The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses

Far from being classless, Britain is increasingly ruled by oligarchies of professional egalitarians. By exploiting popular sentiment and taste, the privileged and opportunistic can earn fortunes and occupy positions of authority, while all the time protesting that they are only giving the public what it wants. In a performance both witty and merciless, Walden unmasks these new élites, a class whose ambitions for social control rival their aristocratic forebears and whose populism is in its way as damaging to democracy. This book will be required reading for anyone who finds modern Britain maudlin, intolerant and conceited, anyone who despairs of our growing ignorance and chauvinism - in short anyone who has visited the Millennium Dome.