Good morning. There’s a new lefty elite running Britain, and they hate you because they think you’re a racist. That is the central contention advanced by the scholar of populist politics Matthew Goodwin, and if the idea was already looming in the Overton window before his attention-hoovering new book came out, it is now hauling itself onto the balcony and clambering through.
This week, the former government equality tsar Trevor Phillips wrote that “the political and media elite” have achieved “institutional capture” across swathes of the UK’s governing apparatus. The Spectator magazine devoted its cover to the “new elite” and how “the woke aristocracy” is on a “march through the institutions”. And Liz Truss, who was quite recently the prime minister, claimed that her monumental unpopularity was not the result of incompetence, but of an elite “coordinated resistance” that “reached into the media and the broader establishment”.
Many people disagree with Goodwin – and we might think that the ease with which his ideas have spread is evidence against his claim that progressives are exercising such an iron grip on what is “acceptable … within the national conversation”. But he claims that his critics are simply in denial about the fact that they are part of the same elite that he says has cut ordinary voters adrift from a say in how the country is run. Today’s newsletter, with the London School of Economics sociologist and expert on elites Mike Savage, is about how much of this is true, and what other elites might also have a say.
Here are the headlines. I’m off on my holidays – Nimo will be with you on Monday. Have a great weekend.
Five big stories
Pentagon leaks | The FBI has arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old air national guardsman in Massachusetts, on suspicion of being responsible for the leak of US classified defence documents that laid bare military secrets and upset Washington’s relations with key allies. You can find a profile of Teixeira here, and read what we know so far.
UK politics | More senior Conservatives have hit out at Suella Braverman’s “racist rhetoric”, accusing her of undermining the party for the sake of her own leadership ambitions. A former senior minister from Boris Johnson’s government told the Guardian they believed Braverman was a “real racist bigot”.
Nursing | Nurses in England will go back on strike this month if RCN members reject ministers’ latest pay offer, with officials saying the result of the three-week ballot is too close to call. The Royal College of Nursing will announce the results of its vote on Friday after a lengthy consultation period.
Police | Eight serving and former Metropolitan police officers have been found guilty of gross misconduct after they were found to have sent sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic and ableist comments in a Whatsapp group between 2016 and 2018.
Fashion | Mary Quant, the British designer who made the miniskirt fashionable, has died aged 93. In a statement, her family said she “was one of the most internationally recognised fashion designers of the 20th century and an outstanding innovator of the Swinging Sixties”. Read Jess Cartner-Morley’s tribute.
In depth: ‘Britain is a deeply unequal society – there is a valid sense elites are too powerful’
In the last 20 years, as the gap between the group shorthanded as the 1% and everyone else has grown, academic studies of elites have grown with it. “It’s quite an old tradition,” said Mike Savage. “But it fell away in the 1980s. Recently, after Thomas Piketty and other economists starting talking about the 1%’s wealth, sociologists have started to look again for answers about who these people are.”
But just as new scrutiny has been applied to that rarified economic class, others have argued that other kinds of elite wield power of their own. One influential broad definition, from the American sociologist Shamus Khan: elites are anyone who has “vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource”.
In his new book, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, Matthew Goodwin reflects a recent intensification of claims that a small group of cosmopolitan oppressors (you may know them as the wokerati) are imposing their view of the world on everybody else, and that this influence is more significant than that of our most electorally successful politicians, much of the media, and the interests of business.
This group “creates, filters and determines what is or what is not acceptable or desirable within the national conversation”, Goodwin writes. “The new elite watched the prevailing culture be completely reshaped around their far more socially liberal values, tastes, political priorities, and interests.”
Goodwin was the director of the Centre for UK Prosperity, itself an offshoot of the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit, libertarian think-tank funded by a New Zealand-born billionaire. He has had support for his thesis from fellow anti-elitists Lord Frost, the former diplomat and civil servant who was Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator; Melanie Phillips, a newspaper columnist since 1987; and Piers Morgan, a television presenter.
***
So who is in the new elite?
Goodwin starts with a contention that would not hear much opposition from the left: there is a group of people from privileged family backgrounds, many educated at Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, who hold socially liberal views and mostly associate with others who feel the same, probably in London. (I should say for the record that I tick all of these boxes.) That group enjoy privileges and influence that most people cannot hope to match.
Many would also agree with his view that this group was blind to the evidence that a majority would vote for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, arguably Britain’s defining anti-elitist event of the 21st century.
The argument starts to be more controversial where Goodwin locates its roots: as a manifestation of a deeply held progressive hatred of British identity and loathing for the “morally inferior masses”. He also claims that “the new elite are fond of portraying themselves as the oppressed and disadvantaged” – which is hard to square with his claim that the group includes the likes of Gary Lineker, Hugh Grant, and Carol Vorderman, who if anything seem to relish casting themselves as obliged to act on behalf of less fortunate others.
