Yves here. Richard Murphy calls out an important shift that took place in the Trump visit to the UK’s King and Prime Minister: it was a state visit devoid of the usual parade and other ceremony. This is a tangible demonstration that the elite no longer feel it is safe to be in proximity of their subjects, save in very controlled circumstances.
This is the inevitable result of very high levels of inequality. We’ve had for at least a decade the super-rich building panic rooms in their ginormous flats and estates, as well as buying and provisioning what amount to glamorous bunkers in places like New Zealand in the event civil order falls apart. A prime concern is how to secure the loyalty of the pilots who would ferry them to safety.
I got a foreshadowing of this type of fear when I visited Mexico City in 1984 on a McKinsey project. The office had booked a car to take me from my hotel in the central city to a leafy close-in suburb. I suspect it was the embassy section of town. I was hardly that observant, yet I saw several snipers on different rooftops as we rode to my meeting. Even at my comparatively young age, it was clear that the rich and powerful did not feel physically secure.
We’ve written from the inception of this site that high levels of inequality impose a longevity cost even on the top income groups. A big reason is unequal societies tend to have weak social bonds. But you can see another here. Even the very well off do not feel secure. Feeling the necessity of bodyguards and fortified compounds is proof. And they are not about protecting property but their person.
Oh, and those faraway boltholes. They are a variant of the “going to Mars” fantasy. How long will medical supplies, like drugs and chips and batteries for solar power storage hold up? Do they plan to have a fully kitted out ER in case someone gets cancer or needs an appendectomy? How do they have enough in the way of skilled surgeons on hand? Imaging equipment? How will they get and keep enough blood in case someone needs a transfusion?
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future
Something quite extraordinary happened yesterday. A state visit took place, with all the associated pomp and ceremony, and no one was allowed to witness it, or to wave the required flags, or to cheer, let alone to stand and watch all the great and good who were to be paraded in front of them, which is the whole purpose of such events.
Why was that? It is because the people of this country are, very obviously, no longer to be trusted by our authorities. They do not believe it is possible to put someone like Donald Trump in front of us and expect us to behave with the obsequiousness that these occasions supposedly demand. And as a consequence, the powers that be retreated, quite literally, behind closed walls, symbolising the enormous divide that now exists between those in authority and the people in this country.
Over a long period of time, I have argued (as have others, of course) that the divide between a ruling elite and the rest of the population in the UK (and elsewhere) has grown considerably.
Partly this is because of the pre-existing wealth divide from which this country has long suffered.
And partly it is because of the ideological differences between the elite and everyone else, with that elite thinking that their sole purpose is to enhance the well-being of the country’s wealthiest people, whether they come from established money or have exploited their way to their newfound exceptional riches, whatever the cost to the rest of us.
Whichever it is, the inevitable result of their actions is that the divide between the power elite and everybody else has increased. We can now see that this divide has reached the point where it is recognised that these two groups cannot coexist: there is no trust left.
What is now clear is that the ruling elite can no longer display their power and wealth without objection and rising dissent. As a consequence, those displays are now having to take place in controlled environments, with the media receiving images that are guaranteed to be sanitised of any interaction with the people who form the population of this country.
No society that has reached this point can survive for long. When there is no connection between those with power and those over whom they are powerful, the breakdown of that society is very clearly signalled, and its collapse is likely to follow. This is the dangerous point that we have reached.
I have no time for the far right, but I do understand why people are angry with a powerful elite in this country that has left them precarious at all times, and most especially vulnerable to the economic whims of those who think austerity is necessary for the sake of mistaken political goals.
I am aware that I am at risk of repeating myself this morning about the dangers that Labour is creating by, in turn, perpetuating what the Tories did for 14 years. However, I think that the risks we are facing as a consequence of Labour’s chosen economic policy are so significant that this fact (for fact it is) has to be pointed out time and again.
The price we are paying for the neoliberal economic folly is now one that is too great for people to bear.
