The Establishment is dead

The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it

Peter Oborne

12 September 2007

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It has been replaced by a narrow, self-serving governing elite

The British Establishment was founded on the Christian religion. Religion provided the overriding justification and legitimacy for the social and moral order of the British state. As a result, members of the Establishment understood and surprisingly often sought to live up to the Christian values of humility, duty, forbearance, truthfulness and service. The Church plays no meaningful role in the formation of Political Class beliefs.

Although a number of individual members of the Political Class believe in God, or claim to do so, they are careful to place a barrier between their faith and their political convictions. However muddled and self-serving it may often seem, the philosophy of the Political Class is always based on a basic assumption about the supremacy of human reason and will. The Establishment, in sharp contrast, subscribed to a system of thought which stressed the fallibility of human beings, and emphasised that there were limits beyond which the human intellect finds it unable to stretch.

The Establishment existed through institutions. Judges, ambassadors, civil service mandarins, bishops, generals, the Queen, the secretary of the MCC were all by definition Establishment figures. So were trade unionists, referred to by Winston Churchill in 1947 as ‘pillars of our society’. The powerful presence of these institutions deprived the British Establishment of a group identity. One of the most interesting findings of Anthony Sampson’s famous survey of how Britain was governed, The Anatomy of Britain, published in 1962, was its demonstration that the British Establishment lacked a common consciousness.

‘The rulers are not at all close-knit or united. They are not so much in the centre of a solar system, as in a cluster of interlocking circles, each one largely preoccupied with its own professionalism, and touching others only at one edge,’ wrote Sampson, adding the vital observation: ‘They are not a single Establishment but a ring of Establishments. The frictions and balances between the different circles are the supreme safeguard of democracy. No one man can stand in the centre, for there is no centre.’