PODEMOS, Spain’s new left-wing party built from nothing in 2014, is now a serious challenger for government in the 2015 election — in part by trying to find new language to articulate people’s anger at the system.

Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias points people to “la casta,” The “caste” at the top of society. This is the layer of rich people and their hangers-on blamed by Podemos for the pain of austerity.

“La casta” are directors of corporations that forced the government to work for them while bending all the rules, or the super-rich who influence politics but don’t pay tax, plus their acolytes in the political parties.

Iglesias attacks the last group as “the political caste that uses the public to enrich themselves.”

Podemos’s use of the caste-based lexicon is successfully creating a new popular perception. Instead of speaking in more traditional left-wing terms like “ruling class” or “the bosses,” Podemos are reaching for a new rhetoric that is less weighed down by old arguments.

The “caste” creates an opposition between the people and an illegitimate elite. Podemos language has a Latin American feel, being derived in part from Argentinan-born (though Essex-based) “post-Marxist” theoretician Ernesto Laclau, and from the Bolivarian socialism of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

But the way Podemos describes a “caste” which nakedly distorts “democratic” institutions is derived from reality as well as theory. Neoliberalism, globalisation and the decay of social democracy has made the elite pull away in fantastic new ways while managerial social democrats and technocratic conservatives crookedly helped them in hopes of returned favours.

You can see this when you ask whether we have a “casta” in Britain.

Are we angry about a “political caste that uses the public to enrich themselves?”

For a long time in Britain the answer might have been “yes,” but the anger would have focused on the MPs’ expenses scandal.

This is just part of the story. Politicians acted corruptly because they thought they should be able to live more like the corporate executives they admired, regardless of the rules.

But the significance of the caste is what Podemos calls the “dense network of client relations” which ensured “institutions served large companies” at public cost.

Recent attacks by businessmen and their political friends on Ed Miliband saw this kind of caste taking to the British stage on cue.

When Lord Rose attacked Miliband’s very modest plans to regulate corporations as a “70s throwback,” the Daily Mail called Rose “the man who saved Marks and Spencer.” Labour pointed out he is also a Tory Lord. But look deeper and you can see how Rose is very much a member of our “casta.” Rose has several corporate jobs. He is a “senior adviser” to HSBC European. He is paid by a bank which helped throw us into recession, benefited from state support and has avoided any serious regulation, despite serious corruption in the bank.

Rose is also adviser to Bridgepoint Capital, an investment firm which owns companies making money from NHS privatisation.

Bridgepoint Capital firm Alliance Medical sell scanning services to the NHS. It just won an £80 million contract for NHS scanning, despite protests from an NHS consortium that wanted to do the same job for £7m less.

Bridgepoint also owns Care UK, which runs many of the 111 telephone services for the NHS. Their low-paid clinically untrained staff rely on a formulaic script to answer callers with health worries. This cheap method is profitable for Care UK, but clogs up NHS A&Es.

Care UK also profit froms very low pay, which led to a nationally significant strike of their care workers in Doncaster. Care UK, like other Bridgepoint firms, also reduced its tax bill by a system of loans and other standard private equity methods. So Rose has an interest in health privatisation which strains the NHS, low pay and tax avoidance.

Rose has a friend on the Bridgepoint board — former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, who is also part of the current attack on “Red Ed.”

A health secretary who becomes a health privateer is also an obvious member of “la casta.” While in Britain we tend to describe things in “Labour versus Tory” terms, in Spain “la casta” involves politicians from the Conservative People’s Party and the Labour-like socialist party, PSOE, in equal measure. Corporate-friendly Blairism made our new Labour ministers join the caste.

Another attacker, Lord Hutton, gave Alliance Medical (owned by his flatmate Alan Milburn’s new employer, Bridgepoint Capital) its first big NHS contract. Now Hutton has followed Milburn into NHS privatisation as director of Circle Health, which has been given many NHS contracts despite its high-profile failure running Hinchingbrooke hospital. Hutton got a job, Circle got money, patients were treated very badly and the NHS was left in the lurch.

Hiss personal enrichment at public cost doesn’t stop there. He was business secretary when the job included energy. Hutton backed a plan for new nuclear power stations. They are privately run but backed with billions of “state aid.” He runs the Nuclear Industries Association, the group of firms that get fat off that state aid, and is also a consultant to Bechtel, a US engineer with big nuclear interests.

He was part of the government that backed the Iraq war, and in 2008, when he became defence secretary, he stuck with the disastrous occupation of Iraq. He is now a consultant to Lockheed, the US arms giant that profited from Iraqi bloodshed.

Hutton has other directorships — both he and Milburn both work for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the accountants and management consultants up to their neck in privatisation and the financial crisis.

Rose, Milburn and Hutton are members of Britain’s caste, a dense network of businessmen and politicians profiting from a system that leaves us in austerity. What we don’t have, and need, is our own Podemos.