A rightwing insurrection is usurping our democracy

For 30 years big business, neoliberal thinktanks and the media have colluded to capture our political system. They're winning

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 1 October 2012 20.30 BST

After contemplating a military coup Sir James Goldsmith went on to form the Referendum party, slogan: Let the People Decide. Photograph: Jacqueline Arzt/AP

To subvert means to turn from below. We need a new word, which means to turn from above. The primary threat to the democratic state and its functions comes not from mob rule or leftwing insurrection, but from the very rich and the corporations they run.

These forces have refined their assault on democratic governance. There is no need – as Sir James Goldsmith, John Aspinall, Lord Lucan and others did in the 1970s – to discuss the possibility of launching a military coup against the British government: the plutocrats have other means of turning it.

Over the last few years I have been trying better to understand how the demands of big business and the very rich are projected into policymaking, and I have come to see the neoliberal thinktanks as central to this process. These are the groups which claim to champion the free market but whose proposals often look like a prescription for corporate power.

David Frum, formerly a fellow of one of these thinktanks – the American Enterprise Institute – argues that they "increasingly function as public relations agencies". But in this case, we don't know who the clients are. As the corporate lobbyist Jeff Judson enthuses, they are "virtually immune to retribution … the identity of donors to thinktanks is protected from involuntary disclosure". A consultant who worked for the billionaire Koch brothers claims that they see the funding of thinktanks "as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves".

This much I knew, but over recent days I've learned a lot more. In Think Tank: the story of the Adam Smith Institute, the institute's founder, Madsen Pirie, provides an unintentional but invaluable guide to how power in Britain really works.

Soon after it was founded (in 1977), the institute approached "all the top companies". About 20 of them responded by sending cheques. Its most enthusiastic supporter was the coup plotter James Goldsmith, one of the most unscrupulous asset strippers of that time. Before making one of his donations, Pirie writes, "he listened carefully as we outlined the project, his eyes twinkling at the audacity and scale of it. Then he had his secretary hand us a cheque for £12,000 as we left".

From the beginning, senior journalists on the Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail volunteered their services. Every Saturday, in a wine bar called the Cork and Bottle, Margaret Thatcher's researchers and leader writers and columnists from the Times and Telegraph met staff from the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs. Over lunch, they "planned strategy for the week ahead". These meetings would "co-ordinate our activities to make us more effective collectively". The journalists would then turn the institute's proposals into leader columns while the researchers buttonholed shadow ministers.

Soon, Pirie says, the Mail began running a supportive article on the leader page every time the Adam Smith Institute published something. The paper's then editor, David English, oversaw these articles himself, and helped the institute to refine its arguments.

As Pirie's history progresses, all references to funding cease. Apart from tickets donated by British Airways, no sponsors are named beyond the early 1980s. While the institute claims to campaign on behalf of "the open society", it is secretive and unaccountable. Today it flatly refuses to say who funds it.

Pirie describes how his group devised and refined many of the headline policies implemented by Thatcher and John Major. He claims (and produces plenty of evidence to support it) either full or partial credit for the privatisation of the railways and other industries, for the contracting-out of public services to private companies, for the poll tax, the sale of council houses, the internal markets in education and health, the establishment of private prisons, GP fundholding and commissioning and, later, for George Osborne's tax policies.

Pirie also wrote the manifesto of the neoliberal wing of Thatcher's government, No Turning Back. Officially, the authors of the document – which was published by the party – were MPs such as Michael Forsyth, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo. "Nowhere was there any mention of, or connection to, myself or the Adam Smith Institute. They paid me my £1,000 and we were all happy." Pirie's report became the central charter of the doctrine we now call Thatcherism, whose praetorian guard called itself the No Turning Back group.

Today's parliamentary equivalent is the Free Enterprise Group. Five of its members have just published a similar manifesto, Britannia Unchained. Echoing the narrative developed by the neoliberal thinktanks, they blame welfare payments and the mindset of the poor for the UK's appalling record on social mobility, suggest the need for much greater cuts and hint that the answer is the comprehensive demolition of the welfare system. It is subtler than No Turning Back. There are fewer of the direct demands and terrifying plans: these movements have learned something in the past 30 years.

It is hard to think how their manifesto could have been better tailored to corporate interests. As if to reinforce the point, the cover carries a quote from Sir Terry Leahy, until recently the chief executive of Tesco: "The path is clear. We have to be brave enough to take it."

