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: Let's start with the first question. British elites have been very wrong about something very important in each of the last three decades. First, in the 1980s, it was Thatcherism. Privatisation, flexible labour markets and non-punitive tax rates are the common sense of our times, but Thatcherism was, at least at the turn of the 1980s, disdained by much of the British establishment as a transient fad propagated by a crazed fishwife from Grantham. Tory "wets" such as Ian Gilmour and Jim Prior were in line with the thinking of the civil service, the Confederation of British Industry, the universities and much of the high-brow media. It's not that these elites were left-wing; indeed, they were truer conservatives (with a small "c" ) than Margaret Thatcher herself. They thought that Britain was a declining nation that could do no more than tinker with the spluttering corporatism of the 1970s. They were wrong. Then, in the 1990s, there was the issue of crime.