The Sun ran an article by Matthew Goodwin of the Legatum Institute yesterday, in which he promoted his new book.
In that book he argues that a new elite exists in the UK. That new elite is neatly summarised, based on the article, in a tweet. The elite are now:
I am probably, by this definition, part of Goodwin's elite. I think I score 6 out of 7 (I have the wrong postcode).
I suspect many readers rate somewhere on this list.
According to Goodwin, this:
New Elite [is] a new governing class which not only holds a completely different worldview from everybody else but is now imposing that worldview on the rest of the country.
This New Elite — as I reveal in my latest book — is completely different from the old elite which used to run Britain decades ago.
Whereas that old elite had been defined by its extreme wealth, its inherited titles and its country estates, the members of Britain's new ruling class are defined by very different things.
So, wealth no longer matters.
Nor does holding the high offices of state.
Or having actual power in government.
Neither does the embedded power of capital have consequence anymore.
Come to that, patrony is dead.
And so too is the power that attending elite public schools provides.
No, being 'woke' and living in CB1 is what gives power now.
Or is this just paranoia? After all, Question Time audiences cannot now find anyone who supports the government on many policies.
And the Legatum Institiute is one of the Tufton Street think tanks, after all, with Matthew Elliott who has been nominated for a peerage by Liz Truss being one if its Fellows.
So is this all mere distraction from reality? After all, when in 2017 the Legatum Institute did a survey of British people to find what they really thought on policy issues they found this:
The majority of the British public:
-
Favour public ownership of the UK's water (83%), electricity (77%), gas (77%) and railway (76%) sectors (Fig. 3.2a, p.15)
-
Believe taxes should rise to provide more funding for the NHS (Fig. 3.3b, p.19)
-
Support higher levels of regulation (Fig. 3.3a, p.18)
-
Favour wage caps for CEOs (Fig. 3.4a, p.22)
-
Favour worker representation at senior executive and board level (Fig. 3.4a, p.22)
-
Support the abolition of zero hour contracts (Fig. 3.3a, p.18)
-
Hold an unfavourable view of ‘capitalism' as a concept, viewing it as ‘greedy', ‘selfish' and ‘corrupt' (Fig 3.1a, p. 9)
-
Hold a more favourable view of ‘socialism' than ‘capitalism' (Fig 3.1f, p. 12)
They found, in other words, that the opinions that they as in organisation held were deeply unpopular and that those of those they now castigate as the 'new elite' were those actually in tune with the views of the country as a whole.
Has anything changed since then? I very much doubt it. I think that this is yet another news story generated by a far-right think tank backed by Rupert Murdoch to create division within society when the only division that actually exists is between deeply deluded far-right think tankers and the rest of the country, which has a lot more sense than to believe them.
A quick poll:
Is there a new elite in the UK?
- Don't be silly: this is the old guard just playing silly games to hide the truth (79%, 468 Votes)
- No (12%, 68 Votes)
- Yes (5%, 32 Votes)
- I'm abstaining, but show me the results anyway (4%, 21 Votes)
Total Voters: 589
Loading ...And a second poll to ask your opinion on whether you think the British public's opinion has changed since 2017, or whether you agree with the findings of the Legatum Institute's polling in that year:
Do you agree with the findings of the Legatum Institute's polling in 2017, which suggested that the UK is a decidedly left of centre country?
- Yes (36%, 187 Votes)
- Largely (22%, 117 Votes)
- No (22%, 113 Votes)
- Only a little bit (13%, 66 Votes)
- I'm abstaining, but show me the results anyway (8%, 41 Votes)
Total Voters: 524
Loading ...Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Hmm. Elite education, live in London, enjoy wealth and returns on capital, marry each other, jobs in the same sectors (e.g. property or finance or central government), powerful, similar values (neoliberal economics, rather than socially liberal).
Yep, that describes our privately educated, Oxford PPE, financialised, policy wonk, right wing overlords.