By implication of their actions, those in power now know it, which is why they are retreating.
Whilst there is no fascist alternative that will meet people’s needs (as the elite running Reform prove by their own backgrounds and priorities, which match those of the Tory elite that led us to this disastrous situation), in the absence of any other economic narrative amongst the larger political parties, it is to fascists that people will go. That is why Labour is so dangerous.
The power elite has drawn up the drawbridge at the castle (quite literally, as it turns out). We are in very deep trouble unless:
- Labiur abandons neoliberalism and outs resources to work to relieve the problems that exist in this country
- We tackle inequality
- We rebuild hope for now and the future, which also requires that climate change be addressed.
It’s a simple recipe. It’s also the only one that will work.
Maybe Gary Stevenson is starting to worry the elite ?
https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics
Unfortunately, Starmer is going to do none of those suggestions. Even the very simple opportunity to renationalise the bankrupt London water supplier, Thames, is considered too radical. No, it will be more arrests of peaceful protestors, for example, those that managed to project the image of Trump with Epstein onto the walls of the royal castle.
The images inside the castle, showed great long tables set for a multi course meal with accompanying wines, while outside these walls, more and more people are forced to use food banks to put food on their own tables. At least food banks do not force you to listen to a speech by Trump, which was pitiful to say the least.
Where is Guy Fawkes when they need him?
Where are the FPV drones is the more important question
When democracy crumbles, bullets speak louder than ballots.
Tinfoil: St Luigi was actually an op to convince the rich they are targets and get them to fully see the proles as the enemy.
And Tetsuya Yamagami 山上 徹也 was an op to convince them that gun laws are no guarantee?
Where Yves says “We’ve written from the inception of this site that high levels of inequality impose a longevity cost even on the top income groups.” I have to take that to include also inequality of influence, i.e. social and political power. In Western civilization, wealth and power tend to be convertible but they aren’t the same thing.
The studies have been done only on income strata v. health within and across countries. Please don’t make unwarranted extrapolations.
And influence would require subjective assessment.
“[I]nfluence would require subjective assessment.”
Not entirely: check out Martin Gilens’s book, Affluence and Influence (2012).
Sorry, I failed to make clear that the unwarranted extrapolations are mine alone.
My thinking is that the Power Elite withdraw to keep their own company within a fortresses, they quell our dissent with violent theatrical shows of enforcement, they spend our budgets on war instead of on what we need, they remove choices from our election ballots that could make a meaningful difference in our lives, and at best they do too little to hide that the motive of it all is to enhance their own class privileges. This is the political inequality I had in mind. If it increases on a trend then I should think it will produce more violence directed back at the Power Elite.
Sounds like the time for a party story!
“…and darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
Sorry, I mean,
“… and they all lived happily ever after”!
They engage in social murder https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2025/04/sow-on-social-murder.html having just passed the One Big Social Murder Bill
It was ill-advised adventurism, but one effect of it is what you mention. Max Blumenthal reported that Steve Bannon, campaigning for Trump 2.0 in front of Silicon Valley notables, invoked Luigi as a reason to back team MAGA: we know how to crush dissent, and aren’t as squeamish as the faux-liberal party when the time comes for hippie-punching and Kent State-ing.
The first time I deeply understood how afraid the elites are was when a boy bitch-slapped Macron and the level of violence that his bodyguards inflicted on the boy. The upside is that if well organized people couls scare them, not straight maybe, but at least away from centers of power.
I also understood what dishonourable pugs they are. They are knowlingly destroying society, socially murder droves of people but don’t even habe the decency to take a bitch-slap on the face. It is really asking for the guilloutines in the long-run.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uVVai_9sn8s&pp=ygUSTWFjcm9uIHNsYXBwZWQgYm95
When the lessons from the Ukraine war fully make their way around the world, then it will get “interesting”.
