The Establishment by Owen Jones
Owen Jones is northern, a socialist, and he writes for The Guardian. I even agree with his viewpoint a fair amount of the time (both in this book and in his articles). I should have loved The Establishment, but unfortunately I didn't - something about the way it's put together got my back up and made me start picking his arguments apart. If it does that to a comrade (yes I am using that in a slightly tongue in cheek way), how far will it go towards persuading an adversary?
The premise of the book is that a small, influential band - the big players in the commercial world, the media, the City - bypass democracy by having a quiet word with our elected politicians so they can have things their own way, no matter what the people want. In essence there is (so the theory goes) a prevailing 'establishment' viewpoint and to rock the boat is to invite reprisal, from being missed off someone's Christmas list to being hounded by an unsympathetic and less than straightforward media. In many ways reading The Establishment (subtitled 'and how they get away with it') was like having a concentrated dose of Private Eye (and will be familiar territory to Eye readers) but with added sensationalism that fell somewhere between That's Life and Our Tune. For me (and maybe I'm hard-hearted) the laying-it-on-thick sentimentality of the section about one woman's loss of a son at Hillsborough undermined the very real tragedy of that day for her and her family, as well as the important point Jones was making about the shocking behaviour of the police and media.
When it comes to the webs of power and the shadowy connections between politicians of all stripes, corporate interests and high-profile journalists there are things that should be pointed out more widely, there are definitely things to worry about, and there are things I think shouldn't be allowed (Gordon Brown's wife apparently being high up in a financial PR firm when he was PM and had recently been Chancellor, for instance). Some of it comes across here as a bit conspiracy theorist though: this MP was seen having dinner with a family friend who works for this big firm who would benefit from a change in the law! The scandal is not that this group of people who went to school or university together, or worked together in their first jobs, are still friends now that they've diversified into government, lobbying, the BBC etc (I'd be more worried if they claimed not to be) but that so many of the influential jobs in the Westminster-media bubble are filled by such a small pool of candidates from such similar backgrounds.
The book sometimes got a bit repetitive (maybe in some cases he was just trying to ram a point home) and while it's clearly been a long time in the making, with copious research and a long programme of interviews with influential people, it felt like the end product had been thrown together in a hurry, with the same sentence appearing in two consecutive paragraphs or a sentence both beginning and ending with 'in 1994' for example.
Where the book is stronger is the 'Conclusion: a democratic revolution' chapter. This is where the author's passion comes through in a coherent argument about why anti-establishment types need to present a proper alternative, not just rail against what's there now. I wonder how different this (and several arguments earlier in the book) would have been if there was the slightest hint that Jeremy Corbyn might be about to become Labour leader.
In short, while I applaud the intention, this book just didn't do it for me. I'm not saying don't read it (I still learnt a few things from it), but I recommend that you read some Owen Jones articles from The Guardian, read some Private Eye, and if you want to know about vested interests and spin, read the marvellous novel The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey or, even better, A History of the Protestant Reformation by William Cobbett (which I've written about here).