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thomas davison

Bankers drowning in money. Out of touch politicians. Unaccountable quangocrats. Not for generations have those who run Britain been so far removed from the common man
By Dominic Sandbrook
PUBLISHED: 22:24, 20 April 2012 | UPDATED: 22:25, 20 April 2012

Old Corruption: Sir Robert Walpole
Three hundred years ago, British politics and society presented a deeply unedifying picture.

In the century after 1700, millions of people lived in desperately poor conditions. Deprived of any meaningful say in their own destiny and condemned to lives of demeaning drudgery, they relieved their frustrations in spasmodic outbursts of mob violence.

At the top, a narrow, gilded elite maintained tight control over the levers of patronage. Under the oligarchic system nicknamed �Old Corruption�, a handful of Whig families and their fawning hangers-on jealously hoarded jobs and influence.
This was a system personified by Britain�s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole � an immensely talented statesman, to be sure, but also one of the most corrupt politicians this country has ever produced.

As a contemporary ballad remarked, the man who governed Britain from 1721 to 1742 �judged of Men�s Worth by the Weight of their Fee�.

At first glance, this might seem like ancient history, irrelevant and obsolete in today�s democratic age. I would argue not.
After all, that ballad could easily apply to many of today�s politicians, especially after the recent revelations about Tory donors paying for dinners with the Prime Minister.
And for one acute observer of 21st- century Britain, we have come full circle. As the brilliant commentator Ferdinand Mount argues in a provocative new book, The New Few, Britain seems to be retreating to the worst excesses of Walpole�s day, when a handful of corrupt oligarchs dominated the lives of millions.

But this is no Left-wing tirade. For Mount is not only a baronet and Old Etonian, he ran the Number 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher and then headed the Right-wing Centre For Policy Studies.

A Tory of the old school, Mount believes that we are sacrificing the gains that Britain made in the decades after 1945. With social mobility in retreat, �power and wealth have, slowly but unmistakably, begun to migrate into the hands of a relatively small elite�.

Humble backgrounds: Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher

Of course, the classic example is the current Government. While previous prime ministers such as Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher came from relatively humble backgrounds, no one could mistake David Cameron � whose mother, by a delicious irony, is Mount�s cousin � for a man of the people.

Of 119 Coalition ministers, 66 per cent went to public schools, compared with only 7 per cent of the general public. And what is more, a staggering 10 per cent went to just one school, Eton.

As for Labour, the Miliband brothers, born and reared in the North London Left-wing intelligentsia, have no more in common with ordinary party members than Sir Robert Walpole did with the average 18th-century labourer.

Men of the people? David Cameron and Boris Johnson in the livery of the Oxford University Bullingdon Club
But, as Mount shows, the slow corrosion of parliamentary democracy is more than merely a question of the individuals involved.
Mass membership of political parties is in deep decline. In the Fifties, the Labour Party had a staggering five million members, while the Tories had about 2.5 million.

What that meant was that about one in five people belonged to a political party � something unimaginable in the 21st century. For today, the Labour Party has barely 180,000 members, while the Tories have fewer than 250,000.

North London intelligentsia: Ed and David Miliband are hardly more in-touch than their Tory counterparts
Little wonder that voter turnout is so pitiful, because even amid the excitement of the 2010 election only 65 per cent of the electorate bothered to vote.
Yet this is merely a symptom of a wider malaise. It is a myth, Mount argues, that the British people are �apathetic� � for hundreds of thousands, even millions, are perfectly happy to march for and against major issues of our time, from the Iraq War and fox-hunting to student fees and spending cuts.

The reality is that most people believe political participation will get them nowhere and achieve nothing. They see party conferences stage-managed by the leadership and Commons votes rigged by the whips.
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They see policies devised on the Downing Street sofa, and top-down solutions imposed by Whitehall bureaucrats.

More than 30 years ago, Labour�s Tony Benn argued that British politics desperately needed to be opened up to popular participation. Mr Benn might have been completely wrong about many things, but on this point he was quite right.

The sad result, as Mount shows, is that today, power in Britain belongs to a largely unelected elite. Even local government has become a hollow sham. The irony is that once, Britain prided itself on its splendid traditions of local democracy.

Quite right: Tony Benn has argued that politics needs to be more open
In the Victorian age, for example, the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, the great Joseph Chamberlain, brought in municipal gas and water supplies, cleared the city�s slums, and turned himself into the most famous politician in the land.

But that is now a fading memory. Outside London, few people can name a single local representative � largely because Whitehall has become so arrogant and overbearing that not even local planning decisions are safe from interference.
Mount gives the example of High Bickington, a village in Devon which put forward a much-needed scheme for 36 new homes for poor families, 16 private homes, a school and a community centre.

Everyone backed it. The district council approved it. So did the county council. Even the relevant minister in London liked it. But the scheme died, crushed by the Government Office For The South West � just one of thousands of quangos of faceless, unelected bureaucrats.

In many ways, bureaucrats and managers have become the oligarchs of our time. No one elects them, and it is almost impossible to kick them out. Most are from privileged homes; few have any sense of what it is like to drag yourself up from the bottom.

Instead of trusting professional people to get on with the job, they spend their time devising ever more elaborate targets, complete with league tables and performance charts. In return, they are paid sums that make most ordinary people weep with envy.

Most NHS chiefs earn more than the Prime Minister, while board members of the regulator Monitor, which oversees NHS Foundation Trusts, take home a whopping �237,500 a year.

Even many university vice-chancellors earn more than �300,000 a year � and this, grotesquely, at a time when their students will soon face tuition bills of �9,000 a year.

Obscene: The salaries of City executives like Bob Diamond are staggering to most people
At the heart of all this is a cancerous culture of materialism, greed and self-interest, not just at the top of the public sector, but in banking, finance and business.

