Throughout the EU referendum campaign we were bombarded
with horror stories from an ensemble cast of the great and the good who told
us, the little people, that we could not possibly know what we were voting for.
Christine Lagarde was one among many whose ‘expert’ testimony foretold of the
utter recklessness of voting to leave. As head of the IMF her particular
warning was expected to carry a hefty weight. It was still ignored. Yesterday
Lagarde received a mild rebuke and a slap on the wrist for unwisely using her
expertise to commit an offence which would have landed others in jail.
Interestingly, part of her defence appears to have been that she did not
herself take expert advice... Oh, the humanity!
“She denied any wrongdoing and claimed she had not seen
all documents suggesting the payout should not be made. Six others [are] being
investigated for fraud.”
Michael Gove’s partial quote, “We’ve had enough of
experts...” became the central jibe in many an attack on the legitimacy of
Leave voters’ ambitions. How dare you reject the advice of experts? Who are you
to gainsay the considered wisdom of such eminences? The sneers were relentless
and the inference clear. And yet... few of the threatened hardships came to
pass and the short-term bump in the road for Sterling and the Stock Exchange
was based purely on the speculative actions of yet more experts, feathering
their nests.
Maybe, in retrospect, expert wasn’t the right word; after
all, one man’s sage is another man’s charlatan. And in any case, it wasn’t a
reaction against just any kind of expertise, but against the type of expertise
that can be bought bespoke. Perhaps the phrase ‘self-serving elite’ better encapsulates
who the vote was rejecting. Use that phrase instead of ‘expert’ and suddenly a
whole lot comes into sharp focus. The Kinnocks and the Mandelsons losing their
tickets to the gravy train. The Cleggs and the Farrons, minor players in thrall
to bigger beasts but nonetheless imagining themselves to one day aspire to an
EU office. And all the big Bilderbergers the Ken Clarkes and cronies who simply
crave the power and influence over those same little people.
In Bill Bryson’s excellent ‘One Summer America 1927’ he
describes the taciturn nature of President Calvin Coolidge who was renowned for
neither doing very much nor saying very much. He is said to have engaged in a
‘grim, determined, alert inactivity’ as he ‘presided over a booming economy and
did nothing at all to get in the way of it.’ Given the constant mishandling of
the tiller of the dinghy of state and the unrelenting changes inflicted on western
societies, a period of Calvinomics is long overdue.
Change anything too completely and too quickly and stability
is usually sacrificed. Was it the indigenous populations of the first world who
demanded to be systematically invaded by primitive cultures? Or was it the experts
– sorry, I mean self-interested elites – who oversaw this population
replacement? The Berlin atrocity of last night was a dose of cultural
enrichment too far yet still they will tell us little sheep it is nothing to do
with islam, that we don’t understand, that we should work harder to better
integrate.
What is so hard to understand about this, experts?
We no longer look to experts to provide solutions – we’ve
already suffered too many of those. The problem of islam, the problems of the
world, likely won’t be solved by global thinkers and strategic experts; they’ve
done enough damage already. It might just be time for governments to back off
and let the people handle this...
