Phrenology of Britain

loan Davies

Anatomy of Britain; Anthony Sampson; Hodder and Stoughton 35s.

“I have written this book,” Sampson states baldly in his conclusion,“without the academic equipment of a social or political theorist.”It is symptomatic of the state of our social studies that the firstattempt at an account of the power elite in Britain should have beenmade by an “enquiring journalist”, whose credentials are his gossipcolumn in a Sunday newspaper. The book bears all the marks of itsorigin. Theory is, of course, completely absent; the emphasis on“particulars” which form a “picture of the metabolism of theanonymous institutions which settle our daily lives” has produced ajumble of trivia held together by vague references to Bagehot (“asa kind of yardstick for developments”); such statistics as are givenare rarely explained, and frequently irrelevant. Although Sampsonclaims to write “in a deliberately detached and analytical way”,such assumptions as he has colour the whole book, without beingdebated at any stage. The book is a monument to the dilettante: itslevel is the whimsical anecdote, the mass of board-room chatter, thehastily-produced vade-mecum for the socialite. The bulk of the bookis a conducted tour round “Sampson’s ‘living museum’ ” with itsPendennis conversation-pieces and its cult of leadership. Instead ofanalysing the structure of power, Sampson is mesmerised by thefact of power: no wonder the top 200 were so eager to talk—Sampson might act as their ambassador. Were it not for the fact thatthe book is likely to get a wide circulation, it would be pointless toreview it. But it is also typical of a trend in popular sociology andapproach to politics that is increasingly influential: if the book itselfis not important, the political thinking which it represents is.

The major problem in analysing power elites lies in locating theseats of power. The analyst has to assess the various claims of govern-ment, parliament, the political parties, business, organised labour,and the majority of the unorganised. He has to work out the relation-ship between these groups, and indicate the effect of theserelationships on decision-making. To do this effectively in Britainmay be more difficult than in some countries: as Sampson notes,there is a sham elite (aristocracy, monarchy, parliament, etc.) whichhas in the long run to be discounted because, although it providesthe ruling mythology, it is not in itself the system of control. In other

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words we have to separate these in whose name power is legitimizedfrom those who actually control the machinery. In Britain, traditionand continuing institutions provide an easy cover under which thepower elite can endure. This observation is not new and has beenmade by political thinkers on the left and right. Conservatives havegenerally claimed this as a position of advantage; Labourites havebeen unsure, attacking some institutions in theory while acceptingthem in practice. Consequently a vast mythology of the state hasgrown up which, in the classic case (Ivor Jennings) conceives of thestate almost exclusively in legitimizing terms.

“You are not here to verify,Instruct yourself, or inform curiosityOr carry report. You are here to kneelWhere prayer has been valid.”

When any division between the practice and the theory of institutionsis admitted, it is only a technical division. The institutions arethe summit of a historical process, parliament the temple ofdemocracy.

Much of this is attacked by Sampson. Parliament is not supreme(and, one may add, never has been). The gilded layer merely providesthe “controllers” with their credentials. The elite, though not exactlya public school club, lies somewhere between the Cabinet and the topexecutive strata of Commerce and the Civil Service. But so concernedis Sampson with documenting the number of garden parties given atBuckingham Palace and the cash taken by the Duke of Bedford atWoburn, that he scarcely begins to relate the decision-makers to thecontent of decision-making. A power elite cannot be studied ade-quately without some analysis of the social structure of the countryand of what the elite does with its power. Sampson apologises thatthere “has been no time or space to cover the broad fields of art,medicine, religion, or provincial life or culture.” Nor was time foundfor nuclear and foreign policy. Instead it was spent on the mostludicrous trivia (“Dunlop’s London office is very rubbery, rubbertiles, rubber floors”; “In the beautiful Gothic divinity school, underTV arc-lights, the votes were counted and the results were declaredin Latin which few of the graduates present could understand”;all this is done merely to attack the idea that the best men hold thebest offices, and to add “human interest”).

