I Went Up the Shard with Owen Jones to Talk About the 'Establishment' Bastards Ruining Britain

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

A lot of politics these days is talked about in terms of whether a particular policy, candidate or party is "Establishment" or not. In a sense, it has always been this way—it's why British party leaders on the election trail invariably try to prove that they aren't Establishment by making visits to building sites, pubs, and cancer wards. But with the gap between the Haves and Have Nots feeling wider than it has since the 80s, the concept of non-Establishment politics has assumed renewed appeal. Many of this year's voters may well choose to back whichever candidate looks the least likely to whisper "let's smash the bloody proles" over a late-night single malt in the darkest corner of some Whitehall drinking den.

Nevertheless, the concept of the Establishment remains a slightly nebulous one. Even Nick Clegg occasionally gets talked of as "non-Establishment" by Westminster journalists, but to a lot of people he's the personification of an Establishment shill—what with all the breaking his election promises for a sniff of Deputy Prime Ministerial power and all.

Fortunately, a book written by Owen Jones, published last year, can help you work out who's really non-Establishment and who's just a poseur in a slave-made Che Guevara T-shirt. It's called The Establishment and How They Get Away with It .

When I met Jones recently, every so often he had to interrupt our conversation in order to text someone from BBC Newsnight to tell them that, yes, he did want to appear but, no, he would not go live with Kelvin MacKenzie. The former editor of the Sun is persona non grata among the left, as well as most with a conscience, thanks to his infamous front page blaming the 1989 Hillsborough disaster on the victims. "THE TRUTH" was a headline based on lies fed to journalists by Establishment tools: the police. Such is the life of Jones, who is something of a figurehead of the left, and probably the best-known lefty who's consistently on telly other than Russell Brand.

Brand, incidentally, is quoted on the front of the new book calling Jones "our generation's Orwell," which Jones describes as "the single most mortifying experience of my entire life."

Jones's first book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class , was a huge success; commercially, as it sold around 120,000 copies; professionally, in the sense that it gave Jones a profile that launched his career as a newspaper commentator; and culturally, as its title alone was enough to hoist anyone donning a Burberry cap for a "Chav-themed" party just below people who black up in reasonable society's "why are you doing that, you dickhead" league table.

In his latest book, Jones locates the current Establishment's roots in the Mont Pelerin Society, a free-market think-tank founded in 1947. Its members adopted the then-radical position of opposing the post-war consensus that, having beaten the Nazis, everyone deserved housing, health care, education, a job, and so on. Jones argues that it was the ideas of Mont Pelerin eventually breaking into the mainstream that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher, rioting miners and the poll tax. This new free-market consensus was demonstrated by Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt just this week, when he insisted that the Labour Party are "furiously, passionately, aggressively pro-business." To think that they used to be into taking oligarchs down a peg if it meant helping the working man.

What defines the Establishment, he writes, is "powerful groups that need to protect their position in a democracy in which almost the entire adult population has the right to vote". Oligarchs getting rich by paying their workers poorly, bonus-loving bankers, obsequious journalists, scumbag corporate CEOs looking for ways to pay less tax, shit-show politicians making ridiculous expenses claims – that kind of person.

Our interview took place on top of the Shard, a nest for those kinds of people—a phallic display of wealth by a powerful group of Qataris who are buying up the capital, and somewhere my editor thought it'd be funny to buy Jones a pricey drink to make a visual gag about Champagne Socialism. We bought beer, but still, here is a picture of Jones looking at the receipt for the drinks that cost almost $15 a bottle:

…and gradually sliding into…

…pained indignation.

He spoke in strident and animated tones, but managed to stay just the right side of tub-thumping. He talked like one of your friends does when they have strong opinions and they want you to share them, rather than someone telling you you're wrong about everything.

Current political circumstances in the UK are posing awkward questions for Jones's idea of the Establishment. One criticism of his book is that he deems most things he dislikes—basically anything right-wing—as "Establishment" and anything left wing that he favors as "anti-Establishment." Which is why it jars that the right-wing UKIP are making political waves, in part because with every gulp of bitter and draw on a cigarette, Nigel Farage cements his image as someone who sits outside of any cozy Establishment cliques.

