Indeed it was not long before neanderthal became a term of common abuse

Indeed it was not long before “neanderthal” became a term of common abuse. Thanks to the latest archeological digs, we now know that he was capable not only of beating an opponent over the head with a blunt instrument, but also that he knew how to heal such wounds, with care available free at the point of delivery in a sort of primitive version of the National Health Service We have much to learn from our ancestors.. Do engineers owe duties to the general public?The UK has suffered its share of engineering disasters. Many have revealed deep-seated management problems, particularly a succession of serious railway accidents.

All such accidents can be seen to have been preventable in hindsight, often by timely action from professional engineers.
If an engineer takes it upon himself to deliver a warning to the public in relation to issues of safety or the environment, he exposes himself to personal risks beyond the threat of legal proceedings. Only by these means will engineers and the public they serve be able to establish the bond of trust that presently seems to be lacking.. After complaining for months that French politics is corrupt and immobile and geriatric, the electors of France have given us a presidential second-round run-off between two morally bankrupt old men (combined age 142). The alarming statistics go beyond the 17 per cent who voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen. The left-wing vote also scattered over a selection of hard or romantic left candidates who refuse to even consider that the old Marxist jargon has little to offer the 21st century.

If you add up hard right and hard left, you get a figure of 35 per cent of French voters who looked backward and inward and seemed to reject the European Union, modern France and the modern world.And yet French voters say, overwhelmingly, that they are pro-European and regard the passage to the Euro as a great success. I know several, modern, young, successful pro-European people who voted “Trotskyist” in the first round, out of a vague sense of dissatisfaction with politics. They intended to vote for the now eliminated Socialist premier, Lionel Jospin, in the second round on 5 May.One of the many bizarre facts about this bizarre election campaign was that the position of the broadly modern, outward-looking France was defended by mainstream politicians – Mr Chirac and Mr Jospin – who are old, shopworn and lacking in the credibility or creativity to overcome France’s often exaggerated fears of change and openness. The attractive, young faces – but also several unattractive old ones – were on the side of a confused and unrealistic view of the past.There are two points to make here.Firstly, France, though a great modern country, is a country that sometimes has difficulty in looking honestly and accurately at itself.

It is country of great rural spaces, scattered towns, trivial television and excellent but unread newspapers. It is a country where it is easy to spread misinformation, where rumours and misconceptions easily take root.France is not a country menaced by a sinister wave of crime (by all leading indicators Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and several other EU countries are more violent). France is not a country whose identity, in any of its key components, is threatened by Big Macs, Disney and immigration. As Serge July, the founder of the newspaper Lib?tion, said yesterday: “France is a disoriented, panicky country, which is scared of its own shadow, which finds it hard to turn towards the future.”Secondly, it is a country sorely in need of a new generation of mainstream politicians – of both right and left – who could capture the spirit of the modern, bold, successful France Such politicians already exist at local and regional level. However, they have had difficulty in breaking through on the national scene, partly because of the top-down pattern of French politics, dominated by Paris and the ?te educational establishments, and partly because of the moribund, discredited, mixed presidential-parliamentary system, which promotes demagoguery and excessive political longevity.It is my belief – my hope – that Sunday’s result is an aberration, not so much a serious regression in French attitudes but an accident on the way to the future.