Britain's New Patrician Establishment

As a youngster I first encountered the British establishment through satire. Private Eye, TW3, the Pythons, and notably Derek and Clive. So as I grew, I saw in my mind red-robed judges invariably with ladies underwear, stockings and suspenders hidden from view, priggish bowler-hatted paragons mired deep in sleaze and vice, MPs preaching virtue then stealing the silver, sin-damning bishops caught cottaging in public lavatories. Of course, cases such as ‘Bunnies can and will go to France’ provided joy and hilarity, and Peter Cook’s take on that bent judge’s summing up remains a classic.

However, these things aren’t static. That 1960s establishment is just a crude parody today. Pompey’s faction, the new Patrician Class, is in the twenty-first century a very different cohort. Here are my candidates for its composition.

THE POLITICAL CLASS
Professional politicians of all shades, lobbyists, advisors, SPADs, researchers, consultants. In particular, those who have never had a job in their lives unconnected with politics, those following explicitly the fast-track Oxbridge PPE – researcher – MP route. Neither party, sex, race or faith preclude anyone from membership and indeed one of the most egregious exhibitions of political nepotism is from Labour; Jack Straw’s son Will, Tony Benn’s boy Hilary, Corbyn’s son Seb, McDonnell’s ‘political advisor’ and being groomed for a safe Labour seat are amongst the most famous.

THE FOURTH ESTATE
The mainstream press and broadcast TV – Sky, BBC, ITV. For years they’ve skated by convincing us that the balance they should maintain is that between left and right – when in fact left and right are just adjacent faces of the same new establishment. The fourth estate, the MSM as they are known in abbreviation, are unashamedly pro-establishment, pro-globalist and pro-supernational, and thus deeply hostile to reform.

THE UNELECTED ELITES
Not only the unelected bosses in Whitehall, but those at the most senior chief officer level throughout the civil and public services. Police chief officers, NHS and local government chief executives, specialist scientific and technical advisers and more commonly now those who run the unaccountable NDPBs and fake charities – the agencies and their drivers, doing the dirty work of the establishment away from public control and scrutiny. Salaries exceeding that of the PM, generous golden hello and farewell payments, murky routes of appointment, make this entire cohort so utterly remote, so completely unfamiliar with the ordinary people of Britain they could all be aliens.

THE JUDICIAL GLOBALISTS
British trained lawyers, judges, jurists who believe that the future of law is global, a world legal order, encompassing intellectual property, tax, incorporation, contract, mercantile and relations between the global corporates and the supernational authorities. They support the executive legal authority of the EU, UN and other global agencies and want to see more legal power flow from the world’s nations to these bodies, staffed and run by unelected elites. Already they have corrupted part of UK law with Eurolaw, through the role of the ECJ, the EU’s political court, in destroying national judicial independence

THE FAT ABBOTS OF ACADEME
As bloated, dissolute and greedy as the greasy-palmed Abbots of pre-reformation days, our university vice-chancellors have stuffed their mouths with ponzi gold. These are the new denizens of an aircraft’s first class cabin and free champagne, jetting to Asia, Australasia, the States for missions and conferences, five star hotels and lavish film-star treatment, their air-con limos gliding them from one spurious quasi-academic event to another. The merry go round is reciprocal – hosting their wealthy foreign counterparts at home, with generous hospitality and an official blessing. Theirs is no longer the world of scholarship, education and knowledge but a billion dollar globalist business that makes its elites very, very, wealthy.

THE GLOBALIST THUGS
It’s now a familiar game for the global corporates, the mutually beneficial trade-off with the supernational organisations of the EU, UN and other globalist bodies to encourage ever-greater and complex regulation. Regulation restricts competition, creates barriers to entry for new firms, gives huge advantages of incumbency to the existing global actors and disadvantages competition from SMEs and start ups. The globals have exhausted their own capacity to be profitable, and exist solely through this anti-capitalist thuggery and by an ever decreasing series of takeovers and mergers. Their stranglehold over the UN and EU, and through their adherents and beneficiaries in the new establishment their power over us all, has slowed growth to a glacial pace here in the West. Only freeing the creators of growth and innovation – the SMEs and national actors – from the shackles of the global corporates can restore Britain’s international competitiveness.

There are more. This list is by no means comprehensive. Bishops and Brigadiers no longer play the roles they played in the past, and though they may hold globalist establishment views, their effect is diminished. For a comprehensive list of establishment individuals, including those in show-business and so forth, see the Wikipedia catalogue of Remain supporters.  

And don’t be disheartened by their number and power. They are Pompey’s bloated patricians – and they face us, Julius Caesar’s lean legions of plebeians. And we always win.