The Establishment: And How They Get Away with it

324 Pages·2014·1.26 MB·English

by  Owen Jones

Owen Jones

THE ESTABLISHMENT
And How They Get Away With It
Contents
Introduction
1 The Outriders
2 The Westminster Cartel
3 Mediaocracy
4 The Boys in Blue
5 Scrounging off the State
6 Tycoons and Tax-Dodgers
7 Masters of the Universe
8 The Illusion of Sovereignty
Conclusion: A Democratic Revolution
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
To Peter and Pamela, my grandparents, to whom I owe so much,
for inspiring me and giving me strength
and
To George, with all my love
Introduction
Britain’s Establishment is stripped naked and, with no warning, shoved onto a stage.
The audience gasps: someone familiar stands before them, but now, under the
unforgiving glare of the spotlights, the character is finally exposed for who it really is.
Yet, as suddenly as the figure appears, it is covered up again and taken back to where it
belongs: offstage.
Or so it has seemed in each of the major crises that have rocked the pillars of power
in Britain over recent years. In 2008, as the greed of an unregulated City helped to
unleash an economic firestorm, the prevailing mood was summed up by a joke that
went the rounds: ‘What do you call twelve bankers at the bottom of the ocean? A start.’
In the years that followed, the powerful were beset by scandal after scandal. Although
never loved, MPs became hate figures after being caught pocketing taxpayers’ money
to pay for their parliamentary expenses: widescreen television sets, second homes, duck
houses, moats and pornographic movies. The British police, meanwhile, were
embroiled in an apparently endless series of crises, ranging from the deaths of innocent
people to the stitching up of Conservative cabinet ministers, exposing a culture of
conspiracy and cover-up. And then, with revelations of systematic phone-hacking by
the Murdoch-owned News of the World, the power of the media became a topic of
popular debate. Light began to fall on the murky connections between the political elite,
media barons and the police, not least with revelations of Murdoch-run newspapers
indulging officers with dinner parties, dodgy job appointments, secret meetings and
bribes.
With this deluge of scandal, the whole question of who really rules, and what they are
up to, has become more pressing than ever. British citizens are taught that they live in a
thriving democracy, in a nation whose affairs are freely determined by the will of the
people. ‘There is much that we in this country can be proud of,’ British Prime Minister
David Cameron told the House of Commons with no little gusto in 2012. ‘The oldest
democracy in the world; the freedom of speech; a free press; frank and healthy public
debate.’1 We certainly enjoy hard-fought rights and freedoms that, throughout this
country’s history, have been won – often with great sacrifice – at the expense of the
powerful. But our democracy is a precarious thing, constantly colliding with the vested
interests of those with power – those, in other words, who form the Establishment. And
yet, despite this being a familiar term that is often bandied around, we don’t really know
who or what ‘the Establishment’ is, or what it looks like – which suits its members
rather well.
Stare at a blank sheet of paper smeared with ink, and you might be able to detect the
outlines of an image. But somebody else looking at the same piece of paper may see
something very different. What we see reveals more about ourselves than it does about
the smear of ink. This exercise, of course, is known as the ‘Rorschach test’ – and the
same principle applies when it comes to looking at the Establishment.
‘The Establishment’ is a term that is often loosely used to mean ‘those with power
who I object to’. This book will indeed suggest there are groups of mostly unelected
and unaccountable people who really do rule the roost, not simply through their shared
wealth and power, but because of the ideas and mentalities that govern the way they
behave. But you don’t have to go far to find strongly held and wildly differing opinions
about what the ‘Establishment’ is: what it represents, who constitutes it – and who is
excluded from it.
Despite being the second most widely read newspaper in Britain and enjoying a
powerful role in shaping political debate, the right-wing Daily Mail regularly rails
against what it sees as ‘the Establishment’. For the former Mail columnist Melanie
Phillips – a journalist who during her career underwent a startling but not uncommon
metamorphosis from liberal to fiery conservative – it is the hippie youngsters of the
sixties who are now in charge. ‘But the odd thing was that these revolutionaries never
grew up,’ she proclaimed in one column. ‘As this generation of post-war baby boomers
grew older, they still clung to the infantilism of their youth. But now they have become
the country’s establishment. Across the professions – the universities, police, civil
service, judiciary – the people at the top came from that generation.’ Meanwhile Peter
Hitchens, a one-time Trotskyist revolutionary turned conservative Mail on Sunday
polemicist, believes that the Establishment is a halfway house for the morally
debauched. ‘Drug abuse, you see, isn’t just a minor fringe activity,’ he wrote. ‘It is the
secret vice of the whole British Establishment.’ Imagining the great and the good
hunched over kitchen tables, chopping up cocaine with credit cards, is a striking image,
one as arresting as it is evidence-free. But with the Establishment proving so elusive a
concept, these sorts of conspiracy theories are inevitable.
