LONDON, 12 April 2006 — Britain is an old, mysterious country. And the roots of its elites — the groups of the chosen few who administer and influence the lives of the many — are stuck deep in the national soil. The power of aristocratic elites chosen by birth has yielded to the dominion of democratic ones chosen by the ballot box. Clerical elites once used the authority of church and sacrament to influence conduct. Their modern equivalents are the officials of the management state who regulate behavior through social policies, benchmarks, and performance indicators. And the meritocratic rhetoric of the elites who run such a modern technocracy hardens easily and quickly into cozy oligarchy. The claim that their power and money are earned because of superior ability is a strategic one designed to close down debate about who has the right to do what to whom.
Elites were once anchored in something real — whether they were lieutenant generals or bishops, general secretaries of trade unions or leaders of political parties, they presided over mass-membership organizations. And the language of class interest supplied them with the vocabulary that could justify their authority as representatives of those groupings. But the collapse of these organizations — the disengagement of the masses and their depoliticization — has left the elites on a more lonely pinnacle.
They are still in place — but the vocabulary that might justify their authority is no longer easily available or credible, which is why they often choose to play the easy British game of being against “elitism.” The bread and circuses of entertainment culture in the television studio and on the football pitch is a useful cultural resource in this regard. Owning a club or appearing on a TV chat show — even starring in a reality TV series — offers some members of the power elite a chance to appear rooted in something other than their self-interest. But there’s a neurotic quality to these displays and to all those diversionary attempts at courting popularity and maintaining access through PR companies. Our elites today — now reborn as a true ruling class — know that the quality of their hegemony is novel and, once scrutinized, unjustifiable.
Once, our elites were part of the peculiar thing called “British liberty.” This was not concerned with individual freedom, but it did somehow keep the national show on the road by propping up different centers of power that might compete against each other and even, sometimes, conflict. Political and professional elites coexisted with financial elites and business ones. The core meaning of a professional existence was membership of a self-regulating body. This, of course, was quite compatible with all sorts of venality and sharp practice, but it did diffuse power. The empty jargoneering of consumerism as supported by the state has now undermined that kind of professionalism. The power of capital on the one hand and that of the governmental apparatus on the other have conspired to destroy the idea of a genuine public-service elite. In its stead have arrived the various spurious forms of consultancy whose management-speak avoids the taking of responsibility. This is why reform of public services has proved so difficult. Doctors and teachers can retain some self- esteem, but only by becoming wage-earning managers rather than actually teaching and healing.
Political elites have also collapsed. This is partly a chosen condition since our masters now tell us that there is little for them to do in relation to the management of the economy. It’s the consensus of the age — and its arrival meant the disappearance of the 20th-century justification for political parties. Membership of a political organization is now largely confined to weirdos and careerists. The power of capital over Tony Blair’s ruling New Labor party, with its superstitious veneration of money, has created Britain’s most consistently business-friendly party.
At least Tories, knowing they had something to prove, would occasionally import into the Cabinet a financial poacher turned gamekeeper who was ready to blow the whistle on sharp practice. Seeking refuge therefore in the orb-and-scepter aspect of British constitutionalism, our isolated political elites have degenerated into a bureaucratic oligarchy.
All that is left is the power of the City — the true governor of Britain, with a world view of global markets that has ended British independence, killed off the professional elites and turned the political elites into its supine agents. British manufacturing produces less and less, so that City finance no longer has to compete with business as a voice of influence. There has always been a peculiarly fetishistic quality to the way in which the English have looked at the City in their midst — so awesome, secretive and ritualistic. And it is the cultural, as well as economic, consequences of the 1980s deregulation of financial services that are now so evident.
The City’s power elites do not have to pull strings behind the scenes, or even use PR or management consultancy, to camouflage their aims. They have simply stepped into a vacuum created by the withdrawal and defeat of all their possible competitors. Britons nostalgic for the age of empire need only visit the City to find the heirs of Clive of India seeking the plunder and dividing the spoils. Here is the great mercenary army of our time, the most achingly modern and frighteningly efficient of Britain’s imperial institutions, its members setting about wresting advantage from a world that lies supine beneath their feet.
