The Non-political Class are Not the Problem to Be Managed
The people closest to failure are often heard last. This article looks at why ordinary working people, small business owners and frontline operators are too often ignored, while organised insiders and professional lobbyists seem to know exactly which doors open first.
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6/8/20265 min read
The non-political class is not the problem to be managed. It is the part of the country that still understands work, consequence, urgency and value. That belief sits close to the heart of Establishmelt, but it should not be mistaken for an anti-politics argument. Good government needs law, process, expertise, scrutiny and elected authority. Without those things, democracy becomes noise with a ballot box attached. The problem is that too many public systems still treat practical experience as something to be consulted after the clever people have finished designing the answer.
That is where things go wrong. The people closest to failure are often heard last, least or only after the damage has become impossible to hide. They are not always ignored because someone is malicious. They are ignored because they are inconvenient, unpolished, busy, tired, local, ordinary or too far away from the rooms where decisions are shaped. They do not always know the language of policy, but they often know when something is not working.
The Post Office scandal should sit uncomfortably in the national memory for a very long time. Sub-postmasters raised concerns for years while running branches, handling money, dealing with customers, balancing accounts and watching a system tell them something they knew did not feel right. Many were treated not as early warning signals, but as the fault in the system itself. By the time the truth became undeniable, lives had been damaged, businesses had been ruined, money had been lost and trust had been destroyed on a scale that should shame more than one institution.
There is a wider lesson here. When ordinary operators raise concerns, the instinct of a large organisation is too often to defend the process, protect the institution and question the person making the noise. The person on the ground may not have a policy document, a communications team or a glossy presentation. What they often have is something more useful: direct experience of how a decision lands when it leaves the meeting room and hits real life.
Between elections, public life is full of organised access. MPs, ministers, departments and public bodies deal with trade bodies, campaign organisations, consultancies, public affairs firms, advisory panels, regulators, arm’s-length bodies and quangos. Some of that contact is useful, and some of it is necessary. A government that never speaks to specialists would be foolish. The issue is not whether expertise should be heard. The issue is whether the current system hears organised influence more clearly than practical experience.
A self-employed electrician does not usually have a route into the room. A shop owner watching a high street decline cannot easily compete with a professional lobby group. A small employer who can explain exactly why a policy sounds good but works badly is unlikely to have a public affairs consultant turning that frustration into a neat briefing note for ministers. This is where the system becomes distorted through habit, convenience and access. The people who know how to influence are heard more clearly than the people who know how things work on the ground.
We should be honest about the influence industry. Peter Mandelson is a useful example because his career shows how power can keep moving long after voters have stopped being involved. He twice resigned from Tony Blair’s Cabinet, later returned to high office, and went on to co-found Global Counsel, a public policy advisory and lobbying business. Whatever view anyone takes of Mandelson’s political skill, his career raises a fair question for a site like this: why does the system so often keep doors open for insiders while making ordinary people fight to be heard at all?
That question becomes sharper when firms with deep political connections operate in areas where public money, regulation, technology and national policy overlap. The point is not to claim that every meeting is improper, or that every adviser is doing something wrong. The point is simpler and more important: access itself has value. The public is entitled to ask who gets it, why they get it, and whether the same seriousness is given to people without a title, a former office or a network.
In a cost of living crisis, £300 is not just a reporting threshold. It is the food shop, the energy bill, the car repair, or the difference between coping and falling behind. If influence is only visible above that line, what sits below it?
David Cameron and Greensill offer another example from a different party, which matters because this is not a Labour problem or a Conservative problem. It is an establishment problem. Cameron was a former Prime Minister when he lobbied government on behalf of Greensill Capital, a company in which he had a significant economic interest. The Treasury Committee later said his status as a former Prime Minister should have been irrelevant to the Treasury’s treatment of his approaches. That finding captures the problem neatly. In theory, status should not matter. In practice, it often does.
A former Prime Minister, former minister, senior adviser or well-connected lobbyist can often secure a level of attention that an ordinary citizen, small business owner or frontline operator would struggle to get, even when the ordinary person is closer to the problem and has less to gain personally. This is not a call to shut experts out. It is a call to stop confusing access with wisdom.
We should also be fair to MPs. Many work hard. Many hold surgeries, answer emails, attend local meetings and deal with difficult casework that most people never see. Some have serious experience outside politics, including business, law, public service, healthcare, education, charities and the armed forces. Parliament is not made up entirely of people who have never done anything beyond politics, and pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. The issue is not whether every MP has run a business. The issue is whether the system listens properly to people who have built, fixed, delivered, employed, sold, repaired, cared, taught, treated or simply lived with the consequences of public decisions.
There is a difference between being represented and being heard. Representation gives us MPs, councillors and elections. Being heard requires a system that takes practical experience seriously before the scandal, before the inquiry, before the compensation scheme and before the apology. It means asking who is missing from the room, not only who has submitted the most polished briefing. It means treating the person who says, “I do this every day, and this will not work,” as a source of useful evidence rather than a problem to be managed.
The same applies to growth and local renewal. If we want more small businesses, better high streets, stronger local economies and more productive communities, then we should spend more time listening to people who understand the barriers. The self-employed person waiting months to be paid knows something useful. The small manufacturer dealing with energy costs, planning delays or procurement nonsense knows something useful. The café owner who understands why footfall drops after 4pm knows something useful. The tradesperson who could train someone but cannot carry the risk alone knows something useful.
Those people may not arrive with an acronym, a funding round or a badge on a lanyard, but they may still have a better answer than the people who do. Expertise matters, and so does practical experience. Public policy should not be shaped mainly by those who know how to get access. It should also be shaped by those who understand the work, the delay, the cost and the fix.
The Establishmelt position is simple enough: the non-political class is not the problem to be managed, and it may be where many of the answers have been sitting all along.
Sources: Criminal Cases Review Commission summary of Post Office Horizon cases; House of Commons Committee on Standards report on APPGs and lobbying access; GOV.UK profile of Peter Mandelson; reporting on Global Counsel; Treasury Committee report on Greensill Capital.