SPEAKING WITH evident anguish on Monday, a bereaved father, Andrew Canter — his baby son had been stillborn, after an ambulance journey to a distant hospital — declared the NHS to be “in a terrible state” and that no hospitals should ever close. That is to say, none. Ever. Anywhere.

Three days earlier, Denise Fergus, whose child James Bulger was murdered by child killers, dismissed proposals to raise the age of criminal responsibility as “a disaster”; a pronouncement backed, however, by no more than a reference to “evil”. And three days before that, on the Today programme, John Humphrys questioned Elizabeth Davidson, whose daughter died because of a speeding driver, on the efficacy of longer sentences as a deterrent for drivers in the future.

With all respect and sympathy, how could she possibly know? Every instance of knife crime involves the obligatory seeking of comment from Frances Lawrence, whose head-teacher husband Philip died from stab wounds; more than four decades after Winifred Johnson’s child, Keith Bennett, was killed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, this dreadfully damaged woman was still being wheeled out for protests various, while Terry Waite was recently described as having “a deep understanding” of radical Islam as a direct result of his lengthy incarceration.

And there’s me, thinking he had been tied to a radiator in a dank cellar for most of it — when all the time he had been engaged in profound scholarly debate in Beirut academia.

The truth is that not one of these people has any better insight into such momentous issues than the rest of us. Prurient media, together with their prurient clientele, have elevated victims to the status of experts, making pundits of people based on absolutely nothing beyond their suffering, which at best achieves no more than the chance of a temporary catharsis for them, and at worst pushes aside the voices of the duller, but better-informed — hospital managers, criminologists, psychologists among them — whose proper expertise could more sensibly inform policy and change.

There is a great clamour for victims’ voices to be heard and, if it helps them, we should listen. But we cannot accept an expression of pain to be a substitute for knowledge. Quite the reverse: it is the hardest thing in the world to be rational, fair or sane when you hurt.