reading

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

I had one overriding reason for writing this book. Ever since Britain was plunged into economic disaster in September 2008, there has been a concerted attempt to redirect people’s anger – both over their own plight, and that of the nation as a whole – away from the powerful. Instead, the British public are routinely encouraged to direct their frustrations at other, often more visible, targets, who have long been vilified by elite politicians and the media alike: immigrants, unemployed people, benefit claimants, public-sector workers, and so on. In the aftermath of financial disaster, this campaign of demonization was quite clearly intensified. Politicians and media worked almost hand in glove to promote the myth that people who should be held responsible for the nation’s multiple social and economic ills are those at the bottom of the pecking order, rather than those at the top.

I wanted to try and redress the balance. The real villains of the piece have not received anything like the attention that they deserve. The behaviour of those at the bottom of Britain’s profoundly unequal order is subject to a relentless barrage of criticism and condemnation: it seems no accident that while Benefits Street graced Britain’s television screens, shows called Tax Dodgers Street or Bankers Street were conspicuously absent. But if the many problems and injustices that not only afflict, but define, British society are to be solved or ended, then the spotlight must now fall on the powerful.

This book represents only a limited contribution to such an enterprise: organized movements succeed in overcoming organized injustice, not individual writers penning well-meaning polemics. For me, though, simply provoking a discussion about the powerful – bringing such a discussion into normal, everyday conversation, in pubs and homes as well as on television, in the newspapers and social media, is itself a key objective. In the aftermath of the financial disaster – and with so many British institutions enveloped in crisis – there is an ever-growing appetite for challenges to the powerful. Encouraging a response from those who defend the status quo is important, too. A victory is scored when your opponents are forced to debate issues they would rather leave ignored …

Opposing views are invaluable, not least because they help to clarify and refine arguments. So it is worth responding to certain themes that have cropped up in response to the book’s initial publication. Several points have been raised about what the Establishment is, and how to define it.

In the popular imagination, the stereotypical Establishment figure is a white male who followed an effortless path from private school to Oxbridge into a lucrative and influential job. While the unrepresentative nature of the powerful is rightly a concern, the social composition of powerful institutions was not central to my understanding of the Establishment. Today’s Establishment, in my view, is bound together by common economic interests and a shared set of mentalities: in particular a mentality that holds that those at the top deserve ever greater power and wealth. Unaccountable power could become more representative, but it would still be unaccountable. There could be women, working-class and ethnic minority people involved in institutions and systems that threaten democracy, but those institutions and systems would still threaten democracy.

Some questioned the significance of powerful people happening to network with each other. It is inevitable, after all, that those in similar fields of work will associate with each other: that happens at all levels of society. But, say, a senior media executive like News International’s Rebekah Brooks becoming good friends with the Prime Minister is inevitably of interest to the public at large. It helps to illustrate how widely the tentacles of the Murdoch Empire had spread throughout the British political elite. In a democracy, the media is supposed to challenge government: closeness between key media and political players is clearly therefore something that needs to be scrutinized. Powerful people associating together both professionally and socially helps cement existing bonds and a sense of solidarity.

The modern Establishment relies on a mantra of ‘There Is No Alternative’: potential opposition is guarded against by enforcing disbelief in the idea that there is any other viable way of running society. So the Britain that existed before the emergence of the modern Establishment, in the decades following the Second World War, is portrayed as some sort of dystopia: a statist, dreary, aspiration-sapping hellhole besieged by bureaucrats and out-of-control trade unions. In seeking to challenge the demonization of this period of recent British history, I was not driven by some kind of misty-eyed nostalgia for a time before I was born – as some at both ends of the political spectrum seem to think – but because there is a genuine need for a corrective.

It’s important to point out that when post-war Britain had higher taxes on the rich, stronger trade unions and widespread state intervention in the economy, it also experienced higher levels of economic growth which was more evenly distributed than today. Today’s Establishment – formed from the late 1970s onwards – has presided over a Britain with lower levels of growth, which has been less evenly distributed, as well as the three great economic crises of post-war Britain: the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and post-2008. That does not mean the old order was not beset with multiple problems, or indeed that it was sustainable in the long run. But as the right-wing journalist Peter Oborne has put it, both left and right in the 1970s were preparing their own break from the post-war consensus. ‘For a while,’ he wrote, ‘it was wholly unclear which side would win, and indeed for long periods it appeared that the Left was in the ascendancy.’¹ So while, in hindsight, victory frequently looks inevitable, the triumph of today’s Establishment was not set in the stars.

