Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Yes, we need experts. But let’s not politicise expertise

For some people, it isn’t enough that we have locked down our daily lives. They want us to lock down our brains, too. Raise so much as a peep of criticism about the shutdown of society in response to Covid-19 and you will be raged against. And the cry is always the same: ‘Are you an expert? No. So shut the hell up.’

Only experts are allowed to speak at the moment, apparently. The rest of us — us lowly, non-expert plebs — must simply sit at home and await our instructions from on high. Those daily coronavirus news briefings feel, at times, like sermons from the mount. It is there, often from the mouths of people none of us ever voted for, that we discover how we must conduct our everyday lives and how long we will remain under house arrest. The experts are hardly staging a coup: they’re being invited to that podium by politicians. When asked, they admit doubt: the figures could be way out, they say. But if the figures are open to question the policies, apparently, are not. And that’s the danger. 

Parliament has gone AWOL — the wrong decision, in my view — and even the Cabinet is no longer able to meet, at least not in the flesh, given that Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and who knows who else is down with the virus. So a very serious question emerges: who rules Britain? The answer should worry anyone who believes in democracy and liberty.

We have become a bio-technocracy, a nation in which the fate of millions is being decided by biomedical experts, epidemiologists and people who are good at graphs. Their word has become gospel. Their expertise lies in science, but how to respond to that science? That’s for politicians to decide – and democracies to question. 

Their expertise lies in science.

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