The Establishment: And how they get away with it by Owen Jones

Author:Owen Jones [Jones, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141975009
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-09-04T07:00:00+00:00

5

Scrounging off the State

Mark Littlewood’s love of smoking is etched on his face and his teeth; his twenty-cigarette-a-day habit is equally evident from his raspy voice. A genteel, engaging man, he speaks quickly and emphatically when discussing his political passions, and has a clear sense of excitement at debating ideas with irreconcilable opponents. The Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs has a straightforward philosophy: a longing to be free of the state, to drive back its frontiers and liberate the human freedom that it represses. We sit talking in a boardroom of the impressive flat-fronted Georgian headquarters of the IEA: although we are less than 400 metres away from the House of Commons, this is a quiet, terraced street with a history of prominent residents, including the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Littlewood explains that this anti-statism underpins his rationale for opposing the smoking ban in public places, an unacceptable example of the state’s infringement on the individual’s right to choose. Littlewood is a former Liberal Democrat head of media and – he emphasizes – not a Conservative. He supports the legalization of ‘all drugs’, would ‘probably abolish the monarchy’, is ‘very sceptical about the nation state’, and is ‘extremely liberal on immigration, probably going for open borders’. He is, essentially, a libertarian. But at the centre of Littlewood’s philosophy is a desire to impose drastic cuts on the state. ‘We produced a big piece of research called “Sharper Axes, Lower Taxes”,’ Littlewood recalls, ‘arguing that the efforts being made by the government were utterly feeble and we needed to broadly cut public expenditure in half.’ Even he admitted it was an ‘out there’ approach.

Littlewood has an unswerving commitment to free-market radicalism. He is, after all, an outrider – there to push the boundaries of what is seen as politically possible. His radicalism is shared by Simon Walker, the head of the Institute of Directors, which represents British company directors. Walker does not hail from a stridently right-wing background, but – like so many others – he shifted to the right in the 1980s. He had fled South Africa’s apartheid regime as an eighteen-year-old in favour of Oxford, and chaired the university’s Labour Club. In the run-up to New Zealand’s 1984 general election he ran the communications of the country’s Labour Party, which had embarked on a programme of privatization and tax-cutting. On returning to Britain in 1989, he worked for lobbying firms, ending up in the Policy Unit of John Major’s Conservative government, before hopping the fence again. He became Corporate Affairs Director of British Airways, Communications Secretary for the Queen, Director of Corporate Communications and Marketing at Reuters. For four years he was the Chief Executive of BVCA – which represents private equity and venture capital – before taking over at the IoD in October 2011. His career could hardly be more embedded in the Establishment.

Walker has the passion of the convert. ‘I think that smaller-scale governments, more freedom for business to exist and to operate

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