Some have questioned whether the police could really be described as part of the Establishment, and whether their bad behaviour is anything new. After all, police cover-ups, violence and racism (which was worse in the past) long predate today’s Establishment. The point is this: the Establishment was forged in the face of considerable opposition, and its most formidable obstacle was the trade union movement. It had to be brought to heel. Accordingly, upon assuming office, Margaret Thatcher granted the police sweeping powers and hiked police pay, thereby buying the police’s loyalty in the battles ahead. Unsurprisingly, the police became thoroughly politicized. Police gratitude was demonstrated during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 and, in particular, its most infamous incident, the 1984 Battle of Orgreave, when miners were charged by mounted police.

Without the police’s support, the British government could never have inflicted such a crushing defeat on trade unionism. Having been trained to regard striking trade unionists as ‘the enemy within’, police contempt was easily transferred to other groups of working-class people: in the case of the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster, it was Liverpool fans. As I show in the book, strikingly similar attitudes and actions – deceit, victim-blaming and cover-up – marked the police’s action at both Orgreave and Hillsborough.

All of which does not mean that the police wholeheartedly subscribe to the Establishment’s neo-liberal dogma. The police are public-sector employees, after all, and receive salaries and pensions from the state. They would not have wanted the neo-liberal policies imposed on other areas of the public sector to be applied to their own ranks. Indeed, that successive governments avoided doing so was a tacit admission of how crucial it was to keep the loyalty of the police. It might be said that the police helped ensure the victory of neo-liberal policies that they themselves wanted nothing to do with. But in recent years, with the Establishment more confident of its total victory, keeping the police on side has become less of a priority. Now, under the coalition government, the police have to face the same sorts of attacks – job cuts, the slashing of wages, the worsening of terms and conditions, privatization – that other public-sector workers have long faced. Predictably enough, they hate it, and the relationship between the police and government is at an exceptionally low ebb as a result. The explosive scandal that followed an angry exchange of words between former Conservative Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell and Downing Street police underlines just how bad the relationship had become. In May 2014, the Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May lectured the Police Federation about the numerous scandals the police had been embroiled in, demanding reform.² Such an intervention would have been unthinkable in an earlier era.

Nor are all police officers ‘class warriors’ who wish to defend a grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and power. They do so because they are tasked with enforcing the law, and the law is often rigged in favour of the powerful. The sanctity of property is judged to be more important than the rights of human beings: the rich, for example, can leave properties empty for long stretches of time, even as millions suffer the consequences of a housing crisis, and the law will protect the absent property-owner from homeless squatters. British prisons are full of people from deprived backgrounds, mostly suffering from mental distress: over 6 in 10 male prisoners and 5 in 10 female prisoners suffer from at least one personality disorder, according to the Prison Reform Trust.³ Benefit fraud – costing an annual £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of social security spending – is treated as a despicable crime, while tax avoidance – worth an estimated £25 billion a year – is even facilitated by the state, with accountancy firms that promote such tax avoidance seconded to government to draw up tax laws. Those who peacefully protest against tax avoidance at a time of devastating cuts, or who demonstrate against companies that destroy our environment and imperil humanity’s long-term survival, face arrest for violating the precious legal sanctity of property. This is how the police protect the existing order in practical terms, whether they wish to or not.

Was I really describing a political consensus embraced by powerful people based on free-market ideas, rather than an Establishment, as some suggest? You don’t have to be a Marxist to agree with Karl Marx when he wrote in 1845 that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.’⁴ Today, the class that predominates – that not only runs the economy but has a grip on the political, media and intellectual spheres, too – plays the key role in shaping the dominant ideas of our time. In the post-war era, a strong and assertive labour movement forced a compromise: while the business class remained in charge, it had to surrender key elements of its power. But the modern Establishment has reversed many of these concessions and clawed back that power. What we know as ‘neo-liberalism’ has provided the fundamental intellectual rationale for the whole process.

