The Economist November 20th 2021 Britain 35Whorunsthecountry?
B
oris johnsonis under siege from all directions. Stories of “To
ry sleaze” multiply. Constituencies in the north of England are
furious about plans to scale back highspeed rail. Yet the prime
minister nevertheless found time on November 15th to don white
tie and tails and address the annual Lord Mayor’s banquet at the
Guildhall in London. Packed with people far more powerful than
mere politicians, it had all the hallmarks of an establishment af
fair. The proceedings were incomprehensible to outsiders; dull
ness and high theatre intermingled. Mr Johnson started by name
checking dignitaries: aldermen, sheriffs and the chief commoner
(whose title was once rendered in Chinese as “head peasant”) and
progressed to quantum computing and AstraZeneca vaccines.
Henry Fairlie, who coined the term “establishment” in 1955, ar
gued that “the exercise of power in Britain...cannot be understood
unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially”. Surveying the
stately procession of seabass and grassfed beef on Monday night
(Monday night!) he would have been certain that nothing had
changed. Yet the selfsatisfied surface concealed a split. For Brit
ain’s establishment is now not unitary, but divided—a pair of rival
power centres, hostile and mutually uncomprehending.
One, centred on the Conservative Party, includes such vestiges
of the old establishment as the armed forces and great public
schools. It extends to publicrelations firms, government contrac
tors and rightwing newspapers. The City, once happy with New
Labour, was pushed towards the Conservatives by Labour’s former
farleft leader, Jeremy Corbyn. This establishment’s heartlands are
the provinces, where smallbusiness owners complain about their
taxes and swap stories of political correctness gone mad.
The other power centre is progressiveliberal. It is less focused
on a political party (though it loved New Labour) than on cultural
institutions: the civil service, universities, publishing houses, the
bbc, the Observer and Guardian newspapers, the arts bureaucracy
and, increasingly, the legal profession. It is so metropolitan that
the division between the two echoes the split between the Court
and Country factions of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Tory establishment believes in the primacy of the nation
state; the liberal establishment in cosmopolitanism. This divide
was both reflected in and reinforced by the struggle over Brexit.TheToryestablishmentbelieves in the primacy of the queenin
parliament (much of Mr Johnson’s legislative agenda is motivated
by a desire to undo New Labour’s constitutional fiddling); the lib
eral establishment in dividing power between lots of institutions.
The Tory establishment sees British history as a treasurehouse of
achievements (David Cameron, Mr Johnson’s predecessorbut
one, said that Henrietta Marshall’s “Our Island Story”, published in
1905, was his favourite book as a child, and he often referred to it
when calling for reforms of the history syllabus.) The liberal estab
lishment believes that the “arc of history bends towards justice”,
with justice defined as diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Tory establishment’s most irritating tendency is to justify
its actions as the will of the people—as if the leading light of Tory
philosophy was JeanJacques Rousseau rather than Edmund
Burke. The liberal establishment, meanwhile, thinks it knows
what is good for people. The Tories see the man in the pub as a
fount of wisdom; liberals increasingly think he is a bigot.
Having two establishments is not all bad. Whichever is out of
power can act as a counterweight to the government, helping to
make up for Britain’s lack of constitutional checks and balances.
Arguably, Britain is now politically healthier than during the early
days of New Labour, when both government and cultural institu
tions sang from the same hymnsheet.
But there are many disadvantages, among them institutional
ised irresponsibility. For both elites refuse to acknowledge that
that is what they are, seeing themselves rather as heroic rebels. Mr
Johnson (educated at Eton and Balliol) thinks of himself as leader
of an army of revolutionaries against what he calls “the blob”—
that is, civil servants and anyone else who seeks to frustrate his
will. Panjandrums of the liberal elite, such as heads of Oxford col
leges, an astonishing number of them castoffs from the civil ser
vice and bbc rather than distinguished scholars, regard them
selves as freedomfighters against a dictatorial government.
Another disadvantage is the triumph of extremism. You can’t
get into the Tory establishment without endorsing Brexit, or the
liberal establishment without lauding diversity. Thus the Tories
have lost moderates such as Rory Stewart, a former diplomat and
candidate for the party leadership. The liberals have exiled hetero
dox thinkers such as Kathleen Stock, a philosopher who questions
liberal pieties about trans identities, and who recently left Sussex
University after harassment by students and colleagues. Power without responsibility
Yet another drawback is a weird combination of blameshifting
and tailpulling. The government is adept at pinning crises on civ
il servants—hence the unusually high number of permanent sec
retaries to resign since the election of 2019. The liberal establish
ment attributes everything bad to Tory cuts. The Tory establish
ment delights in foisting hardcore Brexiteers on the liberal estab
lishment—hence the attempt to install Paul Dacre, former editor
of the Daily Mail, as chair of Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator.
The liberal establishment is never happier than when casting the
other side as womanhating racists, even though the Conservative
Party has produced two female prime ministers and Labour none,
and the cabinet is filled with members of ethnic minorities.
The great virtue of Fairlie’s old establishment was that, for all
its pompousness, it brought an adult seriousness to British life. Its
twin successors, by contrast, are addicted to juvenilesquabbling.
That would be bad at the best of times. Whenthecountry faces
such severe problems, it may prove catastrophic.nBagehot
The country’s establishment has split into two, each convinced that the other is in charge