“Notice how muted the reaction has been to the new Hubs,” wrote the anonymous X memelord Drukpa Kunley shortly after Starmer announced his third-party deportation scheme. Indeed, there was no “return hub” discourse. But perhaps that was the point. The suspiciously twee euphemism suggests Labour has discovered a quietly revolutionary way of doing its dirty work.

On the surface the “hub” is a bastion of technocratic benevolence, an embodiment of a British state that wants to be your bestie. The word conjures images of Technicolor beanbag chairs and gel pen-wielding lanyard-wearers. Yet, scrape a little and the hub reveals itself as a formless, fickle, and malleable euphemism — it bends to the whims of whoever wields it.

Before it became a term of civic optimism, the hub had a rougher beginning. Once upon a time, the hub was a “hobbe”. From the proto-German hubbel, meaning “hill” or “bump”, the early hobbe was an unappetizing prospect. Geoffrey Chaucer used “hobbe” to describe something wretched, while a medieval English-to-Latin dictionary defined it as a tumorous swelling, a synonym for a “bube” — of bubonic plague fame. These hubs signaled sickness, not progress.

Around two centuries later, in a 1570 farming manual, English poet and country gent Barnaby Googe gave the term a new meaning. He described the hub as “the midst of the Wheele, called the Naue or Hobbe of the wheele”. Reincarnated as the bump at the center of a wheel, it became a mechanism of both physical and moral progress.

As English standardized, the hobbe became the hub, and went transatlantic. In 1858, Boston grandee Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared the city’s State-House to be “the hub of the solar system”, and you couldn’t “carry off a hub without taking the spokes with it, or you would damage the wheel”. Boston soon became widely known as “The Hub of the Universe” or simply “the Hub”. Holmes asserted that this progress was driven by an intellectual and moral WASP elite he termed the “Boston Brahmins”, positioning them and Boston at the forefront of American prosperity.

Yet it was in the second half of the 20th century that the hub’s galactic potential began to emerge. Following the war, the Western imagination underwent a profound shift, rejecting a world of essentialism and rootedness in favor of motion and interconnection.

As N.S. Lyons observes, before 1945 nations were moored in soil, faith, and kin — what Karl Popper derided as the “closed society”. After the catastrophe, those bonds began to be seen as a gateway to fascism. Theodor Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” diagnosed loyalty to family or nation as pathology. Popper went further, branding the national community itself “anti-humanitarian propaganda”. The postwar settlement determined that the “strong gods” of belonging and faith were to be dismantled, replaced with the “weak gods” of openness, tolerance, doubt, and consumer comfort. This cultural transformation set the stage for the rise of the hub.

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Bringing this dream to reality would require three consecutive revolutions — in politics, commerce, and technology. First, a postwar political reconstruction to engineer openness and interdependence. Second, a global managerial and commercial revolution to facilitate this ever-deeper integration. And third, a tech revolution to eliminate friction from the system entirely.

Western leaders embedded the new postwar values into the emerging supra-national institutions. By sharing coal, steel, law, and standards, the founding fathers of the European Union, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, argued that war would be “not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. In this new era, centralization and technocracy would become the overarching political theology.

Then, to manage the emerging sprawl of global interconnection, the hub was unleashed. Amid the postwar manufacturing and consumption booms, the hub became the weapon of choice for the new managerial class tasked with holding the new system together. First, in 1955, Delta Airlines pioneered the “hub-and-spoke” system at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport to consolidate flights through a central location. The idea was simple: concentrate routes, reduce operating costs, and increase connectivity. The aviation hub model quickly became industry standard, and a model for managing all complex systems.

Logistics followed suit. Inspired by the Delta Airlines model, a young Yale student named Fred Smith wrote a thesis proposing that a hub system could enable overnight deliveries. Years later, he put the idea into action, founding FedEx and revolutionizing logistics by routing all deliveries through the company’s global SuperHub in Memphis, launched in 1981.

Finally, the Internet arrived. It would streamline not only physical infrastructure (think Ethernet hubs), but societal infrastructure too. “Technology hubs”, explained Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham, were where “rich people and nerds” clustered to build the future. And so Silicon Valley became a mythic ecosystem that could change the world. By 2000, Wired magazine was documenting a global outbreak of “Silicon envy”, observing that “high-tech hubs now dot the globe” all seeking to unlock the wealth, productivity, and magic that the hub could conjure.

Enter, Tony Blair. Despite lacking a phone and an email address, Blair wanted to emulate Silicon Valley’s boundless techno-optimism in British government. And so he waged a hub revolution of his own: launching the Policy Hub website in March 2002. This online tool was designed to centralize policymaking through shared initiatives, tools, and case studies, bringing the spirit of the hub to government. Awestruck by American productivity and desperate to modernize the state, Britain became hub obsessed. Prior to Blair, the term “hub” appeared in Parliament only 613 times in 200 years, mostly in reference to transport. In just 13 years under New Labour, it was used 885 times.