In the book, I look at how neo-liberal ideologues who were ostracized in the post-war period achieved stunning political victories, implementing ideological schemes which were once seen as extreme and unworkable. But the claim that neo-liberalism had triumphed has been challenged, including by some neo-liberal ideologues themselves. If only they had been so victorious, they quip, and point to the fact that the state retains a huge presence in British society as evidence that they have not.

But, as I show in the book, this is precisely the point. An entire chapter – ‘Scrounging Off the State’ – is devoted to exposing the irony that the modern Establishment sneers at a state that it depends on. ‘The state runs through modern capitalism like lettering through a stick of rock,’ I wrote. Bailed-out banks; publicly funded infrastructure; state-subsidized private rail companies; an expensive law-and-order system; state subsidies for low wages and otherwise unaffordable private housing; businesses reliant on a multi-billion-pound education system to train up their workers; half of all public spending going to private contractors, directly subsidizing private profit. The list could, and does, go on and on.

The modern political consensus is vocal in its rejection of statism and in its demonization of the role of the state. But where for the great majority the state safety net has been ‘rolled back’, leaving many horribly and precariously exposed, in other respects it has grown in a different way. Take the mass privatization of public housing. Because council housing that was sold under ‘right-to-buy’ was not replaced, tenants who might otherwise have lived in local authority or other forms of social housing have been driven into the private rented sector, where rents are often and increasingly unaffordable. And so the amount the state spends on housing benefit – partly a subsidy to private landlords, partly a subsidy for low wages – has exploded. The same goes for in-work benefits: the wages of millions of workers have stagnated or fallen for many years, in part thanks to a dramatically weakened labour movement, and so the state has been compelled to spend billions of pounds topping up the low wages provided by employers. The privatization of the rail system has led to a more expensive subsidizing of inefficient private companies. Wherever you look, the state has transferred its support from the people who should be receiving it – the poor and the vulnerable – to those who are now trousering huge profits out of people’s neediness.

Under the modern Establishment, the function of the state has been reconfigured. Now, it exists to support private interests, including sectors – like the City – which have nothing but contempt for the state. Big business has clearly benefited from a counter-revolution that has slashed taxes on the rich, hobbled trade unions, privatized public assets and promoted deregulation. Is Britain the free-market utopia the neo-liberal ‘outriders’ wanted, or indeed desire? No – their ‘ideal’ society is impossible in a democracy. Some of the dreams of the neo-liberals would certainly not be supported by big business – like removing certain state subsidies – and consequently have not been implemented. But Britain has clearly travelled rather far in their direction from the days of high taxes on the rich, public ownership, state interventionism and significant trade union rights, to the immense benefit of large corporations and rich individuals.

Here, it’s worth reiterating that the book is an explicit rejection of the idea that the Establishment represents a conscious, organized conspiracy. Sure, there are undoubtedly specific conspiracies, from police cover-ups to tax avoidance on an industrial scale. Yet the whole premise of the book is that the Establishment is bound by shared economic interests and common mentalities. There is no need for any overarching planned conspiracy against democracy. The Establishment is an organic, dynamic system.

Nor, I should re-emphasize, does the book place the blame on ‘bad’ individuals with power. It is the system – the Establishment – that is the problem, not the individuals who comprise it. The behaviour of those who rule in Britain is, on its own terms, entirely rational: companies are motivated by profit and the bottom line, therefore they wish to avoid paying tax. They have sufficient resources to be able – entirely legally – to manipulate the system to their advantage, for instance by employing accountancy firms who send ‘experts’ to the Treasury and to political parties. And they benefit from an official ideology that celebrates their role while belittling the contribution of the state. When I interviewed Steve Varley, the CEO of accountancy firm Ernst & Young, I was at pains to demonstrate what a generous, charming, thoughtful individual he was (which he is). He was able to rationalize his behaviour: the client companies he serves pay lots of tax, making them pay more would be counterproductive, and so on. His company spends considerable amounts on charity. As I pointed out, this was a return to a Victorian ethos where social provision was patchwork and dependent on the generosity of individuals, rather than an efficient, publicly provided universal system funded by progressive taxation. But it is easy to see how someone like Varley can go home after a day in the office and feel as though he is doing good. The objective is to change the system and the behaviour it encourages, rather than replacing ‘bad’ people with ‘good’ people.

