WHY did the Environment Agency take so long to sort out the Marshgate tip fire, which burned merrily for several weeks last year?

This, according to a story I read in the Adver the other day, is one of the main questions being asked by a council task group examining the disaster.

As I like to do my bit to make the work of such bodies easier, I’ll supply the answer to the question at no charge to the taxpayer.

It is as follows: The reason why the Environment Agency took so long to sort out the Marshgate tip fire is that the Marshgate tip fire didn’t happen anywhere near the homes or workplaces of anyone in charge of the Environment Agency.

In fact, it’s a fair bet that nobody in any senior role in the Environment Agency lives anywhere near a tip of any sort, not even an upmarket recycling point for discarded designer clothing and last year’s Range Rovers.

That’s because many of the people ultimately in charge of the Environment Agency, be they politicians or senior executives, belong to a special class of people who regard the rest of as not quite human.

It’s not that they’re evil, this special class of people, or that they completely lack compassion for us; it’s just that they don’t regard our tribulations and tragedies as on a par with those of human beings – and they define ‘human beings’ as people like them. The rest of us, they believe, are perhaps somewhat less than human and somewhat more than spider monkeys.

If some impossible chain of events conspired to create a rubbish tip in one of the gated neighbourhoods where they tend to live, and that rubbish tip happened to erupt into flames, you can bet that all hell would break loose and no expense would be spared in extinguishing the blaze within hours.

Medical experts would tour local homes and businesses, making sure nobody had suffered.

When such a fire breaks out in an ordinary neighbourhood, however, they feel less need for urgency. It’s not that they think it’s a good thing for businesses to be forced to shut down, for householders to cower behind closed doors and windows at the height of summer and for anybody venturing outside to risk coughs, streaming eyes and nausea. They’re not cruel.

Rather, they regard our sufferings as being on a par with say, some woodlice clustered on a rockery downwind of a bonfire.

Once we grasp this fact, it becomes easier to understand certain other aspects of life, because the same people are in ultimate charge of many of our institutions.

Some British people wonder, for example, why their children’s state schools are falling down, why textbooks have to be shared, and why class sizes seem to grow by the year.

Others might be perplexed about a recent hospital visit during which they were served food unfit for a dog, went without painkillers because overworked staff were dead on their feet, or had to wait months for an appointment or had the wrong limb operated on.

Still others might wonder why the gutters outside their homes run with blood and Class A drugs, why violent criminals make their neighbourhoods uninhabitable and why any item of property not bolted down is likely to be stolen.

It’s difficult to give detailed answers in the space available, but let’s just say that our education, health and judicial systems are under the ultimate control of people who send their offspring to the best private schools, have armies of private doctors on speed dial and can be certain that no criminal will ever be allowed within a mile of them.

I hope this clarifies the matter for the council’s task group.

Now they can devote themselves to other issues, such as how the hell the tip was allowed to get into such a dangerous state in the first place.