The Establishment by Owen Jones

In The Establishment: and How They Get Away with it, Owen Jones offers a cogent analysis of contemporary British networks of privilege, particularly of how the institutions and individuals that are a part of them have contributed to increasingly marked levels of inequality by working in concert to protect their interests. These institutions include free-market think-tanks, the media, the police, an increasingly influential financial sector, major corporations, and the political class. In successive chapters devoted to each of them, Jones argues that they’re all pieces of a puzzle that adds up to a society where standards of living for all but the very rich have been decreasing at alarming speed, and where the rift between the haves and the have-nots grows ever wider. Inequality has become normalised, and the workings of the Establishment are an enormous part of the reason why.

Another thing Jones does very effectively is trace how free-market capitalism, also known as neoliberalism, moved from being a fringe far-right ideology until the 1980s to becoming the political mainstream. The notion that the free market is the ideal system for maximizing human productivity and well-being is the premise behind every political debate, and even those who oppose it have to use it as a point of departure. Jones makes use of the concept of the “Overton window” to explain how the range of ideas considered acceptable in political debate has gradually shifted towards neoliberalism. The conventional wisdom in European politics these days is that a period of reckless government overspending has made it regrettably necessary to shift more and more capital away from public coffers and into private ownership. We may live in a world where the very wealthy have grown 64% richer in the past five years, but alas, sadly we can no longer afford a social state or basic public services. Anyone who deviates from this script is generally dismissed as a foolish idealist at best and a dangerous radical at worst.

Owen Jones is very much aware of the fact that we’re currently engaged in a battle of narratives with momentous political implications; in The Establishment, he provides us with ammunition. More and more, people are starting to question the just-so stories behind austerity: the repetitive justifications for why we have to accept increasing assaults against our standards of living that unfairly target the most vulnerable in society. Austerity policies are not evidence-based, yet over the course of the past decade they have formed a persuasive narrative, one that capitalizes on fear to make people accept the unacceptable. However, there’s hope in the fact that this narrative of inevitability is beginning to shatter; The Establishment exposes its cracks.

In his introduction, Jones clarifies that what we’re about to read is not a conspiracy theory, but rather a systemic analysis: this book, he tells us, is “an explicit rejection of the idea that the Establishment represents a conscious, organised conspiracy.” Instead, “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.” This is pretty much the same point Ben Goldacre makes in his introduction to Bad Pharma, and it’s one that’s always worth repeating: the problem is not unethical individuals, though they undoubtedly exist, but rather systems whose design rewards bad behaviour. As Goldacre reminds us, “it’s possible for good people, in perversely designed systems, to casually perpetrate acts of great harm on strangers, sometimes without even realising it”. Jones makes a similar point when he says,

Nor is this a book about individual villains. The Establishment is a system and a set of mentalities that cannot be reduced to a politician here or a media magnate there. Little can be understood simply by castigating individuals for being greedy or lacking in compassion. That is not to absolve people of personal responsibility or agency, to argue that individuals are just cogs in a machine or robots, blindly following a pre-written script. But it is to argue against any notion that Britain is ruled by ‘bad’ people, and that if they were replaced by ‘good’ people, then the problems facing democracy would be solved. Many Establishment figures are, in person, full of generosity and empathy for others, including for those in far less privileged circumstances than themselves. Personal decency can happily coexist with the most inimical of systems. On the other hand, other figures are selfish, determined to gain wealth and power whatever the cost to others; as journalist Jon Ronson discovered, an estimated 4 per cent of CEOs are psychopaths, a proportion around four times higher than in the rest of the population. It is the behaviour that a system tends towards that needs to be understood.

You might recall that I had mixed feelings about Jones’ first book, Chavs, when I read it a few years ago, and I generally feel similarly ambiguous about his journalism. This is mostly due to his tendency to portray class prejudice as the “one remaining socially acceptable form of prejudice”, arguing in the process that situations that appear to be about sexism or racism are “really” about classism deep down. Not only is establishing such a clear-cut distinction artificial to begin with (the whole point is that different disadvantages interact with each other), but there’s no need to portray classism as more insidious than other forms of prejudice in order to argue it should be taken seriously. Nevertheless, I think Jones is an engaging writer and a very persuasive advocate for economic justice. I found The Establishment a more polished book than its predecessor and I’m very glad I picked it up.

A few things I learned about while reading this book: the full consequences of lack of union representations among journalists, not only for those who work in the media but for society as a whole; the horrifying stories of activist women who were in long-term relationships with undercover police agents, some of which resulted in children (this isn’t distant history, by the way, but something that happen in Britain in the 1980s); the details of how the same accounting firms that encourage their clients to exploit tax loopholes are involved in creating the legislation such loopholes are a part of; and so on. I could make a much longer list, but I’ll just encourage you to pick up The Establishment instead.

To go back to the concept of the Overton window, I was particularly interested in Jones’ point about how accusations of “left-wing bias” in the BBC’s news coverage have helped hone it into a perfect tool of the Establishment. Such accusations, he argues, “leave the corporation in constant fear of proving evidence of left-wing bias” and therefore leaning to the right to compensate for that:

The BBC is a perfect vehicle for the Establishment, for it allows the free-market status quo to be portrayed as a neutral, apolitical stance. Only those who deviate from it are seen as biased and needing to be countered to preserve objectivity.

And we’re back to the idea that the status quo isn’t neutral, which apparently is something I’ll be repeating until I’m blue in the face. But it’s only by pointing out the loaded political assumptions behind what’s accepted as mere common sense that we can cause the Overton window to shift again. The unjust world we live in is not inevitable — it’s the result of political choices. It’s time for different possibilities to be brought back into mainstream debate.

A few more passages I found useful:

The glib response to this argument goes along these lines: ‘Ah, but the difference between tax avoidance and benefit fraud is that the former is legal while the latter is not.’ But such a reply in itself inadvertently underscores how the law is rigged in favour of the wealthiest, even when their behaviour is far more socially destructive. The wealthy are able to hire an army of accountants and lawyers to avoid paying the amount of tax intended by parliamentary legislation. Accountancy firms help draw up the tax laws and then advise their clients on how to avoid them. By systematically depriving the Exchequer of funds necessary to provide services and implement policies, by undermining the legitimacy of the law, and by partly merging with the machinery of the state itself, the tax-avoiding wealthy elite pose a real threat to democracy.

But the Establishment would be wise to take note of history too. The illusion of every era is that it is permanent. Opponents who seem laughably irrelevant and fragmented can enjoy sudden reversals of fortunes. The fashionable common sense of today can become the discredited nonsense of yesterday, and with surprising speed.
‘Power concedes nothing without a demand’, declared the nineteen-century African-American former slave turned abolitionist and social reformer, Frederick Douglass. ‘It never did and it never will.’ In saying this, he concisely summed up an eternal truth of social progress. Change it not won through the goodwill and generosity of those above, but through the struggle and sacrifice of those below. History is not one soap opera, the story of Great Men — or Great Women, although they are all too often airbrushed from the history books. Those with shared common interests — however superficially different they may appear in some respects — use their collective power to win social justice. This tradition should provide hope to those who want change, and inspire fear in those who stand to lose from it.

It does provide hope. It does.