I am looking at the timetable for events held by the Policy Exchange think tank at the recent Conservative Party conference. 

Ministers including Liz Truss, Matthew Hancock, Nick Bowles and “up-and-coming” MPs such as Nadhim Zahawi, Amber Rudd and Margot James are all discussing the big issues. What to do about university costs? Do energy firms rip us off? How do we get the economy moving? 

Beside the details of the time and location of the meetings are corporate logos. The meetings, though at the Tory conference, were sponsored by businesses and their lobbyists. For the price of the room and the wine and canapés, the debate on energy is held “with thanks to” British Gas or Centrica, the rip-off firms themselves. 

The debates on the economy are run with help from Goldman Sachs, one of the banks behind the economic collapse, or thanks to Deloitte, the accountants who failed to spot empty holes at the heart of the banking sector. 

Tesco, the supermarket whose financial success rested heavily on falsified accounting and the tax-avoidance island of Jersey also pay for the debate. There is only one significant private university in Britain, the London-based BPP owned by the US-owned Apollo group, but they pay for the discussion about higher education. 

In every case these corporations get their own spokesman on the top table alongside leading Tories. It is a simple, clear picture of how official political debate is literally owned by the corporations. Almost every political journalist in Britain goes to the party conference and is given a copy of this list of events. 

Some leading journalists actually chair these corporate sponsored meetings, such as Kamal Ahmad of the BBC or Ian King of Sky, and others are part of these corporate events.

Yet despite this business takeover of politics being under their noses, hardly any journalists bother to report this elementary fact.

So it is a real change to read Owen 

Jones’s book The Establishment, which describes this nexus of corporate lobbyists, think tanks, politicians and the media as one of the main centres of power in the country. 

Jones shows how the members of this network worked together to neutralise the gains of democracy — to take the sting out of the way mass voting delivered social democratic politics — and shift Britain towards a new, neoliberal consensus.

He is not just drawing a map of the existing Establishment but also describing how that Establishment transformed its desires into reality over the past decades. 

Some critics say he is describing a battle of ideas — and complaining about being on the losing side — rather than talking about social structures. But the two go together. The people with the big money, through these networks, were able to get their big ideas to dominate the debate.

I’ve been writing stories about where corporations and politics run together for over 15 years, and so I was pleased to see half a dozen of the stories I have worked on reflected in Jones’s book — I haven’t totally been wasting my time. 

But I am completely irritated to see how he can put over the same kind stories in a much more readable way than I have. The Establishment is well researched and very well written, showing that Jones has a real gift for writing from the left. 

An establishment isn’t the same as a ruling class — it isn’t just the people with power, it is also their mates and hangers-on. Jones adds colour by interviewing some of them, so you can hear their voice.

He is very strong on the politics-lobbyist-media side of the Establishment yet seems on less firm ground with some other pillars. He describe shifts in policing, for example, but doesn’t give such a good feel for what chief constables are like. Consequently, he overestimates police alienation from the Establishment and he similarly overestimates how far the military top brass have been pushed to the Establishment’s fringes by the reduction of the armed forces. 

Some other wings of the Establishment aren’t much covered — the heads of the universities or the Royal Family could get a bigger look in. But there are only so many pages in any book. However important Prince Charles is, writing more about him would not justify losing Jones his very important chapter on the big corporations which scrounge off the state and he tells an important story about how supposedly free-market corporations are entirely dependent on government support.

Jones also recommends a positive project to create a kind of counter-establishment, to set up think tanks like Class and long-term political projects to shift politics back towards popular power. It’s a good idea. But it is also worth emphasising how our “institutions” sometimes don’t look like theirs. The political organisations on our side often rely on numbers, not money, on enthusiasm and imagination not slick presentation. 

A scruffy “institution” like Occupy can shift political debate. It can also — as in the anti-Poll Tax campaign or the campaign to free the Cardiff Three in the 1990s — change national politics, bring down prime ministers or free people from prison.

Scots Labour: move left or give up

Former Blair adviser John McTernan described Scotland as a “mendicant nation.” Oddly, Labour folk calling Scots a bunch of beggars did not stop the rise of the SNP. 

At the last Labour conference shadow Scottish secretary Margaret Curran said Labour must fight the “politics of grievance,” while Curran said Scots should stop moaning — and got a huge cheer for it.

Recently resigned Scots Labour leader Johann Lamont reportedly thinks her old pal Curran stabbed her in the back. Lamont, the “left” candidate to lead Scots Labour, says Labour in Westminster held her back, stopping her from opposing the bedroom tax. 

Yet Lamont in her keynote speech attacked Scotland as a “something for nothing country,” demanding unreasonable things such as free personal care for the old.

Labour attacked the Scots as moaning beggars putting their hand out. The solid Labour Scots vote encouraged the ugliest version of new Labour — not just taking “core” voters for granted but actively insulting them. There are two ways out. Scots Labour genuinely moves left. Or gives up.