The state used to exercise if not total monopoly on violence (given privately owned guns and everything) at least total monopoly on indirect fires over a distance beyond a couple hundred meters. That era is about to end.
Right now the first step seems to be Mexican and Colombian cartels learning how to operate FPV drones through the many mercenaries sent to Ukraine, but it will spread much more widely as a skill eventually.
Then it will not be possible to ensure 100% safety for anyone anywhere. Sure, there will be jammers and interceptor drones around VIPs (Putin already travels like that everywhere), but that is not a guaranteed solution 24/7 and absolutely everywhere, and anyone can get caught slipping with sufficient patience.
Once that happens a few times, one can expect hellish levels of repression, the forms of which I can’t quite predict now, but we can be sure it’s coming.
And will be a rather nightmarish world for everyone in general, as it will be much easier for ordinary people to start killing each other with impunity, with no traces or witnesses, and with little defense against it. VIPs can afford jammers and security armed with interceptors to travel with them everywhere, ordinary people can’t. So that will start happening too — you went through the military and learned how to work with drones and have ways to obtain some RPGs and grenades, you have a dispute with e.g. your brother over inheritance, well, nobody can prove anything, just take him out while he is walking around his yard with an FPV drone or a hate drop. That sort of thing.
Likely drones will be banned for the general population — I think Belarus already did that — but at least the military and farmers will still have access, plus if there is demand, there will be supply, and drones are not hard to smuggle and move around.
“…Labiur abandons neoliberalism and outs resources to work to relieve the problems that exist in this country.
We tackle inequality
We rebuild hope for now and the future, which also requires that climate change be addressed…”
Yes, but…
The Labour party abandon neoliberal finance capitalism?
Inequality is worsening, and the trend is continuing.
Hope? We have heard that PR slogan before, but what exactly can be “hoped” for?
Neo-Feudal elites can secure themselves away from the potentially violent neo-serfs, but as noted, their quality of life is affected. Psycho-social stress (see prof. Richard Wilkerson) will still increase, consciously or not. They can build their nuclear bunkers in New Zealand or wherever, but I wouldn’t envy them at all. If we do have a nuclear war, quality of life for the oligarchs will not be so nice. They may well realize that a quick death might be preferable in such a situation, but we don’t want to find out.
Silly humans seem to commit the same mistakes and expect different results.
Sorry, that is prof. Richard Wilkinson (not Wikerson as in Col. Wilkerson)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_G._Wilkinson
Today’s link by Conor on X:
St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle will provide the incredible setting tonight for the State Banquet, with a 165-foot-long table, as King Charles III and Queen Camilla host President Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melania, and 160 other guests
My first thought was that it belongs to the Guillotine Watch section.
I have been writing variations of these sentences for several decades. The only thing surprising to me is it that it has taken this long to see obvious manifestations of elite retreat.
People now in power don’t seem to grasp that a functioning society is one where everyone has bought in to some extent, and feels they are better off with the existing system than without it. For at least a decade now, a big chunk of the US population, and perhaps the European population, has felt like kicking over the table and starting over. This was Trump’s value proposition in 2016, though perhaps he is wearing thin now.
Most societies have enough resources and talent to create a life that is satisfying and safe for everyone in it. I continue to be mystified why people running most societies seem to be trying to do the exact opposite. Not only is it cruel and vicious, but it also creates an extremely unstable situation that is not likely to last long. It makes me worry about the basic nature of the human species.
The elites act like drug addicts, where the drug is power.
The reasons for relocating to Windsor are much more pragmatic and less sinister.
1) Buck House is in the middle of multimillion renovations;
2) Trump is basically very unpopular with much of the UK public and any turnout for a Central London parade might be too small for him to exaggerate as hero worship;
3) With pomp and ceremony in public in Inner London, there would also have been a very high risk of Trump’s fragile ego being exposed to demonstrations against him and his government , especially his supine attitude to Netanyahu – which also is a constant source of embarrasssment for Starmer himself. That would have seriously undermined the vanity masssaging quotient of the event.