It is just one childish upper class/upper middle class caste envying another and wanting their toys.
Quite notable how the Question Time audience is no longer willing to put up with Tory lies and lines to take.
The Financial Times assessed that “The Tories are now the most economically right-wing major party in the developed world”. https://www.ft.com/content/d5f1d564-8c08-4711-b11d-9c6c7759f2b8
Note that they write “the most”. I think there is much more we could also say.
Agreed
Its all very well for Matthew Goodwin to go on about this new ‘Elite’ but the important point he misses is that they dont have their hands on the levers of real power
You don’t fullfil pont 1 either do you?
You didn’t exactly go to an elite university did you now.
I guess it’s always worth checking your facts before commenting.
Southampton was a founding member of the Russel Group.
I am now at another one.
But you didn’t notice that, did you?
What does that make you?
Did you spell your pathetic attack on Richard deliberately badly Jim, or are you so poorly educated yourself that the idea of you criticsing anyone else for their level of education is totally laughable?
Goodwin’s ‘new elite’ is complete nonsense. It looks extraordinarily like the current ‘elite’. I can’t think who he is trying to promote as hate figures here; it might just turn round and bite the elite he supports. It is disappointing to see something like this written by a supposed university academic. It tarnishes the profession.
INo 3. ‘Hoovering up the economic gains of globalisation’ caused some hilarity on the twitter thread I was following yesterday, though.
The consensus among the replies was that a Henry might be well fitted for the task, but a Dyson can’t even hoover up dust, so no chance with those economic gains…
As to your second part, I think that the ‘leftish’ leaning of most of the electorate makes absolute sense in that they support things which enhance their lives and disapprove of the ‘bosses’ earning money way in excess of what they are likely to earn. People do like what they see as fairness (even if this liking might sometimes take them down deeply illiberal routes which give hope to the right wing..)
But what the greater part of the public believes is at odds with the way it votes.
The last is the great paradox
The majority want to see the tax rises necessary for a better NHS but don’t think they should pay the taxes when it comes to it. Then at the ballot box43% or less vote for the party that promises tax cuts. This paradox is partly explained by the low wage economy, the ridiculous structure of the energy market where prices do not reflect those actually being charged at wholesale etc etc – people think they can’t afford more income tax.
However the majority vote for the other parties. It all comes back to FPTP. And we must get rid of it to gain a more equal society.
The old elite in Britain had a sense of responsibility to society that is lacking in the new. It was not perfect but it was there.
We used call this – derogatorily – being patrician. And then there was the ‘nanny state’ with its hint of gender bias too (some sort of bias always has to be present when fascism is sniffing around). You could call the old ways ‘good parenting’ when compared to what we’ve got now.
This new elite – enabled I think by Thatcherism – has no sense of responsibility at all to anyone but itself. It is a form of personal sovereignty that has emerged through the truncated sovereignty of the state the new elite has engineered.
The world is theirs. There has been a coup. Their basis is money and money power – unregulated money power. And they do have their hands on the levers of power. If the Tories fall, then they’ll work on Labour using their funding to exert influence and the political system that enables that.
The U.S. is the same is it not? The U.S. as Michael Moore never tires of telling us is more left wing than it portrays itself. And look at them and their elite with their failing private health care systems and areas of the deep South as poor as some of the poorest countries in the world.
We’ve been on this journey to become more like America for a long time, and maybe now we are getting to the terminus of that journey. And then we’ll see what happens?
The Nanny State has always been one of the more revealing Tory criticisms of Britain.
For the majority of British people (80/90% perhaps?) Nan or Nanny is just an alternative name for your Grandmother.
However, I doubt that the average Tory Politician or Journalist uses the term in that way.
Rather they use it to mean a young, well mannered girl hired from the respectable, semi-educated working classes to bring up their children.
Exactly the sort of woman that Margaret Thatcher would have been in earlier times.
Perhaps that is why they loved her so much.
