If one sees an haitch, drop it

We all make mistakes and George Walden's seems to be that he helped usher in the kind of society he deplores in The New Elites , one in which cash has usurped culture. Not that Walden holds himself in any way responsible for this turn of events; oh no. To read him you would think he had never been a member of Margaret Thatcher's government, loftily dismissing her for trying to make Britain into the "offshore Hong Kong of Europe". In fact, he was her minister for higher education between 1985 and 1987 and was partly responsible for introducing the sort of business practices into universities that have led to the demise of those "moral", "cultural" and "spiritual" values whose departure he now laments.

You can find much the same sentiments in Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold or F. R. Leavis. The New Elites belongs firmly in the tradition of the cultural critique of capitalism, though Walden seems unaware of this history, drawing instead on the work of European and American sociologists such as Robert Michels and C. Wright Mills. The English tradition is divided into two camps. One side claims that the industrial revolution stunted human capacities and destroyed communities, while the other maintains that a high regard for culture is responsible for Britain's economic decline. W. D. Ribenstein in Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750-1990 (1993) has little patience with either of these positions, arguing that they are based on a misapprehension of Britain as an industrial economy when it has always really been a commercial, financial and service one whose values, moreover, are perfectly in accord with those of the wider culture. Be that as it may, Walden's book is proof that the tradition of cultural critique not only survives but prospers.

His central claim is that the composition of Britain's elite has changed in recent years. It is no longer the aristocracy, the church or even the politicians who set the tone of society, but business and the media. In contrast to the old elites who encouraged the masses to rise to their level, the new ones lower themselves to that of the "common man". The new elites are "populists", that is they give the masses what they want, though what they want is engineered by those who appear to grant their every wish. The same is true of public opinion that is manufactured by the media, who then pretend to speak on the people's behalf. The result is an iron consensus, writes Walden, based on emotion not reason because we all have feelings, whereas intellect, "being less equally distributed, is seen as divisive" and, more importantly, "a non-profitable product".

I found it a little disconcerting to agree, even momentarily, with a Tory, but Walden is elegant, urbane and persuasive. You only have to look at how the humanities are now being repackaged as a portfolio of skills to appreciate the point that the end of education is not critical thinking but flexible labour. There is a pressure to conform, there is a distrust of creativity. Nevertheless, Walden's argument is not ultimately convincing. He claims to believe in "the common man", but seems more contemptuous than approving of this being who regards "the Medium Term Financial Strategy as little more than a voodoo incantation"; and whose views "enunciat(ed) with a sort of peeved self-righteousness" are little more than "banalities".

Walden's impoverished perception of the "common man" could not be more different from that of Raymond Williams whose famous declaration that "(t)here are ... no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses" briefly upsets the former conservative minister's composure. He accuses Williams of appealing to our emotions and of refusing to accept that the term mass merely refers to "the average man and not the social underdog". But Williams was a more astute thinker than Walden appreciates. He understood that the concept of the mass derived from the 18th-century mob, renowned for its gullibility, volatility and fickleness. The term mass society therefore suggests a people who need to be kept in check, a people who need to be led, a people, in short, in need of an elite; the sort of elite, in fact, that Walden would like to see in power. This is the true context for his repeated aversion to egalitarianism, which he interprets in terms of the lowest common denominator compared with Williams's more generous "equality of being". To attain this condition, Williams says we have to "abandon the illusion of the masses and to move towards a more actual and active conception of human beings and relationships"; something that Walden, with his essentially patrician instincts, would have great difficulty in doing.

Gary Day is principal lecturer in English, De Montfort University.