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This book surveys the elite state of play in Britain as it is now. It argues that the Establishment, as it has been conceived, is coming to an end. The book looks at how elites, by trying to get ahead, have destabilised the very institutions on which their power is based. It also looks at how leaders have adapted to get to the top. Those most suited to pleasing their assessors get there first. The book reveals some of the ways elites use to stay at the top once they get there. It looks at the secrets and lies that underpin elite power and control. Some are systematic and organised, and some are simply the lies leaders tell themselves. The book shows how leadership has been transformed into a numbers game because numbers can be tallied up in a way that ideas cannot. And because elites co-create the game, they can also change the rules as and when they need to. The book focuses on exit strategies and how canny elites survive when it all goes wrong. It briefly explores what solutions there might be to the current problems of leadership.
) – can be a good safety valve against excessive elite control. As this author has written elsewhere, such votes can be the citizens’ shield and not the rulers’ swords 5 . It is possible to go one step further and let the people (or rather a percentage of them) decide whether they want to have a say. Imagine, for example, if that were the case in Scotland. Then the voters
its political message. By the 1820s, the ultimate emptiness of elite-controlled civic ritual was evident for a majority of the working population. Popular hatred of George IV was fostered in the aftermath of Peterloo and the Queen Caroline affair; Thomas Asline Ward of Sheffield wrote in his diary in 1820, ‘We had rather a poor procession on the King’s proclamation, and some hissing. The yeomanry were very unpopular, though their captains, Shore and Rimington, would not act as the Manchesterians’.23 The rituals of civic patriotism provided a legal outlet for
‘subgovernments, little governments, clientelism, interest group liberalism, interest group capture, whirlpools of power . . . [and] iron triangles’ to describe the elite control of the policy process. Also relevant for elite theorists was the ‘second face of power’, more particularly those who had power over agenda-setting and which issues reached the policy agenda (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962). The issues of coercion, authority, manipulation and power through the threat of sanctions became relevant in this second dimension of power. This theory was subsequently developed by
contrary, violence was the most important bone of contention between republicans and Catholic churchmen, forcefully summarised in 1867 by the bishop of Kerry’s famous dictum that hell was not hot enough, nor eternity long enough to punish the Fenian leaders.8 This antagonism arose from the church’s instinctive distrust of secret movements that conspired to undermine order in society and were impervious to elite control. As David Miller has pointed out, it also gave the bishops bargaining power vis-à-vis the British government.9 The church’s opposition helped to contain
controls (including by the use of selectively constructed ‘public opinion’ data – see for instance Lewis, 2001).2 The senses of ‘good popular’ derive more or less directly from the broad and imprecise idea of affirming the (ordinary) ‘people’ in relation both to cultural and political goals. This is a powerful dynamic in the context of struggles against manifest elite control and is therefore a prominent theme in political history, including the history of anti-colonialism and of nation-building. The ‘popular’ is a term that is not compromised by the senses of the
, through filmmaking and other creative forms, is always in flux. As Sarah Oates and Rachel K. Gibson point out, though, if some ‘dystopian theorists have argued in the most extreme instance that the Internet age may usher in a new era of repression of citizen rights and Orwellian-style constant surveillance […] the approach taken by most authoritarian states to the Internet confirms to a degree the arguments of those emphasising the medium's inherent democratising properties’ (Oates and Gibson 2006 , 10). This does not mean that ‘more subtle shifts toward greater elite
on the outskirts of a town centre and thus to some extent independent of elite control or surveillance, but near to major routes of communication with similar communities in other towns. These were distinctively outlier places that fostered continuity in political and religious dissent and a strong sense of trade and community independence..Trades societies, radical political groups and religious sects seem to have been more active in these places than in their nearest towns.2 P. Belford, ‘Work, space and power in an English industrial slum: The Crofts, Sheffield
precepts of the political elite. In cities such as Glasgow and Belfast, principal–agent uniformity was achieved by means of patronage based on religion. In both cities, local council bureaucracies were recruited from Protestant communities, and so officials in housing departments in particular perpetuated social and economic advantages to their co-religionists. Elsewhere, local government in the north-east of England where the Labour Party has been dominant for long periods of time, there has been a particular version of elite control where council leaders – T. Dan Smith
George’, p. 84. 28 Patriot , 30 April 1839. 29 Michael Cottrell, ‘St. Patrick’s Day parades in nineteenth-century Toronto: a study of immigrant adjustment and elite control’, Histoire Sociale/Social History , 25:49 (1992), p. 60