Universities are also a target. As Will Davies wrote in 2020, disdain for the humanities is a useful feature of contemporary conservatism since it helps “free marketeers to find common ground with nationalists … The figure of the publicly funded humanities graduate, whose cultural privilege grants them access to the London elite, fuels a paranoid fantasy that is now central to conservative ideology.”
“A really key driver of populist politics is how you construct this notion of a cultural elite,” said Savage. “You say: they’re out of touch, but they’re very influential, and they’re working to thwart the will of the people. To be sure, there are people in universities, and journalism, and other places who have a degree of power – but they are not as cohesive or as dominant as that view suggests.”
One of the other features of this definition of a new elite is how easily it can flex to accommodate the politics of those it needs to include: so Jeremy Corbyn is a member, and Boris Johnson is not. To explain this, Goodwin says that “most of all, they are defined by their very liberal if not radical ‘woke’ values”. So if you’re a rich, prestigiously educated Londoner but you don’t like footballers taking the knee, you’re probably not part of this “new governing class”.
***
Is there any other elite?
Goodwin acknowledges that “the old elite still exists. It can be found in the House of Lords, the Sunday Times Rich List, private clubs and the Conservative party. But today the axis of power … has been tilting away from them towards a new ruling class.”
It may not help his case to note that the actual government is at least as infested with privilege as those he’s interested in: almost half of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet went to Oxbridge, and two-thirds were privately educated. We might also note that while on the “culture war” it is true that key voters are more in tune with Sunak (and sometimes Keir Starmer) than Caroline Lucas, there are just as many areas like wealth taxes, public ownership of utilities, and workers’ rights where the Tories are going against the grain – but continuing anyway.
Members of other elites to the one Goodwin is interested in may not be as obvious as they once were. In 2020, a study of 70,000 entrants’ listed recreations in 120 years of Who’s Who found that since the 1990s, there has been a significant shift from hunting and opera towards pop music and football. We might think of Starmer picking Stormzy on Desert Island Discs, or David Cameron’s professed love for West Ham/Aston Villa.
“People in all kinds of elite have a tendency to downplay their privileges,” said Savage. “My point would be: separate out what they say from the sociological truth. So when Liz Truss emphasises that she went to a comprehensive school [where she said children were ‘let down’] but it turns out to have been very good, we should interrogate that.”
***
Which elite is ‘winning’?
Whichever elite you’re most interested in is likely to be part of the 6% of the country that Savage identified as “elite” in work drawing on the BBC’s Great British Class Survey in 2013 – a group with an average household income of £89,000. He argues that different elites within that segment “are often contesting who has power between them – but also, when you interview people in these groups and look at surveys, you find that they don’t necessarily talk to each other much, so they don’t always challenge each other. Ultimately, it is the economic elite who hold the reins.”
Against Goodwin’s claim that the “new elite” is the “ruling class” is the fact that the Conservatives have been in power for 13 years, and none of its leaders since David Cameron would meet his definition. Ambitious Tories still face a Brexit purity test; meanwhile, if “woke politics” are so dominant, we might ask why Suella Braverman recently claimed that grooming gangs are “almost all British-Pakistani”, why the government has promised to rewrite the Equality Act to allow trans people to be banned from single-sex spaces and events, and why death penalty advocate Lee Anderson was appointed as Tory deputy chair. At the same time, Labour is constantly invoking the Queen and wrapping itself in the union jack.
Given all of that, it might seem bold to argue that it is the sneering cognoscenti who rule the roost. But Goodwin and his allies argue that these developments are all part of a rearguard action to defend traditional values against an agenda driven by a shadowy minority. If anyone disagrees, that is simply proof of their original thesis: that the new elite is out of touch.
Even with Brexit in the rear view mirror, “I think it’s going to carry on,” said Savage. “At the root of all of this is that Britain is a deeply unequal society, more so than it’s been at any point since the 80s. That means that there is a valid sense that elites are too powerful. This argument tells you to focus on the cultural part of that elite, not the political one. Until the underlying economics change, this won’t be going away.”
What else we’ve been reading
When first elected as governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis (above) gravitated towards the centre-right, choosing to raise public school teachers’ salaries and pay tribute to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Joseph Contreras tracks DeSantis’s swing to extremist politics in recent years and takes a look at whether he will be able to roll out his hardline experiment nationwide. Nimo
Rachel Aroesti welcomes the inclusion of Elton John in the V&A’s celebration of the diva, regrets the exclusion of Kendall Roy, and hopes the whole thing won’t ruin what makes divas great. “The diva is not supposed to be a wholly serious – or virtuous –proposition,” she adds. “She really doesn’t need to be reframed as an emblem of societal progress.” Archie
Daniel Lavelle spoke to people who have decided, or been forced, to live in caravans as rising rents and section 21 evictions make housing increasingly precarious for many. Nimo
Labour is on track for government – but Keir Starmer “has struggled to set out a vision that could bring [his] policy ideas into a coherent whole,” writes Daniel Chandler. He proposes that Starmer turn to the philosopher John Rawls for answers – and explains why Rawls’ ideas “can help restore a sense of direction and ambition to progressive politics”. Archie
Zoe Williams writes about the iconic, 83-year-old plastic storage container brand Tupperware as it teeters to the brink of insolvency. Nimo
Sport
Football | Two late own goals from Tyrell Malacia and Harry Maguire (above) snatched victory from Manchester United in the first leg of their Europa League quarter-final against Sevilla. In the first half, Marcel Sabitzer had scored twice. There was more bad news for United in injuries for Raphaël Varane and Lisandro Martínez.
