In Britain, the Establishment confronts the Movement

The chasm between Britain’s political class and majority of voters on the Palestine issue raises the prospect of a full-blown crisis of legitimacy.

A pro-Palestinian activist wearing a mask depicting Britain Prime Minister Rishi Sunak carries a baby doll to mark the death of thousands of children in Gaza, along with supporters on a march through London on March 9. | Photo Credit: HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP

The British Establishment: what images and associations the very words evoke. The sigh of leather armchairs in discreet London clubs. “Old boy” networks that run like sinews through the body politic—and economic. Lavish displays of public pomp. A nod here, a little word there, to ensure that everything that really matters—the control of wealth; the exercise of power—continues to operate to the advantage of those at the top.

More amorphous blob than tangible entity, the Establishment has proved remarkably adroit at safeguarding, reinforcing, and legitimising the interests of Britain’s ruling class. Over several centuries, it has deployed a range of strategies, from co-option and “persuasion” to brute force, to surmount every obstacle or inconvenience placed in its way, whether world war, economic crisis, the shenanigans of imperialist rivals, universal suffrage, or the rise of an organised working class.

As befits its slipperiness, the Establishment defies ready definition. Generally accepted components include the royal family, the landed aristocracy, alumni of prestigious public schools such as Eton and Harrow, the topmost reaches of the civil service, the armed forces, and the Church of England, the BBC, and those at the summit of corporate and financial power. Yet such itemisation fails to capture the intricacy of the operation, the myriad subtle ways by which the beast exerts its muscle to achieve “compliance”.

Back in the 1950s, the journalist Henry Fairlie proposed a definition that looked beyond institutional bastions of power to embrace “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised”. “The exercise of power in Britain,” Fairlie argued, “cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially.”

Multiple levers of influence

Part of the Establishment’s brief involves tight control over British politics, both as played out in formal institutions and as expressed through public discussion, debate, and exercise of democratic rights. Through its multiple levers of influence, the blob-at-the-top contrives at all times to control the political narrative, define the parameters of permissible debate and action, and ensure the “reliability” of top politicians, whether inside or outside government. Where “danger” surfaces—perhaps in the shape of a recalcitrant, off-message political leader—counter measures will be merciless.

Such was the case with Jeremy Corbyn: elected leader of the Labour Party by an overwhelming majority in 2015, he was smeared to political death by a ruthless media-coordinated campaign following his near-victory in the 2017 general election. Corbyn’s successor, the “forensic” former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, oozes his Establishment credentials from every pore.

“Events, dear boy, events,” former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously remarked when asked what was most likely to throw a government off course.

Since last October, British people in their hundreds of thousands have been taking to the streets to protest against Israel’s ongoing evisceration of Gaza. National demonstrations in London (the 10th one, on March 9, mobilised 4,00,000 diverse and peaceful participants) have alternated with local and regional marches. Public meetings and inventive new forms of protest (exhibitions of Palestinian art; cycle rides and collective singing in solidarity with Palestine) have been taking place in communities big and small. More than two-thirds of voters support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank.

This is a recrudescence, with new features, of the mass anti-war movement that erupted in Britain in the build-up to the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq in 2003. Twenty years on, the circulation, via social media, of news, analysis, and images unmediated by officially approved channels is enabling people to witness daily the relentless horror of Israel’s genocide-in-progress. As in the United States, popular fury is being compounded by the government’s open complicity in the carnage and by the absence of any opposition from the political mainstream. In Parliament, demands for a ceasefire have come only from the Scottish National Party and a handful of defiant Labour MPs, the excommunicated Jeremy Corbyn among them.

Highlights

• Part of the Establishment’s brief involves tight control over British politics, both as played out in formal institutions and as expressed through public discussion, debate, and exercise of democratic rights.
• Through its multiple levers of influence, the blob-at-the-top contrives at all times to control the political narrative, define the parameters of permissible debate and action, and ensure the “reliability” of top politicians.
• Where “danger” surfaces—perhaps in the shape of a recalcitrant, off-message political leader—counter measures will be merciless.

Crisis of legitimacy

The chasm that has opened up between Britain’s political class and the great majority of voters on the life-and-death issue of Palestine raises the prospect of a full-blown crisis of legitimacy: something the Establishment routinely strives to avoid. An exceptionally weak Conservative government, its unpopularity spelt out by dire polling data (recent polls place its support at a bare 20 per cent of those intending to vote), is facing almost certain defeat in the general election that must be held this year.

At Labour Party headquarters, meanwhile, the would-be victors are busily positioning themselves as replica Tories bent on perpetuating every disastrous policy direction of the past 14 years, from austerity economics (against light-touch taxation for the wealthy) to ever harsher measures for asylum seekers, immigrants, disabled people, and the long-term unemployed. Both wings of Britain’s bipartisan political system appear equally committed to bearing down on civil liberties, restricting political debate, redefining “extremism”, and slashing way at centuries-old rights of assembly and protest.

Rather than rubbing its hands at the prospect of martinet Starmer replacing hapless Rishi Sunak at No. 10, the Establishment, or at least its savvier elements, may be sniffing trouble in the wind. That a raft of independent candidates, some of them expelled Labour Party members, has begun to take shape around explicit demands for a change of direction on Palestine, may strike some within the Establishment as a minor irritant easily dealt with by well-oiled machinery and centuries of savoir-faire. But the reality is that a Labour victory, if it materialises, will be by default rather than the result of anything approaching popular enthusiasm—an indication of deep-seated systemic malaise.

Writing in 1867, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist, philosopher, and slavery abolitionist, drew attention to the persistence of a fundamental divide. “There are always two parties,” he noted, “the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement.” In Britain today, the future-facing side of this divide is once again in insurgent mode.

Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.