Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the other end of society, the ruling class. On the cover of The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It the cod-philosopher and comedian Russell Brand endorses the author as ‘this generation’s Orwell’.
Jones’s concept of the Establishment is more than Henry Fairlie’s matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised through social networks; it is a state of mind, ‘the ideas and mentalities’ that govern the way certain people behave. The Establishment is made up of ‘powerful groups that need to protect their position in a democracy’; its existence is, in the abstract, something upon which both left and right are agreed. Jones likens the perception of the Establishment in practical terms to the inkblot in the Rorschach test: it depends on where you are on the political spectrum as to what you see as the Establishment.
He is sufficiently self-aware to anticipate that some critical readers will regard him as a ‘participant observer’. He was an undergraduate at Oxford with those who have emerged as pillars of the establishment; he is a columnist on the Guardian, the house journal of the public sector establishment; he regularly appears on the BBC; and he admits to knowing some powerful people on first-name terms. But he disqualifies himself from being a member of the Establishment because he challenges the powerful — though the Times columnist David Aaronovitch apparently only granted him an interview because they were both members of the same ‘media universe’. ‘Welcome to the elite,’ chuckled Aaronovitch.
In his introduction Jones opines that ‘“The Establishment” is a term that is often loosely used to mean “those with power who I object to”.’
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