In 1956, sociologist C Wright Mills published a book called The Power Elite, a sharp analysis of the oligarchy running the supposedly egalitarian United States. It was, after all, the era of the military-industrial complex. Mills nailed the corporate bosses, the Wall Street moguls and the machine politicians of his day. I've never read the book in full, but picked it off the bookshelf the other day while waiting for my friend and colleague Alan Harding of the University of Manchester's Institute of Political and Economic Governance to make me a coffee. This passage caught my eye:

“A society that is in its higher circles and middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience.”

Paging through, I found many echoes between the analysis of that hierarchical and static post-war order and our own oligarchical times. Time perhaps for a revival of open talk about the distribution of power?

That same day John Kay had a characteristically eloquent article in the Financial Times (£/register) about the banks' misselling of billions of pounds' worth of payment protection insurance plans. The Competition Commission had found profit margins of up to 70% on this business, because the possibility of a successful claim was so low. On the scale for which the banks have now announced provisions, they clearly had a large misselling infrastructure. Talk about the lack of an inner moral sense.