Better to correct your course than keep steering wrong

It takes courage to admit an error. After all, it’s likely to attract scorn from others. Especially others who start out ill-disposed towards you.

Not admitting an error, however, only leaves you open to repeating it. That’s why I find it particularly admirable when a political leader holds up his hand to accept a criticism and changes tack. Admirable and rare: have you ever seen Donald Trump admit he got anything wrong? Vladimir Putin? Boris Johnson?

Salvador Illa, Spanish Minister of Health
His second thoughts were good

Do you know the play What Every Woman Knows? It’s by J.M. Barrie, the same man who wrote Peter Pan. It’s a bit of a pseudo-feminist work, in that it seems to be extolling the greater intelligence of women, but only by having her engage in some devious and highly skilled manipulation of her husband to forward his career. He takes the limelight and the credit; she does the work he needs to puncture his arrogance and teach him a little self-awareness. At all times, she remains in the background.

Still, it’s an amusing and curious play, worth seeing or reading. One of the characters is a senior politician, who says:

I have always found that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

It’s an excellent notion. Anyone who thinks that a politician will be right every time and, in particular, right first time every time, is only setting themselves up for disappointment. Worse still, the fear of ridicule means that most politicians suffer from a terrible reluctance to accept that they can get things wrong, which forces them to stick with a mistaken policy long after it has already failed.

Here in Spain, we have perhaps the strictest Coronavirus lockdown in the world. The hidden victims are the younger children. Anyone over the age of 14 enjoyed the same privilege as adults, though it’s not much of a privilege: they can visit shops or a bank from time to time, or even, funnily enough, a newsagent to buy a paper. At the last, that way they can get out of doors from time to time, though infrequently and not far.

But from birth to age 14, there was no release, unless they had only a single carer: a lone mother, for instance, was allowed to take her children with her to do the shopping, so that she would not be obliged to leave them home alone. Most kids aren’t Macaulay Culkin, after all, though I suspect most parents wouldn’t want a child who was.

So the vast majority of kids have been drifting deeper and deeper into cabin fever as the lockdown persists, now into its sixth week.

The numbers of cases and deaths in Spain have been falling for ten days now. The government has already begun to relax the restrictions a little, allowing non-essential work to start again, after a two-week interruption. But now, Ministers have decided, it’s time to do something for the kids.

The proposal they came up with was – how can I put this delicately? – not perhaps the one most likely to enhance their reputation for competence. Or, frankly, sanity.

They announced that kids up to the age of 14 would be allowed to accompany their carers on the kind of trips adults were already allowed to take. In other words to the bank. Or the supermarket. Or the newsagent.

The outcry was immediate and loud. What, kids weren’t able to do what the relaxation was intended to achieve – get some air and some exercise? Instead of doing something healthy, they were to be permitted to engage in highly risky activity, going to enclosed places that are visited by more people than any others?

It wasn’t just the political opposition. It was doctors, in particular paediatricians and paediatric psychiatrists. It was public health experts. It was journalists. And above all, it was parents. 

So it was encouraging to see Salvador Illa, the Health Minister, come on TV with a modification to announce. He pointed out that his was a government that listened. And then he told us that from next Sunday, children will be able to go out, up to a kilometre from home and up to an hour, anytime from 9:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night, with up to three kids per adult. They’ll be allowed to do that simply for the sake of exercise and fresh air, taking toys or scooters or even bikes, without having to combine the outing with going to any specific place.

That’s in addition to being permitted to accompany an adult going to the bank, newsagent or supermarket, as originally proposed.

The government didn’t actually say, “we got it wrong”. But they changed their position and admitted they’d done so in response to the objections. 

That takes guts. They will, of course, be ridiculed by their opponents. But I hope enough people will see that what they did was the right thing to do.

After all, there’s a lot to be said for a politician, or a government, whose second thoughts are good.