Once more the press has taken up the call. In the approach to publication, the Telegraph commissioned a series of articles called Britain Unleashed, promoting the same dreary agenda of less tax for the rich, less help for the poor and less regulation for business. Another article in the same paper, published a fortnight ago by its head of personal finance Ian Cowie, proposes that there be no representation without taxation. People who don't pay enough income tax shouldn't be allowed to vote.

I see these people as rightwing vanguardists, mobilising first to break and then to capture a political system that is meant to belong to all of us. Like Marxist insurrectionaries, they often talk about smashing things, about "creative destruction", about the breaking of chains and the slipping of leashes. But in this case they appear to be trying to free the rich from the constraints of democracy. And at the moment they are winning.

"But none of the priests used condoms so at least they're all good Catholics."

Mark Steel in The Independent on 7 April 2010

Gordon Brown has one genuine chance left. He must employ the Vatican, as their public relations team operates at a level of utter genius. Somehow, while they're embroiled in an international paedophile scandal, they've fixed it so the person who's had to apologise is the Archbishop of an entirely different faith, for suggesting on Radio 4's Start the Week that the scandal has caused the Catholic church to lose credibility. Gary Glitter must have been straight on to 118 118 to gasp "Give me the number of the Pope".


The Pope's own preacher managed to make life even trickier for his boss, complaining that criticism of the Catholic Church on this issue was similar to anti-Semitism and "Collective punishment for Jews." Of course. I'm sure when a priest is told the children he abused want action to be taken against him, he thinks "I tell you what, now I know exactly how Anne Frank felt."

Still, I suppose we should be grateful he didn't add "But none of the priests used condoms so at least they're all good Catholics."

In a way this follows the history of the church, which has never been keen on owning up to its bad behaviour until the last minute. As a guide, having threatened to kill Galileo unless he withdrew his astronomical discoveries, they did manage to apologise, in 1996. So if the child abuse victims can be patient for three more centuries that should get everything cleared up.

You could argue there's something in the nature of the priesthood that makes this sort of activity more likely. A shrink for example might suggest that if you're seen as a conduit between your parishioners and the creator of the universe, and have to be celibate and even masturbation lands you with an eternity in unimaginable agonising torment, that could lead to behavioural issues in certain cases.

The Vatican has objected that the percentage of paedophiles in the priesthood is lower than in society as a whole. Who knows what polling company produced those figures but the problem isn't that some priests abuse children, it's that the ones who do it have been protected by their holy bosses.

It may be that a similar percentage of gas fitters are child abusers, but if they're caught they're sent to the police, and not told that as long as they quietly slip off to a different parish they can still advertise themselves as Corgi registered.

For example, one Father Lawrence Murphy is said to have abused around 200 boys at a deaf school over a period of 24 years in South Wisconsin, and when this was reported to the Vatican he was asked to move to North Wisconsin. And if they'd thought of it they'd probably have suggested he tried the blind school instead as at least they wouldn't be able to identify him in court.

Or there's the government commission in Ireland that concluded in one institution: "For six years priests and nuns terrorised boys and girls with physical, sexual and mental abuse."

If that was any other body, the press would plaster photos of all the abusers on their front pages under headlines saying "Boil this scum." And with your normal paedophile case, if someone suggests the institution that protected them will lose credibility as a result, the media reaction isn't "Hmm, well that seems a little strong."

But there's an assumption that if someone's a religious leader they are by definition wholesome and a bit saintly, so even a paedophile priest must mean well. And the person in charge of the branch of the Vatican that dealt with these misdemeanours was Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope, so it must all be a result of a bureaucratic mix-up or something.

So the Pope will just have to offer a semi-regret, send a couple of the worst offenders to a clinic, maybe suggest in future if a priest can't help himself with a bit of child abuse, he should use patches to wean himself off it, and then complain how upsetting it is if in spite of all this someone suggests his church is losing credibility.

Or maybe we've all been fooled and the Archbishop's comments were part of a publicity stunt for the show he made them on, in which case it was a huge success and similar tactics will be used for other shows. So the first question on next week's Gardeners' Question Time will be: "Can the panel tell me why my hydrangeas have been riddled with greenfly since the Church of England has been effectively finished as a religion? And that comes from the Dalai Lama?"