Owen Jones (3)Besprekingen

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..?

As an English Constitutionalist the working class have only themselves to blame because they refuse to embrace their freedom and have this ingrained need to be managed from cradle to grave. 15 years ago I stopped consenting to pay council tax and have not paid it since. If everyone did this we could reassert our power and emancipate ourselves. Most of the tax the councils collect goes back to those who enslaved us via the birth certificate using usury.
its being used to pay of the interest on the national debt that can never be paid back and which they created unLawfully without our consent.

After the prefaces and the first chapter I was ready to move on; my interest in the topic was apparently more article-length and less book-length.

Chavs Compelling investigation into the myth and reality of working-class life in contemporary Britain. Full description

En la Gran Bretaña actual, la clase trabajadora se ha convertido en objeto de miedo y escarnio. Desde la Vicky Pollard de Little Britain a la demonización de Jade Goody, los medios de comunicación y los políticos desechan por irresponsable, delincuente e ignorante a un vasto y desfavorecido sector de la sociedad cuyos miembros se han estereotipado en una sola palabra cargada de odio: chavs.

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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.

Following on from his previous writings Jones analyses the Labour Party, and in particular the leadership style of Jeremy Corbyn, and the conclusion is to damn with faint praise. The ideals of Corbyn shine through, but he is shown here to lack those leadership qualities that might have seen him rise to the office of PM. How quickly things change in politics! Corbyn is now suspended from the Party, precisely because he seems not to understand the importance of actions, not just words, when it comes to rooting out anti-semitism in the Party.

Jones has previously written that the Establishment knows how to debunk and defame any Labour leader who shows weakness, or dithers over vital issues. I am not sure if Jones would agree but it does seem now that Corbyn fed to his enemies the ammunition they needed to wound him with. That said, the book is well written, in a clear and open style, that never allows issues to become entangled in the telling. The future looks very uncertain for UK politics, even leaving out of consideration the pandemic.

Thatcherism is bad, the Working Class have no opportunity to get into modern politics or media and the sneering culture of the middle and ruling classes is objectionable. The book in a nutshell there.

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.

Jones documents how successive British governments, from Thatcher onwards, have pursued policies that had serious negative effects on the working class, by accelerating the shift away from manufacturing industry, enacting repressive measures against trade unions, cutting welfare benefits and support for public services (especially education), shifting from income tax to VAT, selling off most of the (council-owned) social housing stock, and so on. These policies have often been sold to the electorate on the back of patently untrue assertions that "we're all middle-class now" and accompanied by equally misleading propaganda about "welfare scroungers", "workshy single parents" and so on, echoing a negative stereotype of feckless working-class people as "chavs" propagated by right-wing newspapers, TV game-shows, and the rest.

In reality, of course, there is still a large section of British society that thinks of itself as "working-class". Since the annihilation of manufacturing, most of them work in retail, catering, call-centres, construction, agriculture and the like, often in jobs that are less fulfilling, less secure, and far less well-paid than the jobs their parents had in factories and mines. Those who are unemployed, Jones urges, are unemployed not because they are feckless and idle, but because there is a structural shortage of jobs, especially in former industrial towns. And most of them feel let down by the political establishment, which has less and less contact with them and their concerns. Even the Labour Party has few MPs with working-class roots these days, a result of the professionalisation of politics and the "unpaid intern" system, which effectively closes off political careers to those whose parents can't support them in unpaid jobs (in London!) whilst they gain experience. And the same goes for journalism and the law.

Jones also argues that social mobility in general is far less significant than it used to be (other people dispute this, and it's not easy to find an agreed definition of social mobility anyway). The education system is "rigged" by the middle classes to make sure their own kids have access to good schools and university places, leaving the schools most working-class kids attend marginalised; the cost of university education has become so high that few young people from working-class backgrounds can see the benefit of saddling themselves with student loans they won't necessarily ever be able to pay off.

All this demonization and exclusion of working-class people has created a political vacuum that right-wing nationalist parties have moved into. From the interviews and canvassing he's done in working-class neighbourhoods, Jones concludes that the people who vote for the likes of UKIP and the BNP usually don't support the explicitly racist parts of their platforms, but they do respond to the way those parties seem to be listening to their concerns, unlike Labour and the Conservatives. Worries about immigration (competition for housing and services, possible undercutting of pay rates) don't necessarily equate to racism, and Jones argues that the notion of an "embittered white working class" is both false and counter-productive: working-class districts (and working-class families) tend to be more mixed ethnically than elsewhere, and it's often second-generation immigrants who are most worried about the effect of newcomers.