Football | Premier League clubs have agreed to ban gambling sponsors on the front of shirts from the start of the 2026-27 season. But while campaigners welcomes the move, they also said it was “incoherent” as gambling brands will still be able to advertise on sleeves and pitch side hoardings.
Tennis | In March, the conditions for the Women’s Tennis Association to return to China were “piercingly clear”, writes Tumaini Carayol: direct contact with the Chinese player Peng Shuai and an investigation into her claims of sexual assault. Now that message has “crumbled to dust”, and the tour will return at the first opportunity. “It is no surprise,” writes Carayol, since China has been “the centre of the WTA’s plans for growth” since 2011.
The front pages
The death at 93 of fashion pioneer Mary Quant is on most front pages. The Guardian gives her its lead picture, above the main story about Suella Braverman being accused of “racist rhetoric” by other senior Tories. The Times says a fresh nurses strike is likely: “Unions looks set to reject final deal on nurses’ pay”. The Telegraph has a report that links deaths to the junior doctors’ strike: “Deaths rise as junior doctors go on strike”.
The Mail splashes on Rishi Sunak’s contribution to the trans debate: “At last, a leader who knows what a woman is.” The i has a report on disabled children: “Families plead for disabled children to get access to their own savings”. The Express believes a royal reconciliation is off the cards: “No appetite to make peace with Harry”. The Mirror has anger at a criminal’s lottery win: “Rapist gets his hands on £7m Lotto jackpot”.
The FT warns of woes at EY: “EY warns UK arm of fresh cutbacks after failure to split”. And Metro says of Mary Quant: “Farewell, Ms Miniskirt.”
Something for the weekend
Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now
TV
Stacey Dooley: Ready for War (BBC iPlayer)
Did you know the UK runs a scheme that flies Ukrainian civilians here, gives them intensive military training, then sends them back as rookie soldiers with the basic skills they need to fight Russia? Stacey Dooley: Ready for War? assumes you do and pitches us straight into an aircraft hangar full of blinking new recruits, somewhere in Britain. Like the young Ukrainian men who have just stepped off a plane, we are tossed in and must quickly adjust. Jack Seale
Music
Metallica – 72 Seasons
There’s enough worthwhile stuff to ensure that fans will be happy – you can overlook its shortcomings while the title track rages – and that touring won’t seem entirely like an exercise in running through the back catalogue. Equally, no one hoping to convince a non-believer of Metallica’s greatness will reach for it over the classics. Alexis Petridis
Film
One Fine Morning
Perhaps director Mia Hansen-Løve could have given us a heroine with more agency, and she relies a little too much on Léa Seydoux’s natural sardonic hauteur to protect her character from soppiness. But there is such a lovely chemistry between Seydoux and Greggory, and between her and Poupaud there is real erotic languor and romance. Peter Bradshaw
Podcast
The Debutante (Audible, all episodes out now)
Jon Ronson hosts another addictive series, this time investigating Carol Howe – the glamorous former debutante who joined the neo-Nazi movement responsible for the Oklahoma bombings and became a government informant. A fascinated Ronson speaks to those whose lives collided with Howe’s, and asks: “Is it really the case that, had she been listened to, the bombing might never have happened?” Hollie Richardson
Today in Focus
Investigating alleged sexual misconduct at the CBI
Police have launched an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct at the Confederation of British Industry in the wake of a recent Guardian investigation. Anna Isaac reports
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
It has been 26 years since the British children’s television show Teletubbies aired on TV for the first time, with its infamous grassy hill, Sun Baby and 10ft tall aliens capturing the hearts of children all over. Like with so much TV aimed at infants, Teletubbies made no sense, but its saturated colours and catchy songs made it a mainstay in children’s entertainment.
Despite it being off air since 2018 the show has had something of a cultural renaissance. British fashion designer Christian Cowan has released a new Teletubbies capsule collection, including a £2,041 knee high lime green heeled boot that has a bust of Dipsy at the top, saying “it was a no-brainer for me. These icons needed their fashion moment.” Cowan is not alone in wanting to pay homage to the quartet: a footwear range featuring five vegan gender neutral shoes was released last December, and Dipsy has walked the runway for London designer Bobby Abley.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until Monday.