If Blair was a hub emissary, then David Cameron was a hub zealot. Amid austerity, he sought to rewire the state with a series of efficient hubs that combined services. Growth Hubs attempted to reshape local enterprise. Family Hubs provided womb-to-tomb family support. Launched in 2012, GOV.UK was the hub of hubs. It was a digital paragon of efficiency: soothing sans-serif GDS Transport font, paternalistic “nudges” drawn from supposedly cutting-edge psychological insights. All of it designed to dissolve the sprawling machinery of government into a single, frictionless one-stop shop. In just six years, hub discourse in parliament exploded to 2,067 references — doubling Labour’s efforts in half the time.

The Cameron years were defined by the mythos of the hub. If we all come together — individuals, communities, ideas and technology — there’s nothing we cannot solve. From GOV.UK and the London Olympics, to legalization of same-sex marriage, Cameron unwaveringly believed in the open society, benevolently ruled by hubs.

But Brexit was a devastating blow. In search of sovereignty and border control, the spirit of the closed society returned. Voters had rejected the hub ideology of frictionless integration. In the years that followed, successive Tory Prime Ministers attempted to invoke “strong god” rhetoric. Theresa May scorned “citizens of nowhere”; the Rwanda policy aimed to shatter the postwar consensus.

However, in practice things were different. The open society continued to prosper through none other than the hub. Theresa May doubled down on tech hubs. Boris Johnson followed with green energy, nuclear fusion, and hydrogen. Rishi Sunak sought to establish the UK as a global center for AI safety and launched the Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.

This tension reveals a burning psychodrama at the heart of the British state’s self-conception. It wants to be a high-tech superpower without the pain of rebuilding its Victorian bureaucracy. It wants to make cuts to state services while sounding friendly and benign. And it wants to project global openness while addressing the concerns of an increasingly reactionary electorate. Rather than confront these paradoxes, Britain reaches for the soothing Potemkin policy of the hub. Time and again, leaders choose cuddly vagueness over the hard work of politics.

It’s now Starmer’s turn to take up the mantle. In the brand-new Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June, the Government announced its intention to invest in no less than 19 different genres of hub. Some are mere updates of existing hubs, but others are entirely new: commercial innovation, AI skills, life sciences, defense, professional and business services, and robotics.

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In just one year since Starmer entered Downing Street, “hub” has appeared 966 times in parliamentary debates. In June 2025 alone, it popped up 166 times — the highest month since records began. At this pace, the term may feature over 4,000 times before the next election. So inundated by hubs, we are numb to them. Ubiquitous and bland, they’re an instant eyeball glazer.

Which brings us back to the return hubs. The policy embodies the central paradox of the Starmer project. “Return” gestures toward something more reactionary — not just deportation, but a broader RETVRN to an imagined orderly past. Meanwhile, “hub”, of course, is the open society incarnate.

Amid the metaphysical civil war bubbling between voters, Starmer must tread a tightrope. To keep the favor of metropolitan progressives, he must demonstrate technocratic competence. To hold off Reform, he must cut immigration. If he can wield the return hub, flexing toughness while preserving a progressive surface, he might just keep hold of power. The result could be a distinctively British settlement: quietly hardcore with a cuddly demeanor. It would represent yet another evolutionary leap for the hub.

But if Starmer falls, the hub could go down with him. A leader more hostile to the hallowed open society, perhaps a Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick, may choose to kill this symbol of the ancien régime. What might come next? The answer may already be here: look no further than the meme-powered “Skullcrushing” remigration subsuming America. The hub’s wheel will turn — or it will break. Its fate is in Starmer’s hands.

Amid this chaos, Rishi Sunak — former Goldman Sachs banker — has become Britain’s new prime minister. Has the technocratic order of the 2010s returned? Or has the modern world moved beyond its reach? Read Gray’s diagnosis, as well as his interview with Freddie Sayers, below.

The revenge of the technocrats

The point about these people is they’ve learned nothing. There’s no practical way of going back to before 2016. Already in 2016, the world hadn’t fully recovered from a near catastrophic financial crisis which these adults in the room, these extremely intelligent men and women, had given us. The halcyon period of technocratic competence included, going back to the start, long-term capital management melting down in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its debt. That was patched up but it also began what later was called quantitative easing … You then had the 2007-2008 crash. And you also had gruesome sideshows like 20 years in Afghanistan. This is what the adults in the room, this is what the technocrats, the people who are now coming back as safe hands, as competent administrators, this is what they did. So their record is not at all one of competence. It’s one of repeated near-disaster.

They think of themselves as the way of the future. But the future has melted down. It’s not there anymore; their future’s gone. Their future was one in which the whole world would marketise, in which geopolitics would surrender to geoeconomics, global markets. All the states that were emerging, China, Russia and others, would see that their advantage lay with integrating into the global market. Geopolitical struggles would attenuate. They would still be there, but would become less important over time. The opposite has happened. The global market doesn’t exist the way it seemed to exist then and it’s certainly not evolving towards this global market stability that they expected. So, the fundamental problem in this nostalgia, this Osbornist technocratic project, is that they’re adapting to a world that no longer exists, and isn’t coming back. It is a hopeless nostalgia.