Sampson’s ideal society dominates his account. His alternative isa society of manager-businessmen. Britain has, with her empire, losther ability to compete. Consequently there is a power-vacuum: tokeep in the technological stakes we have to look at Sweden, Germany,USA and the USSR. As Professor Eldredge of the University ofColumbia has put it, we have three tasks: (i) to train an intellectualelite; (ii) to preserve a political hierarchy to maintain efficientgovernment; (iii) to make Western “democracy efficient to meet thechallenge of Soviet efficiency”. Quoting Bagehot, Sampson saysthat Britain is likely to fail by “not comprehending the greatinstitutions which (she) has created”. In his survey of the top 200the greatest praise is for Dr. Beeching, the directors of Unilever and

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Shell, and Ernest Marples. When he complains of “malaise”, thefault is with the “few thousand managers of our society who havefailed to communicate new challenges and new ideas. The Britishare quite capable of surrendering to the facts provided they are toldthem.” (My italics). Rarely have contempt and manipulation beenexpressed as crudely as this. The elite must be related to the demandsof technological competition: the failure of the present system is thatthe division between the covert and overt controllers is too great.Parliament and government are unprofessional: they do not accordwith the demands of a specialist society and thus cannot controlthe economy effectively. When Sampson quotes Professor Titmuss’The Irresponsible Society he concedes part of the argument (thatthe insurance companies have too much secret power) but he doesnot even consider limiting this power. Instead he notes that “theinsurance companies . . . are aware that their image is not too good:and they have spent some money on advertising their service to thepublic, with coy fables about animals and bees and a TV hero calledFred.” It is not surprising that Marples, the businessman-administrator is his political ideal.

Thus when we examine the apparent radicalism (“there is no pointin inspecting institutions without a sceptical eye”) we find thatSampson is not concerned with relating power to the behaviour anddemands of people: he is interested in power as such and withtechnical and economic success. The attack on public schools andOxbridge as an elite training-ground does not come from anyegalitarian conception: “The menace of the British conservativenexus, it seems to me, lies in the fact that it has retreated into anisolated and defensive amateur world, which cherishes irrelevantaspects of the past and regards the activities of meritocrats andtechnocrats as a potential menace.” The old boy network preventsthe new administrators from coming into their own. We need “theright decisive men in the right jobs like Sir Norman Brook or Dr.Beeching.” The case is made over and over again: the people whocatch the public eye are generally those who hang on to the trappingsof power, not the effective controllers, who work as the executives ofinsurance companies, as managers of large corporations, or assenior Civil Servants. The country is running down because a shamelite has formal control of government and some of the crucialdecision-making machinery. Thus “there is a failure in com-munication”—“the new and potentially exciting institutions—forinstance nationalised industries, insurance companies, Redbrickuniversities—have grown up in a separate and unacknowledgedsector, and the resulting rift has cut off the old from the new.” Thissumming-up with its attempt to be all things to all men shows thebarrenness of Sampson’s political thinking and sociology. Everythingthat is said in this book has been said before, and with greater effect.Fifty years ago Mosca wrote: “The ruling class must become awarethat it is a ruling class and so gain a clear conception of its rights andduties”, while Pareto’s “History is a cemetery of aristocracies” surelyrelegates Sampson’s tiresome detail to its own mortuary.

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The concern for the professional elite and the accompanying desireto see the “full potential of the society harnessed to a national effort”is a mark of the “new radicalism” ranging from the Bow group,through the Liberals to Anthony Crosland and the hierarchy of theLabour party. It is a position which has established itself in themajor “liberal” papers—the Economist, Guardian, Observer—and isperiodically worked out in Crossbow, Socialist Commentary andEncounter. One of its most explicit statements appeared in the recentBBC talks “The State of the Nation” (The Listener, July 5th, 12th,19th, 26th). The analysis made by Sampson should be seen in thiscontext. As Crosland summarised it: “We still have the cult of theamateur, of the all-rounder, of the dilettante, an emphasis oncharacter and manners, and a strong basic hostility to professionalismand expertise and technocracy,” while Professor Donald MacRaedeplored the fact that the British “do not see themselves as part of alarger pattern.” The main contributors to the discussion cast aroundin all directions for models: Aubrey Jones taking “the best” from theUnited States (“the best intellects of the country have been harnessedto the cause of government”), and even the Soviet Union, thoughabstracting the organisational devices from social relations andpolitical content. In particular, as Crosland, Aubrey Jones and LordJames suggested, we need a more mobile and specialised elite, likeKennedy’s. Though the methods proposed for creating this varied(from Crosland’s Swedish model comprehensives to James’ highgrammar schools), the end product seems to be identical. What wewant, Michael Shanks concludes, “is a greater sense of nationalpurpose, of what can be achieved given the technological achieve-ments of the nineteen-sixties, and this must come from a greater senseof leadership.”