It all sounds pretty convincing, even if it is quite at odds with my experience of British society. I grew up in an environment where the line between "working-class" and "middle-class" was fluid and hard to pin down, and where no-one would have dreamed of mocking the class, or the type of work, that most of their neighbours and relatives were associated with. Or of voting for anyone, under any circumstances, who didn't have "Labour" after their name on the polling card. Even at university, I don't remember anyone expressing disrespect for working-class people, and most people I knew were at most a couple of generations away from miners and factory workers. Except the drunken public-school prats we all laughed at, who are now running the country. But I moved away from the UK about the time Jones must have started primary school, so I've probably missed a lot.½

Enlightening. The book cover reviews said it would make me angry; not an experience I've had from a book before but the description was right - it did. The manner in which Jones draws together the threads of establishment rhetoric and behaviour; media activity and behaviour; the role of 'think tanks'; police behaviour, etc. portrays a country being very much sold to the highest bidder for the highest bidder. Most of us are seemingly being left to go to hell in a hand cart -if that doesn't provoke the bile I really don't know what will.

How quickly things change in politics. Mr Jones' book was published in 2015 and researched in the years before that, when Jeremy Corbyn was never seriously mentioned as a political leader. Indeed he is not mentioned in the book, and neither is Brexit as a serious prospect, let alone a Trump presidency. So things move on; would Mr Jones' thesis change were he to be preparing a new edition today?

Mostly probably not. The key parties to the stitch up - the city, the media owners, big business owners, lobbyists, politicians increasingly from the same backgrounds, and most importantly right wing outriders, such as think tanks, remain in place. But Mr Corbyn's leadership of the Labour party, Labour's improved showing in the last election, the near success of Scottish Independence (Brexit is more complex), and the success of Mr Trump in the US and Mr Macron in France point to increased public rejection of Establishment views and a widening of the Overton window - a fascinating idea Mr Jones expounds about the narrowing window of what is politically possible to discuss, which is illustrated by the torrent abuse hurled at Mr Corbyn, including by his own party. For having non establishment views he is of course a lunatic, a marxist, wants to take the country back to the 70s etc etc. But people want to hear a broader range of ideas, and that's a good thing.

Its hard to argue with anything Mr Jones says. I would dispute his inclusion of the Police as part of the establishment - yes Policing is far from perfect but the Police do not make the laws that repress. In the same way I was interested by his lack of inclusion of the judiciary, or of private education, which is mentioned a lot but not analysed. But these are small quibbles - its a very good book which is sadly already in need of a new edition½

I only read this to chapter 4 but what I did read was enough for me. It is of its time all Thatcher ( spits) and Blair ( beyond derision) Post Brexit it is clear that the working-classes are still despised by the media and the so called middle classes and elite in the UK. Watching Question Time boils my piss every time - woking class is always prefixed by ' the ordinary' - and what exactly is ordinary about a class of people that literally built Britain? SO just to bite back I call the others The Midlings - a dull and uninspiring homogenised lump of busy bodies busy being busy and agonising over the trivia of life - right back atcha!

Well researched and aligned with my own political views, but 100 pages in I felt defeated. Yes, the working class is demonised. So what do we do about it? I couldn't struggle through the last half of the book to find out whether the author had any proposed course of action.

I’ve always been wary of Owen Jones’s work; mainly as I’d like to agree with him on so much. I love his enthusiasm for the political struggle; I’m just unconvinced by partisan reasoning on either side.

The Establishment does fall prey to political partisanship to a degree; but only to the degree of the idealism of what Jones sees as eponymous blob. He wisely eschews specific definitions of ‘Establishment’ or specific personal critiques; instead, over the course of the book, it comes to mean those essentially running the country. This doesn’t specifically mean party political critiques but instead encompasses the mechanisms of government, media, law enforcement and finance. Where Jones’s prejudices do show through is in his analysis of current Establishment orthodoxy; he characterises it as neo-liberal and puts this at the heart of the flaws of British society. Indeed, there’s a strong throughline to the book which begins with political think tanks feeding ideas into the media and government thinking and traces what the problems when this relatively blinkered ideology is taken as a basis for policy and applied in other sections of society. The length of the book allows Jones far more space to expound upon his theories than his journalism does and he comes across here as more thoughtful and likeable than partisan debate allows him to be. Might be a tad too rich for those who identify with a neo-liberal ideology but as a state-of-the-nation book it’s a thought provoking read.

While I already knew about most of the facts gathered together in this book, by putting them all together Owen Jones builds up a powerful and, to me, unarguable polemic. While Britain has always been ruled by a powerful, wealthy establishment elite, there was a period from post-war until 1980 in which their power was being diminished and we were becoming a fairer and more equal society. All that, as this book shows, has been thrown into reverse over the past 30 years and inequality is now worse than ever. Reading this very well researched and argued book should lead us in the UK (and things are no different in the USA) to question just how much we can call ourself a democracy.