4) It is much easier to control media reporting with a closed event – for example Trump has exerted a power of veto over some media outlets like ABC who are normally welcome in the UK;
5) They have chosen the relatively cheap option of doing all the ceremonial stuff in secure areas of Buckinghamshire and at Windsor.
Murphy’s comment that:-
“What is now clear is that the ruling elite can no longer display their power and wealth without objection and rising dissent”
is a triumph of hope over experience….
Linking this event to increasing unpopularity of ruling elites and weakening supremacy of current dominance hierarchies, given increasing inequality, is actually a very thin argument in the UK.
Royalty still secures the approval of over 50% of the UK population – even approaching 40% of the 18-30 age group.
The two usual parties of government are both committed to neoliberalist growth economics and zero wealth redistribution.
The insurgent political party with a poll lead is hardly revolutionary but is basically a business enterprise run by privately educated, city supporting, right wing populists.
As those militant, lefty, American Express advertising, members of the Who once sang:
“Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss”
Just as the British Union of Fascists a century ago was very much a product of the aristocracy seeking to maintain its power, Reform is the 21stC corporate equivalent.
Unfortunately, in the UK, I see little or no evidence that there is sufficient disaffection to disturb the neoliberal corporate elite or that:-
“collapse is likely to follow”
Nor that any prospective collapse is likely to lead to meaningful institutional reform, Gramsci really did get hegemony..
However, we can live in hope…
Hope is a meaningless term in the face of Them literally raising the drawbridge.
‘Triumph of hope over experience.’
I agree with your point. When Murphy states, “when there is no connection between those with power and those over whom they are powerful, the breakdown of that society is very clearly signalled, and its collapse is likely to follow,” ‘likely’ is doing a lot of work here. It almost sounds like you don’t have to do anything, just wait for the collapse and those darn ruling elite will finally get their comeuppance. It reminds me of something that old sage Leonard Cohen once said:
Waiting for the miracle
There’s nothing left to do
I haven’t been this happy
Since the end of World War II
TiPi: Trump is basically very unpopular with much of the UK public … With pomp and ceremony in public in Inner London, there would also have been a very high risk of Trump’s fragile ego being exposed to demonstrations against him and his government
This. I don’t think there’s been a foreign leader since Adolf Hitler who’s more universally loathed by the British than Trump.
So, while what Yves and Richard Murphy adduce about elite views of the populace may now be true or will become increasing true, I don’t think the arrangements made for Trump’s UK visit are necessarily a proof of it.
Should be last sentence in the article. What follows belongs elsewhere. A keeper for sure. I’d even say it was insightful. And here we are.
The suppositions of this piece seem completely accurate to me. Unfortunately like all similar anti-fascist analysis these days, there seems to be an underlying supposition that after a dire regime of the extreme right becomes deeply embedded, history will come to a permanent screeching halt. I’d never buy into an ‘after Hitler, us…” glib attitude here, but borrowing from Sara Silverman, if life gives you AIDS, make lemonades. Terrible things are unfolding now, but with them come tremendous real world liberatory possibilities.
The United States and its Mini-Me the UK are circling the drain. In the case of the US, the once large and aspirational middle class, a bulwark of political torpor and social peace, is fast disappearing. With the exception of the U.K. the U.S. has a more extreme inequity of income distribution than what’s seen in other advanced industrialized societies and in this it serves as a model for an upward redistribution of wealth for the exploiter classes of other First World nations. More than half of the wage-earning class live paycheck to paycheck. We endure mass impoverishment and attendant social ills on a scale not seen in other industrialized societies. No political or economic mechanisms of the reigning market order will slow down or reverse this. Most importantly, liberal democracy no longer commands the political and emotional allegiance of the vast majority of the populace. There is much to build on with this.
