Does the UK have the intellectual resources to take big policy decisions? I ask because of the reaction to Mark Carney's evidence on Brexit to the TSC yesterday. Although his claim that Brexit would increase uncertainty is shared by most economists, Peter Bone (1'21" in) and - more coherently - Tony Yates say he should wind his neck in.

This, though, runs into a problem. The Bank has the biggest collection of macroeconomic experts in the country. The Brexit debate - which is of pitifully low quality anyway - could only be improved by their involvement.

This is especially worrying because there are so few other informed voices. Many academic economists are too busy wrestling with managerialism and publication targets to play a role. Many of the better think tanks have a low profile. The state of Britain's "public intellectuals" was summed up by Prospect magazine's survey revealing that Russell Brand was voted the UK's top "world thinker". And as for the media...

Worse still, the government is doing nothing to change this. If it wanted an informed debate about Brexit, it could have followed the example of Gordon Brown in the early 00s who commissioned weighty academic papers on whether the UK should join the euro*. But it hasn't. Worse still, the absurd proposal to ban academics from lobbying might already be having a silencing effect.

Now, none of this is to say that Brexit necessarily should be judged on solely technocratic grounds. Steve is right to say that technocrats have their limits:

Wonks are the help. The role of the democratic process is to adjudicate interests and values. Wonks get a vote just like everyone else, but expertise on technocratic matters ought not translate to any deference on interests and values. If your theory of democracy is that informed citizens ought to cast votes based on the best social science, you have no theory of democracy at all.

But I fear that, in this case, we have the opposite problem: an under-use of wonks, rather than an over-use. This poses the risk that, whichever way the Brexit referendum goes, voters might be unpleasantly and unnecessarily surprised by what they get.

Luckily, I suspect that this risk is small: the stakes might - ultimately - be lower than people think. But if I'm right, this owes nothing to our political culture.

Underling the Brexit debate, therefore, is what might be a more important set of issues: what role should expertise play in politics? How best can that expertise be used? These issues, though, are being ignored. Which, of course, suits charlatans and third-raters perfectly well.

* Yes, he did so for support rather than illumination - but my point holds.