I liked this article this morning:
https://www.ft.com/content/5dc6fd46-...e-abe238dee8e2
Quote:
|
When Eurosceptics accuse Mr Carney of dabbling in politics, they have a point: he did the immediate work of national stabilisation that politicians are meant to have the gumption to do themselves. His reward is public criticism from the likes of Daniel Hannan and Michael Gove, romantic Tories who might lack the governor’s technical grounding in economics but always stand ready to calm the markets with a tendentious line of verse or half-understood quote from the blurb to The Road to Serfdom.
|
We don't want purely technocratic governments but the likes of Gove and Hannan take the view that all technical or expert interventions are undemocratic intrusions upon their right to make everything a philosophical debate. It doesn't matter if it's a Bank of England Governor commenting on fiscal policy or major scientific bodies advising on global warming, their position as elected politicians doesn't just give them the authority to decide how to act on technical advice but to determine what that technical advice should be. Dougless Carswell
recently joined the ranks of the revolt against the technocratic elite by insisting the Sun and not the the Moon causes tides. It didn't matter than the person he was arguing with was the head of Scientific research at Sussex or that it is the moon which causes tides. He believes the Sun causes them and he isn't going to let some jumped up scientist tell him otherwise.