I have an independent financial adviser. I can recommend him. He gives me expert advice. But I decide, and sometimes I disagree. Nobody would question either the propriety or the commonplace nature of this arrangement.
Recently we were discussing what to do with my maturing pension fund. His suggestions looked shrewd but were predicated on a measure of resumed economic growth and the persistence for some years of low interest rates.
His assessment was well-informed and would be widely shared. But I just have this hunch that all is not well; that Western economies including our own are rather weakly placed in the grand global scheme of things; that the respite bought by pumping money into the system will have to be paid for; that the consequence might be a stunting of recovery, or inflation, or both, followed by higher interest rates again; and that it could happen within three years. This is probably total balls, but it remains my hunch and I can’t (or won’t) discount it.
So having read my financial adviser’s investment recommendations, I asked if he might revise them somewhat in the direction of the scenario I’ve outlined. He said politely that he thought my fears about interest rates were misplaced, but that I was boss and he’d offer me an adjusted portfolio. In the end we’ve resolved to split the difference. My adviser feels under no pressure to resign, nor I to dismiss him. I’m going public, here, on this page, with my thoughts and he would be welcome to go public with his — including his opinion of my judgment, which is that my judgment is wrong.
Is there a problem here? Isn’t that what advisers are for?
I ask because of the furore that has followed the Home Secretary’s sacking of the chairman of his advisory council on drugs. That each may have been entitled to his opinion; that each might have expressed that opinion in public as well as in private; that as an elected politician Alan Johnson was entitled to take into account factors, hunches, readings of popular sentiment and anxiety, and his own sociopolitical instincts about the way legislation impacts on society; and that in the end it was the democratically elected Home Secretary who was the boss, and must prevail — seems so obvious as hardly to need re-stating.
Yet most commentators have thought otherwise, seeing this as a critical test of the relative strengths in our unwritten constitution of (a) expertise, and (b) democracy.
One may think (I do) that Professor David Nutt and his committee are right about the reclassification of drugs, and Alan Johnson and his predecessor, Jacqui Smith, wrong. One may think (I do) that, right or wrong on the issue, both home secretaries mismanaged their approach to Professor Nutt, his committee, and their advice. But advice from different quarters does sometimes clash, and politicians do sometimes make a hash of the way they handle conflicts of evidence, and there does finally have to be an unspoken understanding as to who trumps whom.
And this is where we seem to be faltering as a democracy. Much of the argument advanced in Nutt’s defence seems way too strong. It has been quite seriously suggested in a range of intelligent newspapers that once a committee of external experts has offered clear advice on a question of policy, Cabinet ministers are almost bound to accept it. But why? Experts have so often been wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. No expert is an island, entire unto itself, and experts have their own peer groups, their own blind spots, their own vested academic interests, and their own corners to fight. As Lord Salisbury remarked: ‘No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.’
Salisbury went on to observe of his senior military advisers that ‘if these gentlemen had their way, they would soon be asking me to defend the Moon against a possible attack from Mars’. Today his Tory successors would be sniffing around in hopes of persuading the more militarily distinguished among them to join the next government.
I do wonder whether this almost unquestioning regard for expertise in the case of the drugs advisory council is part of a larger picture; and that the picture is not so much of a swelling admiration for experts, as of a diminishing respect for elected politicians.
Have you noticed in recent years how in order to import legitimacy into their judgments, elected politicians have started to outsource the process of judgment itself? To a now tedious degree, ministers at the Dispatch Box, anxious to reinforce their decisions, talk of ‘the science’ and what ‘the science’ teaches. These days, the moment a government is ambushed by events or by conflicting evidence, the issue is put out to a committee of experts to investigate. From Lord Hutton to Lord Saville to Sir Thomas Legg, judges and retired senior civil servants are wheeled in to conduct the inquiries, and reach the dispassionate judgments, that our elected politicians know we no longer trust them to reach. Even media commentators assume an enhanced status, as though we were in any serious sense disinterested.
In the Commons chamber it is now commonplace to hear prime ministers and opposition leaders throwing at each other the names of academics, greybeards and experts whose testimony exonerates or bolsters their own position. The unspoken minor premise to this line of defence or attack begins, ‘Don’t take my word for it: listen to…’.
This is a problem not only of public esteem, but of self-esteem; and the self-esteem of our democratically elected representatives has never been lower. The recent expenses scandal has only served to lower it further. In the days when elective British politics centred upon the clash of interests — of class, of industry, commerce, agriculture and the land — it all felt simpler. MPs were advocates hired to represent an interest, and we knew where we stood. Today, when our politicians claim to have risen above the politics of class interest and to represent, each one of them, the whole nation, the public have become bemused as to where these people are really coming from. Who is their master? It is then easy to slip into the cynical assumption that their master is their own interests, their own convenience, their own advantage.
And so we begin to think of politics as a courtroom in which the party politicians are counsel for one side or the other — and (between elections at least) we lack a judge or jury. Hence the renewed, enhanced, and (in my view) exaggerated respect for experts.
Professor Nutt is right about drugs. But Alan Johnson is right about who is — or should be — boss.
Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.
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