Institutions like the Oxford Union were established “as a forum for discussion and debate at a time when the free exchange of ideas was a notion foreign to the restrictive university authorities.” Arguably we need such institutions in all parts of society more than ever where thesis can meet its antithesis and hopefully create a new synthesis. All of us as individuals have a responsibility to be more open and to engage respectfully with different views if we are to have a constructive political debate about the issues that matter to all of us. 5. Manage the boundary between Technocracy and Democracy carefully  How can we get the balance right between that which needs to be decided by experts versus politicians? Not surprisingly, the growth in the space occupied by experts, in part because many decisions are increasingly technical, can foster resentment of unelected individuals making decisions that have huge social consequences. Problems often arise when experts try to be politicians or when politicians try to be experts. Clarity about these roles and accountability to reinforce that clarity are essential. I have spent much of my career managing that boundary.
And while the global population has 5  grown from about 5 billion in 1990 to about 7 billion today , the number who go to bed hungry has fallen from 6  about a billion to 795 million . The application of expertise has given us not just aqueducts, sanitation, roads, education and wine, but much, much more. With these achievements in mind, it is not surprising that many decisions have been delegated to experts – by which I mean those who have invested time to develop a deep knowledge of a particular subject, usually with credentials and ongoing professional development to maintain their skills. Since the time when Caesar introduced the Julian Calendar based on expert advice to prevent the pontifex from manipulating the dates to 7  favour their political allies, politicians have turned to experts to help them make better decisions. The mechanisms for doing this have varied: trusted advisors; independent commissions tasked with solving a particular problem; expert witnesses appearing before parliament or the courts; or creating expert institutions with well-defined mandates to deliver a policy objective. A well-known example of such technocracy in action in the UK is the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) which is tasked with making the difficult trade-offs around which treatments will be funded by the National Health Service. This ensures those decisions are made on the basis of medical science and rigorous cost benefit analysis, and insulates politicians from lobbying by different interests.