The term “Establishment” describes the network of official and social relations within which power is exercised. Owen Jones asks if something that reflects huge social inequalities can continue.
I have unapologetic reasons for writing a book about Britain’s Establishment. We are now approaching the sixth anniversary of the financial crisis, and yet it is the powerless – rather than the powerful – who have suffered the consequences. Our media relentlessly scrutinises the behaviour of the bottom of society: unemployed people, benefit claimants, immigrants. The imbalance, in my view, needs be addressed, by shifting the focus onto those with power. After all, we have Benefits Street, but we don’t have Tax Dodgers Street or Bankers Street.
The term “Establishment” was not actually popularised by lefties. Back in 1955, post-war austerity had drawn to an end. This was a time of Teddy Boys and rock’n’roll. But there was a murkier side to the country, and it rattled an ambitious young Tory journalist called Henry Fairlie.
We have Benefits street, but we don’t have Tax Dodgers Street or Bankers Street.
After Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union, Fairlie believed that their friends had intervened to protect their families from media scrutiny. Something called “the Establishment” was at work, wrote Fairlie: “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.” This power, he wrote, was “exercised socially”.
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Like today, an Old Etonian was in number 10, but this was a very different time: of social democracy, state intervention, high taxes on the rich. There were dissidents – those who would later become known as the “neo-liberals” – but they were marginalised. They organised themselves into think tanks promoting free market economics, mixed with politicians and journalists, and laid the intellectual foundations of their ideology. When Britain was hit by economic disaster in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher assumed the premiership, their pamphlets became reality. A new Establishment was born.
So what is this Establishment? I see it as the institutions and ideas that protect the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite. It is a means to protect such groups from democracy. After all, when it was first proposed that working class people should have the vote, Britain’s elite circles were alarmed. Conservative statesman Lord Salisbury had warned that giving the masses the vote would tempt them to take property away from those at the top. But today’s Establishment is a means of managing democracy to make sure that does not happen.
The Establishment is bound together by a common mentality which holds that they deserve their power because – to borrow L’Oreal’s slogan – they believe “they’re worth it”. That’s what’s driven politicians to pilfer expenses, businesses to avoid around £25bn in tax a year, and City bankers to demand ever great bonuses, even after they plunged the world into disaster.
The Establishment is bound together by a common mentality which holds that they deserve their power because ‘they’re worth it’.
It is bound together by a revolving door, too. Big accountancy firms help to draw up tax laws, then tell their wealthy clients how to avoid the laws they have written up themselves. Journalists end up working for politicians they supposedly scrutinise. Politicians end up on corporate boards – and not just when they leave office. 46 per cent of the top 50 publicly traded firms have at least one MP as a director or shareholder.
The Establishment protects an order in which the top 1,000 wealthiest people double their wealth in five years, while 1 million people depend on food banks. It claims to reject the state, but while the banks are given over £1tr of public money with few conditions, unemployed people increasingly have their benefits taken away.
But my argument is that this Establishment is neither just nor sustainable. Yes, the media marginalise opponents of the Establishment as fringe elements or dinosaurs. But despite their triumphalism, an Establishment that presides over such an unjust distribution of wealth and power can surely not last. Our ancestors – from the Chartists to the Suffragettes – confronted those with power. It is a tradition the Establishment should fear.
Owen Jones’s book, The Establishment: and how they get away with it, is published by Allen Lane