Reckless Opportunists

Almost two years ago I wrote a post on the modern establishment, which was triggered by Toby Young's comical failure to wangle himself a bully pulpit at the newly-established Office for Students. Coincidentally, I had read a Guardian article by Aeron Davis of Goldsmith's College on the same subject which I felt didn't diverge sufficiently from the methodology and sociological assumptions established by Anthony Sampson's seminal 1962 work, Anatomy of Britain. The article was a puff-piece for Davis's own slim volume, Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment, which I've finally got round to reading. This is my belated review. The first point to note is that the Guardian piece was a pretty decent summary of the work, so I don't think I was wrong in my superficial reading. In fact, it's pretty much a straight edit for length of chapter 1, whose conclusion was: "The logics of neoliberalism and unbounded self-interest are as potentially destructive to the Establishment as they are to the rest of society. ... Self-interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications".

Davis touches on a number of familiar themes that reflect the declining calibre of those managing the state: the increased homogeneity of the establishment, from PPE degrees to promiscuous job-hopping (hence why a journalist could think it realistic to be appointed to the OfS, or even become Prime Minister); the groupthink and reliance on business bullshit that reinforces this homegeneity and excludes the heterodox; the shift from qualitative to quantitative assessment in both the private and public sectors (the primacy of shareholder value, the tyranny of targets); and the way that the UK establishment has become increasingly international due to globalisation, encouraging hyper-mobility and a consequent lack of loyalty to, and even interest in, British society. In a brief review in April 2018, Simon Wren-Lewis summarised Davis: "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."

What I find interesting is Wren-Lewis's description of a dynamic system, hence the importance of the lack of coherence and the failure to look after the network. Though this critique comes out in the book, Davis has addressed the subject more in terms of the sociology of elites, where the emphasis is on group identification and norms, how people feel and act, rather than historical development - i.e. how and why the system has changed. This is not to say that the latter is neglected, but that the analysis is relatively shallow. For example, neoliberalism is charged with being a corrosive, but without any real explanation as to how it became hegemonic; while the primacy of self-interest is offered as a moral decline and fall (there are the usual nostalgic asides by old City types about the pre-Big Bang days), which ignores the long history of corruption and greed to which the House of Lords stands as a monument. In my view, the establishment has always been essentially political, rather than a field in which different elites, from high finance to the military, coordinate or compete for influence across society as a whole. 

Davis is good on the political milieu, particularly the way that it has become increasingly enmeshed with the media. One of the features of this development, on both sides, is habitual ignorance and a preference for presentation over real expertise. The decline of investigative reporting, along with the increasing social homogeneity of senior media types, appears to have led not only to churnalism but a proprietorial defence of political orthodoxy. The scepticism of power has been replaced by a mixture of sanctimony and sarcasm. Few modern politicians have much of a hinterland beyond machine politics, having often climbed the greasy pole straight from a PPE degree (or a job in PR, like David Cameron) and then struggled with ministerial tenures too short to develop real knowledge, a trend that accelerated during the New Labour years (as Davis notes, domain experts like Frank Field, Chris Smith and Estelle Morris stalled in their careers partly because their expertise was often unhelpful while the glib and media-savvy who lacked independence of thought prospered). 

Another dimension the book brings out well is the way that elites, particularly in politics and business, have come to rely on ever more sophisticated lies to both avoid public scrutiny and salve their own consciences, from an emphasis on "values" and "purpose" to CSR and greenwashing. This has produced a regime of justification in which metrics are routinely gamed, plus a burgeoning industry of thinktanks and academics incentivised to produce helpful research. This in turn has fed the churnalism machine and provided grounds for motivated reasoning, such as the tendentious claims made about "efficient markets" or "threats to security". The consequence is an increasing incidence of catastrophic failures, due to dodgy balance sheets and dodgy dossiers, and a sharp drop in public confidence in both government information and journalism. To bring it up to date, the mix of self-delusion and ignorance has been particularly evident over the last 12 months in the Conservative's serial broken promises and Labour's fear of intellectual engagement.

Where I differ from Davis is that I don't believe that all of these developments have been as stark or as recent as he imagines (the Tories have regularly broken their promises and Labour has always been anti-intellectual). The traditional view of the establishment promoted by Sampson in the 1960s was already out-of-date, being more a picture of the pre-War and immediate post-war world remembered by his interviewees. Likewise, Davis's picture, which he built up over twenty years of interviews, tells us more about Tony Blair's "sofa government" than it does about the cronyism in the award of government contracts seen over the last year. Self-interest has always been at the heart of the establishment, and that heart is the interface of state and commerce. Public service and the interests of "the country" were themselves the self-deluding lies told by earlier generations. Recall that if there was anything that qualified as conventional wisdom among the establishment of the 1930s it was appeasement, which was founded on a desire to preserve the British Empire and avoid the social disruption that total war was expected to bring (the Great War brought democracy and the next was expected to bring socialism, as indeed it partially did).

Likewise, while the structural changes to the City and corporate governance since the 1980s have been profound they haven't produced a notably different commercial culture as far as morality or innovation are concerned. UK business has always tended towards short-termism, financial leverage and asset-stripping, and displayed a perennial suspicion of unorthodox thinking. Indeed, this critique of the commercial establishment is over a century old. If there has been a cultural change in recent decades it originates in New Labour's embrace of wealth-creation as embodied in the City and "superstar" CEOs. It was in the 1990s that the chinese wall between these two rooms of the establishment came down, with the result that they have now effectively merged into one. This is evident not only in the high proportion of bankers and corporate types who become MPs but in the equally high proportion of MPs who then seek second careers in company boardrooms (and not just British ones). The commercial establishment hasn't changed that much but the political has become highly commercialised.

The other significant change in the British establishment over the last twenty years can largely be traced to the disruption of the media. Again the issue is not so much an internal cultural shift among journalists or the structural shift away from reporting to comment and opinion (there's always been plenty of the latter), but rather the merging of the media and political milieus. As Davis notes, quoting Nick Robinson, in an age of 24-hour news Westminster correspondents spend more time with politicians and their competitors in the lobby than they do with other journalists from their own newspaper or TV channel. Now that's probably always been true, but what has changed is that there is no longer as clear a dividing line between the two in terms of background and career. Not only are journalists becoming politicians, but it is student politicians at Oxbridge who increasingly become (privileged) commentators. In other words, the root problem is the wider issue of falling social mobility and the lack of cognitive and cultural diversity this gives rise to.

For all the emphasis on old school ties, the establishment in the social democratic era was still relatively porous and mutable, partly because the expansion of the public sector did open up new paths of meritocratic advance. The marketisation and privatisation of much of the state since 1979 has not only led to greater self-interest and nepotism, it has moved significant operations beyond the conceptual boundary of the British establishment. Fewer people today think of themselves as members of it as opposed to members of a global elite. Increasingly, the establishment has narrowed to politics and those parts of industry and finance, together with privileged elements of the media, with whom they interface for commercial and presentational reasons. I don't think that the establishment is at its "end", as Davis suggests, even if it is more obviously decadent. You can point to the accession of a dishonest journalist to the premiership as evidence of opportunism, but the restoration of Labour's ancien regime under a bureaucratic lawyer suggests that recklessness has its limits.