As far as changing both system and behaviour are concerned, some right-wing and liberal critics have suggested that actually my solutions are pretty timid. This, I have to say, is the point. In the book, I express my deep attraction to the idea of the ‘Overton Window’, a concept invented by US conservatives to describe what is deemed politically possible at any given time. This ‘window’ is relentlessly policed.So, when Labour’s Ed Miliband proposes a temporary energy price freeze – a welcome, albeit pretty unremarkable, policy – it is portrayed by media and right-wing politicians as crypto-Marxism, even though most voters support a far more radical option: renationalizing the energy industry lock, stock and barrel. But policing the ‘window’ helps ensure that neo-liberal ideas generally favoured by the Establishment are deemed moderate and commonsense; anything that even slightly deviates is written off as beyond the pale. So, for my suggested policies – like democratic public ownership, hiking taxes on the rich, granting workers’ rights, and selective capital controls – to be portrayed as rather timid by defenders of the status quo … well, that helps to shift the Overton Window.

Of course, my proposed ‘democratic revolution’ does not go as far as I would like. In time, I would like Britain – and indeed other countries – to be run in the interests of people’s needs and aspirations, rather than on the basis of profit for a small elite; for society to be democratically managed by working people; for democracy to be extended as far as possible, including in the workplace and the economy. Such a society may not be built in my lifetime. But my aim is to reverse the achievements of the neo-liberal outriders: to shift the Overton Window in a different direction. Doing so will open up more radical possibilities. What is now seen as completely extreme would become fringe, and then radical, and then controversial, and then commonsense. We live in a time of Establishment triumphalism, when other ways of running society are portrayed as unthinkable. That triumphalism must be chipped away if we are to build a different sort of society.

Governments enter and leave office, and yet the Establishment remains in power. Which means that anybody disillusioned with the current state of affairs – which, judging by opinion polls, would seem to be millions of us – has a difficult decision to make this May, in Britain’s general election. It might, indeed, lead to the conclusion that there is no point in voting at all. In 2013, the comedian Russell Brand provoked a furious national debate when he declared that he never voted, on the basis that to do so was ‘a tacit act of compliance’, and even went as far as to advocate revolution.⁵ Brand came under sustained attack for disparaging the hard-won right to vote and discouraging young people from exercising this most basic democratic right.

Although I disagree with his call to abstain from voting, some of the criticisms levelled against him range from naïve and out-of-touch to being full of shocking audacity and hypocrisy. People of all ages had long been disillusioned with politics by the time Brand tossed his grenade into the national debate: that his pronouncement resonated so loud and long was a symptom, not a cause, of this disillusionment. In fact, many of the politicians and media types who attack Brand actually bear responsibility for popular disenchantment with the political process. Brand’s public interventions and his YouTube channel, ‘The Trews’, actively encourage debate and discussion about many of the key political issues facing Britain, particularly among those most turned off from politics.

Here’s how I see the difficult decisions ahead. The Conservatives are the most natural, devoted political representatives of the Establishment. In the last five years, the Conservative-led government has further shifted British society in the Establishment’s favoured direction: slashing taxes on the rich and big business, privatizing and cutting public services, rolling back the welfare state, curtailing workers’ rights, and so on. The Conservatives have seized on the economic consequences of the financial crisis as a means to push policies they always desired but did not think were possible in normal circumstances. A return to power for the Conservatives in May 2015 would not only mean more of the same, shovelling more wealth and power towards the already wealthy and powerful, to the detriment of working people. It would also serve to move the Overton Window even further in the direction of the Establishment: a second Conservative-led government could more easily be spun as a vindication of pro-Establishment policies. Labour would have lost because it deviated too far from Establishment mantras – or so runs the narrative that would be woven within hours of the election result. The Establishment message of ‘There Is No Alternative’ would be strengthened, and the most pro-Establishment elements of the Labour party would be emboldened. Labour lost, they will say, because it did not sufficiently embrace pro-Establishment doctrines: cuts, privatization, deregulated free markets and lower taxes for the rich – and such a state of affairs must never be allowed to happen again. Those on the left who reject Labour would suffer, too, as the Overton Window shifts to the right. If Labour lost because it was too radical, they will be told, where does that leave you? All myths, but the Establishment is depressingly capable when it comes to spinning myths into a widely accepted commonsense.