That they think it is a trenchant criticism of how the rest of society thinks tells you far more about them than it does anything else.
“The old elite in Britain had a sense of responsibility to society that is lacking in the new. It was not perfect but it was there.” Try telling that to the people of the Gaidhealtachd, PSR. The old elite of Britain’s sense of responsibility to the people of the lands they owned in the Highlands and Islands consisted of forcing them off the lands, which they had farmed for centuries, and replacing them with sheep.
The Goodwin definition of the elite seems to have been around for quite a long time – especially as a critique of the BBC. It seems to have been very effective in framing the beeb as being essentially lefty liberal, and more recently woke – until the Lineker affair revealed it as being infiltrated and run by Conservatives from top to bottom .
With wealth becoming vastly more unequal in the last twenty years – the Goodwin definition seems just another part of the ultra right disinformation narrative
Agreed
Like you I meet most of the points (also wrong postcode, and I haven’t knowingly “hoovered up” any globalisation profits) so not a disinterested commentator.
The list does seem to characterise a group that exists and largely shares a set of values. But it is odd to categorise us as an “elite”. Unlike the old landowner elite it is quite deliberately excluded from direct involvement or influence on government. And its values are sidelined by the majority of the (Tory-owned) media – despite them being shared with a large part of the electorate as you point out.
It reminds me of an analysis of the appeal of Trump in the USA. Trump seemed to strike a chord by claiming to be “anti-establishment”, even though it would be difficult to come up with anyone much more establishment than a golf-playing multi-millionaire property developer. Especially when he has such an obvious disdain for the sort of ordinary person he managed to get to vote for him. The suggestion was that they all shared a suspicion of those who made their living through use of their intelligence and education, to the extent of almost having an inferiority complex. Trump exploited this to create a campaign of “us against them” which was difficult to counter by those who had a more sophisticated approach to policy and values since they didn’t share the psychology needed to make sense of the “us and them” narrative.
They described David Cameron and George Osbourne. When the right use the word “liberal” I presume they mean doctrines that go by names such as ‘British liberal’, libertarian, classical liberal, neoliberal and liberal conservativism.
I think it is just media spin. It isn’t ‘new’. Far from woke being a value system or an ideology of the institutions. Woke is against institutions and it is far from being an ideology.
And institutions are needed badly.
“Being woke and living in CB1 gives power now”…..I wish…I’ve never felt more powerless.
Quite so
As an example of the far right’s disinformation/propaganda campaign this is a classic. It is also dangerous drivel. I see it conforms to three of the tropes used by the far right all the time. I beleive the nazis used them a lot.
1) “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” So the right wing elite that the Legatum institute, this government and it’s media allies like Murdoch all belong to, are not the controlling elite, it’s their liberal left enemies that are. Especially of course, given Murdoch’s determination (aided by this government) to destroy it, the BBC.
2) “Always accuse your opponents of the thing you yourself are most guilty of”. Simple enough, and linked to 1 above. Accuse the liberal-left and/or socialists of being the country’s elite when in fact you are.
3) ““There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.” Attributed to Goebbels.
Which is why this nonsense is published in the Scum. Don’t bother with trying it on with the better educated, they’ll see through it, but feed it to the less well educated and (often) less well off to distract them from the damage caused by the governing far right elite.
And it works. One of our neighbours has been reading the Scum for years and he voted to leave the EU, and that the BBC is nothing more than propaganda and lies. Unlike the newspaper he reads of course!
Much to agree with there, but I believe that text attributed to Goebbels is not a quotation, but rather a summary much later. eg. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-joseph-goebbels-misquote-co-idUSKBN2492TD
But very similar things are said in Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt
“Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. For the intellectual classes, or what are called the intellectual classes to-day, propaganda is not suited, but only scientific exposition. …
… the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of certain things and the just character of something that is essential. … it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning powers.
