Saturday 16 December 2017

Quote of the day - On the British elite...


Hard to think of a better summation of the braying, negative politics now prosecuted by Britain's establishment elite:
A large part of the political class, and seemingly a sizeable proportion of the country’s educated elite, have distanced themselves from the majority of the country. Never in modern times has there been such an overt and even contemptuous attempt to deny the legitimacy of a popular vote. Edmund Burke in the 1790s gave credit for our freedoms to ‘the wisdom of unlettered men’; William Ewart Gladstone believed that ordinary voters ensured the morality of government; the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville realised that everyday experience enabled people to make sensible choices. But today, some prominent voices imply that only those with university degrees have opinions worth listening to. We might be back in the 1860s, when the Liberal MP Robert Lowe, who opposed giving working men the vote, sneered that ‘you should prevail upon our future masters to learn their letters’.
Absolutely - the rest of the article's good too.
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2 comments:

Trofim said...

Great article, but it's by Robert Tombs, historian, not Roger Scruton

Sobers said...

That article isn't by Roger Scruton, its by Robert Tombs.