The eternal rebels

No one likes to be told they're the elite

Almost fifty years ago Daniel Bell wrote in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism of the great changes that had occurred since the 1960s, a period he wondered might be a sort of new reformation. Although the decade had ended with Richard Nixon’s election victory, there had really only been one winner in the great conflict.

‘The protagonists of the adversary culture,’ Bell wrote, ‘because of the historic subversive effect on traditional bourgeois values, substantially influence, if not dominate, the cultural establishments today: the publishing houses, museums, and galleries; the major news, picture and cultural weeklies and monthlies; the theatre, the cinema, and the universities.’

In fact much of the rebellion of the previous decade, in Bell’s view, had been nothing more than ‘act of bravado’, a movement that ‘was neither daring nor revolutionary’ and trampling on codes that had been weakened by the modernists decades earlier.

A new sort of culture, and cultural elite, had emerged as a result, based on ideas of self-actualisation, rampant individualism and an aversion to parental authority, but one also devoted to capitalism: Left-wing on social issues but Right-wing on economics. The cultural contradictions Bell saw in capitalism – between a Puritan desire to earn and a hedonist need to consume – only became more pronounced under Reagan, and Mark Lilla would later write that ‘the cultural and Reagan revolutions have proved to be complementary, not contradictory, events.’

So it was in Britain, too, although somewhat later and in a country which, unlike the United States, was not built on liberalism, and which still retains many bastions of an old establishment – the Royal Family, the House of Lords and public schools. Yet nonetheless here, too, a new elite also emerged, heavy influenced by American politics and culture and pushed by the same social forces: the expansion of universities, deindustrialisation, changing technology and the dynamism of free-market economics.

Yet one of the defining characteristics of this new elite is that, born in the bravado and rebellion of the 60s, it will never admit to being an elite.

Writing in the Times last week, academic Matthew Goodwin outlined the thesis of his new book, Values, Voice and Virtue, arguing that Britain has ‘a new middle-class professional elite… Symbolised by the likes of Sir Keir Starmer, Emily Maitlis, Alastair Campbell, Emma Watson, Hugh Grant, James O’Brien and more than a few columnists, media editors and BBC managers, the new elite has been swept forward by the vast expansion of the universities.’

Goodwin wrote how ‘they have been shaped, foremost, by their education at the most prestigious Oxbridge or Russell Group universities which, like them, have swung sharply leftwards over the past 50 years. Whereas in the 1960s, the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics in British universities was three to one, today it is closer to eight to one, reflecting how the new elite and their children have often come of age amid “ideological monocultures”.

‘Unlike the old right-leaning elite, the new elite now leans overwhelmingly towards Labour and the liberal left. Had only university graduates voted at the last election, Jeremy Corbyn would currently be prime minister. This has injected a powerful new “education divide” into our politics, pushing graduates and non-graduates firmly apart, not only economically but also politically and culturally.

‘One reason Labour lost the last election so heavily is because the party doubled down on the urban new elite while turning its back on the periphery. In fact, Labour strategists confess they did not bother to hold focus groups in some of these areas for decades. This is not just about Labour, however. The new elite is just as present on the right, reflected in the likes of Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Sarah Wollaston — culturally left conservatives who vigorously opposed Brexit. Today, it is this deep and growing rift between the elite graduate class and everybody else that is giving rise to the three new fault lines which have been reshaping our politics and country over the past decade and which will drive more unrest in the years ahead.’

This seemed to upset quite a lot of people. To quote just a few samples, The Times’s Matt Chorley tweeted: ‘For the avoidance of doubt @GoodwinMJ : Gary Lineker, Carol Vorderman, Emma Watson, Emily Maitlis and even Keir Starmer are not in the government. Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly and Dominic Raab are.

Will Hutton, a former Observer editor-in-chief, wrote: ‘The disaffection of the working class is not caused by Matthew Goodwin’s demonised liberal elite ( maybe 100 strong) but the collapse of Britains social contract by the real elite - the right. Liberal elite have captured the conversation — expect a revolt.’

Further to the Left, Adam Bienkov even declared a ‘Goodwin’s Law’, which ‘states that the longer an online debate continues, the greater the possibility that the side with actual power will accuse the side with none, of being part of the ‘elite”’.

There were many, many other examples, some far less polite and delicately put, all angered about the idea that the British elite might be liberal or progressive.

I can see why, the country being in the state it is, that no one wants to be blamed for being in charge when, quite rightly, that is the responsibility of the governing Conservative Party. What I find strange is people genuinely denying to themselves that British cultural and social elites are by some distance more progressive than the British public, and that they have a huge bearing on the country’s direction.

By elites I would include senior academics, the people who run television and radio, lawyers, publishers, scientists and medical professionals, leading figures in the charitable sector and the civil service, and even those in charge of the police and justice system. If you were to poll the most influential five or ten thousand people from those sectors, they would be considerably to the Left of the British public on social issues, while to the Right of them on economics (although by a smaller margin).

