Well researched and written but I find completely disenfranchising in that the author throws all mechamisms of elite to government interaction out the window or in the moral garbage bin without offering a counterbalance.

If I take the converse: should politicians not be allowed to work in private sector? Should they not be allowed to work through networks of connections they have? How would you ever legislate this? Would this not preclude anyone from working in government? And ok, on the other hand, you should definitely not let your friend in to an exclusive insider deal, this is clear... But the book puts everything on the same moral table.

The book brings up some very serious failing of government and legislation but it brings them up along side other features that are intrinsic to any power system, whether socialised or privatised.

Basically a great book to learn to grumble about what you didn’t know, and will be left wondering what positive policies you should be asking for. I feel like its draining to the power to try ro effect good policy.

Eventually there is a conclusion which suggests some active changes that could reverse the problems the author identifies. I only wish the book spent as much effort on evaluating these final thoughts as on the different dysfunction. Particularly because the breadth of problems described conflates extremely diverse issues. It is hard to aee how the suggested watchdog organisations could reverse it all without becoming elites themselves..? ( )

g ( )

Starts out saying it's not about the lizard people, it's about the organisations and then follows on with stories about lizard people. Apparently unions are the only way to fight lizard people. I would've thought fire to be more effective. Clearly these are asbestos lined lizard people. ( )

The Establishment... Everyone knows what you mean when you talk about it, but do you actually know what it is?

Sometimes though to be the aristocracy, or the political elite, in this book Jones aims to shine a bright light into the dark recesses of this shady group of people that run or control the country. Under that light we find politicians, peers of the realm, as you would expect but standing alongside them, looking shifty, are newspaper magnates, business leaders, the police, the oligarchs and civil servants. All of these groups subscribe to the neo-liberal, free market thinking that advocates the rolling back of the state, the reduction of the tax burden, control over the people and dissent, whilst doing everything to avoid paying their dues to society.

I am not going to say much about the contents of this book, as I think that you need to read it and make your own mind up, in particular if you:

Vote

Pay tax

Care about this country

More importantly, when you have read it, do something about it.
( )

Where Chavs looks at how the people at the bottom of British society have suffered under recent governments, in this book Jones turns his focus on the other side of the same coin, the way that it has become effectively impossible for anyone with power and influence in Britain to argue for any other kind of policies than those which exacerbate inequalities in society, put money and power into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful, and leave the poor struggling to survive.

Jones looks at the development of neo-liberal free-market ideology, championed by intellectuals and think-tanks he calls "the outriders", mavericks who were mocked and despised in the post-war decades, but have found themselves in a robust position close to the centre of power since the rise of Reagan and Thatcher. He interviews several of the leading figures, and clearly has a lot of respect for them and the way they fought to promote their unfashionable ideas, even if he detests the ideas themselves. Whatever set of ideas eventually supplants the "tyranny of the markets", Jones suggests, will have to work its way into the mainstream the same sort of way, and we would do well to study how the neo-liberal think-tanks operated.

But the main part of the book is an analysis of the unhealthily close relationship between business, media, parliamentarians and government in Britain. The political class have almost no links with working-class people any more, and it is all but impossible for someone from a poor or even lower-middle-class background to get into politics, whilst wealthy business-people often become MPs, and MPs and government ministers frequently do consultancy work for business whilst serving, and move into well-paid senior posts as soon as they leave politics. Few MPs would have any motivation to vote for policies that might be considered disadvantageous to business or to people on high incomes: as Jones point out, successive governments have cut the top rate of income tax, a move the overwhelming majority of voters on all sides of the political spectrum disapprove of.
The free press is supposed to keep politicians under scrutiny, but almost all British newspapers and TV stations are the personal property of Rupert Murdoch and a handful of other wealthy individuals, and run stories that serve the interests of the oligarchs. The BBC has long ceased to be an independent voice, not least because the government holds its purse-strings. And of course there is also an active revolving door between politics and the press (vide Boris Johnson and George Osborne). Even the Observer isn't entirely free of that particular taint, it seems.

Jones argues strongly that the "small-state" ideology is inherently hypocritical: the same business people who call for the "rolling back of the state" rely on that same state to provide them with all kinds of things necessary for their businesses to function, including infrastructure like roads, police to protect their possessions, education to train their future workers and provide child-care for their current ones, and most especially social security benefits that allow them to get away with paying absurdly low wages as employers and charging ridiculously high rents as landlords.

Jones also talks about how the police have come to be seen as the enforcers of government policy, since the miners' strike, and are suffused with the idea that poor people, especially if black, are the major threat to the welfare of the nation. He also draws attention to the unhealthy relationship between the police and the media, where journalists have frequently been caught making payments to police officers for information, and officers caught feeding journalists false stories that serve the interests of the police. A relationship that must have caused some awkward moments when the police had to investigate the phone-hacking scandal that brought down the News of the world, and the same editors who were under investigation were taking senior police officers out for meals.

As he also pointed out repeatedly in Chavs, he reminds us that the amount of tax wealthy individuals and companies avoid paying is many times greater than the small amount estimated to be lost to benefit fraud by the poor, but somehow the tycoons never seem to end up in jail. Could this be because the same big accountancy firms that advise them on their tax strategies are also employed as consultants by the government when devising new tax law? Surely not.

As in Chavs, there isn't a huge amount here that will be new to anyone who regularly reads the Guardian, but it is quite impressive seeing it all assembled together in one place like this. I'm not sure how useful it is: even though Jones ends with a call to action of sorts, and has been involved in setting up various groups to fight back against the evils he discusses, it's difficult not to be pushed into despair and start feeling that the dominant ideology will always get you in the end. Especially if you look at what happened to Jeremy Corbyn. ( )