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. …
The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. …
The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”
He goes on to praise the First World War propaganda of Germany’s enemies, which “confined itself to a few themes, which were meant exclusively for mass consumption” and then “repeated … with untiring perseverance. Once these fundamental themes and the manner of placing them before the world were recognized as effective, they adhered to them without the slightest alteration for the whole duration of the War. At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.”
We all groan when politicians repeat their stupid formulae – “Education, Education, Education”, “Brexit means Brexit”, “oven ready deal”, “Make America Great Again” etc – but at some level it works.
And Hitler’s propaganda dictums are being put to work here in the UK by this government and its media allies all the time, and have been for years. And of course, as Hitler showed, they utterly despise the people/great British public/nation they so affect to adore.
All while actually diminishing or even destroying the nation they are in charge of. As Robin says “Loadsamoney shysters who care only for themselves, at the expense of everyone and everything else. Rees-Mogg despite his affectations is a complete fraud in his upper class pretences.”
I was talking to a Uk lawyer the other day – he covers energy matters. Also spoke to a German ex-nuke engineer working for a German energy company. Both mentioned my criticism at a quasi public meeting of another lawyer who worked for the Commission in DG Energy (he now works for Agora Energiewende). My technical criticism was as an engineer & about how heat pumps (etc etc) will struggle to achieve high penetration due to difficult to change network limitations. The ex-ENER guy refused to engage (even sent him an e-mail) – because he was unhappy thay I showed up his lack of expertise (and his his willingness to follow the herd/follow policy regardless if it makes no sense).
What I see in the UK (& the EU), is that discourse in many areas (often technical areas) is dominated by (apologies for what follows) “liberal art graduates”. Nowt wrong with that – my partner is a “liberal arts graduate” (double first Oxford). But what I see is people with a lack of technical background making decisions (or holding forth) on highly complex matters & often, their decisions are based on ideology/belief systems. The UK press and its collossal lack of expertise in most things (apart from celebs) reflects political realities. Shared backgrounds leads to a frozen society (Novara commented on this – one of the commentators said she attended some political meeting and one bloke ask her what uni/school she went to – when told him, he “froze her out”.). EU institutions are populated with seemingly diverse people – but one sees the same faces, time & again – saying the same nonesense. Was Mr Far(t)rage a reaction to this (& as somebody already noted – Trump in the USA)? I don’t know. I do know that there is a profound level of wholly unwarrented self-satisfaction in the EU with an expectation that engineering and physics will follow policy.
Richard, you write so many blogs that no doubt you’ve forgotten that back in 2017 you featured a blog on an article in The Guardian, where they made a big splash of an analysis of what it claimed were the UK’s most powerful people – the ‘elite’. (http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/09/25/we-need-good-administrators-but-the-guardians-wrong-to-consider-them-the-elite/)
Of course, Goodwin is trying to do exactly as the authors of The Guardian article sought to do in 2017, which is suggest – either explicitly or implicitly – that it’s this elite that really has power over our everyday lives – or from what you quote, in Goodwin’s shorthand, they are ‘the governing class’. One of the things that struck me reading your blog back in 2017 – and is no less relevant to this most recent attempt to shift attention away from real power – was the degree to which people have a variety of ideas and understanding of what actually constitutes power. In other words, what really makes a person or group powerful.
As you and many of your readers will know, this is a question that has been argued about and debated for centuries: see the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber, for example, and that of French and Raven (1959), Charles Handy (1976), and Gareth Morgan (1997), amongst others, that examine sources of power and the nature of power relations in organisations specifically. But to my mind – and speaking as someone who once taught this stuff – one of the most comprehensive examinations of power was the (seminal) work of Steven Lukes (Power: a radical view, 1974; revised and updated 2005). So, without wishing to bore you or your readers I thought a brief recap of what I wrote in answer to your blog back in 2017 might be useful.
Lukes critiqued previous studies and theories of power and introduced the idea of power as three dimensional, consisting of:
• decision-making power
• non-decision-making power
• symbolic power.
