Today’s NYT has a biting critique of Britain’s chummy elite. There have been decades of misguided and mismanaged decisions by elite but incompetent imperialists. Events now appear to be heading to England’s final chapter -the fiasco called Brexit.
From left seated at the table, Jawarharlal Nehru, vice president of India’s interim government; Earl Mountbatten, viceroy of India; and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, president of the Muslim League discuss Britain’s plan for India, June 2, 1947.CreditMax Desfor/Associated Press
Forster blamed Britain’s political fiascoes on its privately educated men, callow beneficiaries of the country’s elitist public school system. These eternal schoolboys whose “weight is out of all proportion” to their numbers are certainly over represented among Tories. They have today plunged Britain into its worst crisis, exposing its incestuous and self-serving ruling class like never before.
From David Cameron, who recklessly gambled his country’s future on a referendum in order to isolate some whingers in his Conservative party, to the opportunistic Boris Johnson, who jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to secure the prime ministerial chair once warmed by his role model Winston Churchill, and the top-hatted, theatrically retro Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose fund management company has set up an office within the European Union even as he vehemently scorns it, the British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.