Amazingly informative.

I can't think of a better political education than the last two book that I have read; this one (obviously) and Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century'.

This book is a well researched exposé of the real power within Britain today. Amongst other things, it gives the first credible explanation as to the British desperation to follow the US into Afghanistan and Iraq. The faceless establishment members are not named; this would probably have been a step too far and the book would have been banned, purely in the interests of the state, but the workings and history are laid bare for all to read. The sad thing is that so few will so do. I am a tight wad and waited until a second hand copy was available: I didn't know whether to be pleased or disappointed, when it arrived and had, quite clearly never been opened by its previous owner. Even those with good attentions fall when faced with a little bit of work.

At the moment, it seems that the system is unbeatable and, I certainly do not see it falling in response to the 2015 general election, which will return one of the well trained parties. Jones does offer a ray of hope at the end of the book where, he reminds us that the truths of today, the self evident facts which need no explanation, can and do become the unbelievable falsehoods of tomorrow. The internet is allowing an alternative truth to be told, one that the establishment owned press would never allow to infiltrate their august pages. This is one of the reasons why it is imperative that we do not permit the censorship of the world wide web. Certainly, some of the articles that one finds are unpleasant but, once a censor is appointed, the old 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes' question arises - and I think that we all know who it would be...

Owen Jones is one of the few British journalists with a working class background and thus a lone voice about how the other half truly lives. In this book, Jones has turned his sights from the poor to the powerful in order to describe how the British establishment rules. He identifies the following elements as crucial in sustaining the British establishment: 1) think tanks (lone wolf and plutocrat-financed), 2) MP's and parties driven by lobbyists, 3) the media and the Murdoch empire in particular, 4) the police, 5) well connected companies providing shoddy public services, 6) corporations, CEOs and plutocrats, 7) the city's masters of the universe.

Strangely, this grouping fails to include most of the highly incestuous nature of the British establishment who meet each other early in life at public schools and Oxbridge - institutions that exclude all but a few extremely talented ones from a non-wealthy background. In these institutions, David Cameron and Boris Johnson learned what it meant to be part of the establishment: As members of Oxford's Bullingdon Club, they participated in the hazing ceremony of burning a 20 pound note in front of a homeless man, a teaching moment for the preservation of the class system. Also not mentioned are the monarchy and its plethora of honors and titles that hold the nation enthralled with pomp and circumstance. The importance of the bureaucracy, lampooned in The Thick of It and Yes, Minister, is only partially mentioned. Courts and the bureaucracy shields many nefarious activities of the British establishment. No mention also of GCHQ that the Snowden revelations revealed to hold enormous amount of private data without any checks and balances. Jones' presentation of the British establishment is thus woefully incomplete. He should have collaborated with an academic institution to provide him with a more systematic approach. Second books are hard.½

A polemic that wears its leftwing politics unashamedly (and largely legitimately) on its sleeve. This is a solid review of the excesses of Thatcherism, how gravely it damaged working-class culture in the 1980s, and its upshot in Britain today - where a working-class rump has gone from being viewed as 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Some discussion of globalisation would have been useful (after all, Thatcher's economic policies and smashing of the trade unions didn't take place in a national vacuum), but overall this is a fairly convincing read.

I really enjoyed reading this thought-provoking book about discourses about working-class people and issues that they in particular face in British politics and media. I think it would have been even better if it had spent some time right at the beginning to discuss the range of meanings that the term "working class" has and how those might have shifted over time.

I think that this is a really important book. It explained to me how & why Labour has, to my mind, lost its way and how many of the problems we now have are still the legacy of Thatcherism. Reading it was like having the lens on our society cleaned.½

An outstanding read that isn't at its heart about chavs at all. During my visit to Manchester and Liverpool, I could observe, to my horror, the strange customs and dress code of the British working/under class. In contrast to Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, the working class is no longer invisible in the street. They even have reality TV show vehicles like "Geordie Shore" to beam their behaviors across the globe. In contrast to their visibility in life and in the media, politics is ignoring this lost generation completely.

Jones' claims that this is the consequence of the Thatcher revolution which broke the trade unions and conquered the mind of New Labour. Politics has ceased competing for working class votes. The working class which still accounts for over 50 percent of all jobs has answered by not voting at all (the so-called sofa option) or voting for protest candidates (who usually are ineffective and do not last long in politics). Owen's description of the English political landscape is smart and the absence of a nutty left to balance the nutty right a misfortune for sound governance. Between Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour, English voters are offered three flavors that may taste a bit different but contain much the same ingredients and perform whatever the City of London demands. No wonder that the areas that profit least from such politics such as Wales and Scotland increasingly seek to go their own way. I hope that the author will present a follow-up book soon.½