David Runciman | The Guardian | 10 Sept 2014

The idea of an “establishment” was first popularised in the mid 1950s by the journalist Henry Fairlie, who coined the term to describe how the elite networks at the top of British society closed ranks to protect their own. The particular instance he had in mind was the way the families of the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had been protected by their friends in high places, inside and outside of government (Fairlie’s establishment stretched from the BBC to the Church of England). Fairlie did not think ideology was the glue that held the establishment together: after all, these people weren’t helping out because they sympathised with communist defectors. It was an unthinking allegiance based on personal connections. Social ties trumped political ones. What mattered, Fairlie said, was not what you believe, but “who you know”.

Owen Jones has a very different idea of how the establishment now works. It has become deeply ideological. Political ties trump social ones. What links the people who presently run British society is their shared interest in maintaining a fiction about what is and isn’t politically possible. Their story goes that only a small state, with pared down welfare provisions and a premium on economic efficiency, can function in our highly competitive, globalised world. It’s a story that serves their interests because it allows them to milk the state for their own protection and benefit. Jones is careful to say that this is not “an organised conspiracy” (any more than the 1950s establishment was a conspiracy). But it is a deliberate con. Unthinking social allegiance is no longer the glue that holds the establishment together. It is now a mutual benefit society, which makes it a lot harder to prise apart.

The result of this change in definition is that Jones’s establishment is much more socially diverse and porous than Fairlie’s tight-knit gentlemen’s club. It includes all sorts of people who wouldn’t have got a look-in in the 1950s. Jones quotes the blogger and inveterate political troublemaker Paul Staines (aka “Guido Fawkes”) talking about the political class: “I hate the fucking thieving cunts.” This is not an obviously pro-establishment sentiment. Yet on Jones’s account Staines is one of the ins, not one of the outs, because he is fully signed up to the idea that the state needs to be pared back to the minimum. He belongs to the ideological “outriders” of the new establishment, in a tradition stretching back to Hayek in the 1940s. By attacking the self-serving rapacity of politicians, he is doing the dirty work of the economic and power elites for them, since he is making it far harder for any politician to take them on.

Jones’s establishment stretches far and wide. It includes anyone who stands to benefit from the free hand that the free-market ideology gives them. Some of these are the usual suspects: bankers, newspaper proprietors, civil service mandarins. But it also embraces tabloid hacks, the big accountancy firms, the police, the construction industry, the arms trade, the lobbying industry and foreign energy companies. You no longer have to be British to be part of the British establishment. Jones counts Russian oligarchs as members of the new in-crowd. This can hardly be because of their deep-rooted social ties here: many of them are barely around long enough to have any. Britain is not their home but its tax and legal system has given them the safe haven they are looking for. This is further evidence of how shared interests have become more important than shared backgrounds.

The capaciousness of Jones’s account is both this book’s strength and its weakness. The cumulative evidence of just how big is the tent that has been populated by the devotees of the small state is impressive and dispiriting. Lots of different sorts of people stand to benefit from the hold that a narrow set of political ideas currently exerts, and many of them are the ones – politicians, press, police – whose job would once have been to curb the excesses of the others. Now they have become each other’s enablers. Yet most ordinary people – the vast majority, who have seen their wages stagnate, their benefits cut and their standard of living fall – are not among them. Jones’s outrage on their behalf is righteous and heartfelt. But although he casts his net wide, he doesn’t go very deep. A lot of the stories in this book are the most familiar ones from recent newspaper headlines: the phone-hacking scandal, celebrity tax avoiders, Andrew Mitchell and “plebgate”. Jones has interviewed a wide range of people – think of someone prominent in recent public life and the chances are they will make an appearance here – but few of them have anything revelatory to say. A lot sound as if they are covering their backs.

There is also a sense in which Jones is trying to have it both ways. His new establishment contains echoes of the old one. He continues to believe that personal connections can make all the difference. He quotes David Blanchflower, the Ivy League economist and former dissident voice on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, who insists he was frozen out from day one because he was the only one who didn’t go to Oxbridge. So which is it? Were his ideas heretical or was it that his face didn’t fit? It could be both of course, but if it is both then it’s much harder to know what the remedy is. Given that the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has just documented the continuing hold that a narrow, privately and/or Oxbridge-educated elite has on many leading institutions – the BBC, the judiciary, the civil service, the armed forces – Jones’s analysis provides more questions than answers. Do these people believe what they believe because of who they know, or do they know who they know because of what they believe?

He is not the only one having it both ways. Many of Jones’s interviewees, despite sitting at the heart of the establishment, like to position themselves as outsiders looking in. One recurring motif in the book is Jones sitting down with a disgruntled member of the political class in the cafe of Portcullis House to have pointed out to him all the frantic lobbying and backscratching going on around them. David Aaronovitch reminds Jones that he is only getting all these meetings because he is now connected himself (Oxbridge, Guardian columnist, BBC Question Time). But Jones is at least aware of the ironies of his position. Many members of the new establishment seem genuinely to believe that they are renegades fighting against the system. The Daily Mail went big on the findings of the Social Mobility Commission because it likes to position itself as standing up for its readers against the vested interests of the state. Paul Dacre still thinks that there is a cartel of woolly minded leftist liberals operating from its lair inside the BBC, keeping the rest of us in our place. The blurred boundaries of the new establishment give it an advantage over the old: its members can pretend that they are engaged in an uphill struggle against the existing elite.

Jones is good at capturing the hypocrisy of people used to wielding unaccountable power who suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of its lash. Andrew Mitchell bleats about his treatment at the hands of the police with no one to defend him (“If it happened in Ethiopia, you’d have the British press attacking the lack of human rights there,” he says, absurdly). Neil Wallis, ex-tabloid editor, is traumatised by being hounded for his indiscretions, as though that wasn’t the trade he had been in all his life.

But Jones’s search for genuine outsiders also lands him with some strange bedfellows. One minor hero of this book is Douglas Carswell, then a Tory, now of Ukip. Jones warms to Carswell’s scathing contempt for the narrowness of vision of the main parties and their lack of imagination in looking for new ways to open up the closed circles of power (Carswell is particularly keen on the establishment-busting potential of new technology). Jones knows, of course, that he and Carswell are not on the same side politically (among other things, Jones is much more worried about the Americanisation of British life than he is about its Europeanisation). But in the fight between the ins and the outs, beggars can’t be choosers.

Carswell illustrates the dilemma at the heart of this book. What actually counts as being anti-establishment? Can outsiders on the left really hold hands with the outsiders on the right? Carswell certainly has some anti-establishment ideas but he would organise them in a way that goes directly against Jones’s political interests (Ukip is not the answer to any question that Jones might be interested in). As Jones points out, British public opinion is in some respects far to the left of new establishment thinking: the public want a fairer and more equitable society. The reason the establishment keeps winning the argument is not because it has the better ideas, but because it is better organised. Where you would expect an anti-establishment to exist there is often, in political terms, simply a vacuum. Popular discontent gravitates towards Ukip simply because it is there.

Traditional forms of opposition to the elite – trade unions, churches, mass membership political parties – have fallen away. This is the other side of the story Jones tells, though he gives it much shorter shrift: the new establishment is cosseted by the absence of robust institutions capable of standing up to it. So far, whatever Carswell may think, new technology has not helped: online protest movements lack the force and cohesion needed to take on established power. “The rise of the internet,” Jones writes, “and in particular social media, provide fresh opportunities for new movements to link together. So far they have failed to do so in a coherent way.” Jones says they have to find a way. What he doesn’t know, as yet, is how.