When I visited Clacton—the first constituency to elect a UKIP MP, the Tory defector Douglas Carswell—"anti-Establishment" was exactly what UKIP supporters thought they were voting for. But according to Jones that's exactly what UKIP are not. Jones mainly talks in soundbites—evidence of his hectic media schedule, perhaps—and he deployed one here, which I think I'd heard him use before, but to be fair, it's not a bad one: "They are led by that rare breed of politician," he smiled, "the white privately educated male who used to work in the city."

"They're bankrolled by ex-Tory donors, including one they just got who is a multi-millionaire. The two MPs just recruited are two male, privately educated former MPs who—again—worked in the Ccty.

"UKIP want drastic change," admitted Jones—but it's change in favor of the Establishment. "The point is they push Overton window," or the political theory that says there's a narrow "window" of ideas that the public will accept as politically viable.

"Everything within the Overton window is seen as common sense. Everything outside of it is wacky, nuts, 'What planet do you live on?' And the point is that people like that come up with ideas which mainstream right-wing politicians feel unwilling or unable to say. By having people like that as 'outriders,' they can say more radical things, and they shift the debate more and more in the direction of the people sitting around us," he said, flailing his arms at the City boys there for Friday afternoon team drinks.

"The Establishment represents often disparate groups of people," Jones continued. "But UKIP redirect people's justifiable anger away from those at the top and towards Polish fruit pickers and Lithuanian nurses and care assistants. So they protect the Establishment. Now, of course it's true that they're troublesome for the Conservative leadership." In other words, Jones sees the Establishment as the competing but ultimately homogenous groups vying to comprise the ruling class, rather than an Illuminati-like clique of unassailable lizard-men.

In the same way as people have sought to dismiss Russell Brand by asking about the price of his house, Jones's socialist shtick has been laughed off by some, who see him as part of the very political class he professes to despise. He studied at Oxford, before becoming a researcher for the Labour Party. I put this to Jones and he looked a bit miffed, firing back something that didn't feel like a soundbite. "I went to the largest sixth form in the country with 9,000 students," he said. "It was mostly a vocational college with people doing health and social care or football for life, and they did academics to tag along with it. And it's like, 'Fine, have a go at me.' But if you manage to go to a northern comp and got into Oxbridge against the odds, against people whose parents have bought their education for them and you put people off, then that's a bit shit, really.

"When I went there it was a huge culture shock as I had never met anyone from a grammar school, let alone a private school. And I had all these people going, 'Oh, the only reason you got in is because of the quotas for state schools,' and then afterwards it's like, 'Oh, you're part of the Establishment now because you defied the odds and went to a northern state school and went to Oxford.'"

A more mature understanding of the Establishment—one that doesn't involve negging on working-class kids for making it into posh universities—would still question Jones's anti-Establishment cred. From the outside, Labour's assimilation into the ruling class would appear to be complete. The policy implications of that are damning for someone of Jones's persuasion. Should they win the 2015 election, they'll largely stick to the austerity measures that Jones has spent the last few years railing against, they appear happy to hate on immigrants for the Daily Mail vote and they never seem to back workers on strike. In a country where nearly nobody is a member of a political party, why is a guy who's writing books that attack the Establishment a member of the Labour Party?

Well, he's no unapologetic fanboy. He didn't pull any punches when I asked him what he thought of Miliband and co. "The Labour leadership at the moment is a disaster," he said, stressing the word "leadership" and raising his eyebrows to distinguish between the suited Islingtonite Labour elites and aging socialist grannies clinging onto hope in Newcastle council flats and South Wales community halls.

"It's full of technocrats, careerists, people who can't string a sentence together which vaguely resembles something a human would say. A rise in minimum wage, which after inflation is pathetic, a cut to child benefit, a temporary freeze on energy prices—this is at a time of the lowest fall in living standards since the 1870s," he said, eviscerating Labour's assault on the "cost of living crisis." "[If they're] incapable of coming up with a solution to this rotten, bankrupt system we currently live in, obviously they will just be displaced," he said. "They have no right to exist in the way they do."

All that in mind, how crappy and irrelevant would they have to become before Jones quit the party?

In the Shard, he struck a somewhat fatalistic tone about the need for a party he's not that keen on, and the potential of an alternative emerging. "You know, my great uncle was on the football team of the Independent Labour Party in the 1930s," he told me. "They left the Labour Party during the great depression. And it faded into irrelevance. And that's been the story of every left-wing party since the foundation of the Labour Party." And when I pressed him further, he returned to this line of argument: "Every attempt has failed in the past… Would you want the Tories to come to power instead?"

