Very interesting comment by Big Issue founder John Bird on Question Time yesterday evening.
He said that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to govern.
One thinks of the Blair government where endless laws, edicts and directives were issued only to be ignored (so that now hardly anything tangible remains of the Blair years, with even Northern Ireland regressing).
The United Kingdom used to be a broadly self-governing system in which laws and customs were implemented through an all-pervasive network of institutions (thousands of institutions) known collectively and informally as the British Establishment.
It was often slow and ponderous, perhaps even stifling, but the system worked because people wanted it to work - they felt it was their system, owned by them.
With the abolition of grammar schools the traditional routes into Establishment institutions became closed to ordinary people, and gradually the Establishment (including Parliament, including the media) became a self-perpetuating ruling caste drawn from Oxbridge-educated self-important nincompoops.
The result has been a gradual withdrawal of support (a withdrawal that has now become acute) by the ordinary population for an elite that tries to tell them what to do.
He said that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to govern.
One thinks of the Blair government where endless laws, edicts and directives were issued only to be ignored (so that now hardly anything tangible remains of the Blair years, with even Northern Ireland regressing).
The United Kingdom used to be a broadly self-governing system in which laws and customs were implemented through an all-pervasive network of institutions (thousands of institutions) known collectively and informally as the British Establishment.
It was often slow and ponderous, perhaps even stifling, but the system worked because people wanted it to work - they felt it was their system, owned by them.
With the abolition of grammar schools the traditional routes into Establishment institutions became closed to ordinary people, and gradually the Establishment (including Parliament, including the media) became a self-perpetuating ruling caste drawn from Oxbridge-educated self-important nincompoops.
The result has been a gradual withdrawal of support (a withdrawal that has now become acute) by the ordinary population for an elite that tries to tell them what to do.
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