A Dead Cat On Your Table
A Dead Cat On Your Table
Peter York introduces an extract from his essential forthcoming book about culture wars and how not to lose them, with illustrations by Martin Rowson
People talk constantly now about something called Culture Wars as they do about something called Woke. But they very rarely try to explain what they actually mean. These wars sound ancient and grass-rootsy as if they’re about ‘values’, and convictions about ‘progressivism’ versus ‘conservatism’. All that.
A Dead Cat on Your Table, my new book for Byline – a collaboration with the brilliant cartoonist Martin Rowson – is a first attempt to show the reality of Culture Wars as something that rich, powerful people do to get their way, politically and financially. They’re not about ‘values’, they’re about expert manipulation. Mr Johnson, our recent Prime Minister, once explained how his favourite political campaigner, the Australian Sir Lynton Crosby, diverted and divided people by ‘throwing a dead cat on the table’, by doing something shocking, emotive but ultimately unimportant. Its value lay in taking people’s attention away from whatever you (Lynton Crosby’s client) didn’t want them to see.
In A Dead Cat On Your Table, we set out some revealing Culture Wars ‘stories’ – about Harry and Meghan, Russell Brand, and the campaigns against the National Trust, Trans people, the BBC, and many more. And we profile the secretive people who do Culture Wars as a job; the manipulators in Westminster, the lobbyists, and the opaquely-funded PRs, ‘think-tanks’ and ‘client media’ who run with Culture Wars stories to get you angry and confused. And we show you some of the institutions of Culture Wars in their listed buildings in SW1.
An excerpt from A Dead Cat On Your Table
Chapter 11: The New Elite
Are you in the New Elite, the one that apparently runs the country now, according to Professor Matthew Goodwin? They’re terribly successful and they’re all graduates with, at the very least, first degrees, often more. They’ve been to Russell Group universities – if not Oxbridge, of course. They’ve mostly come from smart, well-off backgrounds and they all know each other. In fact, they’re mostly married to each other.
They’ve got all the top jobs in all the top places, particularly academics. Especially academics. It’s more than my life’s worth to spell out exactly what these jobs are, but they’re tremendously top. So top indeed that they set the rules for everyone – including all the decent ordinary non-smart people who didn’t go to university, don’t live in London and don’t have any top jobs, because they’re not the New Elite.
You’ll know if you’re a member of this New Elite because you’ll have had a charming little note in code, but, because you’re brought up in this sort of thing, you’ll recognise it and then burn the little note. It may sound like a description of the younger members of, say, the Carlton Club, or people who go to Davos. But interestingly, it turns out that all these people are completely unlike such people in the past, and whether they studied Chemical Engineering, Theology or PPE, they’re all wildly, indeed, radically progressive and they support all sorts of ultra-progressive things like Black Lives Matter, trans rights and the National Trust.
They support Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil and they’re forever gluing themselves to the public infrastructure. They’ve taken over the judiciary, the civil service and both main political parties. They control the media. And the City. They always ask you what your pronouns are. They’re different from the Old Elites who, as you know, all had titles and lived in places that looked like Downtown Abbey. Or from the old super-rich – no names please – who had more money than the Queen!
The Old Elites had a sense of place, even if some of them were non-doms and lived in the South of France. They believed in this country and everything in it, including the businesses that aren’t there any more, because the New Elites have sold them to foreigners. And they really cared about the ordinary decent people outside London who hadn’t got university degrees or top jobs. They often wished those nice people would come back and look after them in their big houses – like their grandparents did. Sadly, now they have to bring in charming people from the Philippines and places like that. But the Old Elites did have a traditional work ethic, one which many ordinary people sadly may be losing because they’re always preoccupied about whether to gender transition or take the knee, or welcome asylum seekers at the seashore rather than thinking about what’s best for the nation and volunteering for national service.
This dramatic description of the UK’s New Elites is the central conceit/Big Idea of Professor Matthew Goodwin’s plangently titled Values, Voice and Virtues, published by Penguin on 30 March 2023. There are a lot of other expositions and analyses in the book but this is the one that matters, because in a world of culture wars propaganda, the most important thing is to tell people who to hate most. That’s what the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, first owner of the Daily Mail and the Mirror, had as his guiding principle: “I give my readers a daily hate”. Professor Goodwin’s analysis, like most of the speakers at the London National Conservatism Conference of 2023, is what’s called post-liberal, so he’s against economic liberals (globalists) and cultural liberals because they’ve let the nation down, big time.
This description of the New Elite is a very big initiative since it sets out to define the particular elites who right-wing post-liberals should fight against, and in turn ropes in a number of more particular culture wars issues they should contest. Broadly, they’re the ones that the New Elites are said to espouse because they’re so tremendously Radical and Progressive. Professor Goodwin cites them in the book and on the new-right platforms he’s constantly mounting (they’re all the subjects you’d expect – BLM, trans, asylum seekers, environmentalism, etc).
