Title: The nature of establishment opinion - When elites get it wrong | Blighty | The Economist
Headings: When elites get it wrong
The nature of establishment opinion
When elites get it wrong
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Content: the point about issues such as crime and the euro was that the masses and the elites took such different views, and the masses were vindicated. Caveats aside, these three misjudgments in recent decades are rather damning. They have also had political consequences that might not be obvious to you. Paul Goodman, a former Tory MP and now an astute observer of the party from his perch at ConservativeHome, argues that what traditionally determined whether someone was on the left or the right of the Conservative Party was his attitude to establishment opinion. If you generally deferred to it, you were on the One Nation left, perhaps a member of the Tory Reform Group. If you were generally wary of elite consensus on a given issue, you were a right-winger. Mr Goodman points out that successive humiliations over issues such as Thatcherism and the euro have sapped the old Tory left of members and morale. Bar the occasional Damian Green or Ken Clarke, few Tory MPs would define themselves as being on the left of the party. ( There are several "modernisers", not least David Cameron and George Osborne, but, if you'll forgive this detour into Tory theology, that is not the same thing at all. Modernisers are generally much more eurosceptic, Thatcherite and hardline on crime than old Tory left-wingers.)