In 2011, a group of 16/17 year olds got access to the corridors of power and talked to top people in business, finance, politics and the media, and asked them who ran the place?
Lots of people are asking the question ‘Who runs this place?’ Is it the bankers, the politicians, big business, the police, the church, the media? Who?
A year ago a group of us tried to find out. We researched the biggest companies and institutions in the UK and then found out the names of the people that run them. We raised some money from Rowntree and got on the phone.
We were treated to some surprising revelations:
‘No, it’s not the politicians who run things’ said ex BP chief Lord Browne, ‘it’s the people that get things done’. Did he mean business people like himself? ‘Yes, at BP, I made record profits for any company in the UK, ever!’
Sir John Bond of Vodafone pressed the point home: ‘I suppose it’s the Government, but they don’t have any money; we give them the money’. Adding a little ruefully ‘I don’t even get a thank you letter when I send the corporate tax into the Exchequer’.
Millionaire businessman Jon Moulton, the one who gave gifts to disgraced minister Liam Fox, was very direct: ‘Wealth enables you to get people to do what you would like rather than what they would like’.
‘But don’t some people have too much money?’ we asked Philip Hampton, head of RBS? ‘Yes greed is an ugly word’ he admitted. ‘But as a bank we are worth trillions, we deal with numbers that are unimaginable to most people’ and what’s more ‘modern life is inconceivable without the banks’.
So money is calling the shots, but what about the media?
‘You get us to want what you want us to want’ challenged Mikael, age 16.
Even though the Murdochs refused to talk to us, their presence overshadowed the media interviews we did. Ex BBC director general Greg Dyke led the charge: ‘The things I did at the BBC were deliberately designed to limit the power of the Murdoch operation. So we invented Freeview to stop Sky dominating the digital world’.
Not to be outdone The Sun sent us James Murdoch’s MacTaggart Lecture: ‘BBC news is state sponsored journalism’ he declared. That was nasty. What did Alan Yentob think of that? ‘Absolute tosh’ responded the BBC’s Creative Director, diplomatically. The feud continues.
What surprised us most after 9 months of interviews? Nobody thought that MPs ran the place, in fact apart from the interviews with the MPs themselves, no one even mentioned them.
When we were doing the research we spoke to Stephanie Flanders, economics editor at the BBC. She came up with an insight that ‘haunted’ all the research:
‘It’s true that there’s a club mentality that runs Britain and they all have similar assumptions, and they went to the same schools. It’s open in that people can join it, but it’s quite hard to join and the worry is it’s becoming harder. So there’s a particular mindset that runs Britain, even though it’s not a single mind.
By Billy Ridgers – www.whorunsthisplace.co.uk Contact Billy Ridgers: whorunsthisplace@btinternet.com