Even those who began their careers as political firebrands but who ended up in
positions of real power found themselves at loggerheads with the Establishment. John
Prescott was once a waiter in the Merchant Navy and a member of the radical left. In
1966 he helped organize a seamen’s strike, which was denounced by the then Labour
Prime Minister Harold Wilson as the work of a ‘tightly knit group of politically
motivated men’. Thirty years later, Prescott completed his journey from left to centre
when, as a key figure in Tony Blair’s New Labour project, he became the nation’s
Deputy Prime Minister; after stepping down as an MP in 2010, he became a member of
the House of Lords, an institution he had long campaigned to abolish. ‘Britain is still
ruled by the elite,’ he wrote in his Daily Mirror column in 2013. ‘Those who are born
into wealth and can afford to buy into privileged networks will continue to dominate the
establishment.’ Prescott’s implication is that anyone from a humble background – like
himself – is automatically precluded from being a member of the Establishment; that
only those who were born with the odds stacked in their favour qualify for such a label.
It is a perception that allows some members of the Establishment to convince
themselves that they’re not part of it at all.
These various definitions of the Establishment nevertheless share one thing in
common: they are always pejorative. With this in mind, you might think that few would
be willing to admit to membership of such a reviled club. But some powerful figures
have no qualms about doing so. On being greeted with a firm handshake by the
patrician Lord Butler in his central London pied-à-terre, it was difficult for me to escape
the sense that he was born to rule. When he was a student at Oxford, it was rumoured –
presumably only half-jokingly – that anyone tackling him on the rugby pitches risked
kicking their future career prospects into touch. Private Secretary to a succession of
Prime Ministers, including Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher,
Butler became the country’s most senior civil servant before stepping down under Tony
Blair. He has the intimidating, lightly worn self-assurance common to the powerful. As
his maid busied herself in the kitchen, I asked him whether he considered himself to be
part of the Establishment. He replied without blinking: ‘Yes.’ But even as he expanded
on his answer, his definition of what it meant to be in the Establishment started to blur.
‘Well, I mean, in that I’ve had a privileged background, which has introduced me to a
lot of people, I’ve been fortunate in being in the right place at the right time. So yes, I
think I am part of a group including many of whom have or have had power.’
You could boil down the prevailing views of the Establishment as follows. Right-
wingers tend to see it as the national purveyor of a rampant, morally corrupting social
liberalism; for the left, it is more likely to mean a network of public-school and
Oxbridge boys dominating the key institutions of British political life. The
‘Establishment’ remains an inkblot.
Here is what I understand the ‘Establishment’ to mean.
Today’s Establishment is made up – as it has always been – of powerful groups that
need to protect their position in a democracy in which almost the entire adult population
has the right to vote. The Establishment represents an attempt on behalf of these groups
to ‘manage’ democracy, to make sure that it does not threaten their own interests. In this
respect, it might be seen as a firewall that insulates them from the wider population. As
the well-connected right-wing blogger and columnist Paul Staines puts it approvingly:
‘We’ve had nearly a century of universal suffrage now, and what happens is capital
finds ways to protect itself from – you know – the voters.’
Back in the nineteenth century, as calls for universal suffrage gathered strength, there
were fears in privileged circles that extending the vote to the poor would pose a mortal
threat to their own position – that the lower rungs of society would use their new-found
voice to take away power and wealth from those at the top and redistribute it throughout
the electorate. ‘I have heard much on the subject of the working-classes in this House
which, I confess, has filled me with feelings of some apprehension,’ Conservative
statesman Lord Salisbury told Parliament in 1866, in response to plans to extend the
suffrage. Giving working-class people the vote would, he stated, tempt them to pass
‘laws with respect to taxation and property especially favourable to them, and therefore
dangerous to all other classes’. He elaborated on his theme: ‘In proportion as the
property is small, the danger of misusing the franchise will be great.’ In other words,
the poorer the citizen, the more dangerous it would be for him to have the vote.2 But the
ruling elites were transfixed by an even greater fear – that continuing to deny the vote
would result in social revolution – and by 1918 all men, and some women, had been
given the franchise.
