The New Elite is in Cuckoo Land

Exploring the latest comfort blanket for the ruling class

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Over the last decade, many of the people who run Britain were confronted with the awkward fact they do not know the country at all. Repeatedly, our politicians, our journalists, our intellectuals, the very people who are supposed to be in touch with the mood of the nation, were stunned by a succession of revolts they failed to see coming. The rise of Nigel Farage. The rise of Brexit. The rise of Boris Johnson. And then the post-Brexit realignment, symbolised by the dramatic fall of the Red Wall.

All these revolts pulled back the curtain to reveal a new elite that’s completely and dangerously out-of-touch with the millions of people who surround them. This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s just that, increasingly, across the West, people who belong to the more socially liberal elite graduate class, who live in the big cities and university towns, have steadily been drifting even further to the cultural left and away from a much larger number of people. In turn, the ‘Great Awokening’ of the new elite is now also transforming the institutions they dominate —the media, the universities, the civil service, the creative industries. As the new elite move left, so do the institutions.

The revelation this week that the civil service has embraced Critical Race Theory (CRT), even excluding straight white men from training events, or the finding CRT is now rife in British schools, are not a coincidence. They reflect how the new elite is now rapidly reshaping the institutions around their radically progressive values. So too does the fact the British people wildly overestimate the share of the population that’s black, gay, vegan, and trans. It’s not that they’re misinformed; it’s that they’re being subjected to a sweeping cultural revolution, bombarded on an hourly basis by television adverts, programmes, films, and Netflix shows, which are both created by the new elite and reflect their radically woke progressive vision of who we are.

Yet rather than think about how this huge and growing chasm between the new elite, the institutions and everybody else might be fuelling the intensifying backlash against them, and how they might close it, since 2016 the ruling class have turned inwards and away from the rest of the country. Whether reflected in popular shows such as The Great Hack, Brexit: The Uncivil War, or in the increasingly deranged ramblings of Alastair Campbell and James O’Brien, routinely they’ve blamed these upheavals on things which have nothing to do with them. They’ve blamed social media. They’ve blamed Dominic Cummings. They’ve blamed Russia. They’ve blamed Rupert Murdoch. They’ve blamed dark money. And they’ve blamed a big red bus.

Rather than confront reality, rather than get out of their comfort zone and actually explore what ordinary people out there are really thinking and feeling, the new elite have instead put their heads in the sand, smothering themselves in comfort blankets and cultivating increasingly strange narratives which fit with, and certainly do not challenge, their existing liberal progressive beliefs. And this week they’ve done it again. The issue? The bombshell revelation that net migration into Britain has now soared to a new and historically unprecedented number of 606,000. The reaction? Another classic case of the new elite offering a deeply flawed, deeply biased, and deeply misleading interpretation of the available evidence so that it both supports and promotes their existing worldview. Let me explain what I mean and, with the use of new data, show you why the new elite are giving you a deeply distorted view of what ordinary people out there are actually thinking and feeling.