Review:
Peter Oborne
The Triumph of the Political Class
London: Simon & Schuster, 2007
Some books are born again. Every book with a political theme aims to be prophetic, and only time can reveal their success or otherwise. Orwell’s 1984, Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, Faye’s Convergence of Catastrophes are all books whose time has arrived. It is difficult to believe that one such book is a little over a decade old, but Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class (TPC) has never been as relevant as it is today.
The book concerns itself solely with the United Kingdom, although its main thesis is relevant to the USA, as well as to the gauleiters of Europe. Oborne is a well-respected British journalist. As what is termed in Britain a lobby correspondent, he has access to the innermost workings of the ‘mother of all parliaments’, as politician John Bright described England’s governmental locus in 1865. TPC, as dazzling as it is, naturally made Oborne enemies within the very elite whose rise and victory he describes in the book. For Oborne gave the game away, like the heckler in the audience who sees and tells his fellow spectators how the magician on the stage is working his wonders, or little Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal that the Wizard of Oz is just an eccentric old man with a set of cogs and levers.
Oborne’s essential theme is that “the real divide in British public life is no longer between the main political parties, but between the Political Class and the rest.’ (p. xvii).
This class, he writes, replaced the old establishment and its standards of governance. Instead of public servants entering parliament from many walks of life, politicians in the UK are now unlikely to have worked outside of journalism, PR, advertising, or the legal profession. Very few have experience outside the world of politics, and the established route is from one of the top universities, Oxford or Cambridge, usually studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics, famously known as PPE. The next step is an internship, working for an established politician. Some may become specials advisers, or SpAds as they are known, to a working politician. This tier of government has largely replaced the function of Britain’s long-established Civil Service, and is illegitimately funded by the British taxpayer. It is also wholly politically orthodox. As Oborne emphasises, any opinions or ideological beliefs outside the accepted protocols will disable a political career before it has even begun.
This incubation of political agency has serious consequences. Politics ceases to be an active, deeply social and communitarian practice and becomes instead occupied by a technocratic cabal convinced that they are best equipped to improve the lot of others. The results of this in the UK is a country well on the way to ruination. Increasingly Sovietised, Britain – and particularly England – is being run by malevolent arch-bureaucrats, a managerial class more concerned with appearance than reality. As Orwell famously wrote, in The Lion and the Unicorn, England is a family with the wrong members in control.
Oborne credits 19th-century Italian lawyer and social theorist Gaetano Mosca with the coinage of what he called the classe politica. Mosca’s major work, Elementi de Scienzi Politica, is now seen by the new establishment as a precursor to Italian fascism under Mussolini, and this is a clear example of the ‘fascist’ or ‘far Right’ tag being applied by the Political Class and their provisional wing in the media to anyone who gives the game away.

Peter Oborne
Oborne updates Mosca’s 1896 insight, and describes how the modern Political Class – I will follow Oborne’s practice of capitalising the words in this phrase – has devoted itself to the destruction and replacement of the Establishment. Speech, vocabulary, dress, lifestyle; all of these elements serve to identify the new regime, and have been standardized to produce a homogenous tier of operatives who now serve themselves only, and their shadowy backers in the business world.
Oborne stresses that the political class is the result of a toxic amalgam of 1960s student agitation, technocracy and, in particular, Communism. Ostensibly defeated with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Communism in fact merely hibernated and emerged in a different guise. Oborne relegates his comments on Communism to a footnote, but it should not elude us. “Although Communism has enjoyed barely any electoral success in Britain during the last 100 years,” he writes, “its influence has been exceptionally strong among the governing elite…” (p. 47).
Communism, the spectre haunting Europe with which Marx famously opened the Communist Manifesto, is now a revenant. The EU is notoriously staffed, in its upper echelons at the very least, by ex-Communist sympathisers and even members. Angela Merkel’s Communist past is well known. The Red Menace never went anywhere, it just changed its livery. This lingering of Communism explains Oborne’s observation that ‘the Political Class has at all times resented and sought to destroy the free-standing status of British institutions.’ (p. 49).
And it is the destruction or infiltration of the great British institutions that Oborne delineates, as each one is shown to have fallen to this triumphal Political Class, making as it has a long march of its own of which Mao or Gramsci would have been proud. This factional overthrow serves but one purpose, that “the instinctive priority of the Political Class has been to expand the role and powers of the executive and its proxies, sacrificing civil liberties if necessary.” (p. 183).
The inevitable attacks on the British monarchy are highlighted, seen as it is by the new rulers as an archaic irrelevance whose popularity with ordinary people they despise.
Parliament, and its essential function in what was a democratic Britain, has been undermined as a direct result of the journalistic backgrounds not just of MPs, but of advisers to government. “All important announcements”, writes Oborne, “are now made through the media, and only as an afterthought through the [House of] Commons.” (p. 201).
In addition to this sidelining of an ancient democratic process, Oborne shows the way in which the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards had had his or her role watered down and weakened. The Political Class does not wish for scrutiny, at least not of itself. The people, of course, are another matter. Great Britain has around a quarter of the CCTV cameras in the world, far more per capita than Russia or North Korea.
The section of TPC dealing with the Political Class’s capture of the British media is exemplary of how democracy in Great Britain has been subverted. Oborne writes that the Political Class has “sought to give an almost constitutional role to the British media by building it up as an alternative to existing state institutions.” (p. 234).

In short, the British government and Her Majesty’s Opposition now use the media as a glorified advertising agency. ‘Client journalists’ now do the work Parliament used to do. This pact is compounded by a sleight of hand which effects to produce the myth of a ‘hostile media’, that is, a fourth estate which still fulfils its original role in speaking truth to power in any meaningful way. It does no such thing, of course, and any journalist who dissents from this arrangement will soon find themselves filing their copy in the backwaters of a provincial newspaper.
The role of the media in the Iraq War is focused on briefly in the book, and as an exemplar of the way in which the UK Political Class now uses the media. This war is still the most disgraceful chapter of Tony Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister, and Oborne lays out clinically the way that the British press, and the BBC, conspired to paint a flattering, Dorian Gray-like picture of Blair as war hero, when in fact it was the lies told by him and his jumped-up press secretary Alastair Campbell – very much a villain of Oborne’s book – that initiated that wholly spurious and ruinous conflict.
The great losers in this Caesarean and triumphalist rise to power are, of course, the British people. They are now treated as a set of consumerist statistics to be manipulated and triangulated. Indeed, as Oborne writes, “Members of the Political Class… regard civil society as a threat because it represents a giant area of the public domain which stands outside its control” (p. 329).
With serious calls from the likes of Tony Blair to have a second and even third Brexit referendum, the contempt that the Political Class has for the ordinary people they are supposed to represent is clear. The EU’s disdain for its citizens is even more apparent, and entire countries have already been made to vote more than once for continued membership of this corrupt bloc, the elites simply recasting the vote until it goes their way.
With British politics currently rudderless, and becoming more impotent by the week, it is tempting to herald the unravelling of Oborne’s Political Class, in the UK at least, and my only disappointment with TPC is that Oborne spends little time on technocracy, the fallacious idea that government is best suited to improve the lot of its citizens by virtue of its collective expertise. Having myself worked and clashed with management companies for the past ten years, I can see the parallels between management and government, and the willful blindness of those who believe they are the experts.
Oborne’s book is eerily prophetic, and shows what he calls the architecture of the Political Class. Any tremor which threatens to shake the whole is to be feared and attacked. In the same way that the average Republican is aghast at the victory of Donald Trump, so too the British political class would resist any attempt to alter its fundamental structure and aims, even if its own putative party were in power. Brexit is, of course, the most obvious example of resistance and, in the same way that the deep state is confounding Trump’s attempts to govern, so too the EU, in collusion with Britain’s own deep state, will not allow Brexit to happen without fighting to the last redoubt.
Towards the end of TPC, Oborne writes a paragraph that is a distant echo of Orwell’s famous statement, in his most famous book, that the only hope lies with the proles. It is profoundly to be wished for that these two great visionaries are right.
[It] is almost certain… that the next great political movement will come from outside the Political Class. Just as the Political Class has emerged from the wreckage of the party system, so it is certain to produce its own antithesis. At some stage a British politician may well discover a new language of public discourse and methodology of political engagement which communicates simply and plainly to voters. (p. 331).
Should this language and methodology ever be discovered, Peter Oborne’s prescient book will serve well both as its dictionary and instruction manual.