But the worries of those nineteenth-century opponents of universal suffrage were not
entirely without foundation. In the decades that followed World War II, several
constraints were imposed on Britain’s powerful interests, including higher taxes and the
regulation of private business. This was, after all, the will of the recently enfranchised
masses. But today, many of those constraints have been removed or are in the process
of being dismantled – and now the Establishment is characterized by institutions and
ideas that legitimize and protect the concentration of wealth and power in very few
hands.
The interests of those who dominate British society are disparate; indeed, they often
conflict with each other. The Establishment includes politicians who make laws; media
barons who set the terms of debate; businesses and financiers who run the economy;
police forces that enforce a law which is rigged in favour of the powerful. The
Establishment is where these interests and worlds intersect with each other, either
consciously or unconsciously. It is unified by a common mentality, which holds that
those at the top deserve their power and their ever-growing fortunes, and which might
be summed up by the advertising slogan of cosmetics giant L’Oréal: ‘Because I’m
worth it’. This is the mentality that has driven politicians to pilfer expenses, businesses
to avoid tax, and City bankers to demand ever greater bonuses while plunging the world
into economic disaster. All of these things are facilitated – even encouraged – by laws
that are geared to cracking down on the smallest of misdemeanours committed by those
at the bottom of the pecking order, for example, benefit fraud. ‘One rule for us, one rule
for everybody else’ might be another way to sum up Establishment thinking.
These mentalities owe everything to the shared ideology of the modern
Establishment, a set of ideas that helps it to rationalize and justify its position and
behaviour. Often described as ‘neo-liberalism’, this ideology is based around a belief in
so-called ‘free markets’: in transferring public assets to profit-driven businesses as far
as possible; in a degree of opposition – if not hostility – to a formal role for the state in
the economy; in support for reducing the tax burden on private interests; and in the
driving back of any form of collective organization that might challenge the status quo.
This ideology is often rationalized as ‘freedom’ – particularly ‘economic freedom’ –
and wraps itself in the language of individualism. These are beliefs that the
Establishment treats as common sense, as being a fact of life, just like the weather.
Not to subscribe to these beliefs is to be outside today’s Establishment, to be
dismissed by it as an eccentric at best, or even as an extremist fringe element. Members
of the Establishment genuinely believe in this ideology – but it is a set of beliefs and
policies that, rather conveniently, guarantees them ever-growing personal riches and
power.
As well as a shared mentality, the Establishment is cemented by financial links and a
‘revolving door’ culture: that is, powerful individuals gliding between the political,
corporate and media worlds – or who manage to inhabit these various worlds at the
same time. The terms of political debate are in large part dictated by a media controlled
by a small number of exceptionally rich owners, while think tanks and political parties
are funded by wealthy individuals and corporate interests. Many politicians are on the
payroll of private businesses; along with civil servants, they end up working for
companies operating in their policy areas, allowing them to profit from their public
service – something which gives them a vested interest in an ideology that furthers
corporate interests. The business world benefits from the politicians’ and civil servants’
contacts, an understanding of government structures and experience, allowing private
firms to navigate their way to the very heart of power.
Yet there is a logical flaw at the heart of Establishment thinking. It may abhor the
state – but it is completely dependent on the state to flourish. Bailed-out banks; state-
funded infrastructure; the state’s protection of property; research and development; a
workforce educated at great public expense; the topping up of wages too low to live on;
numerous subsidies – all are examples of what could be described as a ‘socialism for
the rich’ that marks today’s Establishment.
This Establishment does not receive the scrutiny it deserves. After all, it is the job of
the media to shed light on the behaviour of those with power. But the British media is
an integral part of the British Establishment; its owners share the same underlying
assumptions and mantras. Instead, journalists and politicians alike obsessively critique
and attack the behaviour of those at the bottom of society. Unemployed people and
other benefit claimants; immigrants; public-sector workers – these are groups who have
faced critical exposure or even outright vilification. This focus on the relatively
powerless is all too convenient in deflecting anger away from those who actually wield
power in British society.
To understand what today’s Establishment is and how it has changed, we have to go
back to 1955: a Britain shaking off post-war austerity in favour of a new era of