What the Tories get wrong about Brexit

Insofar as Brexit’s a Tory project, it is: Global Britain, supply-side reforms, free market, open the British economy even more to the buffeting of the world. Whereas what people wanted in the North and the Midlands, and other parts of the country, from Brexit, I think, was some shelter from those storms. They wanted not a smaller state, a state that had retreated even further. They wanted actually, maybe not a bigger state, although most of them I think probably did, but one which was more protective of them and more concerned with their wellbeing and more active. So the majority of those who voted for Brexit did not vote — perhaps the overwhelming majority — for the reasons that the Tory Brexiteers thought. And that, of course, introduced a contradiction in the whole Tory Brexit project, which meant it couldn’t work.

Why the technocrats don’t get populism

The only way they could understand these movements, what they called populism, was to say that these are stupid, ignorant people. If they merit any sympathy, it’s that they’re being misled by demagogues. But there can be no real merit, no logic, no justice to their claims. And so that itself was a failure of intelligence. I think populism is a term liberals apply to the political blowback of their policies that they fail to comprehend. It was caused by them…

But I think apart from anything else, apart from the morally, profoundly repellent and even abhorrent attitude these technocrats, these liberals, these progressives, technocratic and otherwise, had for their fellow citizens — apart from that — it’s a failure of understanding. Where did it come from? The devil? Where did this strange sort of diabolical combination of demagoguery and mass stupidity suddenly emerge from? It’s a tremendous failure of intelligence and it’s being repeated.

The technocrats now believe they’ve got a second chance and they’re back in the seats of power. They haven’t got the conceptual equipment to understand that forces other than those that fit into their largely economic view of the world — and of human beings themselves and of human action, it’s an economic view of human action — isn’t realistic and doesn’t really work and they can’t acquire the skills without taking too much out of their worldview.

Why Rishi will fail

Anyone who thinks Rishi Sunak is going to be able to stabilise the boat of the British economy to the point at which growth can resume in a few years — they’ve only got two years more in office — is completely delusional. Because the recessionary forces — put aside even war — in the world economy are very, very strong. And the combination of tightening monetary policies with tightening fiscal policies, with higher taxes, lower spending, and cutting back on quantitative easing, can only exacerbate all kinds of painful trends for the general population. So it’s not going to be politically stable. I’m not convinced that the internal cannibalism of the Conservative Party will permit Rishi to even last to January 2025. There could be another cycle of regicide and folly. But then Labour come in, and then what do they do? Because they are actually also committed to Osborne’s vision.

Why Labour will fail 

They’ve joined the critique that the Tories were being fiscally irresponsible, and that the responsible thing is to obey the markets… But where’s the money going to come from? If they do shut down remaining forms of energy production, which they regard as damaging, where are the workers going to go? What will happen to Labour when it stops working, when the mixture of Osbornism and green utopianism breaks down, is that the party will internally fracture. I don’t necessarily mean a revival of the Corbynites but there are lots of people within Labour who are prepared to accept the bland neo-technocratic ideology of Starmerism because they think it’s a winning one. And it is a winning one, if only because the Conservatives have made such a mess of things.

Why the far-Right might rise

Mosley didn’t get very far in the Thirties. There wasn’t a single fascist MP in the Commons. We’ve remained, actually, relatively untouched by that. But one of the reasons we’ve remained, not untouched, but where we’ve been able to fend off those dangerously anti-liberal movements, is that the Conservative Party actually was able to moderate them and incorporate them within a broader political project that included social democracy, that included a paternalistic High Toryism, which included various strands. If the Conservative Party is going to melt down, which I think it’s in the process of doing now, then there are obviously risks, even in Britain, of something like that. I don’t know if people really, 10 or 15 years ago, thought that in Sweden there would be a government which depended for its support on having more or less a de facto coalition with the far-Right. But that’s the case now, is it not?

Why we need Proportional Representation 

The best outcome would be a change in the electoral system. I’ve not always accepted first-past-the-post. I used to support, 20 or 30 years ago, changes like the Alternative Vote. I think the only way that we’re going to get fresh thinking and a way through the intractable conjunctions that we face — the failure of the Global Britain Brexit, and the almost non-attempt at the more protective and state-centred Brexit that people really wanted — is by breaking up the existing party system and having a wider variety of parties and ideas.

As you may have noticed, the above is a slightly modified excerpt from the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Then, as now, the political establishment was faced with an external threat; and then, as now, they didn’t entirely succeed in exorcising it. Populism continues to haunt European politics. Populist governments in Hungary and Poland retain their grip. And far from fading away, populist movements elsewhere are still making breakthroughs. Only this week, Spain’s Vox party made it into Catalan parliament for the first time.

