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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.
culture and ideas, and adopting dominant norms and positions, no matter how nonsensical. Chapter 6 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. Chapter 7 shows that leadership has been transformed into a numbers game because numbers can be tallied up in a way that ideas can't. And because elites co-create the game, they can also change the rules as and when they need to. Part IV focuses on exit strategies and how canny elites
Introduction Many of the sources of modern-day elite power have changed. Leaders don't all have exclusive educations, stockpiles of money, established old-boys’ clubs and secure jobs. But they do possess alternative resources: secrecy and invisibility, access to expert knowledge, connections with new flexible networks and, above all, mobility. In fact, in our globalised, unstable world, mobility has become ‘the principle tool of power and domination’. 1 For ordinary souls, mobility is
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
The push for greater private sector involvement in financing and operating infrastructure has sparked resistance from many quarters, including trade unions, environmental and human rights campaigners, and other social movements. But its trajectory remains largely unaffected. Does the problem lie is a failure of activists to shout loudly enough? Or in the ways that progressive activists are organising (at least in part)? What forms of resistance are failing? What ways of social and political organising are proving more promising in building and strengthening ways of living that respect the collective right of all (not just the few) to decent livelihoods? What oppositional strategies assist elite power? And what strategies unsettle it? To what extent has effective resistance been undermined by the hollowing out of many of the social institutions, such as trade unions, through which elite power has historically been challenged? Or by the often depoliticised organising that has emerged in many countries to fill the vacuum? Challenging the trajectory of contemporary infrastructure finance – and the inequalities and injustices to which it gives rise – is likely to be more fruitful where it is part of wider efforts to foster and support commons-focused resistance to accumulation.
US: A long struggle by a small group of politicians and journalists over a decade led to numerous abortive attempts to pass legislation in the 1960s. The bill finally became the 1966 FOI Act following a long process of negotiation in the Senate and opposition, though crucially not rejection, from the then President Lyndon Johnson (Reylea 1983: Yu and Davies 2012).
Australia: the Australian FOI policy development, beginning in the 1970s and ending in 1982, was a long series of advances and retreats. The proposed legislation was alternatively weakened during its passage, with crusaders both in government and in the Senate seeking to preserve key features against bureaucratic and political opposition (Snell 2001: Terrill 1998).
India: the traditional view of Indian Right to Information Act is of a remarkable grassroots alliance of dedicated reformers pushed openness legislation from the local level upwards during the 1990s and 2000s (Roberts 2006: Sharma 2013). However the reality is more complex as RTI was the result of a combination of piecemeal reforms in the 1980s, shifts in elite power and support from parts of the bureaucracy and from Sonia Ghandi herself (Singh 2007: Sharma 2013).
1970 manifesto is taken to be the legitimising process for decisions to be taken in the 1970 Parliament, then the government's application to join the Common Market cannot be said to be with the full-hearted democratic consent of the British people. It was this which for many suggested the need for a referendum in 1975. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that elite power is untrammelled as that would be to disregard not only the pluralist arguments, but also the influence of the media and public opinion. Leading pluralists Dahl and Lindblom
This book explains the direct link between the structure of the corporation and its limitless capacity for ecological destruction. It argues that we need to find the most effective means of ending the corporation’s death grip over us. The corporation is a problem, not merely because it devours natural resources, pollutes and accelerates the carbon economy. As this book argues, the constitutional structure of the corporation eradicates the possibility that we can put the protection of the planet before profit. A fight to get rid of the corporations that have brought us to this point may seem an impossible task at the moment, but it is necessary for our survival. It is hardly radical to suggest that if something is killing us, we should over-power it and make it stop. We need to kill the corporation before it kills us.
practices, and secured an image of America as benign and misunderstood in its international political interactions. It shut down space for critical engagement with elite power and foreign policy controversy, or dissent from the ideological status quo, and foreclosed the possibility of genuine dialogue across cultural horizons. These delegitimising dynamics had their roots in a
half of permanent secretaries had been to private school and a similar proportion to Oxbridge. Only 22% of FTSE 350 CEOs had a private education and 18% went to Oxbridge (just 12% of those on the Sunday Times Rich List). The senior judiciary and armed forces are still clearly dominated by those with such an educational background. But in most other elite sectors, the figures are more like a third or less. The interviews and longer-term survey data reveal a couple of important trends. First, there has been a shift in elite power from