In the UK civil service, there is the Northcote-Trevelyan principle which ensures that recruits are selected on merit and not through political patronage and the well-established practice that “civil servants advise and Ministers decide.” At both the World Bank and the IMF, the job of the “expert” staff was to provide the best technical advice and if there were political trade-offs to be made, they were done at the level of the Board, which represented the 189 member country governments. If experts cross that line, they undermine the credibility of their expertise and  36  Evaluating Information: the Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning, Stanford History Education Group, pp 4-5. Haidt, J (2013) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, London: Penguin Books A good example is the recent debate on whether or not migration was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire between Mary Beard, a well-known historian, and Aaron Banks, a UKIP supporter (see here for more details). 37 38  11  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  11  their accountability to their professional standards. And if politicians cross that line, they risk misleading the public who elected them to look out for their interests. Independent institutions such as the civil service, central banks, and universities have a special role in mediating expertise in the public interests, but technocracy can only ever derive its authority from democracy.
Mervyn King: Monetary policy developments Speech by Mr Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, at a dinner hosted by the IoD South West and the CBI, Bristol, 22 January 2008. *  *  *  It is four months since Northern Rock came to the Bank of England for support. And the headlines continue to be dominated by its fate. Northern Rock, however, is not the epicentre of the present global banking crisis. That lies in the very substantial losses made by many banks in the main financial centres as a result of the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market. Those losses, and the fear of future losses on a wider range of loans, pose a threat to the ability of the banking system to finance continued economic growth – the so-called credit crunch. Concerns about the implications of a credit crunch, not only for the health of the US but for the world economy, lie behind the sharp falls in global equity markets over the past week. So the next year will pose economic challenges for all of us – more so than at any time since the Bank of England was given its independence in 1997. Both industrialised and emerging market economies have been affected by the fall in asset prices but conditions vary across countries. It is striking that the banking crisis originated at the heart of the world’s major financial centres.