I’m a market researcher by background, and like Professor Goodwin I’ve conducted lots of focus groups with all sorts of people who aren’t remotely like me, all over the place. I’ve also spent quality time listening to academics – particularly in the sociology area – to help me think about groups and classes and – for my base commercial purposes – market segments. So I’m quite ‘across’ the issue of how informed people define elites. As a result, some things about Prof Goodwin’s Big Idea strike me as just possibly a bit wobbly and overblown. They seem to strike some of his old peer group of academics in politics etc as actively preposterous. To start with, it’s unclear exactly who these people are, and how many of them there really are.
There were two crucial questions my brilliant first employer told me to ask about any alleged trend:
1. ‘Who is actually doing it?’ i.e. demographics, psychographics, the lot.
2. ‘How many of them are there?’
The answers to these questions helped you decide whether the alleged trends warranted attention. A bit later on, I learnt the third and vital ‘follow the money!’ guidance. Meaning: who’s funding it, and who’s profiting from it?
On the first – who’s doing the New Elites thing – Prof Goodwin’s definitions and emphases tend to vary. There’s a lot of focus on the public sector, particularly academics (yes, them again), NGOs, inter- national organisations, activist lawyers, the civil service. And, to be fair, he does talk about business – particularly Big Business – whose key Davos-y leaders will, at a guess, have gone on from their smart first degrees to an MBA from London Business School, INSEAD in France or Harvard in the United States. Professor Goodwin has said that these people have no business foisting their radical progressive views on their companies’ public positions. Apparently, they’re forcing their people to take the knee on a constant basis when they’re out in public and talking about non-binaryness and pronouns at every opportunity.
It’s unclear exactly who is and isn’t included in the private sector in Professor Goodwin’s calculations. You would’ve thought that something like 99% of the City was liberal globalist in the economic sense – particularly hedge-funders – and belong in here, but he doesn’t make much of them. He doesn’t make much of the serious super-rich either – the people worth at least £100 million – proper plutocrats like, say, the billionaire Lord Bamford, who can do anything they like, including supporting Boris Johnson day and night. And, come to that, he’s a bit sweeping and non-specific about media too, practically saying they’ve all gone New Elite radprog too, so that must mean the people at the Mail (the UK’s bestselling newspaper) and its little friend the Telegraph. Or the Sun (Professor Goodwin writes for the Spectator, Mail and Telegraph, and he’s written for the Sun too). I hadn’t noticed somehow that these newspapers had gone completely RadProg.
Then there’s government itself, which might include, apart from civil servants, Conservative Party MPs and the 172,000 party members who elect the PMs between elections. I hadn’t noticed Mark Francois (look him up!) or Lee Anderson saying anything radprog.
Given the uncertainties about the exact groups we are and aren’t talking about here it’s not surprising that Professor Goodwin’s estimates of their actual number is very elastic, seeming to go from 12% of the population to 25% depending who he’s talking to. Whatever it is, we’re talking about huge numbers of people, too many people to constitute a proper seagoing Elite. Experts usually go for, at most, the top 10% but prefer 5%, and when they’re talking about supermoney and superpower, tend to go for a fraction of the top 1% (the threshold income of the top 1% of UK earners is £183,000 pa).
That narrows it down a bit. If the average income of these tremendously successful, connected graduate people was, say, that £183,000 pa or so (we know some in academic, public sector etc. jobs may have to scrape by on anywhere between £75,000 and £100,000, which means they’re only in the top 5% of the population). The top 1% consists of 685,500 people according to Oxfam’s wealth report of January 2023.
So it’s worth going back to the original definitions and theories of eliteness. The ones that Prof Goodwin’s academic peers would roll with; the ones Prof Goodwin’s group should reasonably be compared with if he’s saying it’s all pukka in his bit of prof-land. The people who might be asked to peer-review other academics’ work. One definition of an elite is that its members own/access huge multiples of ordinary people’s access to financial capital, social capital (connectedness) and cultural power/influence, including media.
In the most recent ‘big’ class study of the UK conducted in 2013, by academics from six British universities backed by the BBC as the media partner, the ‘top’ group in the seven-group hierarchy was the ‘elite’ class. It was the top 6% of British society and the average household income of this group was £89,000 back in 2011. It covers most of the tolerably well-educated, well-rewarded types you could identify (but Goodwin didn’t). And then again, to get to the Goodwin level you’d have had to filter them for the radprog tendency. How many of these people – somewhere between the 5% and the 0.5% – are actually radprog enough. I know that two of Goodwin’s targets – academia and media-land – are said to be and sometimes surveyed as being somewhat ‘left’ but how radprog exactly is that?
I talked to some academics in the politics and sociology areas to understand how they viewed Professor Goodwin’s central concept of the New Elite.
Professor Sam Friedman is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on class, culture and social mobility. He has a particular interest in elites and elitism. His The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged of 2020, co-written with Daniel Laurison, describes how class/background influences people’s career outcomes (it’s particularly amusing about the hypocrisy of media organisations!).
His Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (co-written with Aaron Reeves) will be published in September 2024. In it Reeves and Friedman analyse a mass of historic data from Who’s Who to identify – and quantify – people who have roles/jobs that have real influence and power. They combined this with other material – probate records, etc. – about wealth to get some idea of who the current British elite – whether ‘old’ or ‘new’ – might be.
Friedman reckons that there are about 6,000 people in the UK who qualify by virtue of their combination of positional and economic power – i.e. they are both included in Who’s Who and are in the top 1% of the wealth distribution. He thinks Professor Goodwin’s definition is much too wide and much too vague: “The concept of a New Elite is just too fuzzy. How can 25% of the population – some seventeen million people – occupy positions of immense economic, political and cultural power. The numbers just don’t add up,” he says.
And when we look at the big political picture how many academics (or students for that matter) in the largest disciplines are radprog? Take, say, Business Studies, Medicine, Engineering, etc. What percentage are radprog there, would you think? And as for journalists being RP, what matters in terms of output and influence are senior editors and proprietors. If we think across the very small range of such people in, say, the British national press, and particularly the four businesses that account for more than 90% of UK newspaper sales, how many radprogs are there at the very top, the people who say what goes?! (And before anyone mentions the Guardian, it’s worth saying it’s only about 2.17% of UK daily print circulation!)
Rob Ford is Professor of Political Science at Manchester University, and a former collaborator with Matthew Goodwin on a number of projects, especially their very prescient book of 2013, Revolt on the Right. I’d admired it when it came out, describing people who felt, in David Goodhart’s words, “left behind”. I often felt later how very predictive it had been.
Professor Ford told me: “Goodwin’s New Elites concept is far too vague and broadly defined to be useful. Goodwin’s New Elite is not really an elite and often not really new either. The term encompasses a random grab-bag of individuals, institutions and social groups whose only common features are political views Goodwin dislikes. Serious research furnishes us with clear, well-defined concepts and arguments, not boo-phrases thrown around in arbitrary fashion to signal disapproval.” When I asked Ford whether the constituent groups in the New Elite really welded power, he said: “A concept of ‘elite’ which includes a young university graduate struggling to make rent, but excludes the owners of the nation’s most influential newspapers and MPs from the party which has run the country for the last decade, is hard to take seriously. But the goal of the New Elites thesis is political, not explanatory. Goodwin is not making a serious effort to understand the world, but is instead pursuing a political agenda, laying out a framework for identifying friends and enemies. ‘The People’ encompasses everyone who shares his views. The ‘New Elite’ encompasses anyone who disagrees.
“This desire to oppose a ‘pure people’ and a ‘corrupt elite’ is a fairly standard move in radical right politics, a world Goodwin has studied for decades. It seems he is now putting the lessons of his research into practice, by developing his own radical right political agenda, complete with its own roster of heroes and rogues’ gallery of villains.”
Professor Goodwin (I don’t know whether he still does the usual hours in in the usual ways at the University of Kent), is now a very considerable entrepreneur and media face published, in this case, by a major publisher, Penguin. He’s on every right-wing stage, platform and panel going. He writes for the newspapers. He’s on GB News and Talk TV. Back in 2018 the Legatum Institute appointed Prof Goodwin as the founding director of the Centre for UK Prosperity. It sounded completely splendid and as if it might be very well rewarded too (although that doesn’t seem to figure in the coverage). But it didn’t last; in less than a year they’d shut up shop and no one concerned ever seems to have mentioned it again. However Prof Goodwin does have a consultancy company called People Polling which gives research-based advice to presumably elite – but not radprog – business decision-takers. These various developments would suggest that his income has very significantly improved over the last ten years (oh, and he’s got a growing Substack too).
But the greatest change is in what he says. He’s gone from the careful analyst – even a rather centrist sounding one – of the kind displayed in, say, his New Statesman article of November 2013 where he warned, “Why the immigration debate is getting us nowhere. The more we stoke public anger and distraction on immigration, the more we threaten the stability of our political system in general.” But now he’s plunged into all those debates in support of the populist right.
In the text, he says of the voters’ defection to more extreme minority groups, “Those on the margins will celebrate; but those in the more moderate majority should be deeply worried.” Now, however, he is definitely in the ‘Family, flag and faith’ world – the one he spoke to in such decidedly stirring ways at NatCon on 19 March 2023.
Professor Goodwin’s speech at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference was highly dramatic. He accused the Conservatives of economic liberalism and the Labour party of cultural liberalism. The majority of Brits, so he implied, didn’t want either; these views were only shared by 20% of the population (presumably the New Elite radprogs), so he said. The implication being that we’d be better off with a more nationalistic set-up. His critique of the Conservative governments after 2010 was forensic and he went on to say the only people accorded honour in the country now were “minorities and their graduate allies”. All the rest, and particularly white work- ing-class men, were held in low esteem. A number of people, who didn’t want to be quoted, suggested that Professor Goodwin might be interested in a role in the new configuration on the right that is emerging after the election.
A Dead Cat On Your Table by Peter York, with illustrations by Martin Rowson, is published soon by Byline Books. You can pre-order your copy here.