And yet. Labour’s leader Ed Miliband has been savaged by Establishment types for being too radical, which tells us rather more about how intolerant the Establishment is to anything that departs even slightly from their script than it does about the Labour leadership’s supposed radicalism. Much of the Establishment is not satisfied unless politics and society is relentlessly being transformed in their direction: ever lower taxes on the rich and privatization, for example. Anything that hints in the opposite direction is deemed intolerable: partly because of the suffocating triumphalism of the Establishment (‘we’ve won, how dare anyone even consider chipping away at our hard-won victory’), partly because it risks legitimizing even more radical policies.

In some areas Labour has, it is true, made some tentative steps away from Establishment sensibilities. It proposes to restore the top rate of tax to 50 per cent, which the Conservative-led government has reduced to 45 per cent, and to introduce a ‘mansion tax’ on properties worth more than £2 million. (It is worth bearing in mind that the top rate of tax was 60 per cent for most of Thatcher’s time in office, demonstrating how far the Overton Window has shifted.) Its commitment to freezing energy prices, clamping down on land speculators, and regulating private rents all deviate from the Establishment’s pro-market ideology. It would do away with the most devastating recent cut to the welfare state: the ‘bedroom tax’, which makes poor, disproportionately disabled social housing tenants pay more for having what is deemed to be a ‘spare room’. The current Labour leadership has also pledged to halt, and reverse, the privatization of the National Health Service, and has even been known occasionally to express regret at the extent of the previous New Labour government’s promotion of the private sector in public services. Its commitment to clamping down on ‘zero-hour contracts’, a key means of stripping working people of job security and rights, means a modest shift in the balance of power in the workplace in favour of working people. The cuts Labour will implement are on a smaller scale than those proposed by the Conservatives, while Ed Miliband clearly acknowledges that New Labour accepted the political consensus that Thatcherism established.

And here’s the rub: the Labour leadership remains committed to austerity, albeit in a less aggressive form. What’s more, when you scratch the surface of some of its policies, they lose their shine. Its offer of a price freeze of energy bills is merely temporary, while in the face of polling that shows overwhelming support from voters of all political persuasions for the public ownership of utilities, Labour is committed only to a public option to compete with private franchises on the railways, a muddled halfway house of a policy that, in trying to satisfy everybody, satisfies almost nobody. Noises emanating from Labour’s leadership, meanwhile, indicate that a reintroduced 50p top rate of tax would also be a temporary measure, not the beginning of a fundamental shift in wealth. In its proposal to increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020 – a measure that would still consign all too many workers to poverty pay – you can hear the echoing sound of a can being kicked down the road.

In practice, then, Labour by and large accepts the Conservative roadmap, and is still travelling along the same road. Yet over the last five years, austerity as a policy has proved a manifest failure. Even as well over a million workers have been driven into poverty pay, austerity has failed to come close to wiping out the deficit, one of the main promises of the Conservative-led coalition; the current government has added more debt in five years of office than every other Labour government combined,⁶ and has ensured the most anaemic economic recovery since records began. Living standards have not fallen for as long since the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, as the Establishment’s position has become further entrenched, it has been boomtime for those at the top. Labour’s commitment to ‘austerity-lite’ must surely be seen against such a backdrop.

Uninspired, growing numbers of Britons disillusioned with Establishment rule have begun looking elsewhere. At the beginning of 2015, the Green Party began scoring up to 11 per cent in opinion polls, while its membership across England, Wales and Scotland jumped to over 50,000, eclipsing the governing Liberal Democrats and the hard right UKIP, a party dominated by ex-Tories and multimillionaires who support privatizing public services, slashing taxes on the rich and attacking workers’ rights. Developing out of a primary focus on the environment, the Greens offer policies that represent a genuine assault on the Establishment: a statutory living wage, public ownership, workers’ rights, higher taxes on the rich and companies, a clampdown on tax avoidance, a council-house building programme, and so on.

