{"id":8608,"date":"2024-07-03T07:25:45","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T07:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=8608"},"modified":"2024-07-03T07:25:45","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T07:25:45","slug":"technocratic-governance-and-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2024\/07\/03\/technocratic-governance-and-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Technocratic Governance and Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Extracts from three pre-election readings:<\/p>\n

I'm reading Rory Stewart's<\/a> warts 'n' all book<\/a> about his time as an MP for Penrith and the Border, the constituency I was born and grew up in. \u00a0He writes about the difficulty of being an effective MP and minister given that everything changes were so difficult to make. \u00a0He worked as a very junior DEFRA minister under Secretary of State Liz Truss which would have prepared him for when she became party leader and prime minister. \u00a0Truss said she didn't think that 'rural' was all that different from 'urban' which perplexed him and me. \u00a0I recommend the book; it's a grim but well written tale by someone I have a lot of time for.<\/p>\n

In the Spectator, another ex-parliamentarian, Matt Ridley<\/a>, writes about voting for the first time since he left the Lords. \u00a0He begins:<\/p>\n

\"At the age of 66 I feel like a first-time voter. As a member of the House of Lords, I was not allowed to vote in the last three general elections. But I retired from the House in 2021, so democracy here I come. I shall scan the ballot paper with interest: who is standing for head of the Office of Budget Responsibility, or chair of the Climate Change Committee? I would like to read their manifestos, since they seem to be the folk whose \u2018models\u2019 tell the country what it must do, brooking no dissent.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s that you say? It doesn\u2019t work that way? How quaint of me to think that the mighty quangocrats who wield so much power should have meaningful accountability to parliament, let alone the people. Joking aside, I have now seen how government works close up. Stealthily but steadily, almost all real political power has been stripped from elected councillors, MPs and even ministers over the past two decades by \u2018officials\u2019 and handed to \u2018experts\u2019 in quangos, nationalised industries, arms-length bodies and courts.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That's my view as well and I'm surprised how long it took me to wake up to the lack of accountability in so much of our public services. \u00a0Think of the Post Office.<\/p>\n

Then, in last week's New Statesman, John Gray<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

\"Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable. \u00a0...<\/p>\n

In functioning democracies, technocracy rarely works for long. Relying on scraps of academic detritus, its practitioners struggle to keep up with events. Even when their theories are sound, they do not legitimate their policies. Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but science cannot tell you what to do about it. Conflicting values are at stake, some of them involving major losses. What entitles a caste of bureaucrats to make these tragic choices for the rest of us?\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so I think of regulators allowing routine sewage discharges into rivers, deciding how much over the odds we pay for electricity, dictating climate change policy, ruling on where houses can and cannot be built, xxxx, xxxx, xxxx. \u00a0I could go on. \u00a0With the next government now pretty clear, will things get worse (or better if you really like unaccountable people and groups running things)? \u00a0Well, does August follow July?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Extracts from three pre-election readings: I'm reading Rory Stewart's warts 'n' all book about his time as an MP for Penrith and the Border, the constituency I was born and grew up in. \u00a0He writes about the difficulty of being...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}