§

I called him for a quick catch up last month when he had returned from watching Syriza—a truly left-wing party he can really get on board with—being voted into government in Greece. He told me he'd been on a "bit of a journey."

"It was really quite something. It's weird because you could feel that it was a historic moment. I've never seen anything like that before in my life, so it was kind of surreal, really." Inspired by that, and by changing circumstances in the UK, he reckons that the UK left's unhappy marriage of necessity with Labour might be living on borrowed time. "There's Labour's collapse in Scotland in favor of the SNP, we're seeing the rise of the Greens, as well as UKIP, so the election system is kind of in collapse… The Greens are already up to 11 percent in opinion polls, that's before Labour come to power." And if Miliband wins the election and makes the drastic cuts he's promising? "You can see then the potential for a new party emerging, because, you know, in Spain, Podemos was founded a year ago."

Back in the Shard, Jones told me why he thinks Labour are, despite everything, fundamentally anti-Establishment—and that comes down to the party's relationship with the Trade Unions. "They are the biggest democratic movement in the country and are rooted in workplaces and communities like no other movement," he said. "And that link with Labour is what stops the party—as opposed to its leadership—from being part of the Establishment."

The union link, Jones argued, "represents working people, supermarkets, call center workers, factory workers, people who collect the bins, care assistants—and as long as that links remains there is a fight to be had."

His membership of Labour is pretty much conditional on that link, and post-Greece, he can see it coming to an end. "If Labour lose and an out-and-out Blairite takes over, I think you can see the unions walking away and saying, 'We need a new party.' I would throw every fibre of my being into building that party—yeah, absolutely, of course I would. I mean, there wouldn't be a Labour Party [if the unions left it], anyway. It's called the Labour Party because it was set up by trade unionists… I would definitely, 100 percent, go with them."

For many on the left, though, that fight was lost a long time ago. Not for Jones. "Whatever your perspective on Labour, it makes sense to put pressure on them now," he said. "If they are going to form the next government and they are going to do a load of things such as austerity and all the rest of it, you need to put as much pressure on them now as possible. That's my strategy. Otherwise they will be able to get away with it."

Throughout the interview and the book, I couldn't shake the feeling that Jones is more unhappy about the neo-liberal politics of the existing Establishment than the existence of an Establishment per se. For instance, there's a bit in his book where Jones writes—seemingly approvingly—of a time 40 years ago when the leader of the TUC "could justifiably claim to be part of the Establishment," despite his characterization of the Establishment as an entity that possesses "undemocratic power."

Dave Prentis, the General Secretary of Unison—whose union did less than nothing when impoverished cleaners went on strike at the University of London last year—is on over $150,000 a year. "Red" Len McClusky is paid only slightly less than David Cameron, at $210,000. When I asked Jones if Trade Unions can get sucked into the Establishment, he batted it off, saying, "They are viewed as having no legitimate place in public life—by the Tories, the Lib Dems and even the Labour leadership. So I think the point I make about Trade Unions on the whole is that they're completely disconnected from the Establishment. It's the weakness of the Trade Unions as a whole that makes the Establishment so strong, as there is no counterweight to the wealth at the top."

Either way, he's playing the long game, hoping that the Labour movement will build, "A democratic socialist society where democracy is extended to every sphere of life, where you have a society ran by and for the interests of working people."

If that sounds radical, his plan to get there will be relatively familiar to anyone who was around pre-Thatcher. In fact, though he insisted he didn't want a return to the "dead" post-war consensus, it wasn't hard to detect wafts of Spirit of '45 nostalgia. His prescription is for nationalized industries, increased tax, a crackdown on tax avoidance, and the creation of green industries to create jobs. He sees this as "just a first step" on the path to a further reaching "democratic revolution." For now, though, he's focused on an attempt to shift the Overton window much further to the left.

Looking around the bar at the back-slapping City boys necking their $15 pints, and out of the plate-glass that ran from floor to ceiling, across the 800-foot high dead-space between the Shard and Canary Wharf, it was easy to understand how far that window has been pushed. After an hour or so, Jones had been doing most of the talking, but I was pooped. He's got a mouth like a traction engine and is simultaneously the most articulate and reluctant proponent of voting Labour for change that I'd ever met. While his analysis of the Establishment is hard to dispute, I wasn't fully convinced of his remedies. But at the end of our chat, I couldn't remember why, or think of any more arguments for him to answer.

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