In their long-term efforts to abolish historical consciousness among the people they exploit and rule, the rich and their political, academic and media servants have largely abolished it among themselves. This will soon pay substantial negative dividends. A decades-long relentless upward redistribution of wealth has not been an intelligent long-term survival strategy for the owners and rulers of the United States. Some of the sharpest among them know this. In a lengthy piece in the January 2017 New Yorker, the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, valued at that point at 600 million dollars, is quoted as being “concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest.”
…awkward conversations have been unfolding in some financial circles. Robert H. Dugger worked as a lobbyist for the financial industry before he became a partner at the global hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, in 1993. After 17 years, he retired to focus on philanthropy and his investments.
“Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution…
(“Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, January 30, 2017)
There have never been more promising circumstances for subversion in capitalist America. As always, real world practical action is required. A well-organized group of actual anti-capitalists can have an impact far in excess of its small numbers by focusing on employees of big-city public transit systems. Along with this, we can reach a wide and diverse working class audience by using low-tech mass communications methods among transit system riders. There is some small precedence for this in San Francisco in the 1990s, in a not-terribly effective transit system fare strike on SF’s MUNI public transit system in 2005, and in the ‘self-reduction’ efforts of combative proles in Italy in the late 1970s.
A widespread self-organized movement emerging from joint action between transit system employees and riders can affect an entire urban region. Good ideas of this kind can spread from transit system to transit system, from city to city, and into non-transit workplaces. We need to think big. This can be a step towards the working class regaining the political autonomy that was ceded to capital 90-plus years ago with the New Deal. And we should be wildly visionary: self-organized and extremely self-aware mass wildcat actions growing out of labor strife in metropolitan transit systems could conceivably develop, in depth and breadth, and in ways that cannot be predicted at present, to create a working-class-propelled political crisis for the extraordinarily unstable regime that we currently endure in a fast-declining United States.
In Chile beginning in October 2019, in response to a 30-peso fare hike, mass fare evasion on the Santiago Metro helped to trigger a nationwide revolt against inequality and austerity. The resulting upheaval involved a large percentage of the population of the country and lasted for several months. Something like this can have a much more destructive impact against a regime as hapless and historically bankrupt as the one we endure in the United States. Actions like this could help to realign extremely promising political polarization in the United States on class against class lines. Mass action expanding outward from big city public transit systems could be the way that a new social movement begins.
Public transit in the US would be a factor in a relative few major urban regions and is a non-starter for perhaps 85% of the US. Commuter rail is governed by the draconian Railway Labor Act and only the recent NJ Transit engineers showed any militancy (the other crafts caved). Subway or busses strikes impact the working class primarily. Strikes by public employees are illegal in places like NY State and outside of NYC, few would notice a public transit shutdown.
Major urban regions will lead the way in any new phase of mass wage-earning class resistance to what this failing social order is doing to our lives. This kind of action is obviously of a wildcat character and is not about acting within the limits of what labor laws since Taft-Hartley and the union apparatus muzzle us with.
Wildcat means we are no longer playing by the rules that capital demands that we play. An examination of the history of resistance by exploited and dispossessed people, in the United States and elsewhere, is replete with examples of newly rebellious people doing things that were illegal — until large enough numbers of people rendered these law no longer enforceable. This is where the larger reality begins to change.
Thanks for posting this.
I fear we’re trapped in a viscous cycle where the elites only response to the growing Western citizens discontent with the worsting conditions in their daily lives will be to crack down even harder with what caused these problems – the neoliberal economic destruction of a middle class and an increasing concentration of wealth at the top. No doubt this is spurred on by the elite’s growing realization that the unipolar world order has failed, and their world empire is in decline. But again the irony is that the very same neoliberal economic order which they will double down to enforce is what precipitated the failure of Western economies.
It’s funny how we were all told by the preeminent economists back in the day when China was admitted to the WTO that the socioeconomic forces of capitalism would make China a democratic country, but instead what happened was neoliberal economic forces destroyed Western democracies. Oops. But, they all got rich, and that’s all that really mattered to them.