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| Visions & Revisions |
A Distant Mirror
Douglas McWhirter
08/02/2004
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Wealth, in any country, is essential to the acquisition and maintenance of
political power.
The relationship between wealth and power is far more complicated than it
used to be; certainly it is in Britain, though not necessarily [in the United
States]. In the old days in Britain, to have a successful political career you
had to be rich. That was certainly true of aristocrats who were by definition
rich, and by virtue of their membership in the House of Lords, powerful. I
suppose it was true of businessmen, though the number of really rich businessmen
who have gone into politics in Britain is not all that great. But if one looks
now at the current British political elite—that is to say the Labour cabinet and
the front bench of the conservative opposition—very few of those people are
rich. If you look at the overall membership of the House of Commons, very few
are rich. In Britain, the trend is now that in order to succeed in politics, you
do not have to be rich. By contrast, more American presidents have been wealthy
than have British prime ministers. The decline of the British aristocracy was due, in part, to random events
and bad luck.
I think it is true that any social group’s long-term existence is going
to be threatened by random events and bad luck. It is certainly the case that
although Britain had an easier ride in the 20th century than most European
countries—no civil war, defeat, invasion, etc.—there is no doubt that in the
First and Second World Wars, large numbers of aristocrats died. Heavy death
taxes were paid as the result of that, and that was financially damaging for
many families. The whole notion of the family existing across generations was
seriously undermined as not just one, but two or three people in a generation
were killed in war. If one thinks of the First and Second World Wars as random
events, they were very significant in weakening the capacity and the resolve of
the British aristocracy to continue in existence as a ruling class.
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