Talking to the
Establishment is what Aeron Davis, a Professor
of Political Communication at Goldsmiths London, has been doing for
twenty years. In this little gem of a book he tries to pull together
his thoughts and reflections on these interviews and extensive
research on how today’s establishment works.
When
people talk about the Establishment, they often imagine a socially
coherent body managing the country in ways that serve its own
collective interests. An elite network who predominantly went to
certain public schools, who make big decisions of state over dinner
in their private clubs. Even if outsiders entered into the upper
echelons of politics, the civil service, business or the media, they
inevitably became part of the Establishment network. To radicals the
Establishment was a brake on social change, but for conservatives it
provided the comfort that the country was in sound collective hands.
Davis
argues that with the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, that cosy
world began to fall apart. He even speculates that we may now be
seeing the end of what we think of as an Establishment. He suggests
the elite have lost coherence: that rather than look after the
interests of the network as a whole (and for a conservative therefore
the country), they look after the interests of themselves. They have
become the reckless opportunists of the book’s title, getting what
they can from the chaos they helped create.
In
politics this idea is personified by the man on the front cover, who
threw the country into the destructive mess that is Brexit simply for
the sake of his own personal ambition. Press barons turned their
newspapers into propaganda vehicles for the same end. But he also
argues that we can see the same opportunism in business leaders who
put personal returns over the interests of the companies they run. He
finds that in the civil service the key ingredient for success is how
good an individual is at self promotion, and he argues the same
applies elsewhere.
A
lot of this rings true for me, but Davis backs it all up with
research and interviews. While austerity was what I call deficit
deceit (using the deficit to scare people into accepting a smaller
state) which served neoliberal ends, in the UK it was I suspect also
simple political opportunism: a way to embarrass the Labour government with
little thought about what it might do to the economy. In budget after
budget, Osborne seemed more focused on wrong-footing the opposition
than doing anything to revive productivity growth. You could easily call that reckless opportunism.
As
well as this overriding theme, there is acute observation on other
matters as well. For example on how journalism has become churnalism,
and the accompanying growth of the PR industry. The only time I have
met Aeron was at a conference where I was talking about how the media
had distorted the austerity debate, and I remember how taken aback I
was when some in the audience suggested academics just needed better
PR. But this also connects with the main theme, where self promotion
is the name of the game.
I
found the book an enlightening and thought provoking read which was
difficult to put down. It is both a fascinating insight about how
individuals in the elite saw recent history, but also a provocative
interpretation of how our idea of the Establishment may no longer be
valid.
