Prof Mary Beard: "politicians do not have a clue"

Last Thursday, during BBC Question Time, Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University told the politicians, Caroline Spelman (Conservative), Lord Oakeshott (Liberal Democrat) and Chris Bryant (Labour), and Peter Oborne, a prominent journalist and political commentator, as she commented on their discussion how to resolve the current financial and economic rather unacceptable situation:

"When you guys - the whole lot of you - start to talk like this I feel really, really worried. Because I know that I have not a foggiest clue what is going to get Europe or the world out of recession. I am not supposed to know, I am not a professor of economics, I am a professor of classics, it's not my job. When I listen to you guys argue what I see is that you do not have a foggiest clue actually."

Professor Beard, as an academic, is a very credible judge to tell when people have a clue what they talk about and when they do not. This is a good part of her general academic experience of assessing students and fellow academics. And she was precisely right: whenever most politicians and mainstream journalists start talking or writing about the ongoing financial and economic situation they are clearly out of their depth. It is only this part of human psychology that keeps us sane that does not allow them to comprehend how they are seen from the outside. Professor Beard told them just this: that the king was naked.

However behind the politicians and mainstream commentators who do not have a clue about the causes and mechanics of the current financial and economic situation, there are people who understand it well and, actually, engineered this "crisis". They take full advantage of it. They oil the wheels of the system giving politicians well-paid jobs in the City they are not professionally suited for and "The largest heist in history" continues.