Re John Harris’s article (Conspiracy theories are festering – and our politicians are making it worse, 18 June), the idea that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” may be a conspiracy theory, but you only have to change “elite” to “elites” for it to be, in essence, true. The governments of China and Russia are surely secretive elites. And are the governments of, say, the US and Britain (with their flawed systems of democracy, their governments formed by political parties funded by wealthy donors, supported by media owned by reclusive billionaires, beset by lobbyists, and served by administrative machines as opaque as they can keep them) really such paragons of transparency and honesty?
The day before Harris’s article you published an obituary of the US whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed that “everything that the American public had been told … about the Vietnam war … was false”. Of course, Britain has its Freedom of Information Act, introduced by Tony Blair, who later said he regretted it. All governments are obsessed with secrecy, and all governments are, by definition, elites.
Simon Wilson
London
