Time to resurrect Cobbett's campaign against The Thing

 By 

The idea of a ‘feral elite’, the phrase coined by Compass chair Neal Lawson has powerful resonance.

Certainly the letter organised by Compass and nef and signed by more than 50 prominent names in the Guardian has caused a stir, suggesting that a citizens jury is needed to investigate and claw back power from the inter-connected elite who dominate British life – largely for their own benefit.

It has resonance, but there are historic parallels that also need to be knitted into this new debate, and particularly around the campaign two centuries ago by the radical agrarian William Cobbett – because the Feral Elite is very similar to his concept of The Thing.

He meant that great mountain of placemen and aristocratic pensioners paid for by the struggling farmers and labourers of the nation.

He believed that Britain was run not so much by a government, but by a financial system which had “drawn the real property of the nation into fewer hands … made land and agriculture objects of speculation … in every part of the kingdom, moulded many farms into one … almost entirely extinguished the race of small farmers … we are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents.”

Cobbett’s analysis is dated, of course, but it is not entirely out of date, because – let’s face it – The Thing still exists.

Most of us are indeed abject dependents of a huge upper middle class machinery for self-aggrandizement. It covers the pension managers who cream outrageous sums from our pensions, through to the quangocrats and directors of those vast instruments of Whitehall control. Not to mention those high-paid pinnacles of the arts establishment puffing a post-modern arts bubble which they are themselves a part of.

What The Thing explains, which the Feral Elite so far does not, is two-fold.

First, that it includes public sector sinecures as well as private sector ones.  This is at its apotheosis when it comes to the banking elite, but it also includes members of the hugely paid quangocracy that runs the NHS or audits local government or runs the vast state databases.

It includes the retail elite, clawing in public subsidy, recycling it in bonuses, while making swathes of our local communities poorer and more dependent.

It include the consultants to the quangocracy, the IT and management consultancies who have creamed off such huge sums from budgets over the past decade (£over £70bn to IT consultancies alone) while undermining the effectiveness of our institutions.

It includes all members of the self-appointed cadre of ubermensch which are subsidised by us all – both in our taxes and in the huge charges stripped from our pensions and savings – whose inflated salaries are causing house price inflation for the rest of us.

So let’s design a strategy, not just to reveal the Feral Elite for what they are, but also The Thing, because those are the economic tentacles which underpin our abject dependence.