And yet, earlier fears of a wholesale populist takeover were wildly exaggerated. 2016 — the year of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump — was not the end of days after all. Instead, the political establishment has adapted.

In Greece, the power of the European Central Bank proved more than equal to that of the Syriza government. In France, a centrist movement — En Marche — emerged out of nowhere to see off the hard Left and the hard Right. In Ireland, Sinn Féin has surged in popularity — only for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to put aside their historic differences and form their first coalition. In America, the country’s democratic institutions weathered an attempt by a bad loser President to overturn an election result. And in Italy, the populist government elected in 2018 has been replaced by a technical government headed by Mario Draghi, the ultimate establishment fixer.

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The establishment has not killed off populism, but it is learning to live with it. There’s a parallel here with the situation in post-war western Europe, when the main challenge wasn’t populism, but homegrown communism. We forget it now, but there were times in the 1940s and 50s when the French Communist Party was the biggest party in the National Assembly. The Italian Communist Party was another major force — peaking in 1976 with more than a third of the vote.

Despite the scale of the challenge, the communists of free Europe were tolerated — though also deliberately excluded from power, in some parts of Italy with the help of the Mafia. Today’s establishment will hope to do the same in regard to the populists; and, so far, they’re succeeding.

But what if the real enemy isn’t who they think it is?

External threats are visible: the barbarian at the gate, the invading army, the rampaging mob. Only last month, in Washington DC, there was a very literal example of what can happen when the gates aren’t adequately guarded. But not every enemy is to be found outside the city walls — indeed sometimes the threat is from within.

I’m not talking about a fifth column, but rather when a ruling establishment is captured by one of its own — and subsequently remade in the new leader’s image.

The classic example is that of Julius Caesar and the fall of the Roman Republic. Here we see the quintessential features of the internal authoritarian takeover. Firstly, Caesar was a man of action — conqueror of Gaul, invader of Britannia. Secondly, he was already in a senior position of leadership — as part of the first Triumvirate (along with Pompey and Crassus). Thirdly, he posed as the champion of the people — even though the system he would establish was even less democratic than the one it replaced. Fourthly, the new system masqueraded as a continuation of the old. The Roman Republic was not formally overthrown; there was no return to the Roman monarchy and Julius’s successors did not style themselves “emperor” , but rather as princeps — “first among equals”. And finally, once securely established in power, Julius’s heir — Augustus — posed, hypocritically, as a conservative: a champion of stability and of old-fashioned Roman virtue, while ending the republic.

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Joseph Stalin’s takeover of the Soviet Union followed a similar pattern. He was one of the leading revolutionaries — and one among a number of senior figures vying for influence after Lenin’s death. Stalin won that power struggle — not least by presenting himself as a true man of the people against the Bolshevik intellectuals. Once his rivals had been crushed, he maintained and secured the outward forms of the USSR, while remaking it from within.

Given the horrors he unleashed, I hesitate to call him any sort of conservative, but there’s no denying that his totalitarian system was overtly patriotic in character. It was also, in some respects, socially conservative — earlier revolutionary attempts to redefine fundamentals like the family were dispensed with. To bolster morale in the Second World War, Stalin even co-opted what remained of the Orthodox Church. At the same time, just as Augustus expanded the borders of Rome, so in Stalin’s Russia industrialisation took place on a massive scale and Moscow’s rule was extended far beyond the borders of the old Russian empire.

A third example of the Caesarist phenomenon — and the one most relevant to Europe today — is the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Again, we see a man of action, a supremely gifted and successful military commander. Again, we see that the regime he loyally served was unstable — power shifting back and forth between different factions and individuals. Again, we see a man of the people acting in the name of the people to restore order — and in the process grabbing all the power for himself. Again, there’s no return to the ancien regime, but rather the establishment of a quasi-monarchy with himself as monarch. And again, there’s a weird, but effective, mixture of conservatism and ruthless modernism. While Napoleon had no time for the Jacobin excesses of the early revolution, he also saw it as his mission to cleanse Europe of feudalism and other unenlightened remnants of the past.

The reason Napoleon seems particularly relevant today is because of the parallels between Revolutionary France in the late 18th century and the European Union in the early 21st. Note that I say parallels and not convergences. Obviously, we don’t have guillotines slicing up and down in public squares. Those who fall foul of today’s progressive orthodoxies may find themselves consigned to a “basket of deplorables”, but not to a basket of severed heads.

However, if you take away the violence and focus instead on the underlying power structures — the parallels between Napoleon’s time and our own become apparent. To begin with, the European project is revolutionary in nature — it seeks to replace a long-established system of government (the nation-state) with a jarringly different system (a federal superstate). “Ever closer Union” is not just a slogan, it is a political programme of world-changing significance.

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Europe shows its true colours

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Admittedly, as revolutions go this is a slow one. But, from time-to-time, it takes another lurch forward. The creation of the single currency is the most important development so far. Other lurches include the last year’s decision to empower the European Commission to borrow hundreds of billions of euros, and the transformation of the Frontex agency into a quasi-military border force.

A further example is the vaccine procurement strategy. That this has gone so badly wrong doesn’t just expose the administrative weaknesses of the EU, but also its democratic deficit. Ursula von der Leyen and has not been held democratically accountable for the very good reason that she doesn’t have a democratic mandate. She doesn’t even have regular, EU-wide approval ratings to worry about — after all, what would be the point?

In any case, we shouldn’t forget that she’s not the head of government (to the extent that that EU even has a government). Infamously, the EU doesn’t have one President, but five (of the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of the European Union and the European Central Bank). Even without the complications of incomplete integration, authority within the EU is divided — and thus any hope of clear accountability frustrated.

Coincidentally, the governing body that Napoleon usurped in 1799 — the Directory — also had five members. Only weakly accountable to the elected legislature and divided among themselves, the Directors were in a poor position to cope with the foreign and domestic threats to the revolutionary state. It became clear that authority would have to be placed in the hands of an effective leader or the revolution would collapse — with the restoration of monarchy as the most likely outcome.

Currently, the EU has more room for manoeuvre. Its member-states still retain sovereign control over most policy areas. But the further Europe goes down the path of integration, the harder it will be to retreat to national competences. Crisis situations will have to be dealt with at a federal level — the actions of decision-makers facilitated by untested institutions.

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The EU’s future will not be an easy one. The vaccine fiasco is still far from sorted, and there’s the post-Covid economic recovery to navigate — and the impact of “long lockdown” restrictions on international travel. Populism has not been defeated and will feed on the economic hardships that lie ahead of us. A renewed migration crisis cannot be ruled out — only this time inflamed by fears of coronavirus variants from outside the EU. On immigration and other issues, the challenge from the Hungarian and Polish governments has not been resolved — and indeed could multiply if the hard-Right advances in western European countries like Italy or France.

And, underlying everything, there’s the fact that the engine of EU integration — the single currency — is also a ticking time bomb. We’ve already seen that the EU will do “whatever it takes” to stop the eurozone from collapsing. It is a reminder that, beyond a certain point, integration passes a point of no return.

Okay, but can we really imagine a Brussels Bonaparte taking control of the EU’s evolving federal structures? It needn’t be anything so dramatic as a military coup — and, assuming the continuing absence of a European Army, it couldn’t be. But a consolidation of power within a democratically dubious system of crisis government? That certainly can be envisaged. Indeed, it’s happening in Italy right now.

So a technocrat, then, not a soldier — but a technocrat with broad popular appeal built on a record of “getting things done”.

Would the EU establishment tolerate such a figure — and indeed facilitate the centralisation of authority around a single, undisputed leader? It all depends on the alternative. If the other choices are a chaotic meltdown of the entire system starting with the single currency — or a hostile takeover by a Viktor Orbán-style populist, then a Brussels Bonaparte would be the least worst option.

And that’s the trouble with constructing a novel and weakly democratic system of government. Sooner or later, the question of “whatever it takes” boils down to “whoever it takes”.

Was it, as left-leaning commentators and supporters of the former PM argue, because Giuseppe Conte’s government’s timid social-interventionist measures incurred the wrath of the country’s business and financial elites? Or was it just a power play by Matteo Renzi gone terribly wrong?

I actually think it most likely that Conte was not considered by those elites to be strong enough to manage the “great reset” of Italy’s economy, an endeavour that can only be pulled off by a “technical” — or technocrat-led — government. But more interesting than the speculation about how he got here is what the prospect of a Draghi government tells us about the nature of Italian (post-)democracy, and the perverse effects that the euro has had on the country’s economic, social and political fabric.

Draghi’s descent into politics has been accompanied by feverish cries of jubilation by the mass media — on a level that would have probably embarrassed North Korean state media. And virtually all parties in Parliament— including Salvini’s Northern League, which seem to have jettisoned what little was left of its “eurosceptic” posturing — have expressed support. The tone of the discussion was captured well by the powerful governor of the Campania region, Vincenzo De Luca (PD), who compared Draghi to “Christ” himself.

Nearly everyone seems to agree: a Draghi government would be a blessing for the country, a final opportunity to redeem its sins and “make Italy great again”.

Such prophecies aren’t based on an analysis of what Draghi’s policies may actually be — and whether they would be in the interest of the country and its citizens, workers and businesses — but on vague references to the man’s “charisma”, “competence”, “intelligence” and “international clout”. This is a reflection of a sick political culture, whereby statecraft is reduced to a purely technical affair, in which notions such as power, class, ideology are erased from the equation. Instead, they are seen as inconvenient hindrances to the “efficient” management of government, which only requires the “expertise” of well-studied (and politically neutral almost by definition) “technicians” or technocrats.

