For approximately two decades I have formulated and commended a ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH for short). This was done with health inequalities in mind. It asserts that health inequalities in Britain, and indeed in kindred societies, are in large part an unintended consequence of the strategic, profit-seeking and often predatory behaviours of a hard core of what I call the ‘capital executive’ (ie top financiers, shareholders, CEOs etc). It is this fraction of the 1%, replete with capital, that buys power from the power elite at the apex of the apparatus of the state to influence economic, social and health policy. Well, I say ‘influence’. That seems too anaemic a word in post-1970s financialised or rentier capitalism (and as Christophers has documented, Britain is a world-leader in rentier-style capitalism).
I have argued that the GBH reflects an intensification of the class/command dynamic and is the prime cause of the present widening of health inequalities via the likes of economic deregulation, de-unionisation, job precarity, fire-and-rehire, zero hours contracts, welfare cuts, etc. Enough of that. I have stated and elaborated on this thesis often and continue to believe it corroborated by extant data.
This blog is an attempt to think around the GBH. I have in fact at various points both recognised and delved into some of the complexities of class and command or state relations, neither of which of course are simple phenomena. Here I use the device of the blog to ‘think aloud’, which I continue to regard its most useful justification.
The GBH lies behind both the deepening of health inequalities and the political elite’s wilful, regressive and ongoing destruction of the National Health Service (NHS) (witness the Health and Social Care Acts of 2012 and 2022 and look behind the rhetoric). Chomsky was right: under-fund to create public dissatisfaction, then send in the for-profit cavalry to the rescue. But the GBH has applicability beyond the health domain of course.
The first point I want to dwell on develops remarks I have published and blogged about previously. In his The Power Elite, C W Mills drew an important distinction between conspiring and what he called ‘tacit understanding’. Members of the power elite, he contended, rarely need to conspire to attain their ends. Why? Because they (tend to) share a tacit understanding of how things are, why, and what’s best. In practice of course what’s best for them, of which they have an intimate grasp, trumps what’s best for the citizenry and a whole. If Bourdieu’s concept of ‘class habitus’ has a bias towards structure and against agency, as some claim, it nevertheless captures something of the thrust of Mills’ argument.
But where does this intimate grasp of what’s best for them come from? I have recently read two interesting tomes, one on Eton and the major public schools and the other on Oxford. The authors each have personal knowledge of the institutions they savage. They are Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men, and Simon Kuper’s Chums. The focus of these two short volumes might seem narrow, but it transpires that this is more than warranted. The representation of ex-Etonians and public schoolboys (and occasionally girls) and Oxford graduates in the power elite of the state, in finance and business and in the mass media is quite extraordinary.’ Born to rule’, or to occupy significant supportive roles as members of what Dave Byrne elegantly calls the ‘concierge class’, is far more than a simple catchphrase.
Kuper acknowledges the salience of the old public schools for socially pivotal class and command relations but makes a case for including attendance at Oxford as an important independent variable: in fact, he refers to an ‘Oxocracy’. Eleven of Britain’s post-war Prime Ministers went to Oxford. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are all Oxford Tories. They debated each other at the Oxford Union, competed in student elections, honed their rhetorical skills in tutorials and were members of the same clubs (not just the Bullingdon). They are, Kuper argues, peers, rivals, friends. What better preparation for the Victorian melodrama of House of Commons debates than socialisation via public school and the Oxford Union? Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and the Miliband brothers were at Oxford with them. Brexit, Kuper goes on to suggest, was hatched at Oxford in the late 1980s.
Both Beard and Kuper are not only scathing in their condemnation of this form of elite preparation to rule but argue that only radical reform will break the cycle. The privileged, exclusive closed shop of the old public schools must be reformed out of existence. As for Oxford, Kuper argues in similar vein that Oxford, and indeed Oxbridge, should be stopped from teaching undergraduates: ‘that would remove Oxbridge’s biggest distortion of British life’. He makes the point that this need not be the end of their ‘excellence’: rather, it could and should be spread more widely (eg retraining gifted but under-qualified adults, expanding summer schools for promising teenagers etc). He closes with this sentence: ‘alternatively, we could preserve Oxford unchanged, and just accept elite self-perpetuation as the intended outcome of British life.’ Of course, all this is well known. In fact, we are almost so familiar with it that it passes us by. MPs of all parties look the other way, in effect accepting ‘elite self-perpetuation’.
Sociology has concepts other than class – like elite and establishment – that can sometimes sharpen and sometimes dull our analyses. Horses for courses I have always maintained. Each has its uses. I would just add a few extra remarks in what was/is intended to be a short and manageable blog. First, I think class as a social structure of relation has been neglected in post-1970s sociology. Proxies like SEG, NS-SEC etc effectively ‘absent’ class as structure/relation. Elite analysis is important in its own right, and clearly overlaps with issues of class recruitment etc, but it also tends to ‘absent’ class as structure/relation.
The notion of establishment too has an obvious and salient purchase in the context of this blog. My second comment derives from Mills’ idea of ‘interlocking elites’ in 1950s America. It may well be that the notion of an establishment is best approached via a consideration of the nature and extent Britain’s interlocking elites. This would be valid in its own right, regardless of my thesis that class is a vital causal tendency. Such a study would address the interrelations between global as well as national economic, business, political, media, professional and other elites (which we already know to be extensive, not least through studies of public schools and Oxbridge). There already exist important studies of course, like those developed by Mike Savage at the LSE. I am enormously encouraged by the that Tom Mills is working directly on the phenomenon of interlocking elites.
My third and final point may be predictable. There can be no social transformation, because that is what is required if the rich are not to get richer and the poor poorer is a revolutionary shift in societal organisation. My well-rehearsed response has been to push for a policy of permanent reform on a continuum from ‘attainable’ to ‘aspirational’ in pursuit of a crisis of state legitimation. Yes, I know it’s complex. More in my latest published paper: