The Triumph of the political class

Fülszöveg

A new type of government has emerged in Britain over the last twenty-five years. The long tradition of integrity and duty that characterised British public life for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been abandoned and replaced by a form of crony capitalism. Casual corruption, venality, nepotism and mendacity are all on the rise. The distinction between private interest and public good has been lost, and the independence of our great institutions - parliament, the judiciary, the civil service - has come under attack. The effect on British democracy has been dire.
In this devastating and alarming book Peter Oborne argues that during this period we have witnessed not just the emergence but the triumph of the Political Class: the new ruling elite of Britain, a group characterised by its professionalised attitude to politics rather than old-fashioned ideology, and which has made party-political differences nonexistent in its pursuit of power and patronage.
The... Tovább

Fülszöveg

A new type of government has emerged in Britain over the last twenty-five years. The long tradition of integrity and duty that characterised British public life for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been abandoned and replaced by a form of crony capitalism. Casual corruption, venality, nepotism and mendacity are all on the rise. The distinction between private interest and public good has been lost, and the independence of our great institutions - parliament, the judiciary, the civil service - has come under attack. The effect on British democracy has been dire.
In this devastating and alarming book Peter Oborne argues that during this period we have witnessed not just the emergence but the triumph of the Political Class: the new ruling elite of Britain, a group characterised by its professionalised attitude to politics rather than old-fashioned ideology, and which has made party-political differences nonexistent in its pursuit of power and patronage.
The Political Class looks after its own, demolishes with ruthless vigour anyone who threatens its pre-eminence, and regards membership as far more important than mere party affiliation. But who are its members? How do they behave? And how are they different from the policy-makers of the past, guided as they mostly were by now-quaint notions of public service and the 'greater good'?
Assembling his evidence with riveting and forensic skill, Peter Oborne shows how the Political Class -along with its counterpart and collaborator, the Media Class - has changed the very nature of government in twenty-first-century Britain. Brilliantly and grippingly argued. The Triumph of the Political Class shows the chilling reality of how things really work in the mother of all parliaments. It is one of the most important works of political analysis since Anthony Sampson's The Anatomy of Britain. Vissza