This concept is well summed up by the notion of “technical government”, which most non-Italians readers are likely to be baffled by. Indeed, the concept doesn’t exist in nearly any other Western country. The basic idea is that in moments of deep crisis only “experts” supposedly untainted by political partisanship and unburdened by the complications of parliamentary politics can be trusted with making the “right” and “necessary” decisions.

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It’s a concept that, alas, has a long-running history in Italy. It harks back to the fraught relationship the country’s economic elites have always had with mass social democracy, and how they sought to resolve this tension by resorting to self-imposed “external constraints” of various nature. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Italy’s ruling elites were faced with an increasingly militant and “ungovernable” working class and a state-centric, redistributive political economy (grounded in the country’s socialist-leaning Constitution) that was deeply incompatible with the emerging neoliberal paradigm.

They thus began to theorise that only by “tying the hands” of government via a political-economic straitjacket — an external constraint or vincolo esterno — could they hope to achieve a dual objective. Their aim was to essentially “break the back” of the working classes while spearheading those “reforms” for which there was very little popular consensus. And that vincolo esterno was, of course, the process of European integration, beginning with the system of semi-fixed exchange rates known as European Monetary System (EMS), in 1979, all the way up to Maastricht and then the euro (EMU).

One of the main advocates of the vincolo esterno was Guido Carli, Italy’s highly influential economic minister from 1989 to 1992, not to mention one of the mentors of Mario Draghi. In his memoirs Carli made no secret of the fact that “the European Union represented an alternative path for the solution of problems which we were not managing to handle through the normal channels of government and parliament”. Namely, the wholesale transformation, or neoliberalisation, of the country’s political economy. This can be said to embody what Edgar Grande calls the “paradox of weakness”, whereby national elites transfer some power to a supranational policymaker (thereby appearing weaker) in order to allow themselves to better withstand pressure from societal actors by testifying that “this is Europe’s will” (thereby becoming stronger).

The concept of “technical government” is largely a by-product of the vincolo esterno. On the one hand, the apparently inexorable logic of the external constraint — be it the maintenance of a fixed exchange rate or the need to appease “markets” or “the EU” in order to avoid retaliation — creates a semi-permanent “state of exception”. This means that at any moment the complex dynamics of parliamentary politics may need to give way to “non-political” (i.e., “technical”) governments tasked with “getting the job done”.

Such a move implies that the policies they carry out are not a political choice but something entirely rational and necessary, which Parliament should limit itself to rubber stamping without asking too many questions. On the other hand, the socio-economic effects of the external constraint — particularly disastrous in Italy’s case — create growing tensions between the demands of citizens and the requirements of the external constraint (plus the inter/supranational institutions overseeing it). National parties are unable to resolve these because they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to maintain societal consensus. Which then leads them to turn to technocrats to resolve the impasse, by having them implement the measures the parties don’t want to take responsibility for.

It’s no coincidence that the era of the technical governments begins in the early 1990s, following Italy’s signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which was negotiated by none other than — you guessed it — Mario Draghi, at the time director general of the Italian Treasury. The first technocrat-led government, led by former governor of Italy’s central bank, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was formed in 1993 and inaugurated the first round of mass privatisation of state assets. Just a few years later, it was the turn of Lamberto Dini, prime minister between 1995 and 1996.

Throughout this entire period, Draghi, in his capacity as director general of the Treasury, was one of the main proponents of the privatisation of Italy’s state-owned companies, and of the vincolo esterno in general. The fall of Berlusconi’s last cabinet, in 2011, saw the ushering in of another technocrat, Mario Monti, former European commissioner and an international advisor to Goldman, who proceeded to administer a devastating austerity “cure” recommended by Brussels. This was largely a consequence of the decision by the newly-appointed president of the ECB – yes, Mario Draghi again – to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which caused Italian interest rates to skyrocket.

In short, either in his capacity as director general of the Treasury or president of the ECB, Draghi oversaw mass privatisation, severe public spending cuts and tax hikes that all had a deleterious impact on Italy.

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Why the EU lost the vaccine war

By Bruno Maeces

The experience of the Monti government is a perfect case in point: the healthcare cuts administered by Monti, as well as other administrations, and demanded by the European Commission, left the Conte administration dramatically ill-prepared to fight the Covid-19 outbreak. The architecture of the euro continued to impede an efficient response, despite extensive central bank support and the temporary suspension of the EU’s budget rules. This led to mounting economic and social costs, and ended up placing a growing strain on the government — an impasse that we are now told can only be solved by yet another deus ex machina technocrat.

This is madness. There is little doubt that Italy’s crisis must be regarded as a crisis of the post-Maastricht order of Italian capitalism, and more in general of the logic of the external constraint based upon privatisation, fiscal austerity and wage compression. This hasn’t just entailed the permanent stagnation of Italy’s economy but has also had the effect of disarticulating the normal functioning of democracy. If that is the case, then it is folly to think that Mario Draghi — literally the bodily incarnation of the political-economic model that has ruined Italy — can represent a solution.

