The Guardian: Is the British establishment finally finished?

This started to become clear to me when researching the civil service and business world in the later years of David Cameron’s coalition government. Interviews with former career mandarins revealed just how much Whitehall had changed. The service they had joined in the 1960s and 70s was the preserve of the establishment amateur. The vast majority had come from Oxbridge, having previously studied history, classics or something else that failed to equip them for managing an archaic state bureaucracy. Generalists ruled and specialists occupied the lower rungs.

As Sir Alan Budd, a former economic advisor to the Treasury from 1970 onwards, explained, the department was not run by professional economists. Instead, those in charge deferred to the “Brown Book”, a government tome explaining how to use certain technical levers to respond to shifts in employment, inflation, etc. It was sort of a Dummies’ Guide to managing the British economy. “If you wanted to, say, reduce unemployment by 100,000, there were various ways of doing this,” Budd told me. “It was very like any textbook at university. The chapter on macroeconomics – this explained how you did things.” [...]

Second, the automatic links between exclusive education, tradition, status, power and money, which once typified the establishment, have been broken. A far smaller percentage of those in power have taken the Clarendon-Oxbridge conveyor belt to the top. Exclusive London clubs lie empty or – worse still for elites – now allow women, foreigners and lower-class members to join. The members of the aristocracy, once liberally sprinkled across the boards of public institutions and corporations alike, have vanished from sight. [...]

Remarkably, Bailey even predicted the likely causes of the financial crash and how it might play out, three years before it actually did: spiralling property prices and lending, derivatives, banks too big to fail and a Federal Reserve bailout. He was not the only one: a handful of economists and financiers – such as Nouriel Roubini, Ann Pettifor and Raghuram Rajan – went public with dire warnings of what they thought was to come. There were a lot more insiders who had their suspicions, but who chose to keep quiet. A lot of people – insiders and outsiders – still see more of the same ahead. But venal self-interest means most of them don’t care.

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