One of the strengths of Lukes’ work is that it is relevant to the study of both social and societal power because the focus of attention is decision making: when, where, how, why, why not and by whom. For that reason, it is an approach that is relevant to the exploration and analysis of domains of power and power relations at any analytical level.
Lukes argued that the two long established theories of power were limited because they were two dimensional. Thus, while useful in certain situations they did not fully explain power. To do this he added a third dimension. Note however that the dimensions are not mutually exclusive. One conceptualisation is not, therefore, better than another. Instead, each provides an insight into a different type – a different dimension – of power. In some circumstances one will apply more than another but all will be present in one form or another. Thus, they are all appropriate to any discussion of power in whatever context.
The first dimension: decision making.
This dimension of power developed from studies of decision making in American government undertaken by Robert Dahl in the 1950s and 60s. Dahl set out to critique previous definitions of power, and particularly the view that power was largely restricted to elite groups in society. Dahl instead focused on the decision-making process (using as a case study a town in the US) and concluded that in different settings at different times different groups dominated decision making. This system he deemed ‘pluralist’, and the definition of power that underpins it is straightforward: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’.
Lukes saw this as the first dimension of power: power exercised overtly by one actor/group over another. The main criticism of this approach is that it is built on a number of assumptions. First, that power is only exercised in situations of observable conflict. Second, that ‘individuals were assumed to be aware of their grievances and to act upon them by participating in decision-making and trying to influence these key decisions.’ The decision-making environment is seen as ‘open to anyone who had an interest in it, and absence of participation as a sign of consensus’.
The second dimension: non-decision making.
As might be imagined, it was not long before Dahl’s work drew a response. The assumption that non-participation meant that groups/individuals agreed with the decisions made was a particular area of attention. It could, for example, be due to: … the suppression of options and alternatives that reflect the needs of the non-participants. It is not necessarily true that people with the greatest needs participate in politics most actively – whoever decides what the game is about also decides who gets in the game.
(Schattschneider, 1960, p. 105, quoted in Hardy, 1994, p. 223).
Schattschneider referred to this as ‘the mobilisation of bias’, and, following this line of argument Bachrach and Baratz (1960) developed the concept of ‘agenda setting’. This captured the empirically observed phenomenon that in any process of decision-making certain groups of actors/agents may be able to determine the outcome from behind the scenes or prevent or limit other (subordinate) groups from participating in decision making. This can be done in many ways, such as the use of rules and regulations, setting agendas, or specifying a certain timetable and controlling or withholding resources (all used on a regular basis by governments).
Importantly, Bachrach and Baratz identified the fact that ‘power is not exercised solely in the taking of key decisions, and that visible decision makers are not necessarily the most powerful’, a good point to keep in mind when considering the role of so called ‘think tanks’, consultants and special advisers and the mainstream media and its owners.
Bachrach’s and Baratz’s approach became associated with the term ‘non-decision making’ because of their focus on the mechanisms by which conflict was suppressed, questions about ‘who gets what, when and how’ remained unasked, and therefore no decisions needed to be taken.
The third dimension: power as a “deep” structure.
Lukes developed the third dimension of power primarily as a response to the shortcomings of the first two dimensions, and latter versions of the Bachrach and Baratz model in particular. Thus, while accepting the relevance of the non-decisional and decisional approaches in certain circumstances, he maintained that these theories still failed to recognise the exercise of power where there was no conflict.
Lukes’ argument is that this use of power helps maintain the dominance of elite groups and those social (i.e. cultural and normative) and economic mechanisms that perpetuate a situation which allows the dominant classes to define reality and therefore justify their material domination whilst preventing challenges to their social and economic position. Garenta (1980) subsequently elaborated on Lukes’ work arguing that the third dimension represents a ‘deep structure’ that conditions decision making through such features as ‘social myths, language, and symbols and how they are manipulated in power processes.’ In short, power has become institutionalised and therefore virtually invisible. [The terms ‘hegemony’, or ‘hegemonic power’, based on the work of Antonio Gramsci and often used in some academic disciplines, such as politics and sociology, define power in a similar way to Luke’s third dimension.]
