Owen Jones, Russell Brand and The Establishment

The day after Owen Jones appeared in Edinburgh to discuss his second book, The Establishment: And how they get away with it, he would be interviewing Russell Brand on Revolution, the comedian’s controversial third book, in an event organised by the Guardian and screened in cinemas around the country. It is surprising that Jones, with a background in the trade union and labour movements, would align himself with Brand, a man who offers nothing more than an enigmatic assurance that revolution will come. Ahead of the events, Jones criticised the “all-too-smug, seen-it-all-before snottiness towards Russell Brand,” while ignoring some of the legitimate concerns over the naïve nature of Brand’s calls for revolution. Engaging the young and disenfranchised in politics can only be a good thing, but is he letting him off the hook too easily? It wasn't so long ago that millions of dollars were wasted on a series of ever more abysmal vehicles to cement Brand as a Hollywood star, and there is also the issue of the casual use of prostitutes that appears in his previous books. Isn’t the act of a rich white man paying for a woman to sexually pleasure him the antithesis of the rhetoric he now espouses?

Pick up a copy of The Establishment – And how they get away with it, and you will find a single quotation adorning the cover: "Our generation’s Orwell" – Russell Brand. The words 'beyond parody' have come up a few times in response to Brand’s recent incarnation as a political messiah, but this really does take the biscuit. Jones is a good campaigner and commentator, but he isn't a novelist so how he can be compared to a man who is by common consensus one of the most important of the 20th century is mind boggling. It says something rather worrying about Jones, a man I had previously viewed as modest, that he would allow for this to appear on the cover of his book.

Tonight, at a free event for Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair, Jones begins by calling the recent appointment of Fiona Woolf as the head of the Government’s child sex abuse enquiry, the latest example of a country being run by a closed elite that works to keep power in the hands of the few. From here, Jones steadily builds his case that this Establishment – a mix of government, big corporations and London media – works together to create powerful myths about society. While he is clear that this isn't an organised conspiracy, it is a club of self-interest, where all members benefit from propping up a smoke screen.

Jones calls the politics of envy amongst the bottom of society, as opposed to the poor envying the rich, the “greatest scandal of our times.” In order to deflect attention from the Establishment leaders who are responsible for the galling levels of poverty in a wealthy nation, people are encouraged to envy the public sector worker their salary, or the asylum seeker their social housing. This is a classic divide and rule policy, but the problem is that this narrative is accepted as the status quo. How many times have you heard MPs and commentators state the supposed truism that there simply isn't enough money for a living wage, housing for the poor and a universal national health service? Yet, there is money for tax cuts for the rich.

Jones discusses the ‘revolving door,’ a system where ex-politicians are given dubious posts within the private sector. Disparate elements of the state are bound together through economic interests, and politicians and other public figures have a vested interest in keeping big business sweet. Why care if you don’t do a very good job of being a MP on £67,000 a year, when you have managed to keep a certain company happy and will soon be employed by them at a much higher salary? He gives Geoffrey Hoon’s controversial position at AgustaWestland and ex-Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt’s appointment on the board of BUPA as examples.

Owen sums up the current situation as “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.” He is a left-winger of the old school and cites the chartists, suffragettes and the LGBT movement as examples of people who campaigned for change and made a difference. Owen’s lessons may be from history, but with a shockingly complacent and callous government in No.10, we need them more than ever. Commentators like Brand are rightly ridiculed for soley pointing out the problems rather than the solution, but it is also true that the more people who are aware of the way the Establishment works in the UK, the more likely change is. The message tonight is to organise from below, break apathy and believe in hope.

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