DEMOCRACY VS TECHNOCRACY IN THE UK

The displacement of elected government ministers by an appointed group of technocrats in Italy has brought strong opposition from some in the British press, although the occasional academic correspondent favours a fully-fledged technocracy of the kind found in contemporary China.

However, I would argue that technocratic government has long existed in the UK, and has probably been the the norm, rather than the exception, in post-war Britain. The important issue is the implicitness of this arrangement in our country, as distinct from its explicitness in continental Europe. To illustrate this, it is useful to look at how economic growth has been defined and supported through policy-making and government intervention in the UK in the period since 2000.

During the Blair premiership, in one important respect "New Labour" meant precisely what it said on the bottle in the encouragement of mass migration as a means of transforming the UK employment market and creating a growth trajectory based upon a rapidly increasing population. This, combined with the well-documented expansion of financial services sector, together with the encouragement of what some describe as the "feral rich" to locate in Britain, gave rise to a rapid increase in property prices and subsequent speculative bubble.

At no time during the above process, which substantially gathered momentum following the re-election of New Labour in 2005, were the above policies explicitly identified to the UK electorate, many of whom by now had been bought off by the availability of cheap credit, although some politicians, notably Vince Cable for the Liberal Democrats, had begun to sound alarm bells on debt. Such alarms were soon proved to have real foundation as the strongly integrated (but never democratically mandated) UK and US financial systems imploded in 2008.

A British Coalition Government was then elected in 2010 with a political mandate to deal with the serious consequences of the banking crisis, together with other problems arising from the poor governance of the previous administration, including unregulated and unsustainable levels of migration.

During the early days of the Coalition much political rhetoric was directed at tackling these problems, but in retrospect remarkably little has actually been done, and it now appears that the present government is determined to embark upon a leveraged growth strategy, as distinct from promoting sustainable economic development, which is more or less identical to that of New Labour. One can only presume that this must be due to the existence of a technocratic "state within the state" of Britain which is beyond democratic accountability and political mastery because its very existence is implicit rather than explicit in our system of government.

SMART MONEY'S ON MERKEL AND LAGARDE

Picture: The Telegraph

I have recently (and belatedly) started reading Germaine Greer's "The Whole Woman", published at the end of the twentieth century. There is a certain bitterness in later vintage Greer arising from the all too apparent flaws of "The Feminist Project", and in particular the failure of this to empower the "The Older Woman". However, it is not only older feminists who should reflect keenly on recent events in the Eurozone, where female power brokers Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde have this week seen off a male chauvinist of Imperial Roman proportions in Silvio Berlusconi.

For the partnership of German Chancellor and International Monetary Fund chief should be a concern not only for male politicians well-past their sell-by date, but also for fashionably young political leaders like David Cameron, and even President Obama, who have a penchant for coming across as onetime head boys now elevated to the position of school head master or college principal: ie still relatively inexperienced in the workings of European Realpolitik.

The present problems of the Eurozone may have provided a most welcome distraction from those of UK (and US) political economy, with Eurosceptic interests having a field day in the British media, but in the medium to longer term it is likely to be Germany and fellow members of a European Union premier league who are the winners. Indeed Britain should beware being cold-shouldered in both the "Special Relationship" and the New Europe.

With this in mind, Britannia might well do worse than look to "Mature Feminism" for help in renewing her political economy and the national psyche. Why, after all, should women of a certain age fare so well in foreign public life and be largely excluded from appearing in British visual media? The answer must lie amongst our male-dominated political media classes, and the many women who subscribe to their televisual reality. However, whilst this deep-rooted cultural problem may inspire outstanding feminist critics like Germaine Greer, it will prevent Britain from getting real with the challenges of the twenty first century.