EPSTEIN & MANDELSON: DEFEAT OF AN ELITE?

The Labour Party has entered a political Bermuda Triangle.  The relationship between Peter Mandleson now disgraced former UK Ambassador to Washington, and convicted US financier and criminal, the late Jeffrey Epstein, may have more damaging outcomes for the UK’s ruling Party than the Profumo affair did for the Conservatives in 1961-1963.  The then Secretary of State for War was exposed as having a sexual relationship with a 19-year old model who was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché.  The scandal acted as catalyst for the resignation of Harold Macmillan’s and the defeat of his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the 1964 General Election.   But the exposure of Epstein’s activities has had wider consequences, not least for dozens of abused women coping with blighted lives, one who tragically took her own life. 

The political damage goes deep.  It plays into the - transatlantic – belief in corrupt elites acting with impunity and holding ordinary people in contempt.   As many MPs (aware that they were already held in disregard or worse by the public) have commented, it further discredits politicians.  It entrenches the – erroneous – belief: ‘they’re all the same’.  We will hear much about ‘regaining trust’.  But the behaviour of elites is an integral and understandable cause of widespread anger, it is not going away, and is not just based on envy. Nor is it unfounded .

The term ‘elite’ itself is ill-defined, amorphous.  It approaches the pejorative echoes of ‘communist’ during the Cold War, a generic name for the enemy, bad and threatening people.   It offers, as a result, scant insights into how to deal for the common good with actual elites.  

Here, then, is a functional definition which may be helpful: elites exercise authority and power over citizens, occupy top positions in institutions where they can increase their access to resources and wealth through national and international networks.  I say elites, plural, because the positions taken up in society by today’s elite are more varied than those in the 19th and early 20th centuries; 30% are now women, and a small number are non-White from the old empire.  A consistent feature, though, is the predominance of the wealthy.

Public suspicion of elites is not misplaced.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008 and for sexual trafficking of minors in 2019.  In the 1990s, Epstein was receiving prodigious fees for  financial services from wealthy clients, amassing some £600 million,  dodging tax on his two American Virgin Islands companies, and attracting an international elite including Mandelson.   But the US public’s justifiable suspicion had a bizarre side.   During Trump’s 2016 election campaign, extreme Right-Wing social media gave considerable mileage to variants of a story that Hilary Clinton led an international paedophile sex-trafficking conspiracy, run by a “satanic cabal of elites”, in one version operating beneath the Ping Pong Pizza parlour in Washington D.C. 

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman pose and research several pertinent questions about elites in their Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite Belnap, Harvard 2023.  They use inclusion in Who’s Who for membership of the UK elite and a variety of other sources for data in an pioneering historical study with a detailed appendix on methodology for sociologists.   Their most significant use of statistical data explores what they call ‘elite recruitment’, how you join the club, and ‘elite reproduction’, explaining how elites sustain continuity in a changing world.  They document a complex story.

The Clarendon group of public  (i.e. private) schools, Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Malborough, Merchant Taylors, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St. Paul’s and Winchester is a key part of it.  In the second league comes the 350-plus Independent schools of the  Head’s Conference  or HMC, also to some degree, bar a few scholarships, ‘sieving’ out  children of less well-off families.  The contacts and friendships made at school are reinforced in Oxbridge dining clubs and on the sports fields.  The ‘Old Boy’s club’ can help in job hunting and the ascent through different hierarchies: government, law, business.   This was the main 20th century pathway before the Second World War when Britain’s military needed competent officers, not just ones with a sense of entitlement, ill-judged self-confidence and upper class accents.  The 1944 Education Act created competition from State-funded school pupils, aged 11-15 from 1947, then up to 16 in 1972, promoting a challenging meritocracy.   The 11-plus exam for Grammar Schools, and the development of separate Secondary Modern schools for those who failed it, created heartbreak for children.  And the route to the core of the elite remained stubbornly the same.  By the 2020s, Born to Rule finds 47% of the elite went to Independent schools compared with 10% of population,  and compared to less than 1% of the population nearly 9% attended  Clarendon schools with 35% going on to Oxbridge – including Mandelson the ‘meritocrat’ from Hendon Grammar School.

Privileged education remains the propellant boosting youth into an elite orbit.  But the rocket fuel also remains family money, large amounts of it.   Britain’s richest top 1% held 70% of national wealth in 1900 but, for a variety of reasons, loss of Empire, pressure from trades unions, not least, this dropped to 20% in 1980 hovering around that figure for several decades.  Recruitment into the elite has stayed steady around 20% of the wealthiest 1% in the country.

Born to Rule’s interviews provide  insights into elite thinking.  As might be expected, the wealthiest and most powerful expressed what would be considered Right-wing views about equality, tax and inheritance.  But with more varied occupations, creative artists, academics, media stars, more women, concerned with social justice,  a range of political positions were included bringing key aspects of social democrat and ‘progressive Left’ policy, a priority for poverty reduction, alongside racial and gender equality. 

The most striking change since the 1940s is in how today’s elite wish to be seen: ordinary, rewarded and rising due to their hard work.  Nothing to do with inheriting wealth or earning a fortune in the City.  A few of the wealthy elite speak in the book of their family wealth, innate skills, arrogantly confident in their judgement, ready to take big risks.   And these beliefs can be their downfall.

A chapter recommends what to do about elites but the recipe contains essentially the ingredients of what would be considered a socialist approach, taxing financial services’ transactions, high value property wealth and inheritance, VAT for public schools, 50% worker representation on corporate boards, a satisfying meal for the Left but indigestible for much of the British public. 

There is no nod towards the growth of international elites indicated in the volumes of Epstein correspondence.  And no mention of the international power of the US IT tech giants’, nor the related policies of the thuggish US elite – originally brought for transplantation to Europe by a Trump White House strategist, Steve Bannon.

Elites depend on a lack of accountability in political systems to sustain their impunity.  Investigative journalists, an almost extinct species, despite the elite proprietors controlling the media, need time and money to do their job.  Gordon Brown, former PM and  voice of the Manse, has proposed several times a range of doable measures Government can immediately implement to root out elite corruption.  As the Profumo and Epstein affairs illustrate, elites may not be defeated but they can be curbed.