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 elites are not a monolithic group. There were people at the top of the British power structure who supported Thatcherism (including Mrs Thatcher, obviously) and resisted the euro, such as Gordon Brown. And the elites have been right about much. Most fashionable opinion was sceptical about the war in Iraq, for example. However, so was at least half of public opinion; 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.