover, a job having been allocated to a particular driver over a radio to which all drivers listened, another driver might race to the customer ahead of the particular driver. The latter might then find that he had wasted time, effort and fuel, and would accordingly be very angry, without knowing against whom to direct his anger. He therefore viewed all his fellow drivers with mistrust.
By its indisputably fair and objective allocation of jobs, the new system has completely transformed the relations of drivers with each other. Into the bargain, they spend £20 to £30 per day less on fuel to raise exactly the same revenue. No doubt their happiness will evaporate with the novelty of the system, but for the moment, the taxi-drivers are the happiest of men.
Their system (for which they paid £1,500 each) also improves their safety by protecting them from the more aggressive members of the British public. No longer will the drivers have to carry chilli powder to squirt in the eyes of passengers who turn ugly — an uncertain method at best of subduing them. Instead, they press a button fitted to their cabs that will signal their whereabouts to all the other cabs in the vicinity who will come, en masse, to their rescue. They are thus freed of their reliance on the police, who are always busy with other things when crimes occur. Nevertheless, the computer will also, when necessary, plan routes according to the whereabouts of police stations. And, as if this were not enough, the computer will record the abusive language and threats of the passengers.
We must now turn to the interesting question of how the taxi-drivers of a provincial city are able to do what the British government, in all its tentacular forms, cannot do: namely, use modern technology to the advantage of all and the detriment of none but wrongdoers. The first and most obvious answer is that it is in their interest to do so, while it is never in the interest of the British bureaucrat to solve any problem whatsoever. Indeed, he regards any solution as a threat to his job and therefore his mortgage repayments. His interest is in the multiplication of problems, not their solution. The Circumlocution Office has metastasised through British life, since Dickens first coined its mission statement, How not to do it.
But there is more to the difference than this, The taxi-drivers have not had the inestimable disadvantage of what in Britain now passes for tertiary education, and have therefore retained both a willingness and an ability to think for themselves. Their thoughts are not filtered through a mesh of barbarous but gimcrack theory of the type peddled in those institutions of higher work-avoidance known as universities. It is through them that so many of our heartless, inefficient and cowardly public servants have passed.
What, then, are the lessons to be drawn from the success of taxi-drivers and the equal and opposite failure of our public servants? How have the former succeeded when people supposedly much better educated than they have failed? The first lesson, of course, is that the country should be run exclusively by retired taxi-drivers. The second is that nine out of ten institutions of tertiary education should be closed down forthwith, the number of students reduced by the same proportion, and the staff set upon humble but nonetheless socially useful tasks, such as sweeping the streets. Let us put an end to their corruption of youth; let us reflect deeply upon the efficiency of our taxi-drivers and the incompetence of our public servants.
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