Perhaps the only positive quality of the hapless Liz Truss and her short-lived 2022 premiership was her willingness to question the ‘orthodoxy’. In particular, she took issue with the obstinacy and failures of the institutions that oversee the British economy – from the Treasury and the Bank of England to the Office for Budget Responsibility. The great irony is that, after her brief free-market experiment crashed and burned last year, these very institutions and the technocratic outlook they embody became more powerful than ever. By the end of 2022, after an all-too-brief hiatus, technocracy had re-established itself as the driving force in British politics.
After the coronation of Rishi Sunak in the autumn, we were assured that the ‘adults’ were in charge again. Sunak’s government, with fellow technocrat Jeremy Hunt as chancellor, set out to contrast itself with its predecessors. It sought to signal an end not only to the market turmoil triggered by Truss, but also to the Tory Party’s flirtation with populism. It wanted to repudiate what Vote Leave’s Michael Gove famously argued during the 2016 Brexit referendum, that Britain has ‘had enough of experts… saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’. From now on, the government would once again defer to the alleged wisdom of the civil-service beancounters. And its policies would be tailored to placate the money markets, rather than the voters.
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