Yet Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system represents a formidable obstacle to any new party. It is not enough to attract a relatively broad base of support that is thinly spread across the country: a party has to concentrate its support in individual constituencies in order to elect Members of Parliament. For the otherwise sympathetic voter, pencil hovering over ballot sheet, the fear is that voting for a Green candidate will simply split the anti-Conservative vote – and, in doing so, will let in the Conservative candidate by the back door; such a fear of course being the hope of the party in power. And while the Greens are doing particularly well among younger voters, polling suggests that they are struggling to win over working-class voters.⁷

A change in the electoral system – for example, the introduction of some form of proportional representation (PR) – would allow Britons to vote freely without fear of inadvertently aiding the political right. Anti-Establishment forces could congregate together in one political party, including those who previously believed that the electoral system left them with no choice but to support Labour. A shift to a PR-type electoral system has become ever more plausible. Britons decisively rejected a shift to the Alternative Vote electoral system in 2011 – I was among those who voted ‘No’. In large part, the electorate rejected AV because of a fear that it would make coalitions more likely, and the experience of the Liberal Democrats joining forces with the Conservatives has soured the electorate’s view of coalitions. Such governments seem to provide excuses for parties not to introduce policies in office that they had championed during election campaigns: most infamously, the Liberal Democrats abandoned their commitment to free education in favour of a trebling of tuition fees. But the dramatic rise of the Scottish National Party in Scotland, the UKIP insurgency and growing support for the Greens all make the first-past-the-post system seem increasingly untenable. In fact, the next election looks likely to produce another hung Parliament. It seems that coalitions are here to stay, whatever the electoral system. The longstanding argument for first-past-the-post has been that it provides stable, majority governments. But if it can no longer deliver on this promise, as well as poorly reflecting the political will of the British people, then the rationale behind it dies.

In practice, the 2015 election will either bring to power a Labour-led or a Conservative-led government. A Labour-led government will not offer a decisive rupture from the Establishment. But there will at least be an opportunity of some kind to build pressure from below that exerts influence over it. A Conservative-led government will relish resisting such a movement; a Labour-led government would, however, find it rather more difficult to ignore. In part, this is because Labour remains institutionally welded to the trade union movement, a link that gives the party some basis among the organized working class, and which is accordingly attacked by Establishment figures.

The Labour leadership would do well to be aware of the recent experiences of left-leaning parties in other countries, notably Spain and Greece. In both countries, when social-democratic parties imposed austerity measures on coming to power, they went on to suffer a dramatic draining away of support to more radical anti-austerity parties. If Labour has to assemble a coalition in order to govern, the smaller parties whose support it needs could force it to offer a referendum on a form of proportional representation. If approved by the electorate, such a system would make it far easier for an anti-Establishment party to win votes.

Whoever emerges victorious in the May election, opponents of the Establishment have a fight on their hands. To stand any chance of winning victories, they must build broad alliances – from trade unions to community organizations to faith groups. On many key issues, public opinion has already broken from Establishment dogma.

But as the book concludes, there is a desperate need for an international perspective. As I write this, an election campaign is underway in Greece, with the radical anti-austerity party Syriza tipped to win. By the time you read these words, the results will be clear. But there is a determined effort by powerful international forces to make sure the Greek people do not vote ‘the wrong way’. The EU, the stronger European states, international financiers, are all lining up against a Syriza victory. In Spain, too, the anti-austerity Podemos party battles ‘la casta’ – the Spanish equivalent of the Establishment – and faces a campaign of demonization on the part of Spain’s powerful elite groupings. The struggle against an unaccountable elite with interests that clash with those of the broader population is not specific to Britain. The British Establishment, after all, is intertwined with ruling elites in other countries. Struggles for democracy and social justice cannot be won on a country-by-country basis. Only solidarity and unity across borders can guarantee victory.

It is all very well to rail against injustice, of course. But as the late socialist politician Tony Benn would often put it, social change is a combination of two things: ‘the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world’. Those – like myself – who want the old order to be overcome have a responsibility to offer coherent alternatives. Without such alternatives, people may resent the existing order, but they will remain resigned to it. The current Establishment believes it has scored an absolute historic victory and will never be usurped. It is wrong, and the proud history – in Britain and elsewhere – of struggle for justice and freedom from below tells us why. One day, this Establishment will fall. It will not do so on its own terms or of its own accord, but because it has been removed by a movement with a credible alternative that inspires. For those of us who want a different sort of society, it is surely time to get our act together.

Owen Jones

THE ESTABLISHMENT

And How They Get Away With It

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE BEGINNING

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

THE ESTABLISHMENT