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    The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy
    Unavailable
    The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy
    Unavailable
    The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy
    Ebook359 pages4 hours

    The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy

    By Ferdinand Mount

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This was supposed to be the era when democracy came into its own, but instead power and wealth in Britain have slowly been consolidated the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the country struggles financially and switches off politically. We are now ruled by a gang of fat-cats with fingers in every pie who squabble for power among themselves while growing richer. Bored with watching corrupt politicians jockeying for power, ordinary Britons are feeling disconnected from politics and increasingly cynical about the back-scratching relationship between politicians and big business.

    The New Fewshows us what has led to this point, and asks the critical questions: whyhas Britain become a more unequal society over the past thirty years? Whyhave the banks been bailed out with taxpayers' money, while bankers are still receiving huge bonuses? Why have those responsible not been held accountable for the financial crash? Why has power in Britain become so concentrated in the hands of corrupt politicians who have been exposed cheating their constituents in the expenses scandal? Despite this bleak diagnosis, there are solutions to the rise of the new ruling class in the modern West. The New Few sets out some of the ways in which we can restore our democracy, bringing back real accountability to British business and fairness to our society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateApr 26, 2012
    ISBN9781847378019
    Unavailable
    The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy
    Author

    Ferdinand Mount

    Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and three grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. His most recent titles for Bloomsbury Continuum include Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel Making Nice.

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    Reviews for The New Few

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    • 3/5
      This must be the ultimate curate's egg of a book. It begins with a description of Britain's oligarchy, omitting any mention of the powerful families that have run this country since time immemorial. The owners of our media sources are seen as sole representatives of the bad guys.Just as I am about to lay this tome aside and write a blistering critique upon this site, our author produces an insightful piece upon the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments have stripped power from local bodies and secreted it into government offices and quangos.I am beginning to question my initial judgement when, Mr. Mount moves onto the topic of the coalition government, which was obviously just coming to power as he was penning this work. We are assured that this is the solution to all the aforementioned ills and that, although the Conservatives will be held back by the Lib Dems, they will be our liberators. History has, of course, removed any doubt as to the inaccuracy of that prediction. Were the above not to be bad enough, our author decides to end the book with a party political broadcast on behalf of the blue party. This is the weakest section of all; it seems that all rational has gone out of the window as dubious doctrine is extolled and flags are waved.The book deserves its three stars for the section concerning the dismantling of local government: it more than deserves to lose the other two for its sneaky partisanship and painfully inaccurate predictions.
    • 4/5
      Mount has written a considered account of the rise of the British oligarchy. He looks at the way that the power and money has become concentrated in the hands of a few business leaders, non doms and and Whitehall mandarins. These groups have vested interests at heart, as can be seen in the way that the revolving doors between government and business work; the way that directors and non executive directors sit on each other’s boards, and the fact that the nominated shareholders (pension funds) also now sit on the boards of these companies.

      And yet he sees that there is change just starting, if not to reign in the excesses, but to temper them at least. Politicians are starting to make noises about the ratio between the top earners and the bottom earners in companies. JP Morgan said it should never exceed 20 to 1, but it can now be 400 to one in the worst cases. Politicians are starting to wrest power back from the government and mandarins through the select committees. The living wage organisation, supported even by Boris Johnson, is making an attempt to get large companies implementing it; this will life numerous people out of poverty and into jobs. He makes some good suggestions about the lack of training opportunities and that people who are not suitable for university cannot go to technical schools, as they do in Germany.

      Well worth a read for those interested in the way that the political system works in this country.