The contested nature of the concept of power meant that Lukes’ work created much debate. This did not, however, alter his view that ‘we need to think about power broadly rather than narrowly – in three dimensions rather than one or two – and that we need to attend to those aspects of power that are least accessible to observation: that, indeed, power is at its most effective when least observable.’ (Lukes, 2005).
Furthermore, drawing on the work of Morriss (2002), Lukes argued that there are three contexts in which we need to analyse and discuss power and thus why it is important:
• practical (as in needing to know our own powers and those of others to find our way around in a world populated by people);
• moral (as in the connection between power and responsibility), and;
• evaluative (as in the means to assess and evaluate social systems and specifically the distribution of power in societies).
But perhaps most importantly Lukes acknowledged that defining power as the exercise of power – as he had done in the 1974 edition of his book – was a mistake. In fact: ‘Power is a capacity not the exercise of that capacity (it may never be, and never need to be, exercised); and you can be powerful by satisfying and advancing others’ interests: PRV’s topic, power as domination, is only one species of power. Moreover, it was inadequate in confining the discussion to binary relations between actors assumed to have unitary interests, and failing to consider the ways in which everyone’s interests are multiple, conflicting and of different kinds. The defence consists in making the case for the existence of power as the imposition of internal constraints. Those subject to it are led to acquire beliefs and form desires that result in their consenting or adapting to being dominated, in coercive and non-coercive settings.’
(Lukes, 2005, p.12)
Lukes’ reinforces this point by noting that the ‘exercise fallacy’ is also joined by the ‘vehicle fallacy’. As he notes, history teaches us that using such sources or means of power does not necessarily make a person, group or country powerful: ‘In short, observing the exercise of power can give evidence of possession, and counting power resources can be a clue to distribution, but power is a capacity, and not the exercise of the vehicle of that capacity.’ (Lukes, 2005, p. 70).
There are other ways of approaching the subject of power of course – a frequent one being the use of taxonomies of sources/bases of power, as Goodwin does, and many others have over the years (and any of your readers who took organisation and management studies at college/university may well be familiar with Charles Handy’s work on power in organisations). Consequently, whether Lukes is correct can no doubt be disputed. Leaving that aside, with this relatively brief review I hope I’ve established why focusing on elites – however they might be defined – and claiming they are therefore powerful by definition of being defined as such does little to recognise the true nature of power relations in contemporary society. Furthermore, from the brief excerpts you provide from Goodwin’s work, and his association with the Legatum Institute (not to mention that this work was covered in The Sun), I strongly suspect that the prime purpose of this work is not a study of power but yet another attempt to stoke the flames of the culture war now so beloved of the political right.
Fascinating
Thank you
Superb. I’m getting the book. Thanks very much for posting this Mr Horrocks.
I am particularly interested in Bachrach and Baratz idea of ‘agenda setting’. I keep trying to draw attention to the crucial element of news ‘agenda setting’ to the capacity of Government to direct policy and achieve political aims in Britain today. The key to agenda setting has always been thought to be the terrestrial broadcasters who set the agenda, because for most of the last fifty years they had the biggest, immediate audience reach in the UK, and determined the ‘news agenda’. This was never true; because they hold a licence/charter, and ‘impartiality’ requires them to be able to justify their interpretation of the news agenda against some independent measure. How could they measure the impartiality of their news agenda, except against the standard of news to be found – in the press. The press (nobody reads it any more, but it doesn’t matter; it sets the Agebda for terrestrial broadcasting, and therefore effectively set the agenda). The Press is technically virtually defunct, but billionaires buy and rune them; because press political opinion sets the news agenda. The Conservative Party quickly learned that friends and supporters controlling the Press effectively hands them control over the New Agenda; and therefore the nature of legitimate political debate; so tightly, critics came up with the ‘Overton Window’ to describe it.