The Conservative Party is very good at winning elections, although the last one was largely down to Labour’s graduate-dominated membership choosing a pretty unelectable leader. The Tories are not so effective at making the country conservative, and despite the various self-induced hysteria about fascist Britain, the current government is by many metrics more liberal than New Labour, which is hardly surprising when the average Tory MP is about as conservative as the average Labour voter. Most Tory MPs don’t believe anything, in fact.

The Government is to blame for the running of the country, but that is not to deny that most people running education, or the civil service, or most other powerful sections of the state and civil society, tend to be part of Goodwin’s progressive elite. 

There are exceptions; Britain’s newspapers have long had a Right-wing bias, although more so among tabloids, whose power to influence opinion is very limited (in one poll in the 1980s a majority of Sun readers thought their paper supported Labour – as they did). But the newspaper industry is in sharp decline and journalism itself has a huge Left:Right skew now, and even most younger journalists at conservative newspapers are progressive.

People really dislike the idea that progressive elites run the country, but a quite simple test of who wields power is ‘what are people’s politics like in private compared to what they are like in public.’ I know of a few fairly high-profile people who present a public image of their political views which is misleading, and they are all more Right-wing in private. Not unpleasantly Right-wing; not racist or anti-gay, just the sort of median national opinion it’s unwise to voice in public.

Why do people consistently think that they have to pretend to be more progressive to rise up in their chosen careers? Because those are the establishment views. If I was advising a young person going to work in any area of the British establishment, whether the civil service, MI5, the National Trust, the judiciary, the Girl Guides, the education bureaucracy or anything else, I would advise them to keep any conservative opinions to themselves. (And clear their social media.) Which beliefs will most likely get you sacked from your job or monitored by the authorities? What beliefs are considered genuinely subversive?

This argument might seem bizarre because there certainly is a conservative elite in Britain, although in decline, one reason for that decline being that progressives make their values institutional through equality laws. Almost every major institution has sizeable DEI departments whose function is to make progressive ideas the social norm. When an NHS Trust states that equality and diversity take precedence over religious belief, they are just formally stating the obvious — progressivism is the state religion. Britain has blasphemy laws to protect it. That doesn’t change, whoever is in government.

Another reason that progressive, university-educated journalists dislike the fact of the liberal elite is because the Right-wing commentators who make the argument don’t exactly grow up in Ken Loach films themselves. Conservatives critical of ‘the elite’ tend to come from comfortable backgrounds - although not Goodwin. I’ve made a self-conscious effort to never criticise the ‘liberal elite’ ever since I was having drinks at a neighbour’s house in Crouch End, arguing with the neighbour in question (a Times journalist) about the liberal elite while drinking Prosecco, and suddenly having this overwhelming sense of my own ridiculousness.

But then this conflict, like all ‘culture wars’, is an intra-elite struggle. During the last Reformation the new religion was heavily dominant among the educated elite in London, Oxford and Cambridge, but Catholicism was still prominent among the aristocracy. And the aristocrats are often the true believers; working-class Tory voters are often not that socially conservative compared to conservative elites, and in the US, the most ‘consistently conservative’ voters are those with post-grad levels degrees. I would be very surprised if the same wasn’t true in Britain.

Many members of this new ‘elite’ are also poor – a feeling made far worse by London’s catastrophic housing market. Academics, who often live in poverty, resent being told they’re part of the elite, even though they have huge cultural power (just like the clergy they replaced).

But wealth does not always correlate with status or class. Back in 2000, David Brooks observed in Bobos in Paradise that there are ‘boundary markers’ and that membership of the elite is not open to certain rich people, citing as examples televangelist Pat Robertson and some then-famous New York real estate mogul you’ll need to look up on Wikipedia called Donald Trump.

The other objection people make to Goodwin’s argument is about elites having different values to the population. Many people seemed riled by this claim but as a counter could only cite very ancient examples, such as the division between Saxons and Normans. We live in a society far less rooted in traditional moral teaching than the society of 60 years ago, one in which a free market of values has grown – an inevitable result of the huge decline in religious belief. There is clearly far greater variation in moral values than there was 60, 100 or 200 years ago, when people from a range of social classes would have had pretty similar views on most ethical questions and social issues; there would have been small numbers of radicals who agreed with Emma Goldman on free love or the ‘third sex’ but they would be very small in number. The main divide in British politics until the 1960s was over resources.

To deny this value divide strikes me as strange, but one of the characteristics of the new elite is a reluctance to accept any sort of victory. Bell characterised the 1960s reformation as being a revolt against parental authority; now that the cultural insurgents are firmly in charge, and have been for some time, they are unwilling to accept that authority has passed into their hands.