A Liberal theory of power

This is an opinion piece written by William Francis, a member of the Radical Association’s board. It was first published on 16th October 2025.

How do you change modern Britain for the better?

Given how prevalent narratives of a broken Britain are it begs the question of what is there to be done. On a deeper level, answering this question requires an understanding of power in modern Britain, as only by having power can a movement understand what is causing the problems undermining a country, and how best to change it for the better. Currently, the Socialists and Conservatives only offer an incomplete picture of power in contemporary Britain, each addressing an aspect of it but losing sight of the complexity of power in modern society.

The Limitations of Plutocracy

The Socialist argument for what has gone wrong rests entirely on the malign influence of plutocrats; denoted either as “the 1%” or the billionaire class. The reasoning goes that they have amassed such vast wealth that it can translate into overwhelming political power, either directly via lobbying and donations or by ownership of media outlets and think tanks, thereby halting any efforts at social reform. There is a strong case to be made against the vast concentration of wealth in the hands of an individual, but socialists overestimate the political power of wealth alone. Mao’s maxim that political power stems from the barrel of a gun was aptly demonstrated by Vladimir Putin, who used the power of the Russian state to suppress the perceived threats to his power posed by Russian oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky.

But the power of wealth is not only limited by ambitious crypto-Tsars. Consider the history of social reform in the deeply plutocratic Britain of 1900-1945. The state pension, national insurance, labour exchanges, minimum wage laws for “sweated trades”, and the famous People’s Budget were introduced when the richest 1% owned in excess of two-thirds of national wealth. The Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 was introduced when the richest 1% owned around 55% of national wealth, and the postwar welfare state itself was introduced when British society was only marginally less plutocratic. The present distribution of wealth, as uneven as it is, is comparatively egalitarian, forcing socialists to conclude that other factors must be at play.

The shortcomings of the professional managerial class

Though many on the right attribute the wrongs in British society to conspiracy theories and immigrants, more sophisticated Conservatives (and reactionaries) place the blame on bureaucracy rather than plutocracy. For them, the real power in society lies in the hands of a series of left-coded pencil pushers in the private, public, and third sector, referred to as “the blob”, the laptop/lanyard class or the PMC (professional managerial class). It is they, the right contends, that muzzle state capacity and private sector innovation through pointless red tape, wokeness, and net zero. The idea has its origins in James Burnham’s 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, in which the Trotskyite-turned-Conservative argued that the growing size and complexity of firms meant that the real power in capitalist societies lay not the owners of these units of production, but in their managers, administrators, and technical experts. Such a concept was explored by Liberals in The Unservile State, as well as by John and Barbara Ehrenreich, who coined the term “Professional Managerial Class” in the 1970s.

But how accurate is the idea of the Professional Managerial class in describing power in British society? Adam Tooze and Sam Freedman have argued that fear of its power has produced a plutocrat-proletarian alliance that forms the bedrock of right-wing populism, but the idea suffers from many self-imposed limitations. The right’s conception of the PMC dismisses the role of prominent business executives in favour of HR professionals (one of the least renumerated roles in any large business), teachers (whose pay has been squeezed for the past decade), academics (whose working conditions have been subject to growing proletarianisation in recent decades), and the vaguely defined cultural elite whose exercise a hegemonic control of mass media has made the young woke, yet couldn’t stop 14 years of Conservative rule. Ultimately, the concept of the divorce of ownership and control is taken to such an extreme that it gives one a limited view of power.

The Lessons of the Black Act

British Liberalism currently lacks an explicit overall theory of power. The best we currently have is a narrative of the effects the first-past-the-post system has on our politics, and even then, that is only something articulated by activists. However, there is a germ of a theory of power in this narrative born of activist experience; that political power is held collectively and must be gathered and coordinated. Consider the trial of John Huntridge that occurred on 10th November 1723. He was accused under the Black Act of 1723 of aiding and abetting illegal poachers in Richmond Park.

This was not seen as a petty crime, but a direct attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole's efforts to finish Charles I’s enclosure of the park, and by extension, the power of the entire Whig aristocracy. As such, Huntridge’s prosecution spearheaded by the Regency Council of Lords Justices, with Walpole himself extracting evidence from an informant to prove Huntridge’s guilt. He was also tried by a jury of major landowners who were likely to be sympathetic to Walpole’s enclosure efforts. Yet despite the odds stacked against him, Huntridge was found innocent, a decision that Walpole abided as he could not control the courts the same way the Tudor and Stuart Monarchs had done.

But why was this the case?

The dictator’s handbook by Alistair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita offers a theoretical model for understanding this. The leader of every polity requires support to rule. This support is drawn from a “Nominal Selectorate”, of which only a few can exercise enough power to matter (the real selectorate), and a budding leader would need the support of some of these people to rule, with the minimum required dubbed “The Ruling Coalition”. The size of this latter group heavily determines the nature of society, with societies where the ruling coalition is tiny awarding its members special favour and cash. At a certain point, the coalition gets too large for this to work, and so more accessible public goods are distributed instead of cash, assets, and royal monopolies. In Huntridge’s case, it was the rule of law, thanks to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, curbing the power of the monarch in favour of an oligarchy of aristocrats, merchants, and proto manufacturers, for whom the rule of law could protect them (and their property) from the arbitrary whims of monarchs.

Countervailing Power

This pluralistic understanding of power is one that is intuitive to Liberals. Though certainly unevenly distributed power is not truly monopolised or single faceted, it is something to be gathered and channelled through political and economic institutions. The obvious examples are the numerous cases of British governments amassing massive majorities with pluralities of national vote, or the success of NIMBYs to stop million pound and billion-pound developments. For that matter, consider the years when Brexit dominated British politics, where a small number of highly motivated and organised businessmen and their allies in the hard-right of the Conservative party overwhelmed the combined anti-hard Brexit opposition of most of the British business community, the British trade union movement, and the politicians across Westminster. As such, this reveals the real crux of the problems facing Britain is not that some special interests have too much power, but that there is no real countervailing force to keep them in check.

So, at last, a Liberal conception of power emerges! The ability to shape a universal suffrage society depends on the mobilisation of political, economic and cultural power; to gather a coalition of voters and interest groups to take control of the state through elections, and to maintain that power through creating an entrenching alliance with large stakeholders. The Liberal answer to the problems facing Britain is, in many respects, the same as it has always been; widen political and economic power to more people whilst organising civil society to check the power of special interests lest the old corruption rear its ugly head once again.