It is a spell cast over the body politic. Break it, and all this tosh about ‘elites’ collapses. The money will run off somewhere and hide; waiting to follow what new framework offers the best opportunity for exploitation.
In understanding the process that you accurately describe I think the American propaganda concept of “talking points” is informative.
The idea that you can dominate debates even when not present by getting broadcast media to accept that the topics that further your aims are the only way to discuss a topic.
Mick Lynch was one of the first people I have ever heard who challenged this process by pointing out to his BBC interviewers that they were just repeating Daily Mail Talking points.
I notice that ever since Mr Lynch is seldom interviewed.
Agenda setting – yes. Have the very strong impression that the BBC weekly news reflects the Tory ‘comms’ team’s agenda for that week. ‘Small boats’ ,’hotels’, barges, can be dominant for days on end whereas climate target failure reports barely last a day.
Outside the ‘news’ , endless minute and lengthy investigations into people’s miseries, and how money might be saved, rents afforded etc etc..
But no equivalent really in depth analysis of whether this misery is really necessary – do ‘we’ really have no money, is the governments’s credit card really maxed out. Or as someone on here suggested – inviting the politcal parties to face up to these questions.
The BBC ‘impartiality’ remit which gave us twenty years of climate change denial, has to be replaced by a ‘find the truth’ remit.
And BBC does the governemtn’s ‘omission’ agenda equally well . Covid is always in the past tense , despite 1.5 million infected and 500 a week dying.
,
Poor Matt Goodwin – he is so very confused. His first four criteria perfectly describe the elite at the heart of today’s Tory party. The media are of course dominated by the likes of Murdoch, Barclays and Rothermeres, supporting if not telling the Tories what to do.
Meanwhile he totally ignores that critical nexus of money and power. These days it’s the new money of the hedge funds and investment banks, that has bought Brexit and the Tory party, with a touch of Russian money in there too.
As PSR rightly observes, there was at least a touch of concern in the old days of one nation Tories – noblesse oblige. Thatcher was when that started to die out. They were a bit more linked to the aristocracy and old landowners than todays Loadsamoney shysters who care only for themselves, at the expense of everyone and everything else. Rees-Mogg despite his affectations is a complete fraud in his upper class pretences.
Legatum also seem to be contributing to The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) with a UK meeting later in the year and it’ll be interesting to see responses gathered to their 6 following questions – 1. Can we find a unifying story that will guide us as we make our way forward? 2. How do we facilitate the development of a responsible and educated citizenry? 3. What is the proper role for the family, the community, and the nation in creating the conditions for prosperity? 4.
How do we govern our corporate, social and political organisations so that we promote free exchange and abundance while protecting ourselves against cronyism and corruption? 5.How do we provide the energy and other resources upon which all economies depend in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe and efficient, including in the developing world? 6.How should we take the responsibility of environmental stewardship seriously? https://www.arcforum.com/
The new elite is just the (recent) old elite though there is birth and death of individuals.
On that list only one factor fits: 3 Hoover up the economic gains of globalization (through financialization of everything). The rest are distractions. Thatcher and Reagan started this in 1986.
‘Woke’ is the new blob word to bash people who may be making a valid criticism of some aspect of our society; done by distorting the criticism to absurdity.
The Legatum Institute have noted that people are ceasing to believe the narrative the elite have used to hide their theft for the past 40 years and need a new story; stories will be churned out till one is found that works for a few years.
Lots of wonderful intellectualisation being spouted here. History teaches us that whoever controls the miltary/industrial complex has the real power. The clever ‘controllers’ only remove the velvet gloves when absolutely necessary otherwise the shock effect will lessen over time, hence UK TV will never show the real blood and guts. When it can be viewed second hand it is bad enough but up front and for real in the streets will have the population scurrying back to their hutches and total control reinstated.