The philosophy of “national purpose”, coupled with its sweepingcriticism of the power-structure, is likely to confuse the Labour voter(and a great many Labour MPs). The Economist frequently remarksthat it is difficult to see how the TUC can reject current moves by thegovernment for planning when for years it has been clamouring forjust this. And, of course, it is difficult to see how the TUC, even ifoffered partnership on Conservative terms, can shy clear at theprospect of becoming “part” of the decision-making process. For ithas never adequately defined what it means by a planned economy:it was unable to do so while Labour was in office, and is at presenttaking Crosland’s advise and examining Sweden. Armed withScandinavian techniques it will, no doubt, be able to talk to thegovernment in something like its own language. But if the problemlies, not with a planned economy as such, but with the whole structureof the economy and the ends to which it is put, it is difficult to seehow Labour can significantly distinguish between real alternatives.For all the parties are searching for a “national purpose” and theactual content becomes increasingly unimportant. This is perhaps theonly lesson to be learnt from the pseudo-criticisms of British societyrepresented by “State of the Nation” and Sampson. For the criticismscome out of a frustration bred of inefficiency, and much of the

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alternative is culled from half-baked statements by the Labour partyover the past years. (Indeed Samson criticises the largest com-mercial firms much more thoroughly than did “Industry andSociety” or “The Future of Socialism”). The Labour party’s inabilityto develop any theory of the state has boomeranged on it: its enemieshave taken its few slender conceptions and are attempting to weldthem into a form of what might be called commercial statism.This increasing advocacy of commercial statism should give theLabour party the opportunity of re-defining its socialism. Un-fortunately, there is no sign that this is being done. Instead of acomprehensive theory of socialist action and of the socialist statethe Left is increasingly turning in on itself and trying to hold on tothose institutions which give some semblance of democratic control.Hence the near-hysteria about the twilight of parliament and, mostremarkably, the Threat to the Commonwealth. Indeed the left isnow grasping like straws at those institutions which formerly itattacked as irrelevant.

When we encounter the frequent repetition in Sampson, Crosland,and MacRae, that Britain is a nation of amateurs, we are inclined toagree. But the strength of these arguments is weakened by the flatu-lence of the advocates. The work of these pundits themselves hardlyjustifies their pontification. But more serious than this is the apparentabsence of any real concern for democratic institutions, for public par-ticipation in governmental processes, and even, simply, for politicaltheory. Instead we have crude technological objectives coated with ahumanistic candy-floss: unless we become more efficient the Afro-Asians will starve (Shonfield), a meritocracy means greater equality(Crosland), putting the managers in charge will give us a new,purposeful society (Sampson). The concern is not for quality of thesociety but for its efficiency.

But “Anatomy of Britain” is to the right of Crosland-Jay, for itis purely technical, while on the Labour right there is periodicalreference to the humane society, to egalitarianism and to the myth-ology of democratic socialism. In spite of his “sceptical eye”, Sampsonhas not been able to distinguish between business as an occupation (inwhich he is very interested) and business as a system of power (ofwhich he is completely uncritical). His concern for the people inpower, for their posings and their personal relations leads him to ig-nore the institutionalized effects of their policies. Thus his omission ofthe fabrication of defence strategy, the social function of the CivilService, and the growth of the secret service.

The last word on Sampson comes from Mosca, who is not only onSampson’s side, but knows what is wrong with him: “To be worthyof belonging to the chosen minority to which the destiny of everycountry is entrusted, it is not enough to have won a universitydegree, or to have managed a commercial or industrial enterprisesuccessfully, or even to have risked one’s life in the trenches. Longstudy and great devotion are also necessary.”

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