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Europa als dritte Kraft
Dies geschah mithilfe der deutschen Edition seines Werkes The Alternative, das auch in anderen Sprachen erhältlich war und sogar das Lob General Francos in Spanien gefunden hatte. Mosley pflegte Umgang mit der Familie Otto Skorzenys, des Mussolini-Befreiers und vertrat die Auffassung, die internationalen Formationen der Waffen SS gegen Ende des Krieges hätten seine Idee eines gesamteuropäischen, antikommunistischen Nationalismus vorweggenommen. Persönlich reiste Mosley nach Spanien, Portugal, Italien sowie nach Südamerika, stets unter dem wachsamen Auge des britischen Geheimdienstes MI6.
Mosley wie Evola konnten über die Verbrechen des Faschismus und seiner extremen Ableitung des Nationalsozialismus schwerlich hinwegsehen. Oswald Mosley verfiel in dieser Frage in eine dunkle Erlösungs-Mystik, die er sowohl bei Nietzsche fand, als auch seiner Lektüre von Goethes Faust zu verdanken hatte. Das Böse sei für den faustischen Menschen, zu dessen Gattung die Deutschen nun einmal gehörten, die unvermeidliche Finsternis auf dem langen Weg zum Licht. Ganz gleich, ob man sich zu solcherlei esoterischen Spekulationen hingezogen fühlt oder nicht, beide Autoren kamen nicht umhin, die Verbrechen anzuerkennen, sie aber zugleich vom Ur-Faschismus zu trennen. Nur so glaubten sie, den lähmenden Schuldkomplex überwinden zu können. Denn an die Mobilisierungs-Energie dieses frühen Faschismus sollten auch zukünftige Generationen wieder andocken dürfen.


The first Scottish nationalist to contest a Westminster parliamentary seat in Scotland was the journalist, poet and folklorist
An idea of what animated Lewis Spence's political thought can be extracted from his 1905 book The Mysteries of Britain: Secret Rites and Traditions of Ancient Britain (reprinted in 1994 by Senate). The book is dripping with erudition and politically incorrect racial and ethnic analysis relating to the origins of the pre-Christian native religion of the ancient British Isles and the indigenous people of those islands who practised it. Spence concludes: "In no individual born in these islands does there not flow the blood of the Druid priests and seers, and I confidently rely on British mystics, whatever their particular predilections, to unite in this greatest of all possible quests, the restoration of our native Secret Tradition," arguing that "we Britons are much too prone to look for excellence outside of the boundaries of our own island" and "that we should so weakly rely on alien systems of thought while it is possible for us to re-establish our own is surely miserable." 
Another significant pre-war figure in politically incorrect Scottish nationalism was the celebrated Scottish poet, 




The Iraqi nation grew increasingly wealthy, as oil revenues rose from $500 million in 1972 to over $26 billion in 1980, an increase of almost 50 times in nominal terms.

In the last stages of the campaign we had the tragic assassination of Jo Cox MP. The Remain camp cynically seized on this to boost their campaign. Anyone who voted Leave was a ‘hater’ and the language they had used to criticise immigration and the political class had led to a ‘climate of fear’ which in turn led to her death. Her two children were taken to Parliament to hear MPs pay tributes, and also to a big rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. This attempt to manipulate our emotions also failed. In fact many I know were disgusted by the shameful attempts to use the tragedy to boost a Remain vote. They were also angry at the way that their views were being falsely categorised and denigrated. If anything it made them more likely to vote Leave. I even had some friends who had voted Remain by post earlier, saying that they would have switched to Leave because of the disrespect tht had been shown, had they been given the chance! The ‘love versus hate’ theme has caused a lot of bitterness, anger, and division within our nation. Many Remain supporters are dismayed because it seems as if ‘hate’ has won. That’s one consequence of making the argument seem like a battle between good and evil – something the smug, condescending Left likes to do.
Pat Harrington











Phillips explique que depuis le discours d’Enoch Powell en 1968 qui valut à celui-ci sa mise à l’écart de la politique, tout le monde a retenu la leçon : « Adopter toutes les stratégies possibles pour ne pas parler de race, d’ethnicité (et plus tard de religion et de foi), sauf de manière anodine et plate. »




2) Corbyn fait partie de cette “réaction de gauche”, comme Syriza, comme Podemos, même comme Sanders aux USA, de même qu’il y a une “réaction de droite”, comme le FN en France, les deux constituant les deux ailes d’une “réaction générale”... Mais “réaction” contre quoi ? “Contre de vrais dynamiques populaires qui s’expriment contre le Système, en faisant croire qu’ils (ces mouvements de ‘réaction’) les représentent alors qu’ils les canalisent et les contrôlent en vérité, parce qu’eux-mêmes (ces mouvements de ‘réaction’) sont en fait manipulés par la bourgeoisie et les oligarchies”, dit l’auteure en agitant sa pancarte “Trotski sinon rien” ; “Contre le Système, cette réaction de dynamique populaire passant par tout ce qui peut servir de véhicule pour ceux veulent exprimer leur position antiSystème”, dirions-nous en observant qu’il est préférable de ne pas faire compliqué quand on peut faire simple, d’autant plus que Trotski n’est plus parmi nous pour prendre les choses en mains.



Een recente historische roman over Londen en nazi-Duitsland loodst willens nillens naar een recente historische studie over fascisme in Schotland. Ook de SNP heeft fascistische wortels en hoopte via een overwinning van nazi-Duitsland Schotse onafhankelijkheid te bekomen.