Never trust a technocrat

 ‘Technocrats?’ said my husband, turning his face from the television and the latest news from Italy, looking at me for a change, and putting his whisky glass down in puzzlement. ‘Aren’t those the chaps who helped Franco out?’

‘I don’t think they can be exactly the same people still, darling,’ I replied soothingly. But he had a point. It seems strange that we should think politicians more capable simply because they rejoice in the name technocrats, as the men put in to run Greece, Italy and are called. And a technocrat as a caretaker prime minister for Egypt seemed to be just the bone to throw the crowds in Tahrir Square. The techno- part derives from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘a carpenter’, but we have all come across carpenters who make tables that wobble no matter how many times they saw a bit off a leg.

My husband was right that technocrats had been held responsible for economic growth before, if in circumstances very different from today’s. Under Franco, from the 1950s, a new collection of ministers and public officials were put in power who did not necessarily have any ideological commitment to the Falange. At the same time, the ideological underpinning of the Falange, such as it was, made large state enterprises possible. After all, the word Falange was short for the Spanish Traditionalist Phalanx of the Assemblies of the National Syndicalist Offensive. Spain, the unlikely breeding ground early last century for anarcho-syndicalism, was expected after the Civil War to thrive through a very archo- kind of syndicalism. This led to, or at least preceded, industrialisation. The dwindling agricultural population was not entirely forgotten, for something called the National Institute of Colonisation and Rural Development settled families in new little towns such as Guadiana del Caudillo (population 2,536) or Villafranco (population 1,520).