Draghi didn’t just directly oversee the dismantling of Italy’s public industry and application of severe austerity in the early 1990s during his position at the Italian Treasury. He also fine-tuned the external constraint itself by spearheading the transformation of the euro system. It changed from a dysfunctional but formally democratic monetary union into an inter/supranational governance structure where governments are punished through a complex array of institutional mechanisms.

A system in which the formal democratic process itself is systematically subverted through financial and monetary blackmail — first and foremost at the hands of the ECB — to the point that one may reasonably question whether euro area member states can still be considered democracies. Even according to the narrow “bourgeois” understanding of the concept, one would certainly be hard-pressed to still consider Italy as such. Especially now that Mario Draghi has been called in to finish the job he began 30 years ago.

Hayek worried that the government’s stranglehold over the economy would continue after the war, not just in the United States but throughout the Western world. To some extent, his fears were justified. But not to a very large extent. Few of us in the Western world are serfs to our governments. French farmers maybe. But then, France is where feudalism all began.

Most Western democracies have gone down a different road to serfdom, a road that led not to central planning, but toward the increasing role of experts in public policy. In the twentieth century, domain after domain of public life has slipped out of the realm of democratic governance and into the realm of expert oversight. Democracies are increasingly governed, not by the people, nor by their representatives, but by experts.

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How the 'experts' are damaging democracy

By Graeme Archer

The road toward expert government has been a long time in the making. From the very birth of modern representative democracy, experts have been looking for ways to keep power away from the people. America’s favourite rap founding father, Alexander Hamilton, argued vehemently in Federalist No.68 that the President should be chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities” of the candidates, so that “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” No prizes for guessing what he would have thought of Donald Trump.

As US states quickly moved toward universal (white) male suffrage, the experts increasingly took refuge in the courts. In 1803, the United States Supreme Court unanimously asserted the power of judicial review – the principle that the courts have the final say on all actions of government. The last president to seriously challenge this was Andrew Jackson. The courts have been the experts’ favourite branch of government ever since.

The courts were just the beginning. First in 1791-1811, and then in 1816-1836, America’s expert class created an independent central bank to take the management of government finances out of the hands of the country’s elected representatives. Though the cantankerous Andrew Jackson thwarted them again, and the US didn’t get a permanent, independent central bank until the foundation of the Federal Reserve System in 1914.

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Our political class is afraid to govern

By Paul Embery

Lest American readers roll their eyes at the very idea of a supreme court or central bank being subject to the political oversight of a country’s elected representatives, the Bank of England only got its political independence in 1998, and the UK didn’t get an independent Supreme Court until 2009.

In practice, the experts started assuming control in the UK much earlier, but as recently as the Black Wednesday attack on the Pound in 1992, it was the elected government, not the Bank of England, making interest rate and currency exchange policy.

The latest takeover target of the expert class is education. The United States, long the bastion of locally-elected school boards, is rapidly moving toward a national Common Core curriculum. England has had a centralised national curriculum since 1998; the other nations of the United Kingdom have since followed suit. Australia started implementing its national curriculum in 2014. The days when parents decided what their kids would learn in public schools are disappearing into folk memory.

The expert class has now taken over so many areas of public policy that we have forgotten that, at least in the Anglo-Saxon democracies, most of the policies that affect our lives used to be decided at the ballot box. The expert class have even taught us to like our collective democratic amnesia. They call it “good governance” or “professionalisation” or (if they really want to obscure things): “depoliticisation”.

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When eggheads are bigger idiots than meatheads

By Peter Franklin

In a healthy democracy, depoliticisation is a dangerous cancer. It literally means to take decisions out of the realm of politics – i.e., out of the realm of democracy. To be sure, depoliticisation may often produce better public policy. But it does so by opting for less democracy. The modern European welfare state was invented by the German “iron chancellor” Otto von Bismarck; great policy, terrible democracy.

The American newspaperman H.L. Mencken famously defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Mencken was no more a democrat than Bismarck or Hamilton, but he did get to the heart of the matter. Everyone wants to have a democracy where the people make good decisions. The going only gets tough when the people make bad decisions. That’s the litmus test of democracy.

Bestselling books with titles like How Democracies Die, The People vs. Democracy, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy, and (most alarming of all) Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America would have us believe that the rule of the people – call it ‘majoritarian’ democracy, or ‘populism’ – is the biggest threat facing democracy today. They are confusing threats to democracy with threats to the continued dominance of the expert class. They are confusing threats to democracy with threats to themselves.

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How Parliament disdains the people

By Giles Fraser

The United States just experienced the highest voter turnout ever recorded in a midterm election – American democracy is in rude health, thank you. Meanwhile British commentators, consumed with Brexit fever, seem not to have noticed that in 2017, the combined vote of the two major political parties shot up to a level not seen since Britain joined the European Economic Community (precursor to the European Union). Allowing the people a say on Brexit cleared the detritus of five decades of discontent with the creeping Brusselisation of government and restored meaning to domestic party politics.

