However much they may deny it, a liberal elite is ascendant in Britain
Jacob Rees-mogg is a scion of the old order, but he is still right to call out the new establishment
It is one of the oddities of modern culture that the strong seek advantage by claiming to be weak, and the most privileged do so by denying their own good fortune. It plays out across the whole of society, but we saw it on the political stage last week during an extraordinary media debate about the nature of elites.
Like many debates it was in fact no such thing: more a conversation between two journalists very much in agreement with one another. Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye and star of Have I Got News For You, mocked “the presentation of outsiders”, insisting that politicians on the Right who present themselves as anti-elites are frauds.
Lewis Goodall, former policy editor of the BBC’S Newsnight and these days co-presenter of LBC’S The News Agents, agreed and said, “in the journalistic world, we have failed, haven’t we? Because in allowing them that narrative, which has become very deeply embedded, and many people find it very, very hard to challenge. And these people have used it tremendously. But as you say… it’s ridiculous.”
On one level, the two have a point. Almost by definition any politician with a national profile, and any journalist too, can be called a member of the elite. One dictionary definition of the term is “the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or besttrained group in a society”. Having gone to private school and then Magdalen College, Oxford, before editing the Eye and being paid a reported £20,000 per appearance by the BBC, Hislop meets that definition.
It was difficult not to discern a little bad faith in Hislop’s arguments. Ignoring the deliberate and obvious irony of the statement, he complained that “Jacob Rees-mogg literally says ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’, attempting to convince you of his credentials as a popular voice – in Latin!” Mocking Nigel Farage as a “lovely prep school boy” – rather like himself, then – Hislop continued, “Outsider? Working-class hero? These are bogus representations of the self.” But Farage does not pretend to be working class.
It was easier to sympathise with Goodall’s complaint that Rees-mogg had accused him of forming “part of a media political elite”. Goodall pointed out that while Rees-mogg’s father had edited The Times, his father had been a welder. It is obviously jarring to the working-class son of a teenage mother from Birmingham to be called an elitist by an Old Etonian.
And yet even this misses the point. Rees-mogg is unquestionably the product of an elite, privileged upbringing in an elite, wealthy family. He could hardly deny that he is. But there is no singular elite in a complex society like ours, and while wealth inequality and class divides persist, those elites that do exist are more porous than many accept. How else would Goodall – a top journalist who undoubtedly had to work harder to earn his success than more fortunate contemporaries – appear alongside the likes of Hislop?
The more fundamental truth is that self-evidently there are different kinds of elites, with different kinds of power in different contexts and institutions. It is reductive to the point of absurdity to pretend that power only resides among elected ministers, those in big business and the privately educated – and to suggest that politicians, for example, cannot legitimately refer to the power enjoyed by others.
It is normal, in a liberal democracy, for power to be dispersed, and normal, too, for there to be debates and disagreements about whether the balance – within the state itself and beyond it – is a sensible one. Since the radical expansion in the interpretation of human rights and administrative law, our legal frameworks have put far more power into the hands of judges than ever before. What that means for the future of our judicial system is a legitimate debate.
Other examples abound. Our universities, dependent on taxpayer guarantees, are entrusted to effectively oversee the student visa system and determine to a large extent the skills mix of the country. Last week the Sentencing Council announced it was changing its guidelines to tell judges and magistrates to take into account social disadvantage when sentencing criminals. While the online Left fulminate about GB News, little has ever been done about the blatant partisanship of Channel 4 News, and many broadcast journalists have switched from news reporting to campaigning and open advocacy.
It was the BBC taking the decision to finally enforce its editorial guidelines that contributed to Emily Maitlis to leaving the BBC and with Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall establishing The News Agents. Maitlis was reprimanded twice: once for editorialising on screen and once for attacking the Government on social media. This is another way in which elites can be identified: the use of high-profile and powerful positions in society to disseminate consensus ideology. And across many different professions and institutions, that ideology is ultra-liberal.
Whether it is because these positions are adopted by true believers or by leaders too afraid or too lacking in confidence to do otherwise, the result is clear: schools that allow children to “socially transition” to another gender without informing parents; taxpayer-funded research programmes pushing critical race theory; businesses accepting and even imposing woke ideology in the workplace; broadcast media interviews where the critique only ever comes from the Left.
This is why Rees-mogg said what he did about media political elites; it is why Farage is often accepted by the public as an outsider. It has little to do with where he went to school or how much money he has, and much more to do with the fact that he is challenging an orthodoxy from a political perspective that is often ignored.
To deny this – to pretend that all the power in Britain resides in a kind of conservative caricature – is as silly as claiming the opposite. Perhaps the denial is a conscious tactic; perhaps it is sincerely believed. Regardless, it is a symptom of an intellectual rot in which it is easier to complain than to set out a prospectus for change. We can and must do better.
While the online Left fulminate about GB News, little has been done about the blatant partisanship of Channel 4 News