Michael Gove on Experts

I believe this website should be fair to everybody – even Michael Gove. And to be fair to Michael Gove, what he actually said was, "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong."

So it's not all experts that we Britons have had enough of – it's just those who say they know best (you may well ask who does know best, if not an expert) but consistently get things wrong – especially if they work for organisations with acronyms.

Gove But Gove was interrupted by his interviewer, Faisal Islam, so the full context of his remark was not immediately obvious.

Maybe he did have a point; but to describe institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD) in those terms smacks of the sort of arrogance with which I associate Tory politicians in general, and Michael Gove in particular.

Gove was being interviewed on Sky News, in the run–up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, as one of the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign. He was unable to name a single independent economic body that had backed a vote to take Britain out of the EU. Both the IMF and the OECD had said that Britain would be better off staying in, and Islam had put it to Gove that there was no expert opinion to support his view that Britain would be "freer, fairer and better off" outside the Union. The MP for Surrey Heath (who read English at Oxford) declared himself "glad" that "some of the independent economic authorities who've already weighed into the debate" did not support his view, because "they've been wrong in the past."

Like I said: arrogance.