Mount quotes a study for Forbes magazine, which found that, in 1998, the CEOs of Britain�s top 100 companies earned 45 times the pay of the ordinary worker.

Who could want more money than that? Well, as it turned out, the CEOs could. By 2010, they earned a staggering 120 times the ordinary salary. And the shocking thing is that the terrible crash of 2007-8 made no difference at all.

Thanks to the bankers� folly, British taxpayers have had to fork out billions.

But while ordinary families have been struggling to make ends meet after one of the worst recessions in our history, the financial elite have continued to stuff their own coffers with cash. In 2010, as Britain was limping out of recession, City bonuses came to a staggering �14 billion, with one executive, Barclays boss Bob Diamond, pocketing an incredible �6.5 million.

Elsewhere, the pay gap continues to widen. Sir Martin Sorrell, the head of the advertising giant WPP, earns a stunning 631 times more than his average employee.

For Mount, this is the unacceptable face of capitalism. As he reminds us, the U.S. financier J.P. Morgan, who founded one of the world�s greatest business empires, once remarked that no senior executive should earn more than 20 times the salary of his typical employee.

Yet in their sheer greed for plunder, Britain�s new oligarchs have lost sight of their moral obligations.

They are, however, not alone. Indeed, the concentration of power and money in the hands of an increasingly tiny and privileged elite is not just a British phenomenon � as a glance across the Channel will tell you.

Bastion of bureaucracy: The European Parliament in Brussels
As Mount observes, one of the most impregnable bastions of the new bureaucratic order is the Brussels headquarters of the European Union.

Once conceived as a laudably idealistic project to banish the hatreds of the past, the EU has become �an arrogant and unresponsive oligarchy�.

In this case, Mount�s term �oligarchy� � meaning government by a privileged few � is particularly well chosen.

He writes that the Eurocrats �belong to a ruling elite that cannot be ejected by the voters and whose membership changes only through being refreshed by co-opting others like themselves�.

No one votes for European commissioners or Brussels officials. We cannot get rid of them; most of us do not even know who they are.

�Insulated from the hot breath of the electorate�, they are as remote from the rest of us as Walpole�s Whig grandees were from our 18th-century forebears. And this, of course, helps to explain the genesis of the euro, �the oligarch project to end all oligarch projects, entered into in a spirit of reckless vainglory and with no thought of who its casualties might be if things went wrong�.

The casualties, as we now know, are the ordinary people of Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

Yes, their governments were criminally reckless, and to some extent they are paying the inevitable price for their own absurd profligacy.

But thanks to the ruthless imperatives of the eurozone and the ideological self-interest of Europe�s leaders, millions of ordinary working families now find themselves condemned to years of cuts, grinding poverty and unemployment.

Could there be a better symbol of the gulf between leaders and led?

The truth is that, like so many Western countries, Britain has become an increasingly polarised country, divided between a self-interested elite, a welfare-dependent underclass, and a great mass of people in between, bewildered, disenfranchised and increasingly angry.

As Mount notes, Left-wing critics often blame this on Margaret Thatcher.

Filthy rich: Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson encouraged the accumulation of vast wealth
Indeed, even he admits that, sadly, despite her attempts to encourage social mobility � epitomised by the laudable and groundbreaking sale of council houses to working-class tenants � the gap between rich and poor widened during the Eighties. But New Labour, with their slavish obeisance to the City of London, contributed to this just as much as the Tories.

It was, after all, Tony Blair�s right-hand man, Peter Mandelson, who remarked that they were �intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich� � a statement that would have been unimaginable from the working-class men and women who built the self-described people�s party.

And in any case, the causes go deeper than the political headlines, from the slow and sadly inevitable death of heavy industry, which kicked away the ladder for so many working-class school leavers, to the onset of globalisation, which saw thousands of manufacturing jobs disappear to China and India, and gave birth to a new international elite of the super-rich.

'We're all in this together': To most people, George Osborne's words sound worse than hollow
At the end of his elegant but angry book, Mount suggests a host of changes that might make a difference.

Giving shareholders a real say on directors� pay, he says, would help to check the greed of the financial elite. Reforming the welfare state by slashing bureaucracy, targeting the genuinely needy and making work pay, would help those at the bottom.

Strengthening the House of Commons, by beefing up the committee system to hold the over-mighty executive to account, might revitalise our democracy.

And reviving the old technical schools would give ordinary school-leavers genuine vocational skills and experiences, enabling our working-class youngsters to compete with their international rivals.

But the really necessary change, it seems to me, is a cultural one. For half a century, Britain, like other Western countries, has become an increasingly materialistic, individualistic society, symbolised by the rise of rights at the expense of responsibilities.

We now take for granted that the state will look after us. We automatically demand respect, without necessarily earning it. We see ourselves as masters of our little universes, as self-contained individuals in a world that no longer believes in moral obligations and social duty.

At first, this seemed a tremendously positive development, banishing the insularity, poverty and class-consciousness of the past.

After years of deprivation, millions delighted in their new comforts. And after centuries of impenetrable hierarchy, the rise of individualism seemed a thoroughly good thing.

But the sad truth is that all this has long since tipped over into naked self-interest.

The bankers who feather their own nests, the politicians who fiddle their expenses, the fat cats who dodge their tax bills � all are merely symptomatic of a general culture that ignores the greater good and scorns the national interest.

One day, surely, the pendulum will shift. Not even Sir Robert Walpole, who ruled Britain for so long, lasted for ever.

�We are all in this together,� says Chancellor George Osborne � and, to put it bluntly, only a fool would believe him.

Yet as Mount writes: �We can remember times in the not so distant past when this belonging together was taken for granted. So it could be again.�

Amen to that.

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