People these days may have had quite enough of experts, to paraphrase the British MP Michael Gove, but the experts are still in power all the same. We are still traveling that particular road to serfdom, and even if we have hit a few speed bumps, we have certainly not thrown the engine into reverse.

Our democracies are still in good repair, a little better now than three years ago, but the road ahead leads in the wrong direction nonetheless. In an era when politicians of all stripes feel compelled to run on a platform of ‘change’, we can only hope that some of them will get the message before it’s too late.

An array of functions that were once the recognised duty of elected representatives have been progressively handed over to people from business and technocrats with no democratic mandate. Is it because our politicians are so bedevilled by a lack of confidence in their own abilities? Perhaps.

But it is also undoubtedly a consequence of the theory, embedded deeply in the psyche of the political class over the last 40 years, that governments shouldn’t meddle because ultimately the market and experts know best.

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Politicians are in hock to big business – and consumers are paying the price

By James Kirkup

Take the running of the economy – arguably the most crucial function any government can perform and one pivotal to the prosperity of a nation and the wellbeing of its citizens. Conventional wisdom has it that the decision by the New Labour government to grant ‘independence’ to the Bank of England in 1997 was a wise and far-sighted one. Few now question the merits of relinquishing control of the money supply – a cornerstone of the management of any economy – to unelected technocrats.

Yet, given the value of monetary policy in the armoury of any government – for example, by giving it the power to influence levels of investment and stimulate demand through the control of interest rates and quantitative easing – it beggars belief that a Labour government should wish to give it away. And it was given away to career bankers who, far from being ‘independent’, have been inclined to direct policy according to the interests of fellow bankers and asset holders, rather than those whose lives are rooted in the real economy.

In his autobiography, Tony Blair admits that, when it comes to the economy, he sees the role of government as nothing greater than “to stabilise and then get out of the way”. It is a striking departure from the attitude of previous Labour governments who understood only too well the need to use every available economic lever at their disposal to create jobs, build homes and fund public services.

That Corbyn’s Labour – which rails unremittingly against austerity and the rapacious power of finance – has not committed to restoring democratic control over the Bank of England is an indication of how deeply the ‘hands off’ philosophy has infected political thought.

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How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

As with economic policy, so it has been for the public sector, with politicians of all colours eager to divest themselves of responsibility and control. The ideological drive to roll back the frontiers of the state pervades the public sphere at all levels, with few local institutions or services having escaped the onward march of outsourcing. Even modest, yet crucial, jobs that keeps our communities ticking over – the bus driver, the hospital porter, the town hall cleaner, the dinner lady – have often been contracted out.

There was a time when a shared civic pride existed between the communities running these services and the workers who delivered them. But with a diminished public ethos has come a diminished sense of public duty. These community-facing jobs are now seen as purely transactional, a commodified source of profit for an impersonal market. Little wonder that this new, abstract relationship between communities and their public servants has served to intensify the sense of loss and deracination felt in so many of our towns and cities.

The consequence of government disengagement from public provision is most apparent in the area of housing. We don’t build council homes anymore, and the government has no serious plan for addressing the chronic housing shortage. The result has been catastrophic. Try telling a young couple attempting to get on today’s property ladder, but faced with crippling costs due to inadequate supply, that the ‘market knows best’.

And perhaps the most indefensible shirking of responsibility by politicians has been in handing over so much of our justice system, including the running of prisons, to private companies. The punishment of crime, and such matters of moral right and wrong, ought surely to be the responsibility of the State alone, not of commercial entities seeking to extract a profit. Politicians who agreed to put the delivery of justice into the hands of multinational companies should hang their heads in shame.

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The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

This ‘hands off’ approach sits neatly with the attitude of most parliamentarians to the European Union over the last 40 years. Our relationship with that institution has been one of increasing surrender of powers from Westminster to Brussels. We can see the result of that now: our MPs are petrified of control coming back. They are rabbits caught in the headlights. A parliament atrophied by decades of having its legislation dictated by someone else has given its members a mindset similar to that of the average parish councillor. No wonder MPs are reluctant to assume responsibility over laws governing every area of public life.

The ceding of control over large parts of the economy and public services to business and technocrats has profound implications for democracy. It weakens accountability and reduces the status and power of politicians. As the functions of government, national and local, have been outsourced, so has responsibility – and ultimately the blame when things go wrong.

This isn’t a crude argument about privatisation versus public ownership. Any economy, if it is to be successful, needs a flourishing private sector, and God knows politicians have often done more harm than good when it comes to establishing the conditions for one. No, this is a debate about the nature of our society and the health of our democracy, about the proper role of our elected representatives and how much we value a sense of national and civic pride.

In 2008, we saw where a ‘light touch’ government philosophy and misplaced faith in the ‘expertise’ of bankers and technocrats led us. Now, the frontiers of the state must be rolled forward just a bit, and the role of government and elected representatives as a force for good reasserted. But to achieve that, we need a new class of politician who actually believes it.