In September 1955 The Spectator’s political commentator, Henry Fairlie, coined a term to describe the way in which Britain works which has been used ever since. The ‘Establishment’, he said, was the real mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. The elites of the business, political and media worlds wielded power via a ‘matrix of official and social relations’, which varied from the banks to the director-general of the BBC to ‘divinities’ such as Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury). The social and economic upheavals of the following decades only caused this Establishment to regenerate. But it has never faced an existential threat — until now.
The Establishment is in chaos. Financiers are still being routed, as the recent Barclays upheaval shows. Politicians are being found guilty of breaking laws: Chris Huhne’s predicament is remarkable only because of his fairly recent status as a Cabinet member. The sight of politicians being put behind bars is no longer unusual in Britain: six have been sent to prison in the last three years.
Journalists may not be far behind. There have, so far, been 100 arrests in the hacking scandal, which has turned into the biggest criminal investigation in modern British history. Police are arresting police; a 50-year-old officer was grabbed in a dawn raid this week. Newspapers face state regulation now not because they are powerful, but because they have grown too weak to defend themselves and their right to free speech. The BBC’s recent Newsnight disgrace was due in large part to subcontracting investigations to cowboy operations.
Regulation is far from the greatest threat to newspapers: they are haemorrhaging readers and power. On current trends, the last paper copy of the Independent will be bought in April 2013, and of the Financial Times in 2018; the Daily Express will vanish in 2019, and the Guardian early in 2020. The Independent on Sunday has, in effect, gone: this week, it was announced that it is being wrapped into the Independent’s seven-day operation (see Stephen Glover on page 16).
The digital revolution is behind much of this, certainly the flattening of the old business hierarchies. Music, news, books and Danish dramas can now be beamed into computers and telephones, giving infinite choice. The old gatekeepers — HMV, Waterstone’s and the BBC — find their range is deemed too narrow. The BBC has lost its control of what people watch, just as the newspapers have lost their influence over the news people read, and Marks & Spencer over how people dress. The winners of this ongoing revolution are those retailers who give consumers the power to choose.
Normally, a new elite supplants the old. But that isn’t happening now: look at Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He is feted at Davos but wields little power: his online encyclopedia is written and edited by millions of different users. The idea for his online encyclopaedia service came to him when reading Hayek’s essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, an attack on the idea of an Establishment and central planning. Hayek argues that the population at large will always have vastly more total knowledge than any member of an elite. But this knowledge is scattered in fragments among millions. The more freedom people have to co-operate and exchange — and, by extension, the less they are hampered by bureaucrats — the stronger and fairer society will be.
There was a time when the Labour party grasped such ideas. Tony Blair’s ‘choice’ agenda was, in effect, a manifesto for passing power from the Establishment to the public. Parents should choose schools, went the argument, not vice versa. The likes of Alan Milburn and John Reid argued, correctly, that the lesson of the 1980s was that top-down control did not work. They quoted Bevan: ‘the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away’. Their reforms — City Academies, part-privatisation of the NHS — can now be seen as a brief, freakish intellectual flowering in the Labour party. A blip which was ended by Gordon Brown.
Under Ed Miliband, Labour has disowned the Blair reforms and rejects anything that weakens the power of the public sector elite for whom it now speaks. This is understandable, given that the unions are the reason Miliband is leader and provide a staggering 82 per cent of his party’s funding. Miliband is now soaring above the Tories in the polls. But sooner or later he must lay out his own agenda — and the ways in which he proposes a restoration of union power and the public sector elite. To be against the market is to favour its alternative: a ruling class.
This explains Miliband’s deafening silence on policy. He will end school choice by abolishing the free schools programme and putting bureaucrats back in charge. The power of the discredited NHS elite would be restored, as patients would find it harder to seek alternative treatment in independent clinics. Miliband is mulling over whether a new bunch of cronies should regulate the press. His ‘predistribution’ plan, which is supposed to encourage markets towards fairer distribution, will only create a new matrix of social, business and official relations.
He will be saying ‘Trust me’ at a time when voters mistrust everyone. It is an odd thought, but the Conservatives are now the natural party of reform. And at the worst possible time, Labour is becoming the party of the Establishment.
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