On a different planet from the scrapping technicians are the prophets of doom. There were predictions of the end of the world as the end of the first Christian millennium approached. Alarms since then have been too numerous to list. Every tremor in the financial markets has been greeted with cries of 'another 1929' or another Great Depression. I have often been asked by broadcasting producers whether I agreed. When I have replied, 'No; but there are still problems worth discussing', the reply has usually been, 'Can you tell me of anyone who does think we are in for a Great Depression?'

During the mid-1970s, following the Heath defeat in the second miners' strike, there was much talk about the 'ungovernability of Britain'. This provided the right climate for a paper of mine written for section F of the 1974 British Association annual meeting, entitled 'The economic contradictions of democracy' (Brittan 1975). It began: 'The conjecture to be discussed is that liberal representative democracy suffers from internal tensions, which are likely to increase in time, and on present indications the system is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult.' Eventually I reproduced it as a chapter in a later book of essays, The economic consequences of democracy (Brittan 1977a, ch. 23). After the Treasury book it is probably my best-known work (although not among economists).

In truth I was agnostic about my own conjecture. In another essay (Brittan 1977b) in the book I cited Popper's views on the mistaken identification of scientific method in social studies with historical prophecy. My real aim was to exploit the prevailing mood to propagate some observations in Schumpeters Capitalism, socialism and democracy (1943), first published during the Second World War. Schumpeter saw democracy as a market in which politicians competed for votes, as businessmen competed for customers. Political and economic theorists have treated him as a precursor of their own formal models of political competition. What they overlooked were his more fundamental statements of the conditions under which democratic competition would work. These included a limit to the effective range of political decisions, a well-trained bureaucracy as a constraint (I instanced the pre-1914 Bank of England) and above all tolerance and democratic selfcontrol. I was hitting at the sacred cow of unfettered representative democracy - what Lord Hailsham was later to call 'elective dictatorship'. Majority - or still more, plurality - voting is in reality simply a convenient decision rule. Nothing, however, was heard from Hailsham on elective dictatorship after the Tories returned in 